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Feb 16
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840: The Science Behind Strong, Lasting Friendships with Dr. Marisa G. Franco

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Dr. Marisa G. Franco says: "People like you more than you think, so assume people like you."

Dr. Marisa G. Franco reveals how to harness the science of attachment to foster deeper relationships at work and in life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three types of loneliness we all experience.
  2. Why work friends are critical to your wellbeing.
  3. The six practices that help you make and keep friends.

About Marisa

An enlightening psychologist, international speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Marisa G. Franco is known for digesting and communicating science in ways that resonate deeply enough with people to change their lives. She works as a professor at The University of Maryland and authored the New York Times bestseller Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. She writes about friendship for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert for major publications like The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Vice. She speaks on belonging at corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and universities.

For tips on friendship, you can follow her on Instagram (DrMarisaGFranco), or go to her website, www.DrMarisaGFranco.com, where you can take a quiz to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a friend & reach out for speaking engagements.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Marisa G. Franco Interview Transcript

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

Marisa Franco
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marisa, I’m so excited to get into some wisdom about friends but, first, I got to hear, I understand you are a polyglot. Tell us, what languages do you speak and how did you get to learn them?

Marisa Franco
Yeah, I speak Italian because my dad is from Italy, so he sent me to live there for half of fifth grade. I speak Haitian Creole because I taught in a social work school in Haiti for two summers, and that’s where my mom is from. And I speak some Spanish, still working on the Spanish thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, so half of fifth grade was enough for you to learn Italian for life?

Marisa Franco
Well, I then came back and took Italian in middle school for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and went back to study in Florence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there you go. That’ll do it. I’ve got a five-year old and a three-year old at home, and so we’re thinking, “Just how much and when is the ticket for language acquisition?” My wife is big on them, knowing French because she studied abroad in France and then knows some. So, yeah, that’s the whole story.

Marisa Franco
That’s awesome, so valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, another thing that’s valuable is friendship. How’s that segue, Marisa?

Marisa Franco
Good job. Good job.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. I’d love it if maybe, first, before we talk about the how of friendship, can you tell us why are friends important? And maybe that question doesn’t even need to be asked but some might say, “Hey, you know what, popularity contests are over. I’ve got my family and my coworkers. We get along well enough. Isn’t that enough, Marisa?” What would you say?

Marisa Franco
Well, I would say that friends actually make your relationship with your relationship-partner better. So, research finds that if I make a friend, not only am I less depressed, my relationship-partner is less depressed. Women who are friends with women are more resilient to issues in their marriage when they have friends. When people are in conflict with their spouse, it basically alters their release of the stress hormone cortisol in problematic ways unless they have quality connection outside the marriage.

So, basically, I think we’ve always needed an entire community to feel whole. And when we put all our eggs in one basket with one person, it harms us and it harms our relationship with that person. There’s even three different dimensions of loneliness which really reveal this. So, there’s a form of loneliness called intimate loneliness, which is the desire for connection with people you feel really close to.

But then there’s also relational loneliness, which is the desire to connect with someone kind of as close to you as a friend. But then there’s collective loneliness, which is this desire to be part of a group of people that’s working toward a common goal. And so, you could experience any of these types of loneliness, which means you could have found your soulmate as a spouse but still feel like you’re lacking that larger community that’s working towards a common goal, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really good. Thank you. Being self-employed and working from home or an office by myself, that’s a nice distinction, for me in particular, because it’s like, “Okay. Well, hey, yeah, my wife is great. That’s cool. And I got friends, and that’s cool.” But, yeah, sometimes it does feel lonely even though I’ve got a great team spread across the world doing their thing. We’re in different spots and, yeah, you can feel that sometimes.

Marisa Franco
Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. And I think the other reason that we feel lonely when we’re not around different types of people is because we have a restricted relationship with ourselves. Like, each person brings out a different part of us. So, when you’re around the same people, the same person all the time, it’s like, “I only experience a certain side of me.”

Like, let’s say I’m really into gardening, and the couple people that I interact with all the time, nobody’s into that. That part of me begins to wither until I find someone to connect with, who has that shared interest, wherein we can talk with depth about that, I can bring out that side of me. And so, the more that we embrace diversity of community, the more that we feel more full and more whole.

And there’s also research that finds that the larger your social network, the more long you will live. And, actually, how large your social network is predicts how long you’ll live, even more so than your diet or how much you’re exercising.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. So, how large do I want to be?

Marisa Franco
Well, there’s a lot of complexities to that question because, obviously, you want very quality connections. Quality is very important. So, if it’s like I’m having this large network and I don’t feel quality connection, or I’m having a network that’s so large that it feels like I can’t invest in one person, then that’s not good. So, there’s a bit of a balancing act.

But the other thing is that our desire for a larger social network tends to change throughout our life. So, around 25 is when most of us have, like, the highest number of friends, and that’s because around that age, a lot of us are expanding our sense of identity. And, again, friends help expose us to new things, new information, help us feel different sides of our own identity.

But as people get older, they tend to want to think about how much time they have left, and spending it very intentionally with people that they feel deep quality connectedness with. So, they tend to kind of prune their friendships and be very selective about who they hang out with. So, I would say it also depends on your stage in life, what you might be drawn to and what a good size in terms of, yeah, the amount of people that you keep in your inner circle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share any research associated with the value of friends for being more awesome at your job, or friends at the workplace?

Marisa Franco
Absolutely. So, interestingly, there’s a study that looked at workplace fulfillment, and the number one factor that predicted how fulfilled people were at work was their sense of relatedness, which is like their sense of connection with the people around them, how much they feel valued by the people around them. And that’s, like, quite striking because it means that you could be doing a job that you really love but if you don’t feel like you have good relationships, your sense of fulfillment will not quite be there.

There’s a factor outside of your work that you’re doing that really is deterministic for your sense of happiness. And I think, often, when we’re choosing careers, we’re so focused on, like, “What exactly am I doing?” and we’re less focused on, like, the culture, and whether people feel valued, and whether people feel connected, even though it’s really, really important.

Other research finds, for example, that lonely employees, they miss work, more work, they report having poor performance, they report thinking about leaving their job more. And so, when I do speaking engagements on connection and belonging at work, I talk about this phenomenon that I call the employee myth, which is the sense that we go to work and we are no longer human, and we don’t have these human needs, and we’re just like clock away at our computer, and our employee identity replace our whole human identity.

And it’s just not true. Like, the same needs that we have outside of the workplace are the same human needs that we have within the workplace. And one of our greatest human needs is to feel connected to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay, so that’s a nice juicy why. I also love to hear, thinking over the course of your career in researching friendship stuff, any particularly shocking, or counterintuitive, or extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made that really left an impression with you?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, in general, everyone has this negativity bias, which means that we tend to remember negative information more than positive information, it registers more with us. And that, when we’re making predictions, we tend to be inaccurate and often cynical because of our ability to remember this negative information.

So, what that means is that, for example, there’s a study that finds that when strangers interact, they underestimate how liked they are by each other. And the more self-critical you are, the more pronounced this liking gap is, the more likely you are to underestimate how much other people like you. And I think sometimes we think our critical thoughts are the truth, when the study finds that they’re really distorting the truth.

And so, one, I think a really helpful note for people when it comes to making friends is to remember that people like you more than you’re assuming. People are probably a lot more open to you and open to your friendship and connection than you might think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is nice. “I’m more charming than I think perhaps, statistically,” if I’m the average and not an egomaniac or a narcissist. Okay. Cool. All right. So, then your book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends, what’s the big idea or core thesis here?

Marisa Franco
The core thesis is that how we’ve connected has fundamentally shaped who we are. Our personalities are fundamentally a reflection of our experiences of connection or lack thereof, whether you are trusting, open, cynical, aggressive, guarded. Like, all of these things are predicated on your experiences of connection.

Whereas, who you are then affects how you connect. So, it’s not random how you connect with people. These people that have had a history of healthy relationships, they’ve developed a set of assumptions about the world that facilitate them continuing to make healthy relationships. And so, those are what’s called securely attached people, they have this history of healthy relationships, they go into new relationships addressing the relationship in very healthy ways.

Whereas, those people who have relationships that are more difficult or unhealthy in the past, they may have internalized a set of assumptions about the world, like people are always going to abandon you, or you can’t trust anybody, which then inhibit and impede their ability to continue to form relationships with people, so those are the insecurely attached people.

And so, my Platonic is kind of about “How can we all develop more secure attachment in our friendships?” Because, I want to say, sometimes I share this attachment information, and people are like, “Well, good for those people that have healthy relationships. Where does that leave me?” So, I like to make sure I tell people, “You can absolutely change your attachment style.”

The book is actually about how you could change your attachment style in relationships with friends. And all of us can learn to build those secure relationships with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, attachment style, that phrase is bringing me back to college psychology and talking about what went down with babies. Is that what you mean by attachment style? Or, how are you…Could you give us the rundown of the maybe typology of attachment styles?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, the babies are right, the baby thing. So, this idea that in your early relationships, how your parents interact with you, or your caregivers, created this internal sense of assumptions about how everybody interacts with you.

And so, if your parents were sort of like overbearing and not responsive to your needs, like you kind of pulled away and you need alone time, and they would kind of bother you and not really respect your boundaries, you might have become anxiously attached, which means you always feel rejection and abandonment from other people because your parents weren’t necessarily attuned to you and your needs, and might’ve been kind of hot and cold with their ability to give you love.

Whereas, if you are avoidantly attached, that means that you had parents that kind of suppressed all feelings, like encouraged you to be strong, and take care of it on your own, and encouraged you to be hyper-independent. And so, you learned that if you try to be vulnerable with people, they will not be there for you. So, you are someone who goes into your friendships unemotionally, and you tend to not put much effort into friendships because you don’t trust people. So, you put low effort, low reward.

Whereas, the secure attached people, they had the good-enough parent who was responsive to their needs, who tried to show them love, and let them express emotions. And these securely attached kids, which were about 50% of us, but the rates of secure attachment have been going down, they go on to have these assumptions that, “People will love me,” “I’m worthy,” “My needs matter. Other people’s needs matter too,” and so they go on to build healthy relationships.

But it’s kind of more complicated than that, like there’s all of these intervening things that can happen that can alter your attachment style, like your relationships since your parents, whether you had one person outside of your household who made you feel really secure. So, I say that because I’m, like, you don’t necessarily have to go home and blame your parents because it’s quite complex how attachment styles develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, those are the three primary flavors there. And so, how do we know which of the three is predominant within us?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. Well, I do have a quiz in Platonic but I could tell you some of the attributes that we tend to see. So, anxiously attached people, they tend to think their friends don’t really like them. They tend to form friendships very quickly because, again, they’re afraid people will abandon them so they want people to show their level of investment very quickly. They tend to overshare almost to test people, “Will you kind of abandon me if you know all these things about me?”

They tend to, yeah, be very comfortable with vulnerability. They tend to be very self-sacrificing in their relationships because they feel like, again, “If I bring up my own needs, you’re going to abandon me,” kind of passive-aggressive because they have that fear of abandonment. Kind of how I describe them is high effort, low reward. Like, they’re putting a lot of time and effort into their relationships, their relationships are important to them, yet they aren’t getting that same reward.

There’s the sense that their relationships are very fragile. And that’s because, anxiously attached people, again, they think people are going to abandon them, so they tend to think they’re being rejected even when they’re not. And so then, they’ll sort of pull away or act out, act aggressively, like not really respect people’s boundaries as a way to kind of sooth their own fears of rejection.

Then you have avoidantly attached people. They are not putting much effort into friendship. They are not initiating as many friendships. They’re more likely to ghost on their friends. You could describe them as, like, loners where they might have a big group of friends but it’s very shallow. The other attachment styles are attracted to vulnerability.

The avoidantly attached person is not, sometimes put off by the vulnerability of other people. They tend to focus a lot on work and less on relationships. So, the avoidantly attached person is low effort, low reward. They’re kind of taking themselves out of the game. You’ll hear them say things like, “I don’t trust people. Like, people can’t be trusted.” That’s their big issue. They think, “If I get too close to people, I’m just going to be harmed and hurt, so let me just keep my distance.”

Then you have securely attached people who I call the super friends. Research finds that secure attachment is related to initiating more friendships, your friendships being more sustainable. Securely attached people tend to address conflict but in very healthy ways where it’s not an attack. It’s, “These are my needs, these are your needs. What do we do, moving forward?”

They are comfortable with vulnerability but they build it more gradually. They’re giving towards their friends, they’re loving towards their friends, but they don’t sacrifice their own sense of self. Like, if it’s like, “This is really depleting me,” they’ll always try to find that balance where, “I want to show up for my friends, but I also want to show up for myself at the same time.”

And so, in some ways, securely attached people really humanize everyone they interact with. They allow everybody to kind of be an individual. Whereas, anxiously attached people, they’re seeing rejection everywhere. They’re kind of imposing that template onto people. Avoidantly attached people, they’re opposing the template that other people are not trustworthy.

So, for example, there are studies that find that if you try to be loving towards an avoidantly attached person, they will assume that it’s because you want something out of them. And so, secure attachment just, like, gives people the flexibility to tell their own stories because they don’t have this wound from the past, that they’re always ready to happen to them again.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s interesting, and as I think about my own experience, we’ve got our own sort of emotional rollercoaster highs and lows, and moments of stress, and sleep deprivation, versus enthusiasm and openness. I think when I’m at my worst, I just don’t…and the thought of going to some event, for example, or joining some people at a social thing, I think, “Yeah, I just don’t expect the people I encounter there to be very interesting or fun.” Does that fit into a category or am I a unique special flower?

Marisa Franco
Well, it could be attachment but that’s also a symptom of loneliness. And I don’t know if this applies to you or not, because, yeah, you could tell me. But I know that when we are lonely, for example, it’s not just the feeling. It alters how we perceive the world, where we perceive social interactions as less enjoyable. Because, basically, what happens when you’re lonely, if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, when you are lonely, you are isolated from your tribe, which kept you safe from dangers in the African savannah.

So, when we’re lonely, our brain is like hypervigilant for signs of negativity. Like, lonely people think they’re being rejected when they’re not, they report less compassion for humanity, liking their roommate less. And so, when you’re in a state of loneliness, fundamentally, you want to connect but you also are convinced that if you do connect, people might harm you or reject you, like not physically but just, like, reject you. So, there’s this kind of conundrum that we have when we’re lonely, where actually loneliness is also related to wanting to withdraw from people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with these wounds, it sounds like a lot of them have to do with family, parenting, childhood stuff. Are there other categories of wounds? I’m thinking about being dumped, for example.

Marisa Franco
Ooh, it hurts.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some of the other kinds of big places where these wounds can come from?

Marisa Franco
I think our brains are really good at learning. And what that means is that if we go through any experience of rejection, bullying is a big one, isolation for a temporary period of time, it can really leave an imprint on us because that’s a form of learning. Your brain is like, “Let me prepare for this happening again. I know what to do,” and all of those things.

So, I think sometimes we think we get over things from our past and we just move on from them, but it’s actually more typical for them to kind of stick with us because our brain is trying to kind of learn from them, and for us to continue to face them or to continue to see them in the future as we move forward in our relationships. Again, it doesn’t have to be something huge.

It could be like a breakup that was really hard can shape your experiences of grief moving forward, or an experience of, for example, social anxiety is related to your experiences in adolescence, and then you’re having social anxiety later in life, or your experience of loneliness as a child can predict your experiences of loneliness in adulthood.

And so, there’s this way that it gets…I mean, I don’t want to be bleak about it because I certainly think there’s ways to get off the trajectory, and to heal from these things, and to, instead, experience growth from these things, but, at the same time, I think people that feel like, “Oh, I’m still struggling with this thing from my past,” I just want to say, like, “Oh, that’s also pretty normal because we’re humans and we’re really sensitive to how we’re coming off socially, and it’s a way for us survive.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about some of these things. You’ve got six proven practices for making friends. Can you walk us through them?

Marisa Franco
Of course, yeah. So, these six proven practices, I read all of the research on…not all of it, a lot of it. I can’t say it was completely exhaustive. But, yeah, a ton of research on what predicted who made friends and who didn’t. And I came up with these six practices, these people that embrace these six practices were just more likely to make and keep friends.

And so, they are taking initiative, vulnerability, authenticity, showing affection toward other people, being authentic, and harmonizing with anger, which is learning how to work through conflict well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thinking through these six practices, could you expand on them and share a particular action that is really fruitful within each of the practices?

Marisa Franco
Absolutely, yeah. So, initiative, I think one of the biggest takeaways there is that friendship doesn’t happen organically in adulthood, and people that think it does are lonelier over time. Whereas, people that see it as taking effort are less lonely. And so, the takeaway here is that if you want to make friends, you are going to have to take initiative and not be passive, which just looks like, “Hey, it was so great to meet. I love to connect further. Could we exchange contact information?”

Authenticity. I define it in a kind of complex way, which is like who we are without our defense mechanisms. So, our defense mechanisms can really hurt our relationships. Let me define that further. So, let’s say my friend’s kid got into an Ivy League school, my kid didn’t, I feel jealous but my defense mechanism will defend me against that feeling, feeling that feeling.

So, instead of me noticing or acknowledging that jealousy, I say to my friend, “Well, Cornell isn’t really the best Ivy League anyway.” And so, we use these defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from certain feelings at the cost of our relationships. So, I guess the takeaway in authenticity is that what is raw is not authentic, which means the things that you say automatically are often defense mechanisms, they’re not authentic. They’re actually obscuring your authentic feeling.

And so, it can take a while, a pause, to actually understand what you authentically feel if your brain is so quick to try to protect yourself from that feeling.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, well, I’m curious, with this Cornell example, what’s the best way to engage with that person? You are jealous.

Marisa Franco
Yeah, you are jealous.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the best practice is not to trash Cornell, “Never heard of it.”

Marisa Franco
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
What would be the best move?

Marisa Franco
The goal of authenticity is to be intentional and not reactive. So, intentionality means that you are not letting that feeling control how you act and behave, and you can make a decision as to how you’re acting based off of your values, based off of the needs of the other person, based off of the larger circumstances. It’s like you’re choosing. You’re not being hijacked.

So, for some people, if the jealousy is really strong and they can’t get over it, they can say, “I really want to be happy for your kid, but I’m just struggling because my kid has struggled to get into these schools. So, if I’m not coming off as happy as I would really love to, that’s just what’s going on internally with me.” For other people, they might think, “Well, it’s more important for me to center my friend and her experience of her kid right now, so I’m going to get in touch with the part of me that is happy for them and say, ‘Yeah, I’m really happy for you. Congratulations. That’s really cool.’”

It’s not about a particular response but it’s just about choosing something intentionally that actually reflects you and your values rather than being raw and doing something reactively because there’s a feeling that’s really uncomfortable that you’re trying to escape.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. That’s good. That’s good. And so, authenticity, it’s interesting because the way some people read that word or hear that word, you might be led to, “You must disclose that you feel jealous,” but rather, authenticity can have, it sounds like, many shapes or flavors here.

Marisa Franco
Exactly. Right. Like, people that are authentic are, you think, “Oh, if you’re authentic, you’re only going to think about yourself and your own needs,” but people that are more authentic are actually more likely to consider other people’s needs because inauthenticity is psychologically exhausting so you don’t have the resources to think about other people.

So, when you’re able to just be like, “Oh, this is what I feel. I understand what I feel,” and you kind of clear yourself out psychologically so you can choose and make an intentional choice. Whereas, if you’re always trying to suppress that underlying feeling, it takes a toll on you and you end up relying on some of those defense mechanisms, which is you’re kind of tired so you’re just going into that reactive mode.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how about vulnerability?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, vulnerability, I think the takeaway from that chapter is, as social creatures, we are not strong alone. We are strong through receiving other people’s love and validation, and then internalizing it. So, I interviewed Dr. Michael Slepian who studies secrets, and I found one of his studies that basically looked at who is most resilient regarding the weight of their secrets, they’re least impacted by the secrets.

And he kind of found that it was these people that had told their secrets to someone and received this validating response, who were then best able to cope internally with their secrets. And so his research basically, suggesting that we become strong through being vulnerable with people, and then internalizing their love, and that’s what attachment theory is. These securely attached people who are good at relationships and their mental health is better, so much better, and they’re living longer, they had healthier relationships and they internalize them.

And so, vulnerability is key for our mental health and wellbeing but will also deepen our relationships because we’re social creatures. Whatever we do to better our relationships, often also improves our overall health and wellbeing. So, that’s why we should lean into being vulnerable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then sharing our secrets more often, it sounds like.

Marisa Franco
Yeah, with people that are trustworthy, of course, but, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then anger?

Marisa Franco
So, the takeaway with anger is that often when it comes to friendship, we suppress conflict and we think that that’s a good way to deal with things. And what ends up happening is that we actually just withdraw, we don’t end up dealing with it, we don’t end up getting over it. And so, there’s research that finds that open empathic conflict is actually linked to deeper intimacy. And if you’re avoiding conflict, you also might be avoiding a form of intimacy within your friendships.

So, the takeaway of that chapter is if you have issues within your friendships, like, address them, don’t attack your friends. That chapter really goes into how to address them because it’s not just bringing up the conflict that matters. It’s bringing it up in a loving way. But if you have a problem and it’s causing you to withdraw, it’s a way better option to bring it up with your friends. It might increase your intimacy with that friendship.

And I think sometimes we withdraw because we’re like, “Well, if I bring this up, are they going to abandon me or get mad at me?” But then you end up withdrawing, and it’s kind of guaranteed that the friendship is going to end rather than you at least had a chance if you were able to bring it up with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And so, can we hear the crash course in how to bring things up well?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, it starts with framing, which is this idea that we want to make sure that we are introducing the conversation and grounding it as an act of love and care for the other person. So, like, “Hey, I just wanted to make sure, I just wanted to bring this up because I love you and I don’t want anything to get between us because you’re so important to me.”

It’s using I-statements, “I felt hurt when this happened,” not saying, “You’re a bad friend.” Ask perspective-taking, “I was wondering what might’ve been going on for you at that time.” And asking for what we want in the future, “In the future, if this situation comes up, like, maybe we can handle it like this. What do you think about it?” So, it’s collaborative, it’s an active reconciliation rather than combat.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then offering generosity, what do you recommend here?

Marisa Franco
So, I recommend being generous freely, it does build friendships, until you feel like it’s exhausting you and it’s taking a toll on you. And at that point, you need to practice something called mutuality, which is different from reciprocity. Reciprocity is like, “I called you, now you call me.” But mutuality is, “I think about both of our experiences, and both of our priorities, and both of our capacities to determine the appropriate amount of generosity to give in a certain moment.”

So, what does that mean, practically speaking? It means that, for example, like, if your friend calls you in a time of need, let’s say they find out their kid is self-harming or something, it might feel like, “I’m so tired. I want to set a boundary,” but if you take a look at mutuality and you take a step back, and you’re like, “My friend’s kid is self-harming and I’m tired. What is the bigger priority in this moment?” then you might want to get on the phone even if you’re tired.

And so, it’s kind of a different way to think about boundaries, to think about boundaries as more of a mutual act for the closest relationships in your life rather than boundaries as just an act of self-protection.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And when you say generosity, what are the different ways that can be expressed?

Marisa Franco
Well, I really like when we express generosity that reflects our general strengths and talents because I think it feels even better that way. So, what are you good at? Whether it’s art, you can make art for your friends; cooking, baking, doing that for your friends; planning and organizing. You can organize a special day for your friends. Looking up information.

I did a presentation on finances for my friends because I just was really into finance podcasts for a while. So, think about what you enjoy doing anyway and find a way to give it to the people in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then how about giving affection?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, affection, there’s this study that looked at friendship pairs for 12 weeks to determine what’s going to predict who stays friends by week 12. And one of the most strongest things was how much affection they shared with one another. There’s this theory called risk-regulation theory, which is basically the idea that we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on our view of how likely we are to get rejected.

So, if you want people to invest in you, you have to basically indicate to them that they won’t be rejected. And so, one of the ways that you do that is that you express affection. You tell people, “I value you.” “I’m so happy to see you.” “It’s great.” You greet them warmly when they arrive. You tell them that, “This was something really meaningful that you said, that I continue to think about.” What affection does is it creates safety so people feel more comfortable investing in a relationship with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a nice six practices there. I’d love it, Marisa, do you have any fun stories or unique ways that folks have done some of this stuff that really sticks with you?

Marisa Franco
I do. So, in my affection chapter, I interviewed a friendship pair that was very close, like they kind of proposed to each other as best friends, and they would cuddle with each other. And I kind of talked in that chapter about the complexities of romantic love that queer communities, there’s this book Ace about asexuality, have pushed us to differentiate between romantic and sexual attraction, that romance is like, “I’m passionate about you. I’m thrilled by you. I yearn for your company.” It’s a sense of excitement about someone.

But sexual attraction is, “I want to have sex with you.” And those two things are distinct, in that it’s actually pretty normal for us to have romantic attraction to friends, and it’s been normal throughout history because, like, early 1800s and before, like people were getting married to people for practical reasons, “Because you’re going to give my family resources.” And the genders were considered so distinct that the idea was you can only really connect intimately to your friends who are the same gender as you.

So, friends were holding hands and writing their names on trees, and writing these deep love letters to each other, and that was all normal. And I think we need to normalize that people have romantic feelings for their friends, which I’m just defining as being really passionate and thrilled by your friend, and very excited kind of like, I don’t know, a fire, having a fire for your friend, people say, “My friend is my soulmate,” all these different things.

And that that is part of friendship, and that, more generally, I think a lot of what we consider normal in romantic relationships could also apply to friendships. There’s no reason why not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing, the distinction between romance and sexuality, and, yeah, that’s a brain expander. Okay. And so then, cuddling, writing names on trees. What else?

Marisa Franco
Yeah, writing love letters with each other, sharing the same bed, people used to go bring their friends on their honeymoons, going on special dates together, like all these things that we now consider more typical in our romantic relationships. Like, honestly, for me, my goal is to equalize the value I place on a romantic partner and the value I place on my closest friendships.

And because I understand that the ways that I grew up, and probably most of us have grown up, is that romantic love kind of has this monopoly on love, where the most loving acts we consider only appropriate for a romantic partner and don’t do with our friends even though they could really benefit our friendships and make people feel closer to us and loved and cared for.

So, this came up for me when I was I had a friend coming back from the airport, from a trip to the airport at, like, 12:30 a.m. and I hate staying up late. So, I was faced with the question, this was a friend that I’m close to, and I would love to get closer to, but I was faced with the question of, “Should I offer to pick her up from the airport?”

And I literally asked myself, knowing that romantic love has such a monopoly on love, and we almost have to access our concept of romantic love to access what deep love looks like for a person, that I asked myself, “Would I do this for a romantic partner?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Like, I would stay up late and pick up my romantic partner from the airport to make them feel taken care of.”

So, after I realized that, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this for my friend. Like, I’m going to pick her up at 12:30,” and, yeah, it really benefited our friendship. From then on, she saw how intentional I was about valuing her, and then she, like, bought me a plant after my plants died. And I wasn’t drinking, and she bought non-alcoholic cocktails. It just created this positive upward cycle of closeness and care for each other.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful. And I guess I’m thinking about, if you watch some, like, History Channel documentaries, it seems like, “Some historians believe that they were gay lovers.” Well, now you got me wondering, it’s like, “Why, are they thinking that because they’re imposing our modern viewpoints associated with sexuality being linked to romance, and really close friendships onto a different century where that was not the case?”

Marisa Franco
Possibly. I don’t want to understate that also that there was this erasure, intentional erasure, happening of LGB relationships at the time, and that was also happening. But I think we can give ourselves room for both things, which is that, yes, these gay relationships were erased from history, but also a lot of these relationships could also have been nonsexual and just very intimate with each other.

Like, for me, there’s this book, there’s this photographer who basically had pictures from around those times when friends were allowed to be more intimate. And I just remember seeing men go to take photographs together with their best friend with their arms around them, or like men of a football team laying in each other’s arms.

And it’s public, it’s like a football team so I don’t think it’s something that’s happening behind closed doors, and people are not ashamed of it either. And so, when you look back at those pictures, you see how, yeah, people were just a lot more comfortable with intimacy within friendships back then.

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

Marisa Franco
I guess one of my big tips for people making friends is to assume that people like you. The reason that I share this is because there’s research on something called the acceptance prophecy, which finds that when people are told by researchers that, “Your personality profile indicates that you will go into this group and be accepted,” and that’s a total lie. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because making that assumption makes people warmer, it makes them friendlier.

Whereas, when we assume we’ll be rejected, we actually reject people. We become cold. We become withdrawn. We are giving signals to other people that we’re rejecting them and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where they reject us back. And we also learned about the liking gap, which is people like us more than we think. So, try to remember to assume people like you.

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

Marisa Franco
There’s a bell hooks’ book All About Love, and actually think she quoted this from someone else, but you could find it in the book. And she describes love, and I’m kind of butchering this probably, but, “Love is helping someone express their inner truth or the essence of who they are and the ways that they are living.” That an active love is fundamentally helping people live a more deeply authentic life.

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

Marisa Franco
Research finds that when we predict the impact of expressing affirmation toward other people, we think it’s going to come off as more awkward than it actually does, and we underestimate how good it makes people feel. So, just don’t undervalue the impact of your kindness and your love toward other people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Marisa Franco
There’s this really good book called Attached, which is on attachment theory for romantic relationships.

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

Marisa Franco
I really do use, like, connection skills. I guess, like, as a teacher, I try to say hi to my students. I try to not tell them they’re wrong, but maybe say, “What would someone add to that?” I try to create a safe environment where people feel comfortable engaging, and affirm my students.

Every day, at the end of class, we have an appreciation hat where you share something that stuck out to you that someone else shared, and you give them a little bit of a gift. So, I believe that good learning happens on the backbone of connectedness, and so I try to be intentional about that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Marisa Franco
Oh, exercise. I love exercising, like, five days a week. I started going back to the gym and it just makes me feel so good physically and mentally.

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

Marisa Franco
Friendship doesn’t happen organically. People like you more than you think, so assume people like you.

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

Marisa Franco
I would point them to my Instagram @drmarisagfranco, that’s D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. And my website, DrMarisaGFranco.com has a quiz to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a friend, and gives you some suggestions on how you can improve. And you can also reach out there for any speaking engagements on connection and belonging within the workplace or outside of it.

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

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, one thing that you can do if you want to make friends at work is, and I guess this is if you are hybrid or in-person, is something called reponing, which means varying the settings in which you interact, which tends to deepen your relationships.

So, if you have a work friend that you kind of like, try to invite them to do something outside of work because that’s going to bring up different sides of them and different sides of you, and allow there to be a transition from work-friend to real friends. So, if any of you changes jobs, you have this precedent of hanging out outside of the workplace, and your relationship will be more sustainable.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Marisa, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many good friendships.

Marisa Franco
Thank you so much for having me.

Feb 13
0

839: The 12 Stages of Burnout: How to Identify and Recover from Yours with Hamza Khan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Hamza Khan says: "Burn bright, not out."

Hamza Khan provides an in-depth look into how professionals burnout—and offers powerful advice for recovery and prevention.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 12 phases of burnout.
  2. The D.R.A.G.O.N. framework for beating burnout.
  3. How to set boundaries without ruining relationships.

About Hamza

Hamza Khan is the Co-Founder of SkillsCamp, a leading soft skills training company, a top-ranked university educator, and respected thought leader. He is a TEDx speaker whose talk, “Stop Managing, Start Leading” has been viewed nearly two million times. His insights have been featured in notable media outlets such as VICE, Business Insider, and The Globe and Mail. Hamza is trusted by the world’s preeminent organizations to enhance human potential and optimize performance. His clients include the likes of Microsoft, PepsiCo, LinkedIn, Deloitte, Salesforce, TikTok, and over 100 colleges and universities.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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Hamza Khan Interview Transcript

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

Hamza Khan
Pete, thank you for having me. Truly honored.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about some of your insights on burnout and more, but, first, you have many cool work accomplishments in your career. And one that stuck out for me is the time you did a movie marathon at your desk at work. Can you tell us the tale here?

Hamza Khan
Oh, man, I was quiet quitting before it became a thing, apparently. Wow, where do we begin? First of all, I’m just a little bit starstruck because you interviewed very recently on this podcast one of my heroes, Dr. Christina Maslach.

Pete Mockaitis
I was going to say she’s on my mind when we talk about burnout.

Hamza Khan
I listened to that episode three times.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Cool.

Hamza Khan
And the first time, I was like, “I cannot believe I’m listening to Dr. Christina Maslach. She’s going off right now on the upstream factors, which influence burnout. But, oh, my goodness, I’m going to be on this very podcast very soon.” And then I went back to it for a third time to just take notes and transcribe it, but thank you for providing the transcription, and you just saved me a lot of time. So, that was fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, yeah. Thank you.

Hamza Khan
Okay, so the quiet quitting. Really interesting. If you listened to that episode, I think, at the time of this release, it might be maybe ten episodes out. I think it’s number 823, if I’m not mistaken, Pete, which, by the way, congratulations on nearly a thousand episodes of this podcast. That is remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Hamza Khan
I was very disengaged at this workplace, quite frankly. I was working at an organization that I just accepted a job with soon after graduation, or, actually, just before. I was petrified that I wasn’t going to find a job, graduating in 2008, into the middle of a recession, so I said yes. First job that was offered to me, I’m like, “I’m taking this. Let’s do it.”

And I joined this company, and I realized it was very imbalanced in the sense that there was a lot of people that were benefitting from the labor of a very small group of people, of which I was a member of. It was a very heavy marketing organization. Even though it was a tech company with two developers, it was very marketing heavy.

And I realized about a year into it that this company was shady, to say the least. They had some Ponzi scheme-like elements to it. And this was an organization in which the optics were rewarded, so you were rewarded for appearing to be productive, showing up early, speaking up in meetings even if you had nothing valuable to say, if you seemed busy, and if you were staying late. And I just increasingly became disengaged, disillusioned by the organization.

And all of the things that Dr. Christina Maslach talked about in her episode, Pete, were present in my working experience there. There was a lack of fairness, there was inconsistent or missing values, there was a lack of control, an unsustainable workload, insufficient reward, to say the least, and a lack of…or poor/toxic community. So, all of those things gradually wore me down and, by the end, I was like, “Hey, what would happen if I just played the game, if I just pretended to be productive over here, if I just leaned into the optics, could this happen?”

And I talked about this in my first TEDx Talk, Stop Managing, Start Leading. For, I think, two weeks, I would show up on time, I would say hello to my boss, wish me good morning, and I’d sit there for eight hours a day, and just marathon movies. And I did them all. I did “Rush Hour,” “The Lord of the Rings.” I did Harry Potters at the time, Godfathers, extended editions of course, and I would leave shortly after 5:30, and my boss would be like, “Hey, good job, buddy. You did an amazing job today.” I’m like, “Oh, all right, man. If you say so, sir, no problem.” And I quit at the end of that marathon. I was like, “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I had several follow-ups when I watched your TEDx Talk, and that was one of them. I was like, “Just how long did this marathon persist?” And so, two weeks, like ten business days, 80-ish hours, so, yeah, extended editions would probably be a good 25 plus films here.

Hamza Khan
Yeah, man, I also had to pop into Reddit and just had to leave my thoughts as well. Make sure they understood.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. The world needs to hear what Hamza thought about these movies on Reddit.

Hamza Khan
One thing I will say, the only sort of – what’s the word I’m looking for over here – movies that are part of, like, franchises or trilogies that actually improved over time, “The Lord of the Rings” I would say, and, surprisingly, “The Planet of the Apes,” which wasn’t out at that time, but those were the only movies that actually get better and don’t actually experience any quality loss, in my personal opinion.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, so I was also going to ask, so you mentioned Ponzi scheme vibes, and maybe I already know the answer to this question. To what extent did you feel guilty, like you were stealing from the company? And it sounds like you thought they were shady and you’re on your way out, so, yeah.

Hamza Khan
Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t have engaged in that behavior were the circumstances of…I don’t know how much I can say over here because I did sign an NDA but, to be fair, I think people can look this up. You can go on my LinkedIn and put the timelines together and figure out what organization I was with, and you could Google them and find out which one is no longer in existence. And I think there’s one that’s going to stand out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Hamza Khan
So, this organization, once I clued into the fact that they were engaging in fraudulent behavior, that’s when I was like, “Oh, wow, you guys are unethical, and I would contend, engaging in some criminal behavior,” so I didn’t feel bad about it at that point. That’s when I realized that, “Hey, we’re being abused.” When I say we, me and my coworkers were being abused in this workplace. That was very much using the Theory X style of management, assuming the worst in employees, and treating us in this pretty antisocial way, behaving in some very antisocial ways, relying on some very dominant behaviors.

And so, once I clued into that, I was like, “Ah, yeah.” I knew I was going to leave but just for my own edification, I wanted to see what would’ve happened if I played the game. And, of course, it worked out in those two weeks, and I was like, “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is kind of fun, that experiment. And I have sort of daydreamed about, I don’t know, interviewing for jobs and being just flagrantly honest and see how that goes, or, if it’s like a lucid dream or fantasy or experiment, to see what happens. And so there, you saw it happened, they said, “Great job,” and that persisted. Who knows how long it could go on had you not exited?

So, that is an amusing opening picture of what can happen when you’re in burnout. And so, Dr. Christina Maslach did share a lot of excellent insights in terms of the fundamental guiding principle causes of burnout. So, please, yes, if folks have not heard that, and you’re interested in the topic, she is maybe the luminary on the topic at Episode 832.

But, Hamza, you’ve got some good stuff here which is fresh and interesting. In particular, you walked through a very resonant 12 stages of burnout, and then a six-step DRAGON method, which I think is supremely practical and very worthwhile. So, I’d love it if we could dig into these particulars and if you could maybe, first, start us off by sharing something you found kind of surprising or novel as you did your own burnout research.

Hamza Khan
Wow, I just want to clarify for the listeners, I sound like an awful employee.

Pete Mockaitis
The worst two weeks of your career, I mean, you had some experiment.

Hamza Khan
The worst two weeks of my career. I did not repeat that experiment ever again. You can ask my bosses. Even during that time, I was a delight to work with. I hope that that is something that all of my employers would say and have said in most cases. And you can go on my LinkedIn, you can see my accomplishments. I’m not a slacker, I promise. I work very hard. I apply myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Message received.

Hamza Khan
Because I would be listening to this, and being like, “Holy, this guy is terrible.” Okay, but I did burn out. And so, this happened when I was highly engaged. Fast-forward to a couple of years later, I’m in an environment in which all of those upstream factors that Dr. Christina Maslach described are working in my favor. My workload is manageable, things are fair, the values are clear, there is a healthy community, so on and so forth, and yet I burned out.

And I burned out in a scenario where, in hindsight, on paper, I shouldn’t have burned out because this was a place where I was very well compensated and we had the best of benefits possible. I mean, if you wanted to, you could get a massage every single day there if you wanted. So, in terms of the things that should’ve prevented burnout and promoted optimal mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, those were at play, and yet I still experienced burnout.

And I realized so much of the reason why that happened is because I had internalized some greater fears. I think any given day, people don’t feel like they’re perfect enough, efficient enough, progressive enough, satisfied enough, innovative enough, whatever the case may be, and they engage in patterns of overwork that, inevitably, extinguish the fires of productivity, and that’s what happened for me.

I subjected myself to persistent chronic stress that left me feeling depleted. I was ineffective, I was negative, I was cynical, and there was a distance between me and the work that I was doing. And so, when this happened, I was very perplexed. Well, first of all, it was very isolating. I felt like I was alone in this. I really needed to understand what had happened to me.

And, at that time, I was using the term burnout quite casually, even flippantly, I was like, “Oh, I’m burning out. I’m burning the candle on both ends.” I didn’t really understand what it was. At the time, I even remember that my understanding of burnout was related to an XBOX game that was popular at the time, “Burnout Paradise” or something.

And then when I delved deeper into this, I realized, “Wow, I was quite lucky to have experienced this and emerged on the other side of it with my health intact,” because that is not the case for so many people. For instance, burnout, ooh, I get chills when I think about this, people are dying every single day because of this.

Just today alone in China, approximately 3,000 people will die from working too hard. And this is not just people working in difficult labor-intensive jobs, blue-collar work. This is knowledge workers just like us dying every single day around the world, not just in China, dying every single day around the world from overwork. So, I felt very lucky in this sort of me-search that gradually became research, and then we-search.

I discovered the 12 stages of burnout, a model proposed by some of Dr. Christina Maslach’s contemporaries, some of the pioneering researchers, Dr. Herbert Freudenberger and Dr. Gail North, respectively. They demonstrated a linear progression of burnout. It starts with the compulsion to prove one’s self, which I imagine a lot of people feel in the work that they do. They feel like they need to prove themselves, which then naturally leads to working harder, stage two.

And then stage three is neglecting needs. And then stage four is displacement of conflicts, and that’s when it becomes tricky for me. That’s usually my tell that I’m burning out. Whenever I become short with clients, whenever I become short with my family, with my friends, that’s when I clue into the realization that I might be on this path to full-blown physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. And that’s the last stage of burnout, stage 12 is there’s nothing there. You’re a husk, essentially.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, when it comes to the working harder and neglecting needs, let’s zero in on what are some particular sorts of needs that are easy to kind of push to the wayside when you’re working harder that can start to sneak up and spiral?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, this is a good one, right? Let’s go into some specific examples. You should try, to the best of your ability, to eat three meals if possible, and eat them around the same time. It’s optimal for metabolism, for energy maintenance and sleep, a whole host of other benefits, but it starts with you just saying, one day, “Oh, you know what, I can’t do breakfast today,” or breakfast starts to happen at lunch, or you just breeze through lunch, or you’re working while eating and you’re not chewing your food in the same way, so just disrupting your eating habits. That’s one thing that you can neglect.

Another thing that you can neglect is fitness, skipping going to the gym, or whatever other recreational or fitness activity that you engage in, pushing that to the side. Not sleeping consistently, not waking up at the same time every single day. So, eating, sleeping, family, friends, whatever you need to refill your energy buckets, you start neglecting those, I would say that’s what happens around stage two, stage three, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
Yup, got you. Okay. The friends, the exercise, the eating, the sleeping, yeah, okay. And so then, the displacement of conflicts, you say you’re being short with people, so you’re displacing that you’re feeling conflicted about what’s up at work on over to other people around you.

Hamza Khan
It’s just avoidance behavior. You just sweep that conversation underneath the rug, below the rug, or you need to have a difficult conversation with your boss, and you think, “Maybe I’ll have it tomorrow. Maybe next week,” and then next week becomes next month, and next month becomes never.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that makes sense because if you don’t feel like you’ve got much in the tank, it’s like, “Oh, that’s too hard. That’s just beyond me.” And I guess I find in my own self that it’s not only sort of difficult emotional conflict conversations, but it’s all kinds of hard projects or things, like taking a hard look at the subscriptions that you’ve signed up for over the last two years and see which ones really needed to go a while ago, and feeling the, I don’t know, maybe guilt, shame, regret, silliness of not having cleaned up some of these messes where they’re hiding in your life earlier, whether they’re difficult conversations or difficult, let’s say, looking at the mirror, peering into the messes that you’ve made sorts of things.

Hamza Khan
That’s a very, very relevant example that you gave over there. So, last year, I was flirting with burnout, 2022, I think on record was one of the most difficult years of my life just in terms of the sheer frequency of stressors and the intensity of stressors. And I remember when I de-loaded my priorities, and we’ll go into the DRAGON method in a bit maybe and talk about ways that we can recover and beat burnout, recover from or beat burnout.

I remember thinking to myself, at the start of the year, like, “Hey, I need to cancel this NBA League Pass subscription that I have.” And an entire year went past, 2022, where I just had this subscription running in the background, and in December I’m like…

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, I might use this soon someday-ish perhaps, maybe.”

Hamza Khan
I was like, “Hey, Adam Silver, you’re welcome, man. I just made a 12-month donation to you and your organization. I didn’t use it at all.” So, yeah, this happens, right? You just avoid, you push away, because you don’t want to deal with it, it’s difficult, and there’s one more stressor that’s going to maybe push you over the edge that you parry.

But I think it was JRR Tolkien who said something to the effect of, “Shortcuts now result in roadblocks later.” And I think about that a lot with stage four. Avoidance of these difficult conversations will ultimately resurface at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve covered the first third of this dozen. Now, let’s hit it with number five, revision of values.

Hamza Khan
Revision of values. So, this is rewriting your own code, the things that are important to you, your sense of purpose, and the things you reward, tolerate, and punish, enter into a state of flux. Work at this point becomes really your only focus. Then, I think, next, we go into stage six, denial of emerging problems. People are starting to notice things are off about you but you dismiss them, you say, “It’s not a me problem; it’s a you problem.”

Stage seven is withdrawal. All of the stress and, especially, all of the social pressure that you’re now feeling, it just becomes overwhelming, it becomes a topic of conversation whenever you meet your friends, whenever you sit down with your family or your spouse. They’re pointing out that something is off, and you say, “It’s easy for me to just not deal with this,” so you retreat. You become isolated, you become even antisocial.

And then eight, we have odd behavioral changes. You undergo obvious behavioral changes that are now significantly concerning friends and family. Stage nine is depersonalization. You fail to see yourself as valuable. You start to antagonize other people. You start to blame people for things that are going wrong in your life.

Stage 10 is inner emptiness. This is loneliness. It’s an extreme sign of burnout. And then stage 11 is depression. It’s like a forced introversion. And then stage 12, full-blown burnout syndrome. This is when you experience physical, mental, and emotional collapse at this stage. And, frankly, I think some stage six onwards, it’s imperative that you seek out professional help.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, this collapse, can you paint a picture for what that might look, sound, feel like?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, I talked about this, I did another TED Talk in 2015, I believe, titled “The Burnout Gamble,” and I went into some detail about it. If I do that topic again, I would definitely just be more present with what was happening. So, I experienced this in 2014, the December of 2014. I had worked that year from January all the way until beginning of December.

I was putting in the nine-nine-six, and nine-nine-seven work weeks. I was just working 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week, and some weeks 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. seven days a week, a style of working that was very popular in the tech sector and was popularized in, I think, it was Alibaba. Jack Ma of Alibaba really just talked about this and extolled its virtues.

Anyway, didn’t take a break, didn’t really have weekends, no vacations, and it was working in the beginning for me. I was being rewarded, I was being promoted, given more responsibilities, and – what’s that saying – the hardest worker gets the bigger shovel. And so, I was just grinding myself down, wearing myself out.

And then in December of 2014, I’m ready to take this epic trip around the world. I’d booked my flights, I’d reserved hotels, Airbnbs, intracity travel. And the day I was supposed to leave on that trip, that grand adventure around the world where I was going to flame out like a phoenix and recover from the ashes of all of this overwork, I got cold feet. And it happened minutes before I was supposed to call the Uber to go to the airport.

My knees buckled, my chest clamped, my breathing became shallower, my temperature skyrocketed, I panicked, and I blacked out. I think my body just said, “Enough is enough. Hamza, you’ve subjected us to too much over here. We’re shutting you down.” And it was just such a surreal feeling because I was, when I awoke, there’s barely minutes left until the flight was supposed to take off.

And in my delirium, I thought that I could still book it into the airport, rush the tarmac, state my case, and hop on the flight, and everything would be okay. But I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t stand up. And the flight left without me. And what happened, instead, is I became sicker than I had ever been in my life, and this is coming from somebody that caught COVID, and this is the OG strand of COVID, too, pre-vaccine.

I threw up, I became nauseous, and, essentially, for the next month, I was alone at home, bedridden, completely bewildered. My mental health was a wreck. I could barely get up out of bed, one of the lowest points in my life. There was just nothing there. I just became a complete shell. And when I talked to doctors about what had happened, they all said that I had burned out, but I had, based on what I told them had happened on the eve of that trip, they said I experienced the symptoms of very traditional panic attack, complete system failure which led me to fall as deathly ill as I had become at that point.

That’s what it looked like for me, and I imagine all the people have gone through similar…who’ve gone through the full 12 stages of burnout, who’ve made it all the way to burnout syndrome, they’ve experienced something similar to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s heavy, and thank you for sharing that experience. I’m thinking that’s certainly dramatic and memorable. I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with another guest, Carey Nieuwhof, and he says, “I don’t have a diagnosis on this but from chatting with people, I think many people suffer from a low-grade burnout.” And he would define it as you’re still able to show up and do the things as opposed to being bedridden, but there’s not much feeling or joy or emotion or life inside you.

And I thought that that was powerful because it rings true to me, is that I’ve seen burnout take kind of these two routes. One is like, “That’s enough. Done. Out.” And then, I’m just sort of like, I was like in a quiet desperation going through the motions. What’s your take on that?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, geez. I never want to go back to that level of burnout that I experienced, full-blown burnout. And the two routes that you mentioned are really interesting. I don’t think I’ve publicly spoken about this but last year, 2022, I definitely was on the burnout cycle. I was in a cycle of burnout but I didn’t make it all the way to stage 12.

And so, there’s a part of me, like an inner defense mechanism that made me maybe reluctant to share my burnout story in the first place, that’s like, “Don’t admit that you experienced burnout because that will undermine your message. It’s like how can you be an expert on burnout? How did you write this book? Are you speaking on burnout but you’re going through it as well?”

But the truth is even if you’re on stage one of the burnout cycle, you’re still technically experiencing burnout. It’s just to a lesser degree than somebody might be experiencing if they’re at stage 12. And the fact remains that you’re still going through the motions, you’re still experiencing, on this continuum of burnout, effects, the thing that the World Health Organization ascribe three dimensions to: feelings of exhaustion and energy depletion, increased distance from your jobs, and negativism and cynicism about your work.

And that can happen at stage one, it can happen at stage 12. It certainly happens at stage 12. So, even if you’re experiencing chronic stress that has not been successfully managed but you’re still effective, you’re still productive, you’re still getting things done, you might be tempted to think and say that you’re not going through burnout, but the truth is you are. And acknowledging that you are is the first step, in my opinion, towards recovering from burnout, to dealing with it constructively.

Pete Mockaitis
And as we look at the 12 stages overall, one that’s striking a chord with me right now, and I don’t think I noticed it at the time, is I was working a lot and I wasn’t really pleased with it, but I thought, “Well, hey, man, that’s the nature of the game. Some projects are tougher than others and some seasons are trickier.”

And then I found myself frequently checking my bank account balances and stock holdings, which was weird because I didn’t do that before. And it was like, “Ah, man, I’m working a lot and now I’m tired.” I was like, “But, you know what, I’m making a lot of money.” It’s like, “Look at that. That’s pretty impressive. Look at that. Did you imagine a couple of years ago that…?” And then I remember even reflecting on myself in that moment, thinking, “Yeah, but when did you care about that?”

Hamza Khan
Yeah, yeah, I’m right there with you. That’s busy work, right? Like, you’re just doing things to give you the illusion that work is being done, that progress is being made. I’m right there with you. And I would actually start to obsess about whenever money was leaving my accounts because that was a stressor for me too.

So, Stevan E. Hobfoll, a researcher, has proposed this theory, the conservation of resources theory, which states that people experience psychological stress, which is a big contributor to burnout, psychological stress in three scenarios: when there’s a net loss of resources, when there’s the threat of a loss of resources, or when there’s insufficient reward following an investment of resources.

So, when I was going through burnout, just like you, Pete, I would obsess, I would check my bank account every single day, and I was like, “Ah, in case of movement, things are okay.” And I’m like, “What am I doing? This is not moving the needle on anything. I’m just trying to fill my time over here.” I’m just trying to give myself some optical illusion that progress is being made, or at least I’m not regressing, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I also remember thinking about how, like, we’re working a lot and that, somehow, meant that we were really tough and hardcore and awesome like Navy Seals or something, and a 9-to-5 worker was weak or lazy or something. And so, that’s kind of gross too in terms of stoking…

Hamza Khan
A toxic hustle culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s stoking a toxic…and it’s inside my own mind too. A toxic, I don’t know what the word is, othering or being contemptuous of like normal.

Hamza Khan
A disassociation almost.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it’s like it is weird in terms of the revision of values. It’s like, “Who I am is different, and that’s not pretty.” So, that resonates as a real step that pops up there, I didn’t care about being a super hardcore dude capable of working a lot or having a fat bank balance. But in a world in which I was working too much, that was the consolation I had available to me, and that’s what I clung to.

Hamza Khan
I can relate so much to that. So much of our identity, it sounds like, and just hearing that, was tied up in being productive. It’s how we made meaning in the world. It’s something that we did to inflate our egos and to feel valuable, to feel wanted in the world. And when that wasn’t true for me in 2014, when I burned out, it was an ego death.

It was like a, “Holy smokes, what’s going on? Who am I?” moment. “If I can’t be effective in the workplace, if I’ve now signaled to all of my colleagues and to my partners and to my leaders that I can’t manage myself well enough to be effective in the workplace, then maybe I’m not who I think I am.” So, there was a significant period of depression that followed that burnout, and it’s taken me years to recover from that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s talk recovery. There’s a six-step DRAGON method you mentioned, D-R-A-G-O-N. Yup, that’s six letters, or six steps. It’s an acronym. Lay it on us, Hamza.

Hamza Khan
Look, I got to be honest with you. It was not dragon when I put it together. It was like D-R-A-G-X or G-L-M, and I was like, “Ah, I got to find a synonym for this X and L word, and let’s just make it dragon,” so it worked out. But I think the idea is still salient because the way I was behaving in 2014, and prior to, was very much like a phoenix. I had this false belief that I could just continue to burn bright and burn out, and then recover from the ashes every single time.

And I think a fantastical mythical creature that has better relationship with fire, that isn’t beholden to fire, is the dragon, very much in control of it. It’s calm, it’s powerful, and it’s resilient, so I’ve leaned into that metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Look at you, smart work with that dragon, fire breathing, controlling it.

Hamza Khan
Thank you, sir. There we go. There we go. So, better to behave like a dragon than a phoenix. Now, I was very inspired by Dr. Christina Maslach’s work so I want to preface by saying this. What I’m sharing, this DRAGON method, it assumes that there is a good fit with you and the organization, and it assumes that the upstream factors are non-existent. Because if the upstream factors are in play, then this DRAGON method, it’s going to be very difficult for you to implement.

And I’ll take it a step further. I’ve heard this verbatim from some clients throughout the years, like you can’t yoga your way, you can’t journal your way out of burnout, if you’re dealing with a toxic leader, or you’re grossly underpaid at your workplace, or if there’s no mission, vision, values, principles, purpose. So, these are very much designed with the individual in mind, and it’s what I used to emerge from burnout and to keep burnout at bay.

So, the first step is to de-load priorities. Identify the sources of stress in your life, and diminish them, and reduce them down to something that’s manageable, to create the time and space, essentially, to recover. That’s step number one. The second step is to reconfigure focus because it’s one of the things that we lose sight of when we’re going through burnout. We lose our north star. We lose our sense of purpose. To reconnect with why you’re doing what you’re doing, the transcendent reason for your being in the world of work.

Then stage three is to assemble boundaries against the very things that caused you to experience undue stress and burnout in the first place, to get better at saying no, essentially. Then we go, once we’re past the recovery stage, D-R-A, then we go into the inoculation stage. This is how to prevent yourself from burning out.

So, the first part of that is G, gain mastery of stress, separate good stress from bad stress, and understand that it’s better to then go into the next stage, O, be a high-performer and not an overachiever. So, overcome overachievement. And then the final stage, perhaps the most important stage in terms of inoculating yourself against burnout, is to nurture resilience. And a big part of that is about developing better self-awareness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. De-load priorities, reconfigure focus, assemble boundaries, gain mastery of stress, overcome overachievement, and nurture resilience.

Hamza Khan
Bingo.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you share a couple of your favorite tactics or huge bang-for-the-buck types of initiatives or interventions that fall within each of these six that are some of your faves?

Hamza Khan
Okay. Wow. I’m going to give you a couple ones that I have been relying on extensively over the last year and a half. So, the one that I’ve gone pro at is assembling boundaries, and a big part of this is learning how to say no, and doling out respectful no’s. You could do it like Oprah, that’s one way to do it. You could just make your default response, to everything that takes you out of balance, no. Like, no to birthdays, no to Zoom meetings, no to coffee dates, all of that.

But I think you’ll quickly learn that you’re going to lose friends and exhaust a lot of social capital. But one way that you can dole out no’s is respectful. You can acknowledge their request. You can say, “Thank you so much for thinking of me for this opportunity.” Then you can clearly state why you can’t do it. So, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, thank you so much for thinking of me to be on the podcast. Unfortunately, I can’t do it because for the next three months, I’m busy with…” whatever. Clearly state why I can’t do it.

Then I can offer an alternative, and that’s the master stroke. Instead of leaving you hanging, I should say, “Hey, what if we circle back in about six months? Or, instead of me, I think somebody else would be a better fit for this podcast on this topic.” In this way, you don’t feel like I’ve left you high and dry. It actually builds social capital between us because I’m looking out for you. I’m looking to solve your problem, looking to help you out in that situation. So, that’s one way to do it. Doling out respectful no’s, that has been very helpful to me.

Another strategy, ooh, I love this one a lot, it’s the five D method. This is especially important whenever you’re dealing with triaging any of your inboxes. I use this with my inbox every single day. Before I decide to do something, I run it through another set of D options. The first one is defer. If I can do this at a later date, great, push it aside. Diminish, reduce the scope of it. Delegate, if you have the ability to give it somebody else, and if it’s unnecessary, if it’s not relevant, just delete it.

And then whatever is left over, then do that. And I promise you, if you run your inbox through that filter of defer, diminish, delegate, delete, and then do, you will overcome that hesitation to start something. I mean, what’s that saying? There’s only way to eat an elephant; one bite at a time, which is a ridiculous adage when you think about it because you shouldn’t eat elephants, unless you’re a dragon, of course. That’s a different story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yes.

Hamza Khan
But the point remains that our reluctance to start something is proportional to the size of it. And so, when we’re staring down an inbox of 200, 300 emails, the five D method comes in handy. And the last one I want to give you over here, I could give you so much, but one that I’m using quite regularly is the dash method.

Decide, essentially, how work is going to end before you start work, in this way you activate what’s known as Parkinson’s Law, this productivity principle which states that work expands so as to fill the time allocated for its completion. Well, if you don’t have these constraints in place, if you’re not simulating these constraints, you’re probably like, if you’re like me, like a procrastinator, you’re going to wait until the very last minute to start it, and it’s probably not going to get…or at the very least, it won’t be very good.

And there’s a couple of dashes that you can use; there’s time-based dashes. So, let’s look at it in the context of this podcast. We have an hour allocated for the recording of this, so we’re either going to reach the full 60 minutes or we’re going to end before then. So, that’s a time-based dash. You and I both know how this recording is going to end.

There’s also an energy-based dash, whenever either of us loses energy in the tank to continue, that’s another way we can end this. There’s a unit-based dash, we can go through all of the questions that, Pete, you’ve designed, so that’s one way to end this podcast. There’s time, energy, unit. There’s feeling-based as well. So, Pete, whenever you feel like we’ve got a good episode in the can, we can wrap this up.

And there’s also results-based. We’d be trying to hit a certain metric for the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast, and then you might feel confident that we’ve reached that metric. And so, what you can do is you can establish one of these dashes as a way to end work before it begins, or you can combine some of these dashes and decide to end work when one of these dashes has been reached. So, that’s another strategy that I would recommend that falls within the DRAGON method.

Pete Mockaitis
And within the gain mastery of stress step, any favorite tools there?

Hamza Khan
Okay, so when it comes to gaining mastery of stress, this is one that was challenging for me last year, when I was flirting with burnout, and it was taking regular breaks. And I know this seems really pedestrian. There are probably some listeners who are just rolling their eyes, being like, “Seriously? Just taking breaks? How important is that?”

It is essential. It should be non-negotiable. It’s not a nice to have in a very busy work day. It’s actually essential to you doing your best work. And so, put them in your calendar, hardcode them. I now have breaks built into my calendar. For example, I’ve really slow mornings, and I color-code them as well to be green. And green signals to me that this is going to be something that’s going to be replenishing.

Lunch, non-negotiables, in there at the same time every single day. Weekends blocked off. Some evenings, date nights with my partner, all blocked off. So, scheduling these breaks and structuring them is essential. And if you have the ability to take regular vacations if you can, and when you are taking these vacations, I think, plan them in such a way where you can actually go dark and disconnect completely from the very things that might be causing regular stress.

So, within overcome overachievement, or, sorry, gain mastery of stress, I would say, in that step, take breaks, and, if not, be warned that you could break in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Take several breaks. Got it. Well, Hamza, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Hamza Khan
Wow, no, you’ve really asked some questions here that have given me reason to step back and just appreciate all of the wisdom that has been accumulated through mentors, through different researchers, and Dr. Christina Maslach being one of them, that helped me get through the stress of last year. I think had this conversation happened in 2014, you’d be speaking to a very different Hamza that would be on the brink of full-blown burnout.

So, I’m just very grateful that I have the ability now to pay it forward to people who might be experiencing any stage on that 12 stage of burnout model, and, hopefully, it’ll compel you to separate run-of-the-mill everyday stress from what might be something that will lead to debilitating consequences for you. And, hopefully, you can say that.

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

Hamza Khan
It’s by Martha Graham, considered to be one of the pioneers of ballet in the United States.

She wrote, “There is a vitality, a lifeforce, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there’s only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly to keep the channel open.”

And, Pete, I sometimes find myself just staring at this quote, and really meditating on it because, as somebody that’s very critical of their work, as somebody who easily becomes disheartened with the results or lack thereof, I tend to fall into the trap of just comparing myself and competing unnecessarily. And so, when I read this, whenever I feel down about my work and my output, I’m like, “Hey, there’s a thing that’s working over here. Just keep the channel open. It’s okay.”

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

Hamza Khan
I’ve got a lot but the one that has my attention these days is The Dark Triad of Personality Traits, specifically within leadership. Very interesting research. And as a nice companion to that, you can look at the D Factor of Personality. Fascinating, especially if you’re studying destructive leadership and how that might be impacting such things as employee engagement, burnout, turnover, and the works.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s tempting for me to jump all over that. So, what are the three things, just the minimum?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, okay. So, The Dark Triad of Personality Traits: subclinical levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And they fall within the other model, which is the D Factor Personality, the inverse of the OCEAN Big Five Traits. This is essentially, and I hope I can get this right, it is the relentless pursuit of maximizing one’s individual utility while provoking, neglecting, or accepting the disutility of others. In other words, selfish behavior. And that is what is at the root of destructive leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it seems to check out, having done none of that research, that sounds about accurate. And how about a favorite book?

Hamza Khan
One that I’m reading right now. Man, I cannot say enough good things about it, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. My goodness, it’s about something that happened in 1886 but it’s reading to me as though it was written for this moment in time, 2023, and all of the tension and the levels of disengagement and burnout that are happening in the workplace.

Clearly, to me and many others, there’s something fundamentally wrong about the world of work today, and I think this book offers a very timely warning for if we don’t correct the things that are going wrong in the modern workplace, then we face some kind of upheaval that is going to be uncomfortable for everyone.

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

Hamza Khan
If I had to pick of the current suite of tools that I’m using at the moment, Asana, the task management system.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Hamza Khan
A favorite habit is waking up at the same time every single day, even on weekends.

Pete Mockaitis
And what time is that?

Hamza Khan
It ranges between 5:00 and 5:30.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Hamza Khan
Never the same time on the dot. I’m always surprised whenever it spills over beyond 5:30.

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

Hamza Khan
Two in particular. One is “Stop Managing, Start Leading,” and the other one is “Burn bright, not out.”

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

Hamza Khan
HamzaK.com. You can find all of my links, my social links, links to my podcast, newsletter, all of that at HamzaK.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?

Hamza Khan
Don’t resist change. Don’t resist chaos and the uncertainty of the future of work. Embrace it. Understand that change is the ability to triumph through adversity. To overcome adversity is something that makes us uniquely human. It’s the closest thing that we have to a superpower. So, always be changing, and, at the very least, change before change is required, especially before it’s too late.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hamza, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and little burnout.

Hamza Khan
Thank you, sir. Thank you. And likewise.

Feb 09
0

838: How to Listen and Solve Problems Like a Master Innovator with Mark Rickmeier

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Mark Rickmeier says: "Fall in love with the right problem before you get too attached to a solution."

Mark Rickmeier shares the specific approaches product innovators use to develop breakthrough solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The double diamond framework for more effective problem solving.
  2. How to quickly generate new, original ideas in two ways.
  3. A handy tool to help you select the most resonant solution.

About Mark

Mark Rickmeier is the Chief Executive Officer at TXI, a boutique strategy and product innovation firm that specializes in UX research, design, and software development and closes the gap between ambition and reality. Over the past 20 years, he has created more than 100 mobile apps, custom-built web applications, and intuitive user experiences.

Resources Mentioned

Mark Rickmeier Interview Transcript

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

Mark Rickmeier
Thank you. I hope I can be awesome today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hope you can, too. I have high hopes and I think the odds are great.

Mark Rickmeier
Starting off strong with optimism. I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we have passed over, well, I guess 50 other people in order to select you, so I think there’s a product innovation lesson in there somewhere.

Mark Rickmeier
Now, I’m feeling all kinds of awesome pressure. Yeah, exactly. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m excited to talk about innovation, creativity, great listening. And could you kick us off by sharing maybe an extra-exciting fun story about a eureka moment, an aha breakthrough, an exciting creative experience that’s just a very fond memory for you that lights you up?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah. All right, so this is timely because it’s also one of my most poorly timed decisions of all time but still, I think, really important in my life. So, go back a couple of years, I was the COO at the time, and I’d just been asked by our founder, who, he was doing his own self-reflection on his career and his journey. He was recognizing that he was a zero-to-one type person. Loves starting things, being entrepreneurial, but as we were growing the business and expanding it, it was a lot more appealing to me to think about how to grow and scale the business, whereas, he wanted to go back to his entrepreneurial founding roots.

And so, he asked if I would be…if I’d step into the CEO role and help to grow and keep running the business. And, at the time, I was like, “I don’t know,” because I was like already a dad, on school board, and doing some philanthropic work, and this idea of taking on this additional role was both very exciting but also a little intimidating at the time.

And so, I told him, “Give me a minute,” and I took a week off to think about this prospect. And what I often do, I turn to the community to get input from outside my little bubble. And so, I invited nine other CEO-type people to go with me. I found a walking trail in the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and said, “I’m going to take a week away without having Slack, or Twitter, or email, or my family, or my coworkers. It’s just some time to think.”

And I wanted to pick the brains of other people who had done this job, this really crazy stressful job before. And said, “I wanted to ask them about their advice and how to be successful in that role. And rather than calling it a workshop, like we always do in most of our facilitation sessions, we called it a walk shop, because we’re gonna be walking the entire time.

And so, five men, five women go to Scotland to talk about, “What is the job of a CEO? How do you handle that? How do you think about the pressures of the job? And how does that affect your other work-life balance concepts?” It was funny, when we came back, each of us were taking pictures of the trail, and when the trail was really wide, we have good group conversations. When the trail got narrow, we paired off more one on one.

And everyone was talking about this experience that we had. And so, when we came back, on LinkedIn, people were hitting us off with, “That’s a really odd idea, going into the woods for five days. Like, what was that all about?” And people started asking me when the next one was, and I had to tell them, like, “Well, there’s no next one. I got a whole company to run now. What are you talking about? Like, I have a thing, a job I just said yes to.”

And everyone kept asking, so I was like, “All right. Well, I’ll organize another one. I got so much out of it, let’s try the Black Forest of Germany.” And now 18 people said they wanted to go on this to unplug for a week, and have this time to think and to process with other people. And we did a hike for the Black Forest, and, again, when we came back, and everyone was posting stories in that, two people ended up going into business together after that hike. And I got an idea for a thing that became a kickstarter concept, and then that got backed.

And all this creative energy came out of the walk shop that people kept asking when the next one was. So, we did a third, and by that point, when it sold out almost instantly, I was like, “Okay, this is something I want to do and find a way to do more regularly.” So, I’m also the genius that started a travel company during the 2020, brilliant timing, before all that happened.

But as far as a fun, creative experience, one of the best things I do as a gift for myself is, at least once a year, try to shut down away from the day-to-day kind of experience, and get away from what otherwise a very sedentary job, and be on my feet. Quite literally thinking on my feet. This year we’re going to the Algarve in Portugal.

So, 12 of us are going to be hiking, talking about this year, “How do you lead organizations in remote situations? Like, how do you really involve yourself in remote leadership?” Since a lot of us are coming from a place, not that long ago, of running organizations are being involved in a lot of co-located scenarios with team members all side by side, and now we’re living in much more distributed and remote kind of worlds.

And so, there’ll be 12 executives are going to go hiking through Portugal with no distractions and technological interruptions to have those dedicated time together to dig into this kind of stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And can you orient us a bit to what is TXI and Product innovation?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah, TXI, so it stands for technology, experience, and innovation. So, the three things we care about most. And when we talk about product innovation, it is being able to help our clients think about new ideas for their business that will drive them forward, and then having the designers and engineers that can take those ideas off of a slide deck and make them into reality. So, building a chatbot, or a mobile application, or a web app, or wearable products, like some kind of digital application that can then provide business value.

So, half of our brains are thinking about, “How do we build something right?” which is all the agile background and technological background to build something that scales well on a good tech platform. But beyond that, also, “How do you build the right thing?” which is where we get into some of the design thinking and product innovation, helping clients unlock some value in their business by coming up with new concepts that can then become a digital product.

Pete Mockaitis
And a core skill to doing that well is listening a little better than the average professional, I dare say. Could you make the case for how listening makes the difference and how you listen differently?

Mark Rickmeier
I think it’s two things. I think it’s both finding how you, like the actual skills of active listening, very, very important, but also what you’re listening for. And so, I can give a story here to maybe provide a concept. So, a client came to us, this is in maybe 2015, 2016, just as I was learning the difference, I would say, between custom development and product innovation.

This is a research university in Texas, and they said, “We want to build a mobile app.” And, honestly, up until that point, I would’ve said something silly, like, “Great, we’re really good at building mobile apps. We call them, these products, like MVPs, our minimum viable products.” So, you’re going to give us requirements, we call them stories in agile, and in a few short months, we’ll knock that out, we’ll build you a mobile app.

And, thankfully, we had, at that point, been working with a number of designers that are required to design team in building out more of this design-thinking framework. And the team said, “We hear that you have this idea for this mobile app, which is wonderful, but back up a second. Don’t tell us about the solution. Rather, tell us about the problem you’re trying to solve. Let’s start there.” And that was confusing because, at the time, they’ve talked to a lot of other companies and everyone was doing the same thing, “Tell us about your mobile app, we’ll write a proposal and then you’ll pick the cheapest one.”

And the team said, “Really, just humor us. Who are your users? Let’s start there. Let’s better understand that.” And the case they were making is that “Custom technology is really expensive. To build a custom mobile app could be a quarter to half a million dollars, and before we go do that, let’s just make sure we’re doing the right thing.”

And in their case, their users were their students. They were trying to figure out how to navigate the four years at the university, how to pick a major, how to build trust with an adviser on the administration side, and the team said, “Great. Let’s go talk to some students before we assume that the mobile app, which could cost half a million dollars. That’s an awful lot of money. Let’s just make sure this is the right path.”

So, we spent a few short design sprints, talking to them, getting a better sense of their challenges, what their goals were, doing some rapid prototyping and validation, and came back, after only two weeks, and said, “I don’t think this is what you want to do. Think about if you were student, it’s been a week-long of frustration and anxiety, it’s Friday afternoon, you don’t know who to turn to, what to do, so the first you’re going to do is go to the App Store. Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“Like, you probably want to talk to a human as soon as possible. And while we could build you a mobile app, and it’ll go live on time and cost half a million dollars, and we don’t think anyone is going to use it, or something that acts more like a chatbot, where if you ask and answer a few certain questions, we can partner you with the right person. That probably we can do in about four to six weeks.”

And so, in this case, it wasn’t just listening to what they were saying, because, again, if we had listened to what they said they wanted, we would’ve built them a mobile app, which would’ve gone live on time but not actually met the need. It was listening for what the real need was and helping them to understand the desire of, like, fall in love with the right problem before you get too attached to a solution.

In this case, they came in with a solution because they really thought mobile app would be the best way to engage students. And, in this case, helping them to listen better was getting them to step away from the, I guess, the solution they were already kind of excited about, and go talk to some students, and go talk to them about what their issues are, and what really will help, and really try to identify the right problem first.

So, the beginning of design thinking, the beginning of product innovation is always seeking to understand and trying to do as much of that before you get too attached to a potential idea. There are lots of ways this is going to scatter. There are lots of apps you could build, or digital products you could build. In this case, it was helping them to realize there was maybe a better problem to focus on, and a cheaper solution to build that would give them a better outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to this active listening and doing it better, do you have sort of a step-by-step or a few key principles? It seems like one is just getting oriented to, “What are you really trying to achieve here? What is success look like?” And taking a step back, zoom out, getting that broader view as oppose to just getting off to the races.

Another principle is engaging with the folks who are actually affected, impacted, going to be using the thing, and to see what their scoop is. What are some of the other favorite principles, or steps, or tips that you find make a world of difference to upgrade your active listening?

Mark Rickmeier
So, some of it is mindset things. So, when you’re working with an organization, I mean, a lot of people come in with already pre-baked ideas of, “This is what’s going to work. This is what’s going to be successful for us.” And to some degrees, especially if you’re looking to do something rather innovative, you have to be willing to invest in a little bit of what we call unlearning. So, yeah, there are things that may have gotten you at this point, but you may need to let go of some of those to be able to make space for a new way or working, or a new approach you might take.

And so, there’s a concept, there’s a mindset of unlearning, of getting rid of maybe old patterns and old ways of doing things to be able to be open to new concepts, and that’s very important. Also, as we said, going in with the mindset of you really want to be open, and so this is where you follow a framework called the double diamond. But if you think about the ways a diamond is drawn, the very first thing is you go wide, and it’s called diversion thinking. You’re trying to get as much exposure to new ideas and outside perspectives as you can.

And then from there, you consolidate down to a point which is identifying what the core problem is. And it’s from there that you can explore and go wide again, and say, “Well, now I know what the real problem we want to solve is. Now, let’s get really creative. Let’s come up with lots of ideas of how we could solve that problem. There are tons of ways to solve problems.”

And then from there, we consolidate down the ones we think are best. And so, it’s important, as we go through that process, to be able to explore different ideas. And then, and this is the hard one, I think, to make sure you’re listening to the best idea, which is not always the most loudest voice or the most executive voice. It’s really helping the best idea to win.

And so, part of the challenge, I’ve always been encouraging that unlearning aspect of letting people to let go of old ways of doing things, but also making sure that, like a single part owner, or a single executive, doesn’t be like, “And this is what we’re going to do,” that you really want the data and the insights to be able to guide the product.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, as you walked through that double diamond, I’m thinking I was involved in a club in high school called Future Problem-Solvers, and we did exactly this, and I had to pull it up. Step one, identify challenges. You listed like a bunch of challenges. Step two, select the underlying problem. Step three, produce solution ideas. Step four, generate and select criteria. Step five, apply criteria. Step six, develop an action plan.

So, indeed, we’re diverging and converging, and then diverging and then converging. It’s like, “Whoa, okay.”

Mark Rickmeier
“I’ve heard this before.” What’s funny though, how many people think about this jump in at the second one, they’re like, “Okay, let’s start brainstorming. Let’s get some ideas going.” And it’s really hard, you got to back up, they’re like, “We hear you.” And there’s a lot of enthusiasm for generating ideas but are we solving the right problem? Like, let’s back up.

Like, identifying the right problem, way more valuable. Asking the right question, way more valuable than generating a ton of ideas. Like, in this case, how do we brainstorm a whole bunch of great mobile app concepts? It would’ve been fun to do but it wouldn’t have solved the problem what they were looking to solve with the student engagement, so it is hard.

Especially, when people are really jazzed and you’ve got stakeholders really excited about, “Let’s get to the whiteboard and start sketching out apps.” You’ve got to find a way to back them up a bit, and say, “We will get there but, first, let’s talk to some users and make sure we’re identifying the right problems to solve.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s the broad overview framework perspective for how you’re proceeding. I’m curious, once you get into some of the steps, are there any key things that help you generate more ideas, or key questions that help get to the root of things super effectively?

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah. So, one of the things we’ll do, let’s say we have identified that right problem, and now we all are thinking about the same thing, we like trying to find ways of, again, diverging to get new ideas without being too heavily influenced or kind of biased by a single concept. So, one of the things we might do is ask everyone, it’s a really easy exercise, take a sheet of paper, A4 paper, and fold it in half, and then fold in half, and fold it in half again till you get like a series of creases on the paper that looks like a series of eight squares on a normal paper.

And then within each one, we ask people to draw out concepts. They don’t have to be high-fidelity graphic design. Just draw concepts of what you’re thinking might be a good solution to this problem. And people go about doing that independently, so we don’t have people influencing each other’s ideas or stealing each other’s creative thoughts. We just go diverge there.

And then we do a series of dot-voting where people can go through, they’re walking through, and say, “I like this concept. I like that concept.” And dot-voting is where you put a dot on the idea that you think is most valuable, most interesting. And we found that to be…those two practices to be very effective because, one, everyone can sketch. Sometimes there’s this misconception of, like, only designers can come up with ideas. We like everyone being involved in the ideation side. So, developers, designers, product people all doing some high-level sketching.

And then we also really encourage this practice of dot-voting because what often happens is sometimes, like we said, the most expensive paid person in the room, which is called the HiPPO vote, the highest paid person, or you have an executive will come in, like, “Ooh, this is the right thing,” and then everyone says that. Dot-voting is a nice way for everyone to independently say, “This one really caught my eye. This could be really valuable.”

So, there are techniques that we use in our facilitation to try to get everyone to be part of the generative process, but also find a way to eliminate bias from some of the discussion is kicking around ideas, so that the best idea is not the most executive voice wins out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, dot-voting is one mechanism by which you’re doing some narrowing and selecting. Do you have any other favorite approaches or criteria?

Mark Rickmeier
One of the things I’ve done, actually, this goes back on the generative side, is getting people to think about like a new way of working. And sometimes, as we say, like, unlearning is very difficult. You have to think about a new way of approaching something. And so, have you ever heard of escape thinking?

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell us.

Mark Rickmeier
So, imagine you have a process, and it’s a process that you assume everyone follows, so everyone does it the same way, and we just assume this is the way it’s done. So, if I were to ask you, like, “How do you go about a typical restaurant experience?” Most people would say, “Well, you get met by the greeter, and then you’re brought to a table, and the waiter brings you a menu, and you order. The waiter brings you your food, you eat. The waiter brings you your receipt, you pay, and you leave.”

And escape thinking is you map out a process that everyone understands, everyone assumes to be true, “This is what it looks like to go to a restaurant,” and you say, “Okay. Table one, we’re going to take this one core component that everyone assumes has to be true. Remove it, and you have to have the exact same outcome.”

So, table one, you have no menu, how do you handle that? Table two, you have the exact same process but you have no waiter. How would that happen? And then you start getting some really creative new ways of thinking, like, “How would I go about doing that if I didn’t have a waiter? Well, I probably would have to have some kind of kiosk at the table or some kind of mobile menu option. Or, if I didn’t have any, if I just walked out of the restaurant, I never paid anything, like with an Uber, you just walk out the cab, how do I still pay for things? How do I organize this?”

Escape thinking for us is an interesting way to facilitate a new kind of ideation to get people to think about new ways of engaging in a process, especially if they’ve been doing it for a long time, and they’ve been following a process that’s, “This is always how it’s been done.” We find that things like that will allow people to try new ways of working and thinking about things in a slightly different way. So, it’s a way of thinking about a process to encourage creativity and allow them to go wide and think of new ways of doing things. And so, it’s a kind of facilitation pattern we can use.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any other perspectives on the convergent, the narrowing down and selecting?

Mark Rickmeier
One of the things, and this is where we get into listening. I find this really interesting. I was trying to experiment with this, especially as we had more remote team members. Obviously, there are tools like Miro. Like, Miro, you can use for facilitation and for things like dot-voting. But I was trying to think about a new way of hearing from people when you don’t have everyone all co-located, and to make sure that there wasn’t more, I guess, influence and bias.

And so, there’s a new facilitation technique I learned about during the pandemic, which I’ve really fallen in love with. It’s a tool called ThoughtExchange. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it. But it’s an interesting way of being able to get to specificity around the concept when you’re trying to hear from lots of different people.

So, an example, when I would run our all-company meetings, I might ask a question, like an AMA, “Ask me anything. What do you want to know about next week?” And then I would assume, when we’re all together, I’d just bump into people in the kitchen, or I could ask them in the hallway, “What do you want to talk about?” Well, I no longer have that as an option during 2020. I did what I thought was next best, which was to do a survey, and say, “What do you all want to talk about next week?”

And then I would assume that the most-frequently mentioned things were the highest priority ones. And so, I would say, “Okay, five people, ten people all mentioned office space. Let’s talk about office space.” A different way of doing prioritization is doing a thing called a ThoughtExchange, which was something I’ve never heard of before.

But the basic concept is that you ask an opening question like this again, “What should we talk about next week?” And then everyone anonymously answers that question. Afterward though, they also then get to see everyone else’s anonymous responses and can up-vote or down-vote, and be like, “Ooh, I didn’t think of that but that’s a five-star idea. This other one, meh, one-star idea. Much rather agree with that.” And you get to all interact in each other’s suggestions.

The reason why that’s really important when you come into prioritization is that if you’re doing a survey, like I would’ve done in my old world, again, I would assume that the most frequently mentioned things, the highest responded are the most important because they kept getting mentioned over and over again.

And so, when we did this, for example, all kinds of responses of like, “Do we need an office space?” “Are we going to renew our lease?” “Are we going to get a new office space?” All these questions about space, and only two people, probably very brave people, were saying things like, “God, I’m going through a lot right now. I wish we could talk more about mental health and anxiety. Like, that’s where I just am feeling really burned out. I wish we could talk more about that.”

But when I saw frequency of mentions, I was like, “Oh, only two people said this. Ten, fifteen people said space, ‘We should talk about space.’” When we did a ThoughtExchange or whatever happened, was that people saw each other’s responses, and everyone anonymously say, “Ooh, you know what, I didn’t think of that, or maybe I wasn’t willing to put myself out there and say that. But now that I see that, I’d much rather talk about burnout and mental health than I would about physical space. That could be in email. Let’s use our precious to give our time to talk about this thing instead.”

And so, we changed the access to say, “Don’t show me frequently mentioned. Show me highest voted,” and that totally changed the prioritization matrix. And now we look at that mental health went from only being mentioned by two people and being like second to the bottom to being second from the top, like one of the most highest voted concepts. Even though it wasn’t frequently mentioned, when people saw it, they’re like, “That’s the thing we should spend our time on.” And it became a much higher priority for our company for discussion.

And so, this idea of a ThoughtExchange where people can interact with each other’s ideas and up-vote them and engage with them allowed us, in six minutes, to get over a hundred interactions on each other’s ideas and stickies, and allow other ideas to bubble up at the top, which would not have happened had we just done with a survey-type approach.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re engaged in conversation, maybe you’re doing some one-on-one user research and interviews, etc., are there some key questions you found that just tend to yield cool insights over and over?

Mark Rickmeier
It depends on the nature of the problem we’re trying to solve. I always like, for open-ended things, I like ideas, if we’re talking about the company experience, ideas of what keeps you up at night. Or, if you’re working with someone, what advice would you have to work with me? If someone was working with me for the very first time, what advice would you give a new person for working with me? Like, there’s interesting ideas can always come up from those kinds of questions.

And if it’s very product-focused, then I think it depends on the nature of the problem you’re trying to solve. But I think one of the best questions I like thinking of is, “What is the worst way you could solve this problem?” because that always gets interesting fun answers. And you try to get to the worst possible scenario, and that generates a whole bunch of new creativity. You can say, “All right. If we didn’t do that, what would be a way we could fix that? Or, what will the one small way to tweak that?”

But, generally speaking, if you ask that question, “What’s the worst possible way we could solve this problem?” ultimately, what people do when they answer that is they will bring up some of their latent fears or maybe like things they’re nervous about. Everyone has some concern about maybe a direction a product might go, or a direction an organization might go. And when you ask that silly question, it’ll give them freedom to be like, “Oh, man, I could see it going really horribly down this path if we’re not careful.” It allows them to maybe say the thing they would otherwise be unwilling to say or nervous about saying.

So, I like exploring both, like, the positive direction as well as the kind of the anti-pattern, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?” because even though, hopefully, you’d never pick that path, it gives people the flexibility and the freedom to talk about what would otherwise maybe be unspoken concerns.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I like that question with regard to what would be the worst way. Could you share with us what are some worst ways to approach innovation, problem-solving, listening, or common mistakes people end up making when they are taking things the double-diamond way?

Mark Rickmeier
Well, the worst thing we’ve seen is that people jump right into the brainstorming, “Let’s get some ideas on the table of the thing we’re going to build,” and we really have to bring them back, to be like, “Let’s talk about the problem we want to solve first.” Like, that’s the first critical mistake, is that people jump in on the wrong foot, on the wrong diamond.

Or, when they actually get to identify what the problem is, that they don’t actually involve the users who will be impacted by the product to be influential in the ideation process. And so, again, you have a top-down product design or executive-driven ideation session. Those are frustrating. When we’ve asked questions, like, “What’s the worst way that this will be solved?” or, “What’s the worst way that this might be rolled out?”

It’s really funny when people would be like, “Oh, we’ll build out a product and we won’t do any training whatsoever.” And then you start thinking about, “Well, how will we solve that?” And you start thinking about, “Well, how do we design something that’s so intuitive, it doesn’t require a lot of training? Maybe we don’t need a product that comes with weeks and weeks of training for people to understand how to use it. What would be the best way to solve that? Maybe it isn’t having more training time. It’s more intuition, like a better intuitive unique way of experience, so we should talk and validate and do more testing on the experience we’re designing.”

So, anyway, as you’re going through and thinking about ideas, you can keep asking that question over and over again about ways you could optimize something. I just like when you are able to take a little bit of levity and humor to it, because humor can often bring out other things people might not be willing to say.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you’re listening to folks, and they are saying stuff, are there any key signals or things you look out for that often surfaces gold?

Mark Rickmeier
I look for, I think, making…so, if we’re doing a good workshop, I like looking for everyone participating, making sure you get input from everyone. We mentioned that, we kind of glossed over it, but when you’re doing this kind of discovery, it’s valuable to have insight from the users, from designers, from developers.

Like, from example, even though an engineer is not a designer, they might say like, “There’s this API we can use. There’s a dataset that we could leverage that’ll make this faster, or maybe a cheaper way of building this. And it’s valuable to get technical info even at that early design stage.” And so, I think one of the things we’re looking for is making sure that no one is too quiet, that everyone has an opportunity to participate.

Even when we’re doing those sketching sessions, because we’re sketching, it’s such a low-fidelity way, I think a lot of people, when they hear that, they’ll bow out, they’re like, “Ah, this is the designer’s job. I’ll step out of the room now.” We really try to encourage that level of participation from everyone to make sure that we get those well-rounded ideas and input.

So, one of the things we’re looking for is just participation, and that people are willing to jump in and be part of that ideation side. I feel like that’s really helpful when we’re doing discovery work to get input from not just a single source.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think, at the risk of beating a dead horse, I think how you facilitate a room and getting them to really explore the problem set before they get too attached to a solution is the difficult thing to do. And thinking about the group dynamics within the room, also very challenging. I mentioned earlier, when we’re on that hike together through Germany, we had an idea that ended up becoming a kickstarter.

It was thinking about a game we could play within workshops to be able to encourage the right level of discussion. And from that game became a kickstarter which actually became a product that people started playing around, “How do you facilitate really inclusive meetings so that the best ideas are heard?”

And you know like when you’re playing soccer and you hold up a yellow card when someone does the wrong thing? We started looking out for patterns of, like, “This person is interrupting this person, or speaking over someone,” so there are like interaction patterns we wanted to call out as negative interactions in the session.

There were different kinds of penalties we’d hold up a card for. If someone was beating a dead horse, or saying the same thing for the 15th time, or getting so technical they were losing their audience. And then we started thinking about new facilitation techniques, like escape thinking, that could encourage people to try a new way of engaging.

Anyway, we made these series of cards around facilitation patterns and anti-patterns people could follow in discovery and, on a whim, put it out for a kickstarter, and it got backed, which cracked me up. So, in addition to building digital applications, we also built a very analog card game. But it’s been fun to think about when you’re working with a group of humans in a room, how do you get the best out of them? And what are the kind of common patterns to look for or things to think about when facilitating a group?

And I think it’s harder when you’re distributed because you can’t read body language, but all the more important that you’re thinking about, “Who’s interrupting each other? Who’s really being open to ideas? Who hasn’t spoken in a while?” just to make sure that everyone really is participating in a healthy way.

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

Mark Rickmeier
Yeah, “Not all who wander are lost,” is a favorite quote of mine from JRR Tolkien. I think a lot about the value I’ve gotten from being able to step away from my desk. Doing that long hike, like I said, at least once a year, I try to give myself like gifts of time, of dedicated time away, but even if you can’t do a five-day hike through Scotland, just an opportunity to step away from your desk, go for a walk.

So much of what we do is sitting down at a desk and typing, and I find that not only is it beneficial for your physical health, but the mental health of getting a break. Doing more walking one-on-ones, doing more walking breaks is particularly something we have to think about in Chicago where it’s freezing and cold outside right now but I think always worth it, so I’ve always loved that quote. “Not all who wander are lost.” That wandering time, let your minds and your leg wander. Both valuable.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think some of the best research we’ve done recently, this goes back in the last couple of years, we’ve been thinking about for even our own company, we often ask our customers about how we’re doing, and we found that sometimes customers are more willing to talk to a third party than they are to you directly.

And so, we did a thing called brand insights. We brought in a third-party firm to talk to us about our own experience. They also talked to some of our longest customers, and then talked to people that we did not work with but maybe talked with us early on and chose to go in a different direction, to get a kind of unique perspective on what the customer and employee experience of TXI really is.

And I feel like that third-party insight is really, really valuable, something that sometimes we don’t always think about doing as having someone else help you see yourself. And so, I highly recommend that kind of opportunity to talk to your own customers, but also talk to people who did not work with you, and get insight around your business and your own experience of how that can be shaped. So, that kind of what we call brand insights has been really, really valuable for us. We do it every couple of years.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Mark Rickmeier
There are two. One is really boring. One is really fun. Which one do you want?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear both.

Mark Rickmeier
Okay, the boring one. Well, I should say impactful but dry. It’s a book called Traction. It talks about EOS, or the entrepreneurial operating system, if you’re familiar with that. It’s, basically, if there are books out there that tell you how to run agile projects, how to help you run a project or a program at work, EOS is about, “How do you help run a good company?”

And it has a lot of borrowings from things like Good to Great. Just taking a lot of good principles around running a healthy business that has, well, traction, and that’s why the traction the book is called. So, Traction is all about, “How do you set up a leadership team to have good accountability, good traction in your business, and run a more resilient organization?” It’s dry but I found it to be very, very helpful.

The other book that I really like is a book called Rituals for Work, and it is this pattern of maybe like 50 different rituals you can use within teams, within the entire company, or for individuals. And they talk a lot about how to get the best out of your teams in, like, moments of conflict, which has been a topic on this podcast in the past, moments of ideation and creativity, recognition and reward.

They have all these really interesting rituals you can adopt within your company, within teams, or just for individuals. So, different kinds of rituals and different kinds of levels, and they also just rewrote a new version of the book for what rituals you can adopt within hybrid or remote teams. So, a fun read and a very different kind of book. One is very workshop and practically focused.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Mark Rickmeier
Well, we talked a little bit about it. I like to cite this tool called ThoughtExchange that allows me to see different kinds of data that I won’t otherwise see in a survey. If I’m trying to get input from a large number of folks and have them interact with each other’s ideas, it’s one of the most innovative things I’ve seen that I’ve been able to use. In addition to the tools we use, like Miro, to get good facilitation exercises, ThoughtExchange provides unique set of insights I wouldn’t have otherwise. So, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Mark Rickmeier
Walking. I try to do it all the time. I try to spend at least an hour a day where I’m away from my desk. There was a great quote, someone was doing interview with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and they were asking them about, these two captains of industry, “How do you spend your time? What does your week look like?”

And Bill Gates held up his weekly planner, it’s full of all these things he was doing, his fingers on all these different parts of the business. And then Warren Buffett had like half hour on Tuesday and a half hour on Friday, and the rest was just time for him to consider to read and to think. And his famous quote from that little interview was, “Busy is the new stupid.”

You can spend so much time doing so many things, you’re not giving yourself the time to really think, and giving yourself that space. It’s very hard when you’re jumping between meetings and invoices and emails to be really productive and have meaningful thought about the direction of your product or the direction of your company.

So, the habit I’m trying to instill, especially in the new year, despite the cold, despite the dark, is to get time out of doors and to do those walks where I can really think about where I want to be going, what I want to be doing, and using my time as productively as I can. So, I take it to extremes by doing these long hikes together with other execs. I really find that to be valuable.

But even in a one-hour a day thing, I feel like that habit, and reminding yourself of that, “Busy is the new stupid” mantra, it’s really productive to give yourself that space to think.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think that one, I think “Busy is the new stupid.” It gets quoted back to me quite a lot. I talk about it quite a bit. I even tried to put a block on my time on my calendar that says, “Busy is the new stupid” so people know not to block that time when I’m just thinking and giving myself that carte blanche time as a valuable use of time on my calendar, that I should not be interrupted. So, that one gets quoted back to me quite a lot.

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

Mark Rickmeier
Certainly, the TXI site, TXIDigital.com. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn and talk about the work that we do, also about this upcoming trip we’re going to be planning to Portugal. That experience is called Walkshop. you can find that on walkshop.io. But, also, I’d say I’m mostly active on LinkedIn these days.

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

Mark Rickmeier
I think too often people are in a rhythm, I’m certainly guilty of this myself, where you have all the stuff to do. And I think when you fall into that rhythm, you fall into a cadence, not unlike when we’re talking about on the product innovation side. There’s a way that you’re operating and to step back and to unlearn old ways of doing things, to give yourself the flexibility and time to consider a new way of working.

It’s hard and super, super valuable. My career has changed dramatically since I took that first long hike with other execs to get ideas from. And I think that’s why I’ve intentionally been carving out that space every year to be doing that kind of experience. So, I think people who are looking to really be awesome in their job and thinking about what they’re doing, give yourself that gift of time to step away from your day to day and think about what part of your job you really enjoy, what part of the job you would want to change.

And I think there’s a great book called Prototyping Your Life. It talks a lot about how you can take the similar design-thinking concept, this double-diamond process, to your day to day, and think about, “What problems I really enjoy solving? How do I want to solve them? How do I want to be working?”

And I would say you can’t figure that out in between meetings. You can’t figure that out when you’re running around doing all bunch of emails. You really need to take that dedicated time to consider where you want to go. So, get out, go for a walk, and think about what you want to be doing. Give yourself that time and precious time to consider where you want to be this year.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and innovation.

Mark Rickmeier
Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate it.

Feb 06
0

837: How to Transition to a Better Career Future with Tricia Sitemere

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Tricia Sitemere says: "Take CONTROL of your future, ALTer your mindset, and DELETE all doubt."

Tricia Sitemere discusses how to prepare for and successfully execute a career transition.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The CTRL + ALT + DELETE mantra for developing your career.
  2. The toxic trait holding many professionals back.
  3. The telltale signs it’s time for a switch—and how to start.

About Tricia

Tricia Sitemere is an action centered Career Strategist and Consultant supporting mid-career professionals on their career transition and professional development journeys. She is a published author, an international speaker, an alumna of the University of Texas at Arlington, where she earned her degree in Advertising, and Simmons University where she earned a master’s degree in Communication Management. She currently resides in Dallas, TX but works with clients all over the world.

Resources Mentioned

Tricia Sitemere Interview Transcript

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

Tricia Sitemere
Hi, Pete. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m doing great. Doing great. I’m excited to talk career, strategery, and mindsets, and finding great opportunities. But, first, I need to hear about you and the oboe. What’s the story here?

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, my goodness. Okay. So, I played the oboe for six years, and, initially, I wanted to play the drums. And I’m talking to my mom about it, and the first thing that she’s really thinking of is, “I don’t want this girl banging drums in my house.” And so, she was like, “Pick a quieter instrument.” That definitely backfired on her because the oboe is not really quiet.

And I would think that it’s kind of an acquired taste just from a sound perspective. And so, I played the oboe for six years, I marched in the marching band. In high school, I played clarinet doing that, and then spent two years in color guard, so I’m a band geek, and I absolutely love music.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I was going to say, can you march an oboe? But, yeah, all right, clarinet. I did marching band, four years saxophone, in high school. And at one time, I went to the Drum Corps International World Championships in Indianapolis just to see what that was about. It was just as cool as I thought it would be. So, I’m totally down. Totally down.

Tricia Sitemere
Nice. Nice. Yeah, I was at a parade just yesterday, and it was cool to see all of the bands assembled in their band uniforms, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, that was my life once upon a time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I remember we did the competitions, it felt like the most important thing is that we were going to make the state finals. I think at one point, I thoughtfully considered and said I’d be willing to trade a pinky in order to achieve that objective.

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, I don’t think I was that committed.

Pete Mockaitis
It was just funny because I didn’t practice all that hard but I’m willing to part with a finger, I was like, “I know my music, I know my spot, that’s right.” All right. Well, so that’s that story. Now, so your company, it’s called CTRL Alt Delete.

Tricia Sitemere
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I remember back in my marching band days, I would push Ctrl-Alt-Delete a lot on a PC back in the day. Can you tell us what is this organization? What’s your work about? And what’s behind the name?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah. So, CTRL Alt Delete is a professional development and career coaching company. CTRL Alt Delete actually stands for take control of your future, alter your mindset, and delete all doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Tricia Sitemere
It’s kind of a…yeah, it’s a personal mantra of mine. It is the mantra that I share with my clients. It’s kind of a baseline for a lot of the things that I do. I think it’s very relevant when you think about your career that you do need to be the one that takes control. And sometimes you do need that change in mindset and how you think about things, and deleting the doubt, and being confident in who you are, your abilities, what you bring to the table, your leadership, your influence. Those are all very important to the clients that I serve.

And so, I coach folks one on one, specifically mid-career professionals around career transitions, career advancement and growth. And then I take a lot of the case studies and the things that I’m seeing, the trends that I’m seeing when I’m supporting my one-on-one clients, and I create training programs for HR teams so that they can set their managers up to success, to better support their employees, which, in turn, increases employee retention, employee engagement, those types of things. So, it’s a very rewarding work and I absolutely love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. Well, I love those three steps there. Can you tell us a cool story about someone who did just that, they took control of their career, they altered their mindset, they deleted doubt? Like, walk us through what did they do and what were the results?

Tricia Sitemere
I will take you back to where this all started, and I would say the first person that I know that had to take control of their future, alter their mindset, and delete all doubt was me. And I bounced around from a bunch of different careers. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. And I had a lot of interests but I was just kind of blowing in the wind. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back to school.” I got a Master’s.

And came back to Dallas, I went to graduate school in Boston. Shout out to Simmons University. I moved back to Dallas and was still kind of blowing in the wind. And the first thing that I did to kind of take control of my career and my future was a really deep self-assessment, like, “What do I like? What do I not like? What am I good at? What do I want to be good at? What do I want my career to look like?” And I just started putting a plan in place for myself.

In terms of altering the mindset around that, I studied communication management in graduate school, and I thought that I was going to go into, like, crisis communication, working for the Red Cross, managing communication strategy for natural disasters and terrible things. And that was not a space I wanted to spend my time in.

And for a while I thought I was stuck, I was like, “Okay, this is what I have spent the money for. My parents have already paid for this advanced degree. I have to stay in this space.” And it wasn’t until I started thinking about my situation differently and opening my mindset and being open to what my career was going to look like, and being open to having conversations, exploring different things, I continued to feel stuck.

And so, that was when I was able to alter my mindset. And then the deleting all doubt, I don’t think that this is an off-and-on switch kind of thing. I think deleting doubt is something that takes time. It’s something that grows within yourself as you continue to learn about yourself, as you continue to sharpen skills, and just kind of get to know yourself better.

And so, when I was diving further into, “What is my career going to look like?” I started in learning and development, and then I went into recruiting. It wasn’t until I had gotten used to the role, my confidence started to grow, and then I was really able to start deleting the doubt, like, “Hey, Tricia, you can do this. Hey, Tricia, you’re thinking about this in a really positive way. Hey, Tricia, you have some good leadership skills that are driving the team.”

And then, from there, I was able to have a wildly successful career in HR before transitioning into what I do with CTRL Alt Delete. And so, that’s a story that is personal to me because I lived it, and it was really something that I see in a lot of my one-on-one clients. When they come to me, they are often frustrated, whether they’re not fulfilled in their role, they’re feeling bored, there’s financial constraints.

And I help them put a plan together in place so that they can take control of their future. I always tell folks, “You need to be an active participant in your own life.” And taking control is the first step in doing that, saying, “Hey, I’m not just going to live simply off of the things that I am getting.” If there are opportunities, specific to CTRL Alt Delete, career opportunities, or growth and development opportunities that you’re interested in, you have to take control, and then the rest of the things, they kind of fall into place as you build out your action plan, but that’s an example for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Well, can you share with us a few key actions that control alt deleters do or don’t do that many of us just kind of neglect?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah, I would say toxic positivity and not being completely honest with yourself about different situations. Obviously, we’re talking about the career space, but I think one of the things that my clients are really good at is building that transparency and having those honest conversations with yourself, whether that is in terms of, “I thought I was really strong in X, Y, Z space. And after taking some time kind of digging into it, getting feedback, having conversations, maybe I’m not so great at this.”

That’s kind of where the confidence and that transparency internally kind of cross because sometimes you feel like you’re really good at something, and sometimes you’re not as great as maybe you think you are, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That gives you the opportunity to stop and say, “Hey, okay, this is how I want to improve,” or, “These are some resources or tools or connections that I have access to that will help me get to the point where I want to be, thus letting me do X, Y, Z.” You know what I’m saying?

So, definitely, having those transparent conversations, I will say, is something that I coach to. And for a lot of people, it can be a blind spot that can hinder your career growth.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the blind spot is that they just quickly put a positive spin or sheen on things as oppose to taking a hard look, and saying, “Oh, I’m not so good at Excel,” or copywriting, or facilitating meetings, or whatever that thing may be, and, thus, they don’t ever really get the opportunity to open that door and then begin improving because they’re unaware of the shortcomings.

Tricia Sitemere
Right, to grow.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tricia Sitemere
To grow, yeah. Another thing that I would say is you hear a lot about having a growth mindset, having an open mindset, and being able to look at all of your opportunities that are being presented to you, and it sounds nice. You’re talking about growth with your manager, your friends, family, whatever, you’re like, “You know, I’m really in a space where I’m allowing myself to grow.”

Well, there are certain things that you have to do in order to foster growth and to actually see the traction and the changes that you want, which include commitment and consistency. And so, it’s nice to say, “Hey, I’m doing all of these things,” but actually doing them and not just saying, “Hey, I have a growth mindset. I’m open to these opportunities,” without the action piece, because that’s really what is important and what is going to drive the change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very cool. So, then, I’m curious, when it comes to the deleting all doubt, are there specific practices, tools, disciplines that you engage in to do the actual deleting?

Tricia Sitemere
Yes. So, I talked a little bit about having honest conversations, being open to awareness around your blind spots, maybe where you’re not as strong. On the other side of that, there are things that you absolutely excel at, that when someone says, “Oh, my goodness, I need…” you mentioned Excel so I’ll just keep on going with that example, “I need an Excel guru.” If that’s you, that’s something that you can build on so that you can start deleting some of that doubt.

And so, I think looking at both ends is definitely something that will help you delete all doubt. Getting feedback is an activity that I have a lot of my clients do when they’re struggling in that space, and they’re really struggling to decide, “Okay, what are strengths that I want to continue to grow? And what are my transferrable skills?” I work with them to do a little bit of a self-assessment. And part of that assessment, it’s asking for feedback. So, I’ll have them talk to a manager, a colleague, so, it, one, helps them get an outside view of, “Okay, this is maybe a strength I want to work on,” or, “This is maybe an area of opportunity.”

But if they are really good in those things, hearing it from someone else, and having that little bit of external validation is it can be key because it’s like, “Okay, I thought I was good at this in my head, but now I’m hearing from other people who have the opportunity to experience how I deliver X, Y, Z, and they are also very confident in my ability.” So, that’s going to help over time, those check-ins with yourself and getting feedback from others to help you grow that confidence and delete all doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, when it comes to your clients, I imagine, often, by the time they find you, they might be pretty ready to make a change.

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, yeah. They’re like, “Tricia, we need this to happen last week,” and I’m like, “I get it. I understand 100%.” And the other part of that is sometimes career transitions, they take time. There are so many factors that are outside of your control, that we talk about this when we’re getting started, that we’ll take a little bit of patience.

And that’s not a favorite part of coaching, is having to coach to the patience piece but I see it time and time again, those that can be patient, who do the work and stay consistent, committed, there’s lots of opportunities and great things on the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m curious, if we find ourselves in that position, where, “Okay, the job is fine. Maybe we should be thinking about making a switch,” can you walk us through kind of the step-by-step and then some of your favorite tactics or tools or tricks you use in each of them to really make a lot of progress fast?

Tricia Sitemere
Yes. The first thing I would say is not ignoring the signs. We know when there have been shifts in our mood and when we’re disgruntled or frustrated or stressed out about a situation, and people will make different excuses for why they may feel like they’re in that space. If you are starting to feel that, explore that, whether it is having a conversation with a friend or your spouse, or a conversation with a coworker as long as it’s nothing too crazy because they’re going to be able to understand some of those key players at work, some of those situations at work.

And then once you’ve kind of have gotten to a place where you’re like, “Okay, I think I know what this is. I think I know kind of where this is coming from,” almost like a root-cause analysis, I always empower people to ask for help. You don’t have to go through all of this by yourself, whether that is help from a manager, you’re like, “Hey, I’m kind of struggling with this space. What can we do in terms of support?”

Coaching. I’m not plugging coaching because I’m a coach, but I had worked with coaches, I have had coaches myself, but then I’ve also seen the impact that working with a coach can have. So, that would also be one of the things that I would recommend. And it’s almost like you have to kind of gather a bunch of information for yourself.

You go into this fact-finding after you’ve had these conversations, and now you’re asking yourself, “Okay, I know this isn’t what I want right now. What do I want?” and kind of dream it up real big, is what I tell my clients all the time. Dream it up real big and then move to, “Okay, I want to be an astronaut.” Obviously, for me, Pete, I’m not going to be an astronaut right now. What does it look like to get to that point?

And then in terms of getting that momentum going, and feeling good about the strides that you’re making, because we talked about patience being a key part of making the change, is giving yourself small digestible goals that will increase and kind of build into hitting some of those bigger goals that you have.

When you set a goal for yourself, sometimes you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this goal is so far away. I’m never going to get there,” and that can cause some stress and it can cause some frustration. So, breaking it down into those smaller goals and celebrating the small wins, that’s going to really help you get the momentum, get the energy up, continue to keep the juices flowing, and it’ll also help you stay more consistent.

And then another thing that I would recommend in that space of doing that is share some of these things with people that champion and support you. And I’d talked about a supporting cast in my book, and it is really your supporting cast. Just like the lead in a movie, you have the supporting cast that helps make things happen. Sharing the things and the changes and the career aspirations that you have with your supporting cast, they are going to be able to lift you up when maybe you’re having a bad day.

Or, if you hit one of those smaller goals, or a bigger goal, it’s so great to be able to share and celebrate that with someone who is rooting for you. So, yeah, those would be a couple of my tips and kind of the walkthrough through the process. I love celebrating. I celebrate everything. I celebrate everything and, I tell you, it really does make a huge difference to be able to celebrate the person that you’re spending so much time working on yourself. What better project to work on and to focus on than yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, let’s say we’ve gotten past the soul-searching phase and we’ve got some specific companies, roles, positions posted that we’re eyeing, and going, “Ooh, that’s enticing.” I’d love it if you could share some of your favorite job-hunting tips, whether it’s on the LinkedIn side, or the networking side, or the resume, or the cover letter, or the interview side, what are a couple things that just work like magic that you’re a huge fan of?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. When I was coming up through HR, I used LinkedIn a ton, both sending messages but being recruited from my engagement and participation on LinkedIn. So, I coach to LinkedIn. It’s not the only way but I particularly really like it just because it connects so many people from so many spaces that you might not even cross paths with in your everyday life.

And so, in terms of, like, if you see a role that you’re really excited about, you can search the title of the role, and you can see other folks that are in that particular space, and you can kind of do a little bit of sleuthing, see what kind of things they post about. Oftentimes, they will talk about things that are going on within the company or within the industry, where their company has been in the news.

All of that information is intel that you can, A, use if you reach out to a particular person or if you’re in an opportunity to network, it shows that you know what’s going on. And, two, all of that information can be really, really helpful in an interview. It shows that you’ve taken the time to investigate and research what’s going on within the industry, within the particular company, or if it’s even a specific team that the role that you’re interested in is on. All of that are data points that you can use in your career toolkit to help you make those connections and build those relationships to get into the role.

So, I would say those are some of the things that I’d recommend for LinkedIn. Connected to LinkedIn, people do not like sending blind invitations or messages on LinkedIn, and I get it because I do get my fair share of, “This is an interesting message in my inbox” kind of thing, but there are ways that you can grab the attention of the person that you’re reaching out, whether it is mentioning something you guys have in common, or you guys went to the same alma mater, or the same school, mentioning something that they’ve recently posted.

There are different ways that you can reach out so it’s not just this spammy message that you’re sending to probably someone who gets a lot of messages similar to that. So, here on LinkedIn, it says, “Hi, I’m a hiring manager.” Some people may reach out to you about X, Y, Z jobs, and sometimes they’re maybe not the greatest message, they don’t really share any information, so there’s no incentive, I guess, on the other end for that person to respond.

And so, doing some of this recon on the frontend is going to help you craft your messages, and type it up, take a deep breath, and send it. Sometimes people won’t respond, but sometimes they will, and those can lead to some really, really great conversations. And then the other thing that I would say, or the last thing that I would say in terms of researching job and reaching out to folks and looking for work on LinkedIn, is following up.

Following up and showing up are huge. They’re so huge. If someone that you’ve reached out to reaches back to you, don’t wait a week and a half to respond. I get things happen but it’s all about keeping that momentum going, so respond to them. If you guys have something scheduled, show up. And that sounds a little elementary but I had spent almost 10 years with hiring managers, and I am always blown away by how many people just don’t show up to interviews and don’t communicate.

And so, I always feel like that’s something worth mentioning. And so, just taking that, building those relationships, having those conversations, sometimes there’s opportunities that are available more immediately, just like with any relationship, networking including, it takes a little bit of work. And so, don’t just completely disregard a relationship because it didn’t result in a job right away.

They might have something coming down the pipeline one month, two months, six months. We don’t know what that will look like. So, continuing to cultivate those relationships is also something that’s going to be super key.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Well, tell me Tricia, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Tricia Sitemere
Feel empowered to create the life you love. I think some would say that sounds corny or that sounds cheesy but I think it’s so important. We have this one life to live. And you should be able to live it on your own terms with things and people and experiences that you want to have a part of your life. So, that’s what I would say.

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

Tricia Sitemere
“Everything you can imagine is real,” by Pablo Picasso. And I think that ties in perfectly to what I just said about creating the life that you love. Everything you can imagine is real. And sometimes it does take that shift in mindset to start to bring some of those things to fruition or realize, “Hey, this isn’t exactly what it looked like in my mind but it’s exactly what I’m looking for.” Yeah, that’s my favorite.

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

Tricia Sitemere
It’s actually a case study, and it’s from one of my favorite books, Mindset actually by Carol Dweck. And it is exploring the impact of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset and a false growth mindset. And it’s a study and she’s working with children that are in elementary school. And so, it’s like she has one group who are told, like, “Hey, you can do anything. You’re great at all these different things,” and she studies how they perform versus another group of students who are kind of being coached or fed that, “This is not in your skillset,” and she monitors how each of the groups react.

And she uses this study to kind of talk through the importance of fostering a growth mindset and paying attention to the different things that we tell ourselves, and being transparent and honest with ourselves and some of the other things that I had mentioned. And I obviously work with mid-career professionals, but some of this stuff around mindset and feeling equipped starts so much earlier than when I work with them. And so, that wasn’t a study that I was thinking I would come across, and it’s really interesting. It’s in her book, Mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Tricia Sitemere
Ooh, I’m a checklist girl, Pete. Do you like checklists?

Pete Mockaitis
I do, yes.

Tricia Sitemere
I’m a checklist girl. I’m a calendar girl. I keep a to-do list. I keep list of several different sorts actually, but in terms of being awesome at my job, at the end of every single day, I will review my list of deliverables, or tasks, or clients I need to follow up with, and just kind of put a cap on my day so that when I get started in the morning, I can hit the ground running.

Or, I can take a look at my list, and say, “Okay, this doesn’t exactly fall into place with what I thought my day would look like because there’s fires, there’s things that pop up,” but I use that as my guide. And then I’m also really big about calendaring and blocking time off to do different things, and that is so helpful. It helps me feel very organized and it’s like, “Okay, if things get crazy, at least I know I have dedicated time to focus and do my very best work on this thing because I’ve blocked out time for it.” So, those are my two biggest tips that I use, my two biggest tools.

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

Tricia Sitemere
CTRL Alt Delete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go, yeah.

Tricia Sitemere
Which, obviously, is a delight to me. I’ll run into folks, and they’re like, “What are you doing to take control of your future or alter your mindset?” And I’m like, “Let’s talk about it.” And they’re like, “Oh, my goodness, now I’m in a conversation with Tricia. This is going to turn into a coaching session.”

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

Tricia Sitemere
Yes, you can find me on my website TriciaSitemere.com. I’m also on YouTube under the same name, also on LinkedIn, and Instagram. I post a variety of different free resources, information, and tips on all of those. And I look forward to engaging.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. This has been a treat, Tricia. Keep on rocking.

Tricia Sitemere
Thank you. Thank you so much, Pete, for having me. I appreciate you.

Feb 02
0

836: How to Drive Engagement to Get Your Project Done with Anh Dao Pham

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Anh Dao Pham says: "“What are the next steps?” It’s the most powerful question that you can ask."

Anh Dao Pham shares her battle-tested strategies for leading your team to project success, even without formal authority.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one essential question to get any project moving.
  2. An overlooked skill that boosts project success rates.
  3. The two things you need for people to align with your goals.

About Anh Dao

Anh Dao Pham, VP of Product & Program Management at Edmunds.com, has successfully led technical projects for two decades at start-ups and major corporations. In her book Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, Anh vividly brings compassionate, positive, nimble leadership to life, demonstrating with actionable guidance, the power of caring and connection to inspire outstanding results.

Anh lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles, California.

Resources Mentioned

Anh Dao Pham Interview Transcript

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

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you so much for having me here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom about project leadership and high-performing teams. But, first, I think we need to hear a little about your history of writing jingles and rhymes associated with team accomplishments. What’s the story here and can you give us some examples, please?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, this is a really silly thing. A few years ago, when I was working at Opower, I was one of the more senior leaders on the engineering team and I was asked to give the quarterly update. And the first time I gave that quarterly update, it was so dry I think everybody fell asleep, including me if I could have. But the reason it was so dry was because when you work in product development and you’re leading an engineering team, the engineering team’s accomplishments are very similar to the product update. So, the product team gives an update and then you give yours, it’s almost the same.

So, the next time I was called upon to do a quarterly update, I decided not to give the general product update and, instead, decided to write, like, a tribute to the team in a jingle format. So, I got some inspiration from The Brady Brunch tune, and then wrote a jingle about our product managers and our engineers and how they had delivered on this website product, and then got folks on the team to actually sing it during the quarterly all-hands, and it was a really big hit.

And from then on, it became kind of a tradition at Opower, so every quarterly update, they look for the jingle. We’d get a bunch of people to sing and we had some great, great things out there. And so, since then, instead of just giving normal praise or an update when I have, like, a big team accomplishment or a big milestone the team has approached, then, oftentimes, I’ll write a jingle and then I’ll recruit people to sing it.

And so, as an example, this last holiday season, instead of having, like, a big party because everybody was remote, I ended up writing 17 limericks for everybody on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, limericks?

Anh Dao Pham
And I read them out like in a toast format, and it was a pretty big hit. There’s something very novel about writing a rhyme or a jingle, and I find that it’s very memorable, people really appreciate it, it shows them that you care in a very special way, and it gives people just that special feeling when being on a team.

And so, I want to tell you, I have a surprise for you, because I decided before I got on the show that I would write you a jingle…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
…just so you can see this in action. It’s actually a limerick, so here it is.

There once was a host named Pete
Whose podcast was rather sweet.
He interviewed people with tips to share
For being awesome at work everywhere.
And on top of that, he gave it all away for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Thank you. That is a first 830-some episodes, first limerick. So, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Okay, cool. Well, I’m excited to dig into those kinds of tidbits, your unique flavor and spin on project goodness. You’ve got a book called Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, which is a great title. We like those sorts of things here. Can you tell us any particularly novel, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this stuff over the course of your career and putting together the book?

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say the most surprising thing is that when I set out to write Glue, I didn’t realize how much of an influence books on social psychology and happiness would be and influence on the actual content in the book. And for a few years prior to writing Glue, I was doing a little bit of soul-searching, I read a number of books on the science of happiness and different social psychologists, like Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Sean Achor, just a bunch of very well-known authors in that space.

And it turns out that a lot of the work that supports the science of happiness, around how to make yourself happy ends up being really applicable content for how to motivate teams. And so, in my work and in Glue, I talk a lot about the science of happiness, social psychology, and how to motivate and influence people through those same mechanisms, which I think makes that unique. And, for me, it’s most important, when I’m a leader, to help teams not only deliver but do it in a way that makes them feel fulfilled and happy at work.

And so, I think a lot of that comes through and ends up being somewhat surprising or a novel content for a leadership book you don’t typically find as many studies around the science of happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love those here, so it’s no surprise that we have found each other. So, that’s cool. Well, then I’d love it if we could dig into some particulars. Could you start off with sort of the core message or big idea or thesis behind the book?

Anh Dao Pham
So, Glue, at the end of the day is both a project management leadership book, and the main principle behind it is that I wanted to be able to express to people how you can both manage teams and lead people in a way that makes them productive so that they deliver but also makes them really happy and inspired with their jobs, and that in turn inspires me and makes me feel better about my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so let’s dig in. Now, one thing that’s intriguing is you draw a distinction between a project manager and a project leader. What is the difference and why does that matter?

Anh Dao Pham
The main distinction between a project manager and a project leader is that you don’t necessarily have to have a title in order to be a project leader. Project leaders rise up through all parts of the organization because there is a need to have somebody lead a particular initiative or a particular team. And what I find is that people often, if they don’t have, like, an ordained title in some way, feel like they don’t have the authority to act in a certain way.

So, I wanted to make the distinction between somebody who has the official title of project manager, which has, like, a specific job description associated with it, versus a person who just may have risen up in the organization and is a leader of sorts but would likely need very similar tools and tactics to be able to make their team successful.

So, at the end of the day, you can be a project leader from any part of the organization. You just have to be a person who has stepped up to lead in some capacity on a particular initiative, and I’m hoping that this book is applicable much more broadly than just anybody with a specific project manager title.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then could you kick us off with a pretty inspiring…let’s see, I’ll do that again. Well, in getting a taste of what could be possible and at stake for us if we internalized some of these best practices, could you share a cool story of a project leader who was able to see a beautiful upgrade in the results they’re able to create by following some of these principles?

Anh Dao Pham
I wanted to start with an analogy from a different industry entirely, which is basketball. And I’m actually not a basketball fan, but one of the things that I realized as I was doing research for the book, was I was talking to one of my best friends who is into basketball about the book and about some of the principles that I was talking about, about being glue, and he said, “Oh, it’s like Draymond Green. He’s a glue guy. He plays basketball.” And I’m like, “Tell me more about this.”

And it turns out that there’s a phenomenon in basketball where there are players called glue guys who are extremely valuable to the teams but they are not the people who score the most points, so it seems counterintuitive. Like, typically, when you think about a star basketball player, you think about somebody like a Michael Jordan who scores the most baskets.

In this case, these players are most valuable not because they actually score the most points, but because they are true team players. And so, when they’re on the court, what happens is the teams have a much higher likelihood to achieve success and win the games than when they’re not on the court even though they don’t actually score.

And the principles around Glue are basically the same. So, it’s not about being a leader, being out in front, getting all the credit for something, or being the star player on a particular team. It’s about looking at a team and trying to figure out what you can do to actually bolster the productivity of the team and make them feel healthier, happier, complete the team where they may have gaps. And that’s what the essence of Glue is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like something we all love to be here in terms of listeners of How to be Awesome at Your Job. And now let’s dig into some of the particulars. I love your table of contents chapter titles. They’re so enticing and captivating, so I’m just going to go right through my favorites and ask bit by bit. First, how do we build rapport quickly?

Anh Dao Pham
There are a lot of ways to build rapport quickly. And, actually, you’ll notice that my book was endorsed by Robert Cialdini. He wrote a book called Influence, which is immensely popular.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ve had him on the show and we love him. Oh, he’s so good.

Anh Dao Pham
He’s amazing. He’s amazing. There’s all these tactics that you can use that help you understand how to build rapport with people and how to influence people without actually having authority. And so, a lot of the things are very simple. Like, in Robert Cialdini’s book, he talks about just making sure that you, when you speak with a person, you actually provide a reason for what you’re asking to do.

And when you do things like that, where you ask a person to actually complete a task for you, or make a request, and you provide them a reason for the work that they’re doing, it helps them understand why their work is important, and, ultimately, build rapport and helps them trust you more. So, that’s one principle.

Another one comes from Dale Carnegie, which is really simple. It’s just using people’s names. But in a multicultural environment, and, in particular, in a remote environment, it’s even more important that you use people’s names and that you also get their pronunciations correctly and that you know how to spell their names correctly. These are small things but they make a really big difference in building rapport with a particular person.

And then another type is, just make sure that you’re accessible and approachable. So, if you have a team that you’re trying to get know, maybe arrange some sort of social situation where you can get to know them better, take some time at the beginning of your meetings to pause a little bit, have some informal conversation to warm up, talk about their weekend. Make them feel like they’re people not just a person who’s actually completing a task but somebody you genuinely care about and are interested in. Those are the best things that you can do to start building rapport.

And then the final thing, which is something that I get quoted on a lot is I call the candy bowl, the magical candy bowl, and you’ll see this in the book title, or in the chapter title, where I always keep a candy bowl on my desk. And the reason that I do that is because it sort of embodies a bunch of these principles. It makes me approachable in the sense that it gives people a reason to actually come to my desk and talk to me.

Oftentimes, people actually come to my desk and then take candy when I’m not there, but it establishes me as a giver. So, even if I wasn’t there, they remember, “Anh has a candy bowl on her desk and I can come get it whenever I want.” And if I then talk to them later, even if we haven’t had a conversation, it actually creates a certain amount of equity with them, like I’ve deposited something in their virtual piggybank. And if I go talk to them later, they already have a warm feeling associated with me because I’ve given them something whether or not I know it.

And so, that to me is like a very classic trick, and I have always had a candy bowl on my desk since I can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. I’ve got a couple follow-up questions there, Anh. One is what candies are the fan favorites, perennial, time after time?

Anh Dao Pham
Branded chocolate goes the fastest.

Pete Mockaitis
Anytime, like KitKat or Snickers or anything.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, Hershey’s, Snickers, Reese’s Pieces, anything that’s branded. I would try generic chocolate, like Palmers, during the holidays, when you get the Easter eggs and things like that, they don’t go quite as fast. But anything that’s like, yeah, KitKat, Reese’s, M&Ms, chocolate M&Ms, those go really fast. And it’s kind of my own experiment over the years, that’s something you see, what type of snack actually goes the fastest.

And there’s something interesting about the amount of candy that you put in the bowl as well. This is such a random nuance. But if you put too much candy in the bowl, especially if, let’s say, I get a brand-new bag of chocolate, and I dump the whole thing in the bowl, it goes faster. There’s something about the idea that there’s just a lot of candy that people come and take a handful of it, but if I ration it and put it out in smaller segments, then it tends to last a lot longer. People will come and take one or two rather than a handful. So, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
I absolutely noticed this phenomenon with, well, I was thinking, like, just drinking water in terms of if I have a big vessel of water, I will take bigger gulps more frequently versus if I’ve got a bottle of water in my last thirst, “Ooh, we better be sparing,” even though there’s more not too far away. It just gets inside you. That’s good.

Well, Anh, my next follow-up question is, when it comes to using names, how much is too much? Sometimes I feel like I hold myself back more than I need to, Anh. And so, now I’m just going to try a little bit right now, and you tell me when it feels excessive. I’m thinking when you address someone, of course, it just makes sense, or when you’re wrapping something up, like, “Thank you, Anh.” I guess every sentence would be too much. Do you have a sense for how much is too much when it comes to name use?

Anh Dao Pham
There probably is a too much. Like, yeah, I’d say every sentence is probably too much. But if you go back to what Dale Carnegie said, and I reference this in the book, the sound of a person’s name is the sweetest sound to them. So, if you can use it tastefully, in particular, if you can use it to address a person when you’re prompting them for a question, so I think that’s really important.

Addressing a particular person, addressing or acknowledging something that somebody said so that they understand that you actually heard them, those two, I think, are the most critical times to say a person’s name so that they really feel like you’re making a connection with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m thinking about my buddy and mentor, Mawi, episode number one, he will insert my name right in the middle of sentences, and more than most people I know, and I really like it. He’ll say, “You know what we discovered, Pete…” and I’ll be like, “Well, what? What did you discover?” It’s like you have galvanized my attention, and I want to know even more.

And if I happen to be drifting, I really do feel, like, “Oh, I should be paying attention. He’s talking directly to me even though, of course, he was. We are really the only two people at this lunch.” But it has an effect, it’s a good one. Thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And then I think, in particular, if you’re working in a remote environment, using people’s names is extremely important. A lot of times, people have their cameras off, and if you use their name, they know you’re speaking directly to them even if they can’t see you. So, I think it is an even more important tool to be using now than it has been in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And another table of contents prompt so juicy, what is the essential question to getting any project moving?

Anh Dao Pham
“What are the next steps?” It’s the most powerful question that you can ask. At the end of every meeting, if you leave and you don’t ask that question, you’re going to find that you’re going to be less productive on all of your projects. And so, if there’s no other question that you ask, if you’re silent the whole meeting as a facilitator, in the very end you make sure to ask, “What are the next steps? Who’s going to be doing them?” and then capture that information, you will be able to move your project forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This reminds me of David Allen, for individuals getting things done, “What is the next action?” And it’s just magic how it gets stuff unstuck. And sometimes it’s so simple, it’s like, “Oh, I guess we got to look at our calendars to see when these three people can get together.” Like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s not so hard. Let’s just go ahead and do that.”

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And I think if you’re doing any sort of leadership, in particular, project leadership, your goal really is to always be making progress. So, even if it’s small, as long as you’re moving the project forward with something like, “I know what the very next step is,” it doesn’t have to be the next ten steps, just the very next one, you’re going to continue to move everybody forward and make progress against your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Now, everybody asks you to teach a particular skill, which I would not have guessed – it’s notetaking. What’s up with that? Why does notetaking matter? And how can you do it in a way that is differentiated-ly excellent that matters?

Anh Dao Pham
I am very passionate about notetaking. This is one of the strange traits about me, and most people, almost everybody who’s encountered me even briefly at work, knows this about me. It’s something that’s actually, to me, a cornerstone of my success in my career. I take avid notes, I type very fast, I take avid notes almost on every call or meeting that I have, even if I’m not going to publish them, because it’s part of my learning process.

And the reason that people ask me about it is because I often publish those notes out. So, as a part of my learning process, when I’m learning more information, I tend to take them. And I don’t just sort of listen to things verbatim. I listen to things and then I rephrase them as I’m typing them, or I try to reorganize them. So, when I was in college, I learned, like, you could take…if you take notes in outline format, your retention of that information is so much higher than if you just sort of listen to something coming in one ear and then typing it out verbatim what people had said.

So, what I started to do was sort of reorganize the information, put it in such a way that it is summarized, and then send all that information out and broadcast it to people so that they know that they’ve been heard, they know whose action is next, what the next steps are, all of the things that were important as a part of those discussion get captured, codified, and then broadcasted.

And it is possible to be significantly better at taking notes than another person in the sense that if you take really good notes, in particular, in today’s environment when you’re managing a lot of projects, some things are moving very fast, a lot of things don’t get documented. So, oftentimes, a good set of notes is the document that explains what happened and ends up being a system of record for any decision-serving needs.

So, if you become that person who takes really good notes and people know that, you start to just have a certain amount of power because you hold this information and people see you as a person who has access to this information very readily. The other thing about it is, like I said before, if I take good notes, then I learn more than almost anybody else in the conversation. It just crystallizes my memory for it so that when people ask me about it later, I have much greater recall ability.

And when it’s summarized in that fashion, I once had a person tell me he went home after my meeting, and told his wife, “These notes were better than the meeting,” because a lot of times, meetings will meander back and forth.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anh Dao Pham
But if you kind of like consolidate the information under certain bullets, you can read this nice summary, it refreshes your memory and you know exactly where to go after that. So, yeah, those to me are the big key traits around taking good notes, is making sure that they’re organized, making sure that they track, capture what’s most important as a part of the conversation, and that you share them out so that people know you have access to them and can refer back to them.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we might have to do a full follow-up episode if you’re down to talking about notetaking, because if it’s your superpower, and no one else has brought that up as their superpower, and it’s yielding value, that’s certainly cool. So, I’ll just restrain myself to a couple follow-ups for this conversation.

Anh Dao Pham
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re not just verbatim writing all the things you hear, but you’re rather trying to get some organization outlined to it. So, when I hear the word outline, I could think of a very strict “Roman numeral one. Indent, capital A. Further indent, Arabic numeral one.” So, that’s like a very formal, like when I’m learning how to write a paper in grade school, outline. Is that what you mean by outline in terms of the transformation that you’re mentally processing stuff as you outline?

Anh Dao Pham
No, actually, it doesn’t have to be. If that’s really comfortable for you, or your word processing application automatically numbers things for you, I think it’s fine, but it’s more important that you sort of categorize information. So, if a topic meanders, as an example, sometimes, let’s say we talk about notetaking now, and then five more minutes, it comes back again.

What I would do is have a topic of notetaking in my notes, and then I would put a couple of bullets from the first part of the conversation, and then in the second part, I would move that up so that it’s in the same section. So, when somebody is skimming it, they can see all of the takeaways all together at the same time.

And it’s not so important that you have, like, a strict way of taking the notes. It’s that you’ve summarized the information. And what’s even more critical is that you summarize the information in your own words. So, don’t try to take notes verbatim as somebody said them. Try to restate them in your own words so that it comes out more naturally and to confirm that you actually understood what it was that was being said.

Because, oftentimes, when people speak, it doesn’t make for eloquent or concise writing, so if you’ve summarized it in a good way, then people can read it, get the takeaways very quickly, rather than trying to skim through all the uhms and ahhs that actually come out in a conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And to give us a taste, can we find a sample of your notetaking somewhere?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, in the book, I actually put a few samples, one of the worst notes or no notes at all. So, if you just take basic notes, it’s still better than no notes. The second tier up is, at least, capture the key decisions and action items and who’s responsible for them. So, there’s a sample of what that looks like, then there’s sort of the next layer of fidelity, which is capturing a few key decisions in a little bit more detail. And then there’s sort of a more robust version of those notes.

And the sample I gave is from, like, a home remodeling project, which may have been overkill for a home remodeling project, but at least gives you an idea of the types of things that you would want to capture. Some of the salient points in the conversation that you might want to have for context later, those are the types of things that you might want to capture if you were taking really robust notes.

And, in particular, the why behind decisions. So, if you’re capturing just the decision but not why, if you take those in your notes, it again helps you understand it, and then it also helps you convey that information to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I imagine it might vary a bit, but just to give us a bit of reference, if there’s a 30-minute meeting, which might have a word count of 4,500-ish words – that’s a lot of podcast ads experience talking right there, 150 words per minute – how many words or pages might your notes end up being?

Anh Dao Pham
It really depends on how efficient the conversation was. So, it could be that you had a 30-minute meeting but you swirled around talking about different options and deliberating them and debating them. In the end, your summary may have been as concise as maybe half a page, you said, “We talked about option one, option two, option three. We made this decision and this is why.” It could be that concise. And so, it doesn’t have to be verbose, it just has to capture the most salient points.

Now, sometimes you have a meeting, like I had one with one of my managers this morning, and we covered 15 topics, and it was 30 minutes, and it was, like, “Bullet. Here’s what we discussed. Bullet. Here’s what we discussed.” And that one ended up being more than a page long just for me to sort of capture those points.

So, I think it really depends on how much ground you cover. It’s not so much what your word count is but what were the most important things that you needed to capture and what’s the most concise way to capture them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us the three levers to keep your project on time and on track?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. So, this is actually the one thing in the book that does sort of follow classical project management. There are really three things: it’s scope, meaning how much you’re actually trying to achieve in a particular project; time, which is the amount of time it’s going to take; and then resources, which could be either money or the number of people working on a particular project. That’s like the classic triangle of constraints for any project management course you would see.

And when you’re managing a project, it’s really important for you to understand what levers you actually have available to you. And so, if there is something that ends up being a gotcha or surprise, which always happens, no project ever goes as planned, then you can look to see which of these constraints are movable. And the easiest thing typically to do is to increase your timeline but, oftentimes, if you increase your timeline on a project too often or too much, then people fatigue of the project and they feel like it’s not successful, so you want to use that very sparingly.

The next is resources. If you have any resources, you can throw at a project, or if you can clear things off of a plate of a person who’s on the project so that they’re not splintered, then you can get more capacity. That’s always a good way to go about doing things. And then scope is something that people forget is negotiable.

Because even if people say at the very beginning of a project the scope is not negotiable, the closer you get to launching your project, the scope gets much more malleable, and that’s for two reasons. One is that people are more or less willing to actually yield on things that they want very early in the process. And the second is that the closer you get to launching a particular project, the more clear you are about what you’re trying to achieve.

And so, things that seem like they may have been very important at the beginning tend to be more negotiable or more malleable towards the end. So, I like to lean on scope first, then resources, then time if possible.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. I’m familiar with the triangle and the constraints. I learned that in college, and it was an eye-opener, and I love, Anh, those extra layers and considerations and weightings that you put on them. So, handy stuff. I’m just going to keep rolling through your excellent table of contents. Chapter 13, how do we communicate what’s most important?

Anh Dao Pham
Through every medium possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anh Dao Pham
And this sounds funny, this is sort of like your question, “How much is too much when you’re using my name?” How much is too much when you’re articulating a goal? It’s almost never too much. And the reason is because people are very focused on their individual tasks, and it’s very easy for them to lose sight of what’s going on for a bigger picture.

So, if you’re trying to orient somebody against a goal, then what you want to do is, first, make sure that the goal is clear and unambiguous, everybody understands what it is. Then, second, articulate it in writing, verbally. If you want to plaster it on a wall, like, do whatever you can to broadcast the goal and do it in multiple mediums, and to reinforce it almost every chance you get.

I had a very funny example where I was marching towards a big project, and every day at the very beginning of the scrum, which is the meeting that we had for everybody, getting together to check in on status every day, I had a slide at the very beginning before we actually went to scrum that said how many days were left to the goal, till the launch date.

And so, 15, 14, 13, counting down every day. And two times, very close to launch date, I think I remember it was like five days to launch date, somebody pulled me aside, and was like, “Wait, when are we launching again?” And I realized, and so I just very politely said, “We’re launching in five days. This is the date.”

And it’s funny because people learn through different mediums. Some people are audio learners, so if you say it to them, they actually get it. Some people are visual, so if you broadcast it visually in some way, that’s when they get it. Some people need those things reinforced and some people actually need to say it themselves.

So, if you really want to know if somebody has actually ingested and internalized your goal, you can ask them to say it back to you, and only when they’ve actually articulated that you know for sure that they actually understood it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And I guess you have to be careful with that so that it does not seem, I don’t know, patronizing or condescending.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I think you have to just take the request and respond to them, and know that you’re going to be repeating yourself a lot but that it’s just totally expected. And as long as you’re always tying it back to work that people are doing, they’re not going to feel like it’s too much.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right, Anh, let’s hear Chapter 14. “When is your project done?” It’s not when I think. Do tell.

Anh Dao Pham
This chapter is actually about the principle of taking ownership on a project. And one of the things that I think is a big misconception is people put together a project plan when they start a new project, and there’s typically a launch date at the end, and that’s what you’re marching towards. So, let’s say you’ve got a three-month project, you’re launching towards the launch date.

And then at the end of the launch date, people feel like their project is done but that is not the case because, oftentimes, like I said, maybe you’re marching through that launch date and you looked at all these constraints because there were some sort of crazy surprise that happened, and now you’ve started to cut scope. And I like to call cutting scope very close to the launch date as roadkill. This was like roadkill on the path to getting to my goal. I started pushing things to the side, and saying, “Not critical. Not critical.”

So, once you’ve launched, there typically is, like, a number of things that still need to be happening in order for you to make your project a success. It can’t just be launch and sort of out on the ether. You need to go back and take care of all of the things that you don’t need in this roadkill along the way. Maybe you need to do additional communication to people who were stakeholders but maybe impacted after the fact.

So, a key example here is if you work in product development, or if you’re launching any sort of product or new thing, oftentimes, there are people who have to support that new thing once it’s out. So, it’s not just like making the feature available or the new product available, it’s also about making sure that the people who are going to need to support that are trained and have all the answers that they need to be able to do that in a sustained fashion, or there’s a place to ask later when there’s an issue with whatever that is that you’ve just released.

And so, all these things happen after a project launch date, but the project launch date is most commonly focused on as the end of your project. And so, in the chapter, I talk about this, it’s not so much that there are steps that you can do to say when your project is done. It’s more about an attitude. If you take ownership of a project as a project leader, and you think of yourself almost like the CEO of your project, then you don’t limit yourself to the scope of work that’s already been defined or what’s been defined to you by your title.

So, if you’re a product manager in my world, I might say, like, “Well, my goal is to define the product and get it out there.” But if I want it to be a success, I might have to do things that are beyond the launch date, beyond the scope of my role. And so, if you really think of yourself as an owner, and that you are paramount to this project’s success, then you will look to see what else needs to be done after the launch date. And until those things are completed, you’ll know that your job is not done.

The other thing is, always plan a celebration when you hit a big milestone. Don’t forget the tail end of a big project. It’s not done until you celebrate it with your team.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Anh, tell me, any final thoughts you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. I’d say, at the end of the day, leading projects and leading people is not cookie cutter, and I think this is probably the biggest thing that’s not fully articulated this way in the book but, hopefully, is a big key takeaway for people. Most of the things that I do are very people-driven. I’m most worried about boosting productivity for the people on my team, and I do whatever it takes to make that happen.

So, every project, every team is custom, and you’re different, the way that you add your perspective to a team is different. And so, I would like to warn people against sort of blindly following checklists, and, instead, to think about ways that you can customize your approach based off the team’s needs and what you’re trying to accomplish, and the personalities on the team. And know that if you do that, you’re going to be a lot more successful than somebody who is just trying to apply some set of rules blindly without thinking them through.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Yes. From one of my favorite books on happiness, What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth, the quote is, “We don’t describe the world we see. We see the world we describe.” And I love this because it’s very telling about human thoughts, in the sense that we often think that things are dictated to us, but, in fact, we actually have a lot of power to transform our worlds based off of what we call ourselves.

So, if you call yourself a project manager versus a project leader, that makes a really big difference in how you actually translate your role and your sense of ownership. And so, I love that quote because every time I feel like I’m being limited by the way that I’m calling myself something or the way that I’m framing a particular scenario, I try to reframe it to see if I can change the way that the world is reacting to me.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. And I don’t know where I borrowed this phrase. I got it from a job description which I thought was funny. I think it said one of the requirements was to “Provide visionary leadership.”

Anh Dao Pham
Like it’s so easy.

Pete Mockaitis
And just like that, and I thought, “All right, what’s on my to-do list today? Okay, provide visionary leadership. Check.” But I found that when I say that to myself, like, “Okay, I’m going to write a bunch of emails to my team and the collaborators, right,” it’s like, okay, so one view is, “Okay, that’s a thing that’s got to get out the door, a bunch of emails. Check, check, check.”

Versus if I say to myself, and I’m kind of joking and I’m kind of being highfalutin for the fun of it, it’s like, “All right, on my to-do list is to provide visionary leadership on these course adaptations.” And then, sure enough, I really do feel more jazzed about it, and really do spend some more time providing useful feedback and direction that is more enriching for folks.

So, yeah, how I describe that to-do list item really does shape how I perform it even though I was kind of joking.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, there are studies about this. It’s called jobcasting where you take your job, and you try to put it in a bigger context. So, for example, you’re a podcast host, you could say, “My job is to create podcasts,” or you could say your job is to put more information out in the world so that you can help people all over the world be better at their jobs. The second one is going to be so much more inspiring than the first, right?

So, the way that you frame what you’re doing has a very tangible impact on your perspective and how motivated you are going to be to do that job. So, I think that that’s so insightful, and the fact that you actually have the power to change your own perception by describing it differently, I think, is just phenomenal.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Now, this is a hard one because a lot of your prior guests have cited lots of great studies, and so I was trying to find one that I felt was unique. And I ended up landing on a study that Sean Achor, who’s the author of The Happiness Advantage, did to himself, which I think about all the time. And it’s a very novel study about what it takes to adopt new habits versus what it takes to deter yourself from stopping…or to deter yourself from continuing to do old habits that are not so good for you, and he calls it the 20-second rule.

And the experiment goes like this. He wanted to play his guitar more often. And so, he had a guitar that he bought, it was in his closet. And he decided to see if he removed the friction from playing the guitar by just buying a stand and then putting the guitar out in the middle of the room, whether or not he would actually play his guitar more often.

And it turns out, just the additional friction of getting off of the couch, going over to the closet, getting the guitar out reduces the amount of time that he would actually play on the guitar. So, he had a lot of success in just moving it from one location to another. And then he did another experiment which I thought was so funny.

He had a remote control that he typically used to leave on his couch so that when he watched television, it’s there. That’s what everybody does. Their remote control is right on the television, so you plop down on the couch and got it, and then you turn it on. But he wanted to stop watching as much television and, instead, read more books.

So, what he did was he took the batteries out of his remote control, and he put them in a drawer that was a few feet away, and he said he timed himself. It took him about 20 seconds if he were to get up out of the couch, go to the drawer, put the batteries in and close the remote control to start using it. And his goal was to see if he created that little additional friction if he would stop watching television as much.

And so, what he found was he did. He stopped watching television as much because he was sort of inherently lazy in that additional 20 seconds. The friction actually caused him to pick up the book that was, like, right within arms’ reach on the couch rather than watch television. So, I find that to be like a fantastic study. And in my real life, I use it both at home as well as at work when I think about why people are not responding to me or not able to complete a different task that I asked them to do.

I see, “Is there a way that I can make their job easier?” So, for example, if you ask people very open-ended questions, it’s difficult for them to answer because they have to craft a response from scratch. But if you give them statements that they have to react to, that takes a lot less brain power so you can be much more effective at getting responses that way.

Another example is in my home life. My husband is 6’2” and I’m 5’4” and so I love Post-Its, I put them…write things on them all the time as a reminder I want to give him. There’s one trick that I have done more recently and that is very effective. It’s when I have a reminder for him, and not me, I write it on a Post-It and then I put it at his eye level, not mine. And just by writing with it being right in front of him instead of right in front of where I would be, he has a much harder time missing it, and knows it’s for him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a favorite book?

Anh Dao Pham
A favorite book, this is really hard. I’ve just quoted What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth. That’s one of my all-time favorites in terms of happiness as well as The Happiness Advantage. And then in terms of non-self-help or happiness books, I recently enjoyed a couple of memoirs. I really liked Untamed by Glennon Doyle, and then also Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a particular nugget you’re known for, something that people quote back to you often?

Anh Dao Pham
Outside of notetaking and the candy bowl effect?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s plenty really.

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say, yeah, those are nuggets. The one thing about the book that’s actually been very controversial and has come up quite a bit is I do have a chapter about planning where I state that I believe plans are optional. And this is almost like sacrilege for the project management community, but it’s created a lot of controversy.

And it’s not so much that I’m against planning. It’s that, like I said before, I’m against people following things blindly and doing things for the sake of doing them, rather than doing things with specific intention. And so, I challenge the notion that every single project needs to have, like, a detailed project plan. Instead, if you’re looking for ways to boost team productivity, tailor a process to your team, plan when your team needs a plan, and be thoughtful about it. That, to me, has been like a really insightful takeaway that most people have come back to me and ask me about, and particularly controversial.

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

Anh Dao Pham
I’d love it if folks could find me at my website, it’s www.GlueLeaders.com. Pretty easy to find. You can contact me there, find everything about the book, and also a link to this podcast once it’s available.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, actually. I was listening to your podcast, and I think it was episode 830 with Dr. Waldinger where he cited a Gallup quote that I also cited in my book about making friends and making best friends at work, and how that increases both productivity as well as enjoyment. And if you take nothing else away from all this, there’s a lot of little tactics and tricks that you can do to build rapport, be more organized, take notes. But, at the end of the day, to me, the most rewarding thing at work is when you make personal connections.

And so, what I would love to advocate people do is don’t just think of your job as a job. Think of it as a way to make meaningful connections with people, and to accomplish great things together, and bring part of yourself to work. And the reason that I started writing jingles is because I like to rhyme, and it’s silly, but it’s very uniquely me. And if you love to cook, maybe organize potlucks. If you love ping-pong, maybe organize a ping-pong tournament.

My husband and I like to play poker, and so now we’re thinking about combining my love of cooking Vietnamese soups and poker with a “pho”ker night. So, those are things that you can do to bring to your workers, and it makes it more rewarding when you actually create genuine friendships, and then accomplish things together. So, what I would say is find ways to connect with people at work, make friends, and in doing so, hopefully, both your job as well as your coworkers’ jobs will be more rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anh, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and good glue.

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you. So nice to meet you.