This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

Dec 15

825: The Six Steps of Masterful Delegation with Aaron Schmookler

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Aaron Schmookler shares practical, hard-won wisdom on how to delegate wisely to minimize time, and frustration.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get over the resistance to delegate
  2. What you need to do before delegating anything 
  3. The simple trick to ensuring follow through 

 

About Aaron

For nearly 30 years, Aaron has helped people find their intrinsic motivation, their capacity to collaborate, and the fulfillment that comes from harnessing their creativity. As the co-founder and CEO of The Yes Works, he specializes in supporting business leaders who believe that people are their greatest asset to create environments that bring out their best. 

Aaron and The Yes Works serve clients across the country and across industries including Microsoft, MOD Pizza, DiscoverOrg, Burkhart Dental Supply, SOG Knives, 9th Gear, and Textainer to make work good for people and people good for work. 

Resources Mentioned

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

Aaron Schmookler
Thank you for having me, Pete. It’s exciting to be talking to you again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited too. And I was taking a gander at our last conversation. Fun fact, in the transcript of Episode 497, the phrase “Tell me more about that” appeared 13 times.

Aaron Schmookler
Oh, fun that you counted.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I could just do Control-F find. It’s funny because I think we’re both such fanatical fans of the phrase and how useful it is for a variety of purposes. And, listeners, I recommend you check that out. It may transform your lexicon forever. But I’d love to hear, over the last three years, have there been any interesting stories or discoveries or saves of that day that have emerged with you trying out our favorite phrase?

Aaron Schmookler
Boy, I’m sure that there have been countless times that that has come up. I had already experienced the time when somebody called me a jerk or some other less kind, less family-friendly term, and I said something to the effect of, “Well, clearly, I’ve rubbed you the wrong way. Tell me more about that.” And that turned the relationship around.

Since then, I’m sure it’s helped with the health of my marriage and with my daughter. I’m sure, also, that it’s helped with my business partners and with my clients. It’s such a natural and consistent part of my lexicon now that I don’t think that I have the dramatic stories that I might’ve had when I first started to employ that phrase as a tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Well, it has continued to serve me well also, particularly when I just need a beat to think, to orient, to, “What the heck is going on right now?” as well as, “I genuinely don’t understand what you said,” and it’s much more friendly than, like, “What the heck are you blathering on about now?”

Aaron Schmookler
“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” is what I’m often tempted to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know. So, now, I’d love to chat with you about delegation. You sent me a beautiful proposal. Thank you for that. And I thought that’s exactly something that we should talk about, so let’s do it. Can you kick us off with any particularly surprising or fascinating or extra counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about delegation in your 30 years of working with different folks?

Aaron Schmookler
Well, I’ll skip to the end and say I love the book Who Not How. And I’m trying now to remember the name of the author, but “Who Not How,” the premise or the thesis of the book is, essentially, “Stop trying to figure out how to do it. Somebody already knows and they can do it better than you. So, figure out who should be doing this instead of how you are going to do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much that I was frantically Googling in the background. It is Dan Sullivan. I believe that’s the strategic coach Dan Sullivan.

Aaron Schmookler
That’s the guy, yeah. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Who’s got a wealth of goodies that I’ve enjoyed.
Who Not How, I think that really holds true. And I am astounded at how people can often do things so much better than me. Maybe I shouldn’t be astounded. I should just expect that by now, having learned it so many times. Where I thought, I’ve got a rental property in Chicago, and I thought, “Okay, I’ve checked out the BiggerPockets podcast, okay, I’ve got a little bit of sensibility associated with finding a bargain and renting it out and making it look okay.”

And then I get a property manager who just, like, ran circles around me in terms of, “Oh, yeah. Well, that’s actually a two-car garage so you just got to paint a really good line in there.” I was like, “Oh, but it’s kind of tight.” He’s like, “Welcome to every parking space in Chicago. Also, here’s how we can make them pay for their own water.” It’s like, “Whoa, you should be doing this and not me.”

Aaron Schmookler
One of the things that’s coming to the top of my mind as you’re sharing that story, as a counterintuitive truth about delegation, when I’m training managers to delegate effectively, one of the questions that I ask them in kind of preparing before we got to the “What are our six-step model looks like?” is I ask them, “What holds you back from delegating?”

And, very often, I get responses like, “I don’t want to give people things that I wouldn’t want to do. I don’t want to just push the scut work off onto somebody else.” And the remarkable truth is all the stuff that I hate doing, somebody else loves.

Pete Mockaitis
It is remarkable and true. Hence, a remarkable truth.

Aaron Schmookler
Right. I thank God every day for inventing accountants, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. You’re speaking my language, and I love accountants too. I hope I haven’t been harsh on them just because I dislike doing accounting work so much, but if it’s in the realm of bookkeeping or compliance-y things, today, we had to find a title for a car in order to renew a thing, I was like, “What? Is a paper I was supposed to have received in a mail and then held on to for a year? That’s really pushing my capability.”

Aaron Schmookler
As my friend Dave would say, “I resemble that remark.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right, so that’s cool. So, it’s who not how, and Dan Sullivan wrote a great book called just that, which is nifty. And some things we sure dislike doing, other people love doing. That’s cool and a blessing. So, then lay it on us, is there, maybe, a particularly inspiring story to tee this up and get us going, “Oh, yeah, I’m fired up to delegate”? Maybe there’s someone who’s overwhelmed and transformed their effectiveness and their stress levels with delegation. No pressure, Aaron.

Aaron Schmookler
I’ll tell a story from my own history. I don’t know if we talked before, Pete, about the fact that I come from a theater background, and my primary training there was as a director, but on the way, I was also a technical director. And one of the things that the technical director is responsible for is, at the end of the show, the very night that the last audience sees the show, as soon as the audience is out the door and those doors are closed, at that very moment begins what’s called strike and they start tearing down the set.

A lot of it goes, ridiculous amounts of the set goes into the trash, all the lights are removed, those that aren’t part of the regular repertory in the theater. And the technical director’s job at strike is, essentially, to make sure that it goes and that it goes off without a hitch. And the first time that I ever led strike, I remember standing on the stage, I’ve got my tools in my hands, I’m spending a fair amount of time working on the materials myself, and pointing and telling people, “Okay, go do this,” and giving them a single task to do, and people would be flocking to me.

I, eventually, had to put my tools down, and it was just so much work for me to try to direct 23, or something like that, people to go and do this task and then this task, and then this task, and then this task. I was so exhausted at the end of that night that I might as well have done the strike myself in order to have gotten that exhausted, and it wasn’t very effective. And we were there much longer than we should’ve been, and we made much less progress than we should’ve been.

So, I called up the last tech director that I remembered working for and really enjoyed, and I said, “What did I do wrong? What do I need to do better?” And he said, “Okay. Well, tell me about what you did.” So, I told him the story of the night, he said, “You are assigning things task by task. And then he said, “You got to break things down into objectives, what’s the result that you want to see, and put somebody in charge of that result.”

“And when somebody comes to you and says, ‘What do I do next?’ you say, ‘Go join Mary over there,’ or, ‘Go join John over there. He’s got this project and he’ll put you to work.’” And so, by delegating objectives, I was able to create mini-teams of my team. And the next time, we got more done than we had anticipated. We got out earlier than we had anticipated.

And so, just that one shift from delegating or assigning tasks, and this is a distinction that I was expecting to talk to you about by the end of our conversation, this distinction between assigning tasks and delegating end results, delegating outcomes, was tremendously powerful for me in an instant.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it, and it really does resonate. I am thinking about events. When you talked about striking the stage, like, “Oh, I did some theater stuff back in the day.” And some events, like putting on these, it was called HOBY, Hugh O’Brien Youth Leadership, sophomore leadership seminars for high school students, as well as my wedding. Like, one of my favorite things to do was carve out zones of responsibility for people.

And sometimes, I even like to make up new names. It’s like, “Okay, Michelle, you’re fantastic and I’m going to trust you to be the person who answers all of the guests’ questions that they would like answered when me and my bride would rather not be tied to our phones on our wedding day.”

Aaron Schmookler
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Because I’ve been on both sides of that equation in terms of, “Oh, I’ve got some questions but it’s not quite clear. Like, where do I go? What do I do? Can I do this at the wedding? I don’t want to bother the bride and groom but I kind of like to know.” And so, I was like, “Michelle, you are the director of guest experience. That’s your role. And we’re letting all the guests know, ‘If you have any questions, you call Michelle.” And so, that was really cool.

And for HOBY, we got someone who’s talented with design things but she didn’t want to be in charge of the whole programming thing, so we said, “You are the artistic director. If there’s any sort of color or logo or design or image that goes on a T-shirt or a booklet or a nametag or a door decoration, you are the master of that.” And she’s like, “Oh, sweet.” I knew it was fun for both of us because it decimates ambiguity, it was like, “Oh, that’s me.” It’s like, “Oh, lights? You say lights, Aaron, that’s me.” “Oh, did you say the huge backdrop? Oh, that’s me.” And you get to feel good when you own that thing.

Aaron Schmookler
That’s right. That’s right. And I’ve created an event recently that we called “I’m not participating in this recession.” And it was an event for C-suite folks to come to. I had a CEO, who had been the CEO of SOG Knives, to come because he had taken his company through some recessions. And one of the things that he shared with our attendees was that he likes to make people the CEO of their realm within his company because it just creates so much leverage for him to be able to say, “You handle this.”

And one of the things that I advise, when people are contemplating, “Can I delegate this?” is that if somebody can do a job up to 75% as well as you can, 75% is a good marker to say to them, “You, go take care of this.” Because if you can delegate to three people 75% of what you could accomplish, well, the leverage of all that multiplicity is tremendous.

Aaron Schmookler
Seventy-five percent of three things is much better than 100% of one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I dig that. And I think it’s really useful to note, “The thing that you’re delegating, is it super crazy mission-critical?” Like, there are very few things in this world, although there are some, in which if you do it a hair better, the rewards are huge. I’m thinking about maybe direct-response copywriting. I’m thinking about Google search engine optimization. I’m thinking about Olympic swimming. Hundredth of a second, like, gold versus nothing.

Aaron Schmookler
Yes, that’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
But almost everything else is, “You can do this 75% as well? Well, then have at it, and away we go.”

Aaron Schmookler
Especially within our companies, part of the time and effort that we put in our companies is on the core competency of our company, “This is what we do. This is what we do different from other people. This is what we do better than other people. This is what you have come to us for. Everything else in our company is not that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Bookkeeping, you didn’t come here. Or, invoicing. Yeah, that’s good. All right. Well, lovely concepts. Now, you actually have a pretty precise five or six, depending on how we’re counting, steps for effective delegation. Can you walk us through these?

Aaron Schmookler
Sure. And you’ve hinted at the idea that this is a six-step model with five steps, in a way, because step zero, I’m considering step zero because, though this is the first step in delegating, it is just you, all by yourself, getting yourself ready to go and do the delegation. And there are some questions for you to answer before you go and do that.

One, “What is the desired outcome? What do you want? What is the end state that you need to have accomplished?” In the military, they call this commander’s intent, “What’s the commander’s intent?” It sounds simple but it’s often very hard, and one way to get there is to think about, “Why do I want this done?” That will help you to conceive what is the end result look like.

So, then when you’ve got your end result mapped out, you also need to answer the question, “When do I need to have this result in hand? And, therefore, what’s a decent margin for failing?” So, if I’m going to delegate something to you, Pete, that I need on Friday by 3:00, if I asked you to deliver it to me by Friday at 3:00, I’ve set us both up to be in real trouble. Better that I should ask you for it by Thursday at noon so that we’ve got time to look it over, make some adjustments, figure out that we’ve got problems, resolve them before I need the thing.

The next question to ask yourself, and we’re still in step zero, is, “Who will be served by taking on this responsibility? And who is able to serve the purpose?” That’s kind of a two-part question. So, who is the right person because they’re going to be served by this? Maybe they really enjoy this kind of work. Or, when I have somebody working for me, I ask them, “Where do you want your career to end up? Where do you want your career to be a year, five years down the line? Okay, what skills and talents are you going to need to get there? Oh, well, this project is going to serve you developing that. So, that is a good reason to give this to you, also, because you’re going to be capable of serving the purpose.”

And then the last question to ask yourself, but still in prep, is, “What are they going to need to succeed? What’s the information that they’re going to need? What resources are they going to need?” And do not skip this one, “What authority, what decision-making authority are they going to need in order to succeed?” That’s step zero before you even begin to delegate, preparing yourself to be ready.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, I’m wondering, for those who have a hard time letting go, delegating, they might say, “Well, nobody is sufficiently qualified or able to handle this.” How do we respond to that?

Aaron Schmookler
Two things. One is, “Are you sure?” We talked already about that 75% rule. If somebody is going to be able to deliver 75%, then maybe it’s time to reassess what nobody looks like. The second thought that I have is Dennis Bakke wrote a book called Joy at Work in which he suggests that you push decision-making down. And in delegating, he says, “You can set parameters. Without withdrawing the authority to make decisions, you can set parameters.”

So, if I delegate to you, Pete, and I think you don’t have the judgment yet, I might say, “I want you to talk to Betty and Bob about everything that you’re considering before you make the decision. At the end of the day, the decision is yours, and I want you to have the benefit of their insights before you make the final decision.” So, that’s another way of cranking up people’s capability while leaving their decision-making authority intact.

And I’ve actually thought of a third thing to share, which is, “If they can’t do the whole thing, what parts of it can they do? What parts of it can you delegate and then maybe you retain the rest?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. I like that notion of the parameters. So, one of it could be, “If it’s you get the input from these people, another one could be if it’s over X thousand dollars or whatever, then you check in with me,” or, “If it’s concerning super client A, B, or C, I want to know about it. If it’s any dozens of other clients, have at it.”

Cool. So, we’ve got the parameters, so it’s not a sort of 100% carte blanche, “It’s all yours,” but rather, “Okay, here’s a slice of it,” and it may very well still be the vast majority, which is cool. All right, so that’s step zero. What’s our step one?

Aaron Schmookler
Step one, and this one is a little bit counterintuitive, is to ask somebody, to give them something to do without giving them any details. And this is counterintuitive on a couple of levels. When we’re training managers, some people push back on the idea that they should ask anybody anything instead of just simply telling them, “Hey, here’s what you’re going to do.”

And then the other reason that they push back is they say, “What do you mean with no details?” So, here’s what I mean, “Hey, Pete, can I get your help with something?” “Pete, may I give you a project?”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, like, when you asked me that, you’ve galvanized my attention but maybe in an anxious kind of a way, it’s like, “Ahh, what do you have in mind exactly, Aaron?” And maybe…

Aaron Schmookler
So, the maybe is important because the maybe is correct, and we’ll get to that in a moment. The galvanizing your attention is the biggest part of this. One is I’m treating with respect by asking for permission. And then I can’t count the number of times, somebody will poke their head into my office and simply start to ask me questions, and my attention is on whatever I’m doing, and I have no idea what they’ve said, it goes in one ear and out the other.

And with my attention deficit disorder, and I’m very much like this, and even neurotypical people are like this as well, we all need a basket to put things in. So, when you say, “Can I get your help with something? Can I give you a project? Can I give you a new responsibility?” I now have a basket to put all of the details that you’re going to give me in and create order for my brain, and that’s going to serve everybody.

And with respect to the anxiety that I’ve created, largely that’s because you and I don’t have a relationship where we’re doing this, where you know what’s going to come next. So, one of the things that I recommend to any manager or anybody who’s in a position to be delegating is to tell people in advance, “Hey, when I delegate to you, here’s what it’s going to look like. I’m going to go through these six steps.”

“And what this step I’m going to do before I even get to you, then I’m going to come and I’m going to ask you, ‘Can I get your help with something?’ I’m going to ask you, ‘Can I give you a new responsibility?’” And no is a perfectly good answer, and here are the other steps that I’m going to go through so that that anxiety is alleviated in advance by your knowing, “Okay, this is just step one in a five-step process.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And then I think you say no is the acceptable answer to, “Can I get your help with something?” I guess, also, maybe any number of context-sharing things, like, “Well, I feel wildly overwhelmed by this crazy important task that’s due in two hours, but what did you have in mind?”

Aaron Schmookler
Right. And if you tell me you have a crazy important task that’s due in two hours, I’m going to say, either, “Thank you for telling me, Pete, you’re not the right person,” or, “Oh, well, this is not pressing. Why don’t I come to you three hours from now to give you a chance to get that turned in and catch your breath?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Aaron Schmookler
So, that takes us to step two, which is now we’re going to lay out the details of who does what by when, what is it that I’m asking you for. And there’s another podcast called Manager Tools, and one of the things that they suggest at this point in any delegation is that instead of delegating the task be done, delegate the reporting that it is done.

And I think that is just a brilliant insight to say, instead of, “Hey, Pete, will you do this?” to say, “Hey, Pete, please tell me by 3:00 p.m. on Thursday that this is complete,” or, “Please send me an email with the file of this report by 3:00 p.m. on Thursday.” So, you’re delegating the reporting because if I don’t know it’s done, it has no value to me.

So, delegate the reporting, “Tell me as soon as this is complete. Here’s the outcome I’m looking for,” the manager’s intent, what is the end state, rather than all of the meticulous details, “Here’s the deadline and here are some resources, here are some considerations, here’s the authority that you have.” When I say consideration, that might be you might be tempted. If I’m asking you to rent us a truck, I might say, “The last time we went to U-Hall, we had these problems, so consider looking at Penske and Budget before you go talking to U-Hall.” So, that’s step two, is to lay out what it is that I’m asking for.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So you’re elaborating, so who does what, by when, to what standard, for what reason, with what resources. Can you elaborate a little bit on the standard? Like, how can we go about unpacking and delineating what is good optimal acceptable versus what is not?

Aaron Schmookler
So, you’re going to want to ask yourself the question of, “What do I need to see?” So, the standard for a truck might include it needs those rails on the wall that you can latch things to. The standard might include the budget. The standard might include the size of the truck. If I’m asking you to create a report, the standard might include margins for error.

Or, if I’m asking you to design something, the standard might be, “I want this to look opulent.” What are the ways that you can describe what it should look like, what it should feel like, what it should be like? And what are the questions that you’re going to be asking when you assess its success?

Aaron Schmookler
In other words, how do we know if you’ve succeeded at the end? Are there no grammatical errors? Are there no spelling errors? Does that matter? And perfectionism, when we talk about perfectionism, perfectionism is somebody insisting that they go beyond the standard, which wastes time, effort, and peace of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Cool. Well, now, can you share with us the step three, negotiate?

Aaron Schmookler
Yeah. So, step three, as you said, is to negotiate, “I asked you if I could give you something. You said yes. And you said yes sight unseen, or maybe you said it depends, so you don’t know what…you didn’t know until now what I was asking for.” So, at this point, the negotiation includes asking the questions, “Okay, now that you know what I’m asking for, Pete, are you still in? Does this still work for you? Do you have what you need?”

“I’ve told you about these resources, I’ve told you about that authority, I’ve given you these tools. Is there anything else that you need that I haven’t thought of? Do you need help? Do you need people? People are some of the resources that you might need. And if you’re tempted to say no, and/or if you’re not sure how to meet the rest of your obligations, then we may be reallocating your other priorities and your other responsibilities.”

“I don’t have time to do that because I’ve got this.” “Oh, well, let’s delay the deadline on that,” or, “Okay, let me take back this thing that I was trying to delegate to you because, clearly, this isn’t going to fit on your plate,” or, “Let’s take this other thing off your plate and give it to somebody else so that you have the bandwidth to handle this.” So, the negotiation is, “Okay, what will it take to make this work if, in fact, it does?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then step four?
Aaron Schmookler
So, step four is to keep in touch, and this is very often an overlooked step because people say, “Okay, go do this. I’ll see you at the end.” Tools for this include if you’re a manager having weekly one-on-ones where you’re checking in with your direct report, or the weekly one-on-one is focused on your relationship in general where you keep touch, “How is this going?”

Or, if this is a longer-term project, you set, “Here’s the final deadline,” that there are benchmarks along the way, “Here’s how we know we’re on track. This is going to be accomplished three weeks away from the deadline,” “This is going to be accomplished four weeks away from the deadline,” “This is going to be accomplished five weeks away from the deadline.” So, you’re keeping touch of, “Are we on track at each of those benchmark locations?” And you’re checking in on the standards at those times as well.

So, you create a channel for reporting and keep in touch at least weekly, at least briefly. So, that’s step four, is to make sure that you’re keeping in touch.

Pete Mockaitis
At least weekly, that’s handy. And then you mentioned that fine is not a status report in terms of, “Hey, how are things going?” “Fine.” What more precisely are we looking to hear when we’re keeping in touch?

Aaron Schmookler
Here’s where the benchmarks come in, “Oh, well, I’m two days behind on this benchmark,” or, “I’m two days ahead. I’ve reached this benchmark even though it’s not actually due until two days from now.” So, that’s one thing. Or, a status report is, “We’re on track and, in terms of we’ve hit all the benchmarks, up until now. And there’s an obstacle emerging that I didn’t anticipate. Let’s talk about how I might get around this obstacle. Can I have your insight?” Or, “I’m going to need a $100 or $1,000 to level this obstacle that’s come up.” “The price of lumber has changed.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then step five, debrief?

Aaron Schmookler
Step five is after the fact. So, arguably, this isn’t part of a delegation model. It’s part of a checking in, and I think it needs to be there because I don’t consider it complete until we’ve learned what there is to learn from the process that we just went through, “What worked and what didn’t? What worked in terms of how our communication went? What worked in terms of my execution of what you delegated to me? What worked in terms of did our standard actually meet the need?”

“I delivered this entirely on standard. This is exactly what we designed and it still didn’t solve the problem that this project was intended to solve. So, what needs to change?” So, a few questions to ask here, “What do we need to keep? What do we need to stop, to just get rid of this entirely? This was completely extraneous. What do we need to add? What wasn’t there that needs to be there? And what do we need to adjust? We got the blue one, it was the wrong blue. Or, we got these but, instead of five, we need seven.”

So, what do we need to keep, what do we need to stop, what do we need to add, what do we need to adjust. And that takes us, Pete, through six steps if you include step zero to prepare yourself for the delegation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then maybe zooming out or cutting across all these steps, what are some of the top things that make all the difference for preventing disasters, disappointments, oopsies, and stressful moments?

Aaron Schmookler
So, I’ll start with perhaps the answer that people are going to like the least. I remember when I took my first advanced level biology class in college was a genetics class. And I sat down for the first exam, and I looked at the cover sheet of the exam, and what it said was, “This is one test in one class, in one part of your schooling, which is just one part of your life. Your performance on this exam, while it may be important right now, is not critical to the outcome of your life, so don’t fret.” That was the cover page of this exam.

And then I opened up the exam, and the first question was, “For ten points, what color is a Golden Retriever? Hint: Look at its name.” So, that story is intended, Pete, to illustrate that part of how you can prevent disasters is by chilling out, both because the things that you’re thinking of as disasters are probably not as disastrous as you think they are, and because fearing disaster makes disaster more likely. And so, one illustration that I love about this, I used to be a hang glider pilot.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Aaron Schmookler
And when you land a hand glider, generally, you’re looking for a big open field to land the hang glider in. And what happens more often than you would imagine is that there’s a big open field with one tree in the middle, and the hang glider pilot hits the tree in the middle. There’s lots of open space, and the hang glider pilot flies right into the tree.

And the reason is that in the fear and anxiety of not wanting to hit the tree, the pilot looks at the tree. And your brain is designed to take you where you’re looking. Millions of years of evolution have made our brains direct where we go to where we’re looking. So, if you’re looking for a disaster, you are much more likely to steer into it. Look instead for the clear open field, and you think, “Open field. Open field. Okay, there’s the tree, that’s where I don’t want to go,” and then you spend the bulk of your time and attention on, “Here’s where I do want to go. Here’s where I do want to go.”

Another part of the answer to your question, Pete, is to consider those benchmarks, and to really not get lazy about checking in with those benchmarks, and assessing along the way, as part of your keep in touch step, “Do these benchmarks still make sense or do they need to be reassessed? Are we still on target to meet the deadline? Are we still on standard? Are we getting further and further? If we start to fall behind, are we getting further and further behind, or are we finding that, over time, we’re catching up?” So, those are a few of the thoughts that I have about that question.

[39:21]

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then when it comes to micromanaging, I think folks don’t like being micromanaged, and, on the flipside, managers are scared to be micromanaging. How do we make sure we strike this balance appropriately?

Aaron Schmookler
Micromanaging is about backseat driving. It’s about checking in so regularly that people can’t get into a flow. Micromanaging is about making decisions that other people could make. It is not about the frequency of your check-in, provided you’re allowing people to accomplish stuff and get into a flow state before your next check-in. People are so afraid of micromanaging in my experience. The tyranny of micromanagement is the fear of micromanaging far more often than the tyranny of micromanagement is actual micromanagement.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s reassuring and comforting. So, then any maybe pro tips or indicators, like, “Oh, you might be getting close to that line”?

Aaron Schmookler
Of micromanagement?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Aaron Schmookler
If you are tempted to take back the project that you’ve given to somebody, think twice. Taking back the delegation is often a piece of micromanagement. If you are trying to get marginal improvement by changing the decisions that they have made, you’re very likely micromanaging. And it’s important to think about… micromanagers are very often, what they’re trying to do is risk management, “I don’t want this to go badly. I want this to go as well as it possibly could. I want the outcome to be 100%.”

The risk there, the risk that you actually attain is demoralizing people, is losing the leverage that you have as somebody who can delegate, to get more than one thing done at a time. And so, if you are wasting human capital, if you are wasting people’s potential and fulfillment in pursuit of marginal accomplishment, you are a micromanager. It’s time to rethink your priorities.

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

Aaron Schmookler
I’m glad you brought up micromanagement because that probably would’ve been how I would’ve answered that question. I think I’m ready for favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Aaron Schmookler
This quote is often attributed to Goethe and it, evidently, is not his, and it’s not known where it came from. So, it is, “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.”

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

Aaron Schmookler
there’s an experiment around something called enclothed cognition.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Aaron Schmookler
And enclothed cognition is, essentially, enclothed, meaning the clothes that you are wearing, cognition, meaning thought. And so, this experiment took people and put them in a smock, like a painter’s smock, and asked them to do accounting work, like work on a spreadsheet, the kind of stuff that you and I were talking about we don’t really like.

And wearing a smock, they were worse than if they were just wearing their normal clothes at doing that task. And wearing a lab coat, they were better than they were at doing that task than if they were just wearing their normal street clothes. And by contrast, if they were asked to do something creative, like create a painting, then they were better wearing the smock than they were in their normal street clothes. And if you put them in a lab coat, they were worse at being creative and original and interesting in creating their art than they were…worse in a lab coat than they were in their street clothes. Fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Aaron Schmookler
Today, I’m going to name Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. A very compelling book about negotiation.

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

Aaron Schmookler
I love Calendly. I’m not that great at tracking administrative details, so being able to give somebody either a link to go and book time on my calendar, or Calendly gives you this one-off meeting thing where I can tell you, “Here are a bunch of times. Click one and you’ll appear instantly on my calendar.” Very, very useful for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Aaron Schmookler
“One more” is my favorite habit right now. There’s a lot to do in my life, as there is in all or our lives. And I might go to the sink that’s maybe full of the day’s dishes and start to wash the dishes and start to be tempted to go, “I’m feeling hungry. I want to go dirty another dish.” And I just say, “One more.” And one more will often get me all the way through all the dishes, or all the phone calls that I need to make, or any of those things. So, I have a habit right now of saying, “One more,” when I start to feel like, “I’ve got to move on from this.”

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

Aaron Schmookler
I’ve mentioned some of the manager training that we’ve been doing lately, and this is something that hits all managers, I think, where they live. I’ve had CEOs audibly kind of get hit, they sound like they’ve just been punched in the stomach when I say, “If there’s no consequence for consistently missing a job requirement, then that thing is not actually a job requirement. It’s something that you’ve put on your wish list and it’s a resentment-builder.”

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

Aaron Schmookler
You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Aaron Schmookler on LinkedIn. And you can find me on all the work that we’re doing at TheYesWorks.com.

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

Aaron Schmookler
Yeah, I’ll stay in keeping with the theme of the day – delegate. Go delegate. Are you not good at it? Delegate it. Are you not interested in it? Delegate it. You don’t have time? Delegate it. Delegate it. Go delegate. There’s almost nobody that I know who delegates too much, but there are lots of people that I know who delegate too little. Myself included, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aaron, this has been a treat. I wish much luck and fun in all your delegations.

Aaron Schmookler
Well, thank you. Likewise, right back at you.

Dec 12

824: Thriving amid Information Overload with Ross Dawson

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Ross Dawson shares battle-tested strategies for excelling in a world of massive information.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five information superpowers 
  2. How to consume information optimally
  3. How to discern the good sources from the bad ones 

About Ross

Futurist and author Ross Dawson has focused for over 25 years on the challenge and opportunity of how to thrive on unlimited information. The initial offering of his first company Advanced Human Technologies was helping financial market leaders and company directors develop their information capabilities. He shared early insights in his prescient 1997 article Information Overload: Problem or Opportunity? 

For over two decades Ross has applied and consistently refined his frameworks for enhancing information capabilities. As a leading futurist, keynote speaker and advisor he has travelled around the globe helping business and government leaders envisage and create positive futures for an immense array of industries and issues.  

Resources Mentioned

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

Ross Dawson
Wonderful to be talking to you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about Thriving on Overload: The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information. But, first, could you tell us a little bit about your knack for musical instruments? I understand you can play many. How did you learn how to play them all? Any tips and tricks, or any special performances that really leap to mind?

Ross Dawson
Well, it’s just at the age of 14, I said, “I just want to play guitar,” so I gave a little money to my dad, he bought me a guitar, and I actually, at the time, had some cassette tapes and a little book, and I taught myself. So, I teach myself just about everything, and so it was the guitar included, and then I sort of worked out, “Okay, well, that note on the guitar, is that a note on the piano?” And so, I looked out on how to play the piano, and learned a couple of other instruments. It’s all self-taught.

Sometimes it’s useful. Often, it’s useful to have teachers but I think there’s so much we can discover ourselves in the way we find our own ways of doing things if we do them ourselves. And that’s certainly been my musical journey where I just do what I want to do, and I enjoy it, and not necessarily following what anyone’s suggesting to me I should be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. Okay. And were you in a band at some points along the way or any noteworthy performances?

Ross Dawson
Yes, just lots of bands along the way, mostly pretty early on when I was at school, when I was university, and then after that, yeah, a number of other bands, and playing guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion. And I’ve been certainly keen to get back to it for quite a while, and it’s a bit harder when you have kids and you got busy and so on, but working on some ways to use technology plus instruments to be able to create my own one solo show live.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun.

Ross Dawson
So, working it too.

Pete Mockaitis
Looking forward to it.

Ross Dawson
So, see you if I actually get on stage at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. Well, one final question on the music scene, did any of your bands have funny names? Band names are our favorite.

Ross Dawson
Nothing that I…well, funny, I don’t even remember them all. Platinum Blues was one of the sorts of bigger bands that I was in. So, this idea of those blues but we were sort of gilding it. So, that was, I suppose, one of the steps along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, Ross, now tell us a little bit about Thriving on Overload. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way on this stuff?

Ross Dawson
Well, I suppose, in a way, Thriving on Overload is counterintuitive in the sense we live in a world of overload, but we can thrive on it. I think this is a fundamental belief that our brains are not adapted to the world that we have created. Incredible inventors that have made, among other things, a profusion of information, and screens, and always on, and this is something is what we have brought ourselves, but it is not something that our brains are ready for, so we are overloaded. We are overwhelmed. It’s just natural. It’s impossible not to be, in a way.

But I do believe that it is possible to thrive on that. And this is, I suppose, a way where we can become, you know, learn, change how we do things, what we do, our attitudes, practices. And that, in a way, means we can transcend who we have been to be more adapted to the world that we live in. So, this is a journey, we can learn things, we can progress, and so that’s something which is not obvious but I think this really is our most important capability that we need to develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then can you paint a picture for, if there’s any cool studies or data or research, which really reveals just what’s possible in the realm of thriving on overload? Like, what’s the typical level of thriving/floundering in the midst of overload versus what can really be possible if you master this stuff?

Ross Dawson
There’s a whole set of capabilities to develop the capability to thrive. So, the subtitle of the book is, The 5 Powers for Success in a World of Exponential Information. Those five powers are purpose, framing, filtering, attention, and synthesis. So, we need to be able to dig into each of those and how all those fit together. But if we want to distill this, I suppose, to research and some data and some one frame, one piece of research or sort of now what is compounded research is into multitasking.

And some people think they’re good at multitasking, and the reality is that now more recent studies on what’s actually happening in our brain shows that when we think we are multitasking, as we think we are doing two things at the same time, our brain is actually switching from one thing to another thing, and then back to the other thing, and then back to the other thing.

Now, if we’re simply listening to a podcast while we’re cooking dinner, that’s probably achievable. That’s not too hard to go back and forth. But if we’re doing something which is contemplatively taxing, and we’re then checking our email, or trying to watch TV, or whatever it is, it’s simply not functional. So, studies have shown, in fact, that those people who think they are good at multitasking actually underperform those people that don’t think they’re good at multitasking because they’re trying to do something which is literally not possible. Our brains cannot multitask.

So, this is where we are put in a world with so much wonderful things going on, and we try to pay attention to multiple things at the same, and it’s simply, yes, you can do it by switching your attention, but you will perform less than you’ve done before. Now, taking research at the other end of the spectrum, those who are trained in the single practice which takes our attention the most sustained is meditation, which is simply the practice of keeping our attention sustained on one thing for a period of time where we can continue to be on attention on one thing for a period of time.

And you don’t need to be a meditator to get there. There are other ways to be able to get there, and there are people who switch everything off, and for three hours at a time, aside from getting up and stretching and having a drink of water or whatever they need along the way, will be focused on task for a period of hours.

And the reality is that it’s only a very small proportion of people that are able to and do take that time and capacity, develop that three hours of attention, spend it on one thing in which they can achieve incredible things. Whereas, the vast majority of people, it’s literally, their attention is not on one thing for more than literally a few minutes at a time, at best, because they’re just strayed by thoughts or notifications or alerts.

And those are the two poles. One is eternal distraction, eternal attention watering all over the place where we can never achieve that much. And those people that demonstratively can keep their attention on one thing achieve extraordinary amounts of things in quite limited periods of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that does sound exciting in terms of what’s possible. Now, to zero in on that three-hour figure, I’m thinking about ultradian rhythms and just what’s possible for the human organism. Is that three hour like three hours but with, like, a couple minute bathroom and beverage break? Or, how does that unfold, that three hours?

Ross Dawson
Yes. So, to your point, the basic rest activity cycle is generally understood to be 90 minutes, where our brains do go through cycles of, amongst other things, ability to be more focused and less focused. And so, we do need to take that into account, and our brains are different, we could be more or less tired, those all sorts of different factors, but 90 minutes is a reasonable guideline.

So, three hours is something where it is very possible for anybody to spend three hours in reasonable degrees of focus but that’s probably more than as much as most people would want to achieve in a day. The way I put it is that everybody should, for at least 90 minutes, at least once a week, have a complete focus time.

And that’s something which, again, is already challenging for most people. Most people don’t take 90 minutes out where there’s no distractions, nothing interrupting them, where there’s only one thing, they can’t escape from it, and they do get on with it. It actually takes practice to get into that but you can still achieve a lot as you get to that 90-minute period and I think that’s a good starting point for most people.

If you’re used to just being distracted and checking your email all the time, whatever it may be, make sure you have a time of 90 minutes, no distractions, no notifications, nobody’s going to interrupt you unless it’s the end of the world, and you have one task to get on with, and you just do that for 90 minutes, and do that once a week. That’s just incredibly starting point. And from then, you can start to build it.

So, in terms of some of those cycles, one of the most famous is the Pomodoro technique, which you spend 25 minutes of focus, five minutes break, 25 minutes of focus, and five minutes break, sometimes a bit longer break, and then you do that three times, which basically takes you to 90 minutes, have a little bit of a longer break, and then you do that three times again, 25 minutes plus five minutes break. And that works for a lot of people.

Personally, I think that the more flexible approach, as in if you feel you’re in the groove, then why suffer 25 minutes, or if you just feel a little bit of a break first that’s earlier. So, we can let our…some people work to that structure, having a time run, 25 minutes and five minutes break, that works for them perfectly. Other people, I feel that 25 minutes, often I’ll just want to keep on going, I won’t want to stop. But when I’m ready, I can take a stop, wander outside, pick up the guitar, whatever it may be.

So, I think if we get into this practice, what we do need is find our practices, find our routines that work for us, find what times of day is the best time to do this, but just making sure that you are starting with at least carving out some time, which is this what I call deep-dive time. That’s when you can achieve an incredible amount in very limited periods.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then so we’ve got a sense for what that means with regard to minutes of focused attention, which is handy. Could you share a cool story if there’s a particular case or poster child, if you will, that really illustrates what that can mean in practice for one’s results, career, productivity when they get there?

Ross Dawson
I think the reference point for, certainly for me, and I think for a lot of people is writing books. There’s pretty significant proportion of people say they aspire to write a book at some time in their life. You are never going to get there unless you have the focused time and you’ve blocked that out. So, that’s where anybody can say, “All right, I would love to write a book.” It could be a fiction book, it could be a memoir, it could be about this big idea you’ve have, it could be to show you’re the expert in your field, whatever it may be.

And, yes, when I wrote my first book, before I wrote my first book, I said, “I think society overweighs the value of a book. Being an author is an incredibly wonderful thing and society gives a lot of value to authors and, yeah, it’s a good thing but it’s…so I’ll play that game, if that’s what it is.” I have to say that after writing the first book, I say, “Well, actually, probably authors do deserve some respect.”

But it is something where you do need to carve out the time. So, anybody who writes a book will have an incredible accomplishment, it doesn’t matter how many books or copies are sold, you will have achieved something of value, something to point to, one which will advance your reputation, your career, your abilities, you’ll learn a lot through doing that. So, I think it is a wonderful endeavor, and that is something which can only be done with focused time that is blocked out, it’s simply for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there it is, it’s kind of binary, on or off. Certain accomplishments such as writing a book are just impossible without the ability to have that focus for an extended period of time that is 90-ish minutes or thereabouts or even greater. And then I think in this age where there are different media and creations, we could maybe think of the book as a proxy or a representative for any sort of, I don’t know, magnum opus or great work of sorts that they’re not cranked out in 15-minute break in between Instagram sessions.

Ross Dawson
Exactly. To your point, if you want to be a YouTuber, today the bar for YouTube videos is pretty high, as in it’s a very high quality. If you want to do X videos on a particular topic and show you’re the expert, you’ve got to be pretty good because there’s a lot of other really good people out there. And, again, that’s not going to happen by itself.

You’ve got to say, “All right. Okay, I’ve got to work out. All right, what’s my topic? What’s my script? Where do I get my video assets? What are the overlays that’s going to be?” This is, again, going to take focused time. It’s not going to happen just by filling in in between other things. And what you can do, for example, in 90 minutes of focus will far exceed what you can do just trying to do bits and pieces while you’re interrupted along the way.

So, this is a way of amplifying your productivity, but it’s also a way of just being more…creating more value from the world we have. And I think that this fundamental equation for almost all of us are input as information. It’s what we read. It’s what we experience. It’s our conversations. It’s what we see in the world. It’s what we live, what we notice. It’s what we make of the world. It’s our knowledge. It’s our understanding.

And then it’s sharing it. it’s creating value with that. It’s building a startup. It’s applying it to our work. It’s making better decisions. It’s seeing opportunities. It’s creating YouTube videos. It’s creating blogposts. It’s creating articles. It’s having more intelligent conversations that add value to more people. It’s the input and the output. And both of those require this structure to how it is we bring our information together and building knowledge. And the structure in our work lives and to how it is we create something of value from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you mentioned these five powers: the purpose, the framing, the filtering, the attention, the synthesis. Can you expand upon those in terms of, I guess, a definition, and maybe some top do’s and don’ts for really developing each of these powers?

Ross Dawson
Certainly. So, just at a high level first. Purpose is simply knowing why. Why is it that you deal with information, do what you do in the first place? Second is framing, which is being able to literally build frameworks for your knowledge, for your understanding, for your information so you can piece together how they are connected. Filtering is being able to look at the information source that you have, and to be able to discern what it is that serves you, that serves your purpose, and what it is that doesn’t, and being able to make sure that you leave the ones, the information, that’s not useful.

The fourth mode is attention. So, we’ve been talking about this idea of deep diving. We have extended focus for a period of time, but that’s not the only attention mode. For example, we might have scanning, we might say, “All right, there’s a period of time when I’m just going to look at all my information sources. I’m going to stop and then move on to then perhaps reading and taking that in,” so there’s different attention modes.

And the fifth one is synthesis. And this is, in a way, pulling everything together so that it’s rather than just be lots of information, we can make a body of knowledge, we can understand the system, we can be able to have the foundations to build something of value. So, these are the five powers, and we can sort of perhaps flip over the year digging into specific questions. I can obviously go into greater depth on any of those, but I think laying those out as the five is critically important.

So, where would you like me to dig into from those topics?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’d like to hear what sorts of practices enable us to develop and deploy each of these powers well versus what is the antithesis, the kryptonite, of each of these powers that are to be avoided?

Ross Dawson
So, we have to start with purpose, and the way I frame that in my book Thriving on Overload is around our relationship to information. So, we have a relationship with money, we have a relationship with food. In the same way, we have a relationship with information, there’s a lot of parallels with our relationship with food and relationship with information where we can have a not very positive relationship with food where we snack on chocolate all the time or eat when we’re stressed and so on.

And, in fact, there are some quite similar habits, sometimes, which people have with information. But we can also have a positive relationship with food, where we eat healthy food, and we feel that is sustains us, and we don’t have too much food when it’s not something that we truly want. So, with information, the same thing, where we can have a positive relationship with information, which is formed by going to what actually is good for us, which makes us feel happier, which inspires us, which informs our ability to achieve what we want to achieve, and is something which we’re not always indulging and snacking in all the time.

And so, I propose this idea of intermittent fasting information diet. So, some people, for food, they say, “All right, I’m not going to eat for a period of time. Come back and eat a meal, whatever, but I won’t eat anything at all in between.” And I think that’s a very valuable approach with information as well. We can say, “Well, I’m not going to check social media, I’m not going to check the news headlines, I’m not going to indulge in those things because, for a period of time, there are things that I want to do. I want to play with my children. I want to read something which is important, which I’ve decided is something I want to spend my time on, and I want to be able to write my book,” whatever it may be. So, we can vary those things.

But this all comes from purpose in the sense of understanding what it is we want to achieve, what it is we think is worthwhile, and, as a result, being able to determine the information that’s not useful. And the antithesis of that is simply not knowing, “Oh, that’s interesting. A bit about the celebrity news,” or, “Oh, see this horrible thing about what’s happening in politics, and spend some time looking at that.” And none of that serves us because we’re not clear on our purpose.

And so, having that purpose is an absolutely fundamental starting point to simply being able to prosper and know what it is that is valuable to us in a world which is often overwhelming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ross, I’d love to expand on that notion of purpose in the specific context of reading the news. Sometimes, when people read the news, they say things like, “I want to be informed.” And that strikes me as a little bit vague as far as a purpose or a goal goes because, in a way, there is infinite news one might be informed or not informed about. And so, it seems kind of thin in terms of, “My goal in reading this news is to be informed.”

And sometimes I wonder, maybe just because I don’t like reading a lot of news. I guess my purpose, the way I go into this is say, “I’m going to spend approximately 40 minutes scanning the headlines of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal so that I have a general clue as to the happenings in the world so I am able to converse with people,” as opposed to going, “Huh? What?” And so, that’s my purpose when I’m going to the news.

And it doesn’t take that long, and I find that if I spend too much time on the news, one, I’m pathologically curious, which is great for a podcast interviewer but not so great for a news consumer because, like, two hours later, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve read all about the chess cheating scandal, but how does that serve me?” I found it very interesting and I know I can comment a lot about it, Ross, if you have any questions, but it’s not really enriched me much.

So, can you share with us some example articulations of what might be some rich, useful, best-in-class articulations of purpose when it comes to approaching information of the news?

Ross Dawson
So, a couple of points just with what you’re saying. So, I think that’s wonderful in the sense of, first of all, you mentioned you take 40 minutes, and that’s exactly what I say. We need to have a period of time when we say this, “I’m going to scan the headlines and no more.” But news is one category, in a way, of information. It’s what I framed in the book as society, in a sense of, “What do we want to know about what is happening in society at large?”

And we said, the purpose is, “What is our purpose for it? Why is it that I read the news?” And you articulated, again, a quite clear purpose, so you can have intelligent, or at least, somewhat formed conversation with people, and you only need the headline for that to be able to not know…or, to actually know what’s happening as opposed to having the idea of what’s happening. And that’s entirely valid.

So, some of the reasons why you would want to go in the news is to be an informed voter. Now, that’s something which you probably can catch up with just before you need to vote. You don’t need to be constantly…

Pete Mockaitis
The day before, binge.

Ross Dawson
You don’t need to be constantly reading the news all year round in order to be able to vote, whatever it is that you vote. But that’s one valid reason. Another is to be able to have intelligent conversations with your friends you want to have conversations with. Another is to be aware of the things which are changing in your community, and so that gives you a geographic for this, “All right, I would like to see news about my local community.”

Another is to say, “Are there any things which are going to impact my children’s opportunities?” I might say, “All right, if they’re at a particular age, I might be looking at developments in university or college admissions,” or something like that. So, these are things which you would start to be focused. But this comes back to the domains for our relationship with information.

And one of the first ones, one of the most important ones is expertise. We do have to choose our area of expertise to be clear, “This is what I am an expert in, or I’m aspiring to be an expert in, or something which I think I’ll be useful to be an expert in in a few years from now,” and being quite clear around that, writing that down, “I will become…” or, “I am an expert in a particular area,” quite clearly defined, and that gives you clarity on what information, what sources you need to take in, what you need to distill so that you can become that expert. If you’re just skimming across the surface, you’ll never be an expert in anything, and that is not very useful in the current state of the world today.

Another is in wellbeing, “So, what is it that I’d want to know about my own wellbeing, well, the wellbeing of my loved ones? What is it that’s going to help me to have a better diet to be able to help support the conditions of people in my family?” So, it’s perfectly valid to have some passions. All right, so sports teams or there’s nothing wrong with celebrity news as long as you don’t let that expand to take over all of your news.

So, I think there’s different categories around helping you decide what your purpose is. There is information you can look for. You can look in your expertise, your ventures, whether that’s a startup, or whether it’s a community garden, whatever it is, in terms of your wellbeing, in terms of your relationship to society. These are all things that we can think through in order to become effective.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Ross, what you really are crystallizing for me is, and this is so helpful. Thank you. Hopefully, it’s good for listeners too. But I find, internally, I have a response of frustration or irritability when I see a news headline or blog article, or whatever, it says, for example, “Topic: What you need to know.” And I’m thinking, “There is no possible way you know what I need to know because our contexts are so wildly different.”

Like, the person running the political campaign for this politician needs to know way more and way different things than someone who may or may not vote for that person months down the road, or someone who’s managing the budget or employees in that industry. I guess maybe because I’m a content creator myself, I’m prickly or snobbish about the quality, but it’s like, “What you need to know, there’s no way one article can provide what everyone needs to know because everyone’s contexts are so different and their purposes that they establish are so different.”

So, Ross, thank you for clarifying what was simmering under the surface for me. And is it fair to say you’re going to have a hard time writing a piece of content that’s what you need to know for all peoples in one fell swoop?

Ross Dawson
Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I just wanted to make sure. Thank you, Ross.

Ross Dawson
But what it comes back to is saying we need to know it is health, and we don’t necessarily know that. So, what I described is we need to develop our own personal information plan. So, to complement the book, I’ve created some software or course where it takes people through that journey of identifying their purpose, and their expertise, and their areas, and their sources, and how they can use that, and the times they’re going to use that and do that.

You don’t need the book or the course, though they’re obviously designed to be as useful as possible. But we all need to decide, “What is my own personal information plan? What is it that matters to me? What time am I going to spend on that? What time am I not going to spend on the things that don’t matter? How am I going to structure my day? How am I going to structure my time? How am I going to spend time to be focused? How am I going to make space to synthesize this and pull this together?”

Information is the core and the value, I would suggest, of almost all of your listeners, and it’s something which most people haven’t spent the time to think about, is to, “How can I do this better?” And we can all build our own personal information plan, and that starts with this idea of, “Why? What’s important to me?” And from that, a lot of that starts to flow into, “What are the structures and the habits and the practice which will enable you to achieve what you want in your life, and be happier because you’re not drowning in the things that somebody else thinks is important to you but actually isn’t?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, you got me thinking about email outsourcing, but we’ll move on in terms of thinking about what’s important to me, and what’s not important to me, and what’s important to other people that land in your inbox, and how can you navigate that effectively, whether it’s software or helpers or different levels of support. So, we’ll just let that percolate in people’s heads for now. But let’s hear about framing next.

Ross Dawson
So, framing is building a framework. So, we got lots of information, but that’s all just bits of information. It only becomes knowledge and understanding when we connect that, when we say, “What are the relationships between these ideas? How does this fit together? What are the foundations of my understanding of this area of expertise that I’m developing?”

So, there’s a number of tools, a lot of visual tools that we can use. So, we can use things like mind maps. We can use things like concept maps. We can just sort of just draw things on a piece of paper and draw lines with them. And there’s now more and more software which helps people to not just note, “Ah, that was interesting. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, that’s a really good study there,” and then to actually make links between them.

So, there’s a whole new generation of software tools, including around research and obsidian, but also other ways of just using simple software tools, such as note taking tools and so on, that enables us to practice this way of framing by drawing connections in, building a lattice of knowledge which is the foundation for how it is we can become an expert, to understand things, to be able to know what the reference points and the researchers that supports what are valid ways of thinking about these spaces.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you paint a picture or give us an example of what a frame looks and sounds like?

Ross Dawson
So, on RossDawson.com/frameworks, I’ve created a whole set of what I find is useful frameworks about the future, but any mind map. I think mind maps are one of the most people are most familiar with, where you have one idea and you lay that out as a kind of visual representation of some of the ideas and how those fit.

So, one of the good things about a mind map is it combines a hierarchy. You have a central idea and then subsidiary ideas, and then subsidiary ideas, but also being able to lay that out to be able to show some of the potential relationships between these ideas. So, these are forms of structuring, and it’s different for every person as to what is most useful for them and the way in which they think.

And some people like putting things in a linear document but we’re trying to move beyond linear. So, how do we draw connections between things? And I think, often, just being able to sketch things on pieces of paper, write down ideas on a piece of paper, draw lines between them as to what the relationships between those ideas are, and then you can start to literally build a picture of an area of expertise, of what it is you’re looking at.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s hear about filtering.

Ross Dawson
The filtering requires, first of all, understanding what information sources you’re going to go to. And this is not just going directly immediately. You might be using feeds, or you might be using aggregators, or you might be using different tools, but it’s building more and more this discernment of what it is that serves your purpose. So, clarity on your purpose, being able to guide that, and what it is that you need to discard.

And more and more, this is around being able to make sure that we are not succumbing to our confirmation bias, that we are not just looking for things that affirm what we want to know, but we are looking for things that complement our knowledge. So, one of the, I suppose, ways of shifting our thinking is to say, rather than being certain about things, whether that be in politics, or society, or in our area of expertise, is to start attributing probabilities to things.

So, we can say, “I think it is 90% likely, or 60% likely, that this is the case,” and then you can start to look for evidence that either increases or decreases the probability of you being right. So, there is a study of super forecasters, these people that are very good at predicting the future, and they have this implicit way of thinking about the future, or thinking about what it is they know as a probability. They’re never 100% certain on anything, because you can’t be.

But what you can do is to say, “I believe this. This is what I understand. This is the probability I attribute to that,” and then being able to look for evidence that will make your assessment that more accurate. So, this is a way of being able to actually go to the most surprising information to you and assessing that, and whether that’s valid so that you can then start to incorporate that into your mental models, or your ways of thinking, or your hypothesis around, for example, what will be a successful business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, I’m curious, when it comes to arriving at what sources you think are winners versus ought not to be delved into, are there any core criteria or questions that really helps separate the wheat from the chaff?

Ross Dawson
So, it’s context. So, I frame this as, first of all, thinking about yourself. So, what is it that you want to be true, for example? Or, what is it you’re looking for? Or, what are your ideas already around this? You need to be thinking about yourself first, in a way. Second is the source, and you say, “Well, is this generally reputable, to generally other people consider this to be worthy? How much research did they do?” And being able to assess.

And no source is completely accurate. The most credentialed scientific journal in the world, Nature, has had 50 retractions in the last 10 years of things where they published it, and then they say, “Oh, actually, no, that’s not right. Ignore it.” And so, we can go to the most reputable sources and then we can’t actually be completely confident. There are certain sources where you can say, “Well, okay, there’s not much credibility,” but it doesn’t mean that any source is completely off the table either, but we need to have an assessment of that.

And the third one is actually looking at any specific piece of content, one of the most important things to do is to go back to its sources in whatever way to be able to corroborate that, “Is there anything which would suggest this was also true?” And it’s incredible, when you skirt into practice of going back to original sources for what it is you read, how often it is distorted or, in some case, a complete misrepresentation of what it is it says to be reporting on, or simply just misleading.

So, the single best practice is not to take anything at face value, but to then go back, and, of course, only if it’s important enough to you to warrant that, to go back and to do your research, to delve back, to say, “Well, let’s see, where does this actually come from and how do I assess that?” So, I think this requires a curiosity.

Yes, you are trying to say, “Yes, this is a more likely to be true source, more or less likely to be a true source,” concentrate on the ones which are more reputable, of course, but also to take everything with a grain of salt, and to dig back and to build your own reference point just what you believe is true, and be able to find the evidence you can to support that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, could you give us any top do’s and don’ts in the zones of attention and synthesis?

Ross Dawson
So, attention, there are six modes that I identify in my book. So, the first, which we discussed, is scanning, so just looking across existing news sources. Second is assimilating, where we assimilate, and we say, “This is worth spending time on.” It could be a book, it could be an article which you identified, and just rather than being distracted, you spend time and you take that into your body of knowledge.

Seeking for knowledge, explore, and I think it’s important to spend time where you’re deliberately trying to find things you would never normally find. Deep diving, which we discussed from the outset, that way of just spending focused time for a period of time. And the critical one, and one of the most ignored and most important really of the attention modes, is regenerating, which means stop doing, taking in information. And going out in nature is the most powerful way to do that.

It doesn’t need to be a forest. It can be a single tree in a park or whatever it may be. Just getting out in nature is a form of regenerating our attention. So, the best practices, the time box, let’s say, “This is the time I’ll spend on this. This is when I’ll do it. This is the time I’ll spend on that, and I’ll do that.” And to make sure that you’re spending your time deep diving each day, you’re spending time scanning each day, you’re spending your time assimilating each day, and you are spending time regenerating each day.

And the don’t is simply just to go from one thing to another all the time, just continually distracted by the next thing, “Oh, I should be doing that. Oh, I should be doing that. Oh, I might do this instead,” and you never get to a fraction of what you could achieve otherwise.

In terms of synthesis, it really is about getting to a state of mind where you can pull all of the things which you’re exposed to into understanding, into knowledge, into something where you have insights that other people don’t. And that requires this going between the intense focus but also the breath, giving your mind the space in which it can piece together all of the different elements in order to build that understanding.

So, in my book, I describe some of the different ways in which we can get to the state of mind where insights happen, where we can synthesize the ideas, where can come up with insights. And I suppose the don’t on that thing is simply just to burrow down all the time and not give our mind the space which it needs to be able to do what humans are incredibly good at, uniquely good at, is to pull together, connect the dots, and make sense of the whole.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Ross, tell me, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Ross Dawson
Simply that this is the foundational capability for success today, is this ability to deal well with information and create value with it. And I think that anybody, whether you’re a beginner, as it were, or an expert, everyone can get better on it. And I just believe that we can all and should be spending time trying to get better at our information capabilities because that’s what will drive our abilities to create what it is we want in our lives.

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

Ross Dawson
So, one of my very favorite quotes is from James Carse, and it is “Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” And it’s from his book Finite and Infinite Games, and that’s so many things. People are so much stuck in their boundaries, and so we need to play with the boundaries of our life and work.

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

Ross Dawson
One of my favorite bits of research which studied normal people and then meditators, and they put on a metronome, and the metronome started ticking. And for normal people, the first tick, they had this strong brain response, and then, quickly, it went down and they just didn’t notice it anymore. The Zen meditators, the first tick, they noticed. The second tick, they noticed it, and they keep on noticing it. They are continually seeing the world afresh. They are not becoming habituated to it as almost all of us do. So, this shows that we can continue to see the world afresh even as it stays the same, or seems to stay the same.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ross Dawson
One of my favorite books I’ve read recently is The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, pointing to the infinite potential we have as the human race.

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

Ross Dawson
Favorite tool, well, just in terms of information access, Techmeme is just one way, one place where I can just quickly get on top of all of the important technology news of the day. So, just a quick, easy, and simple tool, and makes me informed in that area.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a habit?

Ross Dawson
The habit which I am developing more and more is when I feel like a break, is doing one of two things. One is picking up my guitar, and the other is rather than browsing through things, is turning to a book just to read for a few minutes, and then turn back.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they Kindle book highlight it and retweet it and such?

Ross Dawson
Simply that we have to believe that we can create a better future in order to be able to create it. And I think a lot of people are very negative today. There’s a lot of negative news reported, people getting some poor states of mind, but I think the first thing is we need to believe that a better future is possible. And it doesn’t matter whether we think that’s highly probable or not very probable at all, as long as we believe it is possible to create a better future, that gives us the foundation to say, “Well, what is it that I can do in order to be able to create that?”

So, I think that’s, in a way, the foundation of my work, and I think it’s a lot of what resonates with people is this starting with this potential, this belief that we can create something better to drive the action, which means that we can work towards that.

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

Ross Dawson
For my work, in general, RossDawson.com but for the book, ThrivingOnOverload.com. There’s a wealth of resources there, there’s free parts of the book, the exercises, the introduction, there’s the overload course, there’s a podcast, there’s a whole set of resources. So, ThrivingOnOverload.com is a wonderful place for those people who want to go further on this journey.

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

Dec 08

823: How to Collaborate Smarter with Dr. Heidi Gardner

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Dr. Heidi Gardner reveals when, why, and how to collaborate optimally.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to stop overcommitment and overcollaboration
  2. How diversity makes for better collaborations
  3. How to overcome the barriers to collaboration 

About Heidi

Heidi K. Gardner, PhD. is a Distinguished Fellow at Harvard Law School, and was previously a professor at Harvard Business School and a consultant at McKinsey & Co. Named by Thinkers50 as a Next Generation Business Guru, Dr. Gardner is a sought-after advisor, keynote speaker, and facilitator for organizations across a wide range of industries globally. She is the co-founder of the research and advisory firm Gardner & Co. and the author, alongside Ivan A. Matviak, of Smarter Collaboration.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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

Heidi Gardner
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to collaboration and doing it smarter and better. First, I want to hear, you’ve actually got to experience a little bit of an inside view of an interesting slice of history. You worked with the German Ministry of Education during the post-reunification time, helping reform their English curriculum. Any interesting stories from that era?

Heidi Gardner
So, this goes way back. It was the year 1995, I believe, and I was a Fulbright fellow living in a town, a city, called Dassel, Germany, which was basically smack in the center of what had been the DDR. And at that point, it was a pretty rough time to be living in the former East Germany in the sense that a lot of young people had cleared out, they had moved to West Germany in order to seek better economic opportunities, better job prospects.

And I was there working inside the education system, I was teaching in the Gymnasium, which are the high schools, and teaching in some of the technical programs and things, and I was also doing a lot of teacher-training and education curriculum reform. And it was a fascinating time to be there and experience this sort of change.

What I realized at the time is that, because of people’s relative isolation behind the Iron Curtain, there were so many things that they hadn’t been exposed to intellectually, culturally, that I had taken for granted, and I saw that as a real eye-opener for me. I had known that, of course, growing up in the States in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but to experience it firsthand and to be with people, explaining things that were very basic and very run-of-the-mill to me, which were fascinating to individuals who hadn’t experienced them previously.

For example, the idea that everyone in my family had their own car. It was an incredible eye-opener to them that that was actually pretty normal where I came from. And the idea that we would have bananas day in, day out, that was kind of the cheap food, things like that that I learned to appreciate more by living in that kind of environment.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Okay. Well, now, let’s hear a little bit about collaboration, and you’ve seen a whole lot of different environments, some in which people are grateful to be in, and some very much not so grateful. Could you share any particularly striking, surprising, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about collaboration from your work and research here for so many years?

Heidi Gardner
Absolutely. So, when we’re talking about collaboration, we’re not just talking about run-of-the-mill throw-a-team at every problem. We’re talking about the term we call smarter collaboration, which is starting with the end in mind and being hyper-intentional about how you bring people together, which particular kinds of experts do you need, when do you need to bring different people in so they contribute different perspectives that, collectively, allow the group to be something more innovative, more profitable, more productive, somehow better and tackle more complex issues than any of those people could’ve done on their own.

And what was surprising to me as we’ve been studying this over the last 10 plus years is how many mistakes people can make with something, which is a relatively straightforward process like that. One of the big mistakes that people have fallen into recently, sort of a trap, if you will, is the belief that if collaboration is good, more is better.

And so, what we see is a phenomenon of what we call overcommitment or over-collaboration, that people are joining many, many, many teams, or getting drafted onto different projects, or being asked to join the committee or the taskforce or the initiative, and people are stretched so thin that converse to the intentions, the intentions were, “Hey, let’s make the most of this great employee we have,” but the opposite happens.

That person gets stretched so thin that they end up doing fairly similar work project after project after project, and they don’t have the time to engage deeply, and they don’t have time to stretch their skills, and they don’t have time to really learn and think about how they could improve what they’re doing, and they also typically don’t get great coaching or mentorship along the way. And it’s been really surprising to me how common that problem is overcommitment inside lots of kinds of organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
The problem of overcommitment, I have seen, felt, heard that from my own firsthand experience as well as that of many others I’ve worked with. I’m curious, what is the fundamental root cause of overcommitment? It just seems like it’s almost ubiquitous in terms of professionals have too many emails, too many meetings, too many projects, and it’s just a cluster in a lot of organizations and a lot of professionals’ work lives. So, what’s behind this and how do we fix it?

Heidi Gardner
I see two kinds of root causes and both of them, I should say, stem from really good intentions, and that’s why it’s oftentimes hard to find a solution for it is because people are trying to do the right thing. So, in one scenario, you have the idea that “We’ve got these people who are really great at some specialized area and we want to make the most of them, both because they want to be challenged and because we, as a company, are paying a lot of money for these specialists, and so let’s really make sure we deploy them where they can make the most impact.” That’s the intention.

But, as the person’s reputation grows inside the organization, more and more people want a piece of that thing, so they’re like, “Oh, let me go grab Jane for this project. Let me go grab Joe, this expert,” and Jane and Joe keep getting tapped again and again and again for all of these different pieces of work, and that’s when we run into that problem of overcommitment. But, again, it stems from good intentions, “Let’s make the most of their skills.”

The other scenario is maybe even more pernicious. There is a very strong, credible research-backed reason to believe that when teams comprise people with very different kinds of backgrounds, and life experiences, and cultures, and a whole variety of different categories of diversity that that team has the potential to outperform. Very true.

Pete Mockaitis
Potential.

Heidi Gardner
But oftentimes what that means is that people who fall into particular categories, if you will, inside organizations that are underrepresented, the demand for them exceeds the supply for those individuals. Think about it in gender terms. This is happening in a lot of corporate boardrooms right now where they say…

Pete Mockaitis
“Hey, you’re a woman. Get on our board, too.”

Heidi Gardner
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Just like that. Okay.

Heidi Gardner
Absolutely. And they’re all looking for the same women, “Oh, well, we need a woman who was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company who has this kind of background and this number of years of experience.” And guess what? There aren’t just that many of that particular kind of person. And those individuals end up getting tapped again and again, in this case, for corporate boards or inside organizations. I worked with, for example, a lot of professional service firms. There just aren’t, empirically speaking, that many black women partners in professional service firms, and everyone wants their perspective and their wisdom and their experiences on their teams.

And so, those individuals are just pulled in so many directions, both, in the case of professional services, on client-facing teams but also on internal initiatives, like hiring, and recruiting, and employee engagement, and diversity and inclusion committees, and all of these places. And this is the second way that people get over-tapped and overcommitted.

And in both of those scenarios, managers and leaders with good intentions need to take a step back and look at the system. It’s not a set of individual choices. It’s a whole bunch of choices that systemically, collectively add up to trouble. And what we recommend, you asked for some solutions, first of all, and one probably I’ll keep coming back to in the course of our conversation, is get the data.

There is data that exists somewhere at some level in every company or organization that shows what people are working on and how many different ways and directions that they’re pulled. And there needs to be a person or a department, depending on how big the organization is, that keeps an eye out for this problem of overcommitment.

We studied it in a biotech company, for example. They asked us to come in because they had dropped a major ball, and figured out way too late that some of their best scientists were pulled in a thousand different directions, and when something really went wrong in one project, there was nobody to cover it.

So, this biotech asked us to come in. We took a look at the data and we started by asking them, “How many projects does every scientist like this one work on?” And they said, “Oh, probably two or three,” and they were right to some degree. Most people worked on two or three projects at once. But when we ran the numbers, we found that there were some people working on seven, eight, even eleven projects at once.

And those people who were most over-stretched also happen to be relatively new joiners, and so they didn’t know that that wasn’t normal, a normal workload, and even if they suspected it wasn’t, they were trying to make a good impression in their first months or year at the company, and they didn’t raise their hand and notify anyone that they were just way too overstretched. And so, one of the solutions is collect the data and figure it out, empirically, what’s happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you said took a look at the data and ran the numbers, when you say collect the data, that’s kind of what I’m curious about is how robust is the tracking and recording of this sort of thing in organizations? In my experience, the answer is not very, so you kind of have to go build that from the ground up, or I have seen some pretty cool enterprise-wide systems that capture that stuff, although sometimes they’re gamed and not being accurately reported.

So, when you talk about the data and the numbers, I just want to get your sense for what are the systems and platforms by which that is readily obtained versus how are you building it from the ground up?

Heidi Gardner
So, the best data, I think, is not reported for this purpose because, you’re right, it’s either garbage data and people don’t get around to doing it so at the end of the month, they kind of make a guess.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, my timesheet. Yeah, typical report.”

Heidi Gardner
Yeah, exactly. Or, they game the system for whatever purposes they think works best for them. So, don’t collect data specifically for this purpose, besides it’s just one more admin thing that nobody wants to do. But there is a wealth of data inside many organizations that’s collected for other purposes that can be mined for these sorts of insights.

So, the obvious one is in professional service firms or other kinds of sales or project-based organizations. There are actually ways to track, say, on distribution list, or who’s submitting to certain expense codes, or who’s billing their time to certain files. There are lots of ways that are lots of data sources that are hidden in other kinds of repositories that can be mined for this.

In the biotech company, for example, they have to file a lot of paperwork for grant applications and compliance reasons, and those were actually brilliant project rosters. And so, if you’re creative, you can take a look inside databases that are capturing data for other purposes, and figure out who’s working on how many different things. Again, expense codes are a great one.

Another way to do it though is through a whole variety of platforms now that capture, essentially, network clusters inside firms. And so, you can see you have to make some inferences but you can see that if there are the same eight people emailing each other with similar subject matter, etc., or the same people in certain Teams groups in Microsoft Teams. Or, you can mine calendars for the kinds of meetings that people co-attend. And you use de-identify data so that you’re not actually snooping in what Joe or Jane is specifically doing but you’re looking at patterns. And the patterns are more important than any single individual.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s clever. I like it. Whether it’s from the emails or from the calendars, or from the expense codes, even if no one is judiciously carefully tracking where each hour of their day has gone, you can see what’s that involvement looking like and where and zeroing on some stuff. So, such a fun project on the, I guess, enterprise-wide scale. I’m curious about individuals, if we’re zooming into individuals and teams, what are some of the top do’s and don’ts you recommend they can start right away in terms of getting better collaboration?

Heidi Gardner
So, team leaders are, ultimately, responsible for the health and wellbeing and outputs of the group. And so, it starts with the team leader, first of all, getting some clarity on the degree to which each team member is already committed to other pieces of work. And perhaps even before composing the team, seeking out individuals who are not the usual suspects. Because if I need to think about project X, my mind will jump to certain people who have a reputation for doing that kind of project well or a piece of it.

Well, what if I went to that person, and instead of asking them to join my team, ask them for a recommendation of somebody whose competence they could vouch for who isn’t quite as busy as they are. Now, this hinges on people knowing the skills and quality levels of their colleagues, but especially on their willingness to let somebody else kind of take their “spot.”

And this falls to top leadership to make it a priority that says, “Busier is not better. Doing quality work is better.” But if there’s that kind of culture where people are willing to make referrals, the team leader should be asking not always the usual suspect but perhaps approaching that person with the strong reputation and asking for a referral to somebody else, maybe an up-and-comer, maybe somebody who’s new in the organization, maybe somebody for whatever reason, doesn’t have as widespread of a reputation but is still fully capable of doing the job.

So, get the right people on the team, make sure once you get the team together that you understand not only how many other pieces are they working on, but on a pretty granular level, “Where are we going to have some friction in the calendar?” This sounds like Project Management 101 but it’s astonishing how often this piece gets skipped.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Heidi Gardner
And once the leaders of the team understand that particular team members are going to be under really severe pressure at certain points, then it’s a question of rerouting the work, of approaching other leaders of teams and asking for some flexibility. It’s not leaving it up to the individual, and I think that’s a big problem in many teams, is that individual members feel like they either just need to suck it up and deal with it, or they’ll be perceived as not capable or strong, or that it’s up to them to kind of work the politics and figure out whose project to prioritize.

And that shouldn’t be the job of those individual team members. That should be something that the leader takes on his or her shoulders. And so, there’s an awareness there, there is a willingness to intervene when necessary, and I think everyone in the organization has to create the context where people feel comfortable raising their hand, and saying, “I’m overstretched. I’m not unwilling to do hard work and lots of work but, right now, the degree to which I’m spread across, taking that hard work and spreading across too many different initiatives is unproductive.” And that’s what we need people to identify.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, bringing some of these bits together, could you share with us a fun story or two of a team or organization that was having some disappointing collaboration, and then what they did to change things up and the cool results they gained from doing so?

Heidi Gardner
So, there’s a great experience I had working with the executive team of a huge global electronics manufacturer. And we were asked to work with them because they were really struggling on innovation as a company, and leading innovation as this executive team. So, my team and I worked with 35 top executives. They were the senior president of a certain division, or of a geographic area, or of a product line, or chief-level officers of functions.

And with them, we conducted a psychometric profile. So, we’ve developed this tool, this online tool, which allows people in just 10 minutes or so to complete a bunch of questions, and it provides them with real insight about their natural tendencies. All else equal, what kinds of problems are they drawn to? All else equal, how do they prefer to operate, in a group, or individually? Are they risk-seekers or risk-spotters?

And you might think, “Oh, we all know this,” but actually, we tend to have some blind spots. And so, what we did with this group from the electronics company is we gave them all this profile, this Smart Collaboration Accelerator, and, first, we shared with each individual where they came out. Then what we did is we analyzed the group, all 35 of them, to see what their collective profiles were.

And it turned out that 33 of the 35 were extreme risk-seekers. In other words, they were motivated not to miss a single opportunity, but there were two people on their team who were risk-spotters. They were the kinds of people who weren’t motivated to take opportunities. They were motivated not to fail, not to make mistakes, not to have anything blow up.

And when we revealed with this data, these were mostly kind of engineers and very quantitative people, and we could put the numbers in front of them that said, “Just on that one dimension, here’s what you look like as a group.” There was a bit of kind of nervous laughter and then the, “Ha-ha, do you think that’s why the regulators are crawling all over us and so forth?”

And then one guy kind of raised his hand, we were in a virtual meeting, he raised his hands on Zoom, and he said, “You never effing listen to me.” He’s like, “I’m that risk-spotter, and I keep telling you that we have these problems that are coming up, and nobody ever pays attention.” And his colleagues said…they kind of laughed, and they said, “Yeah, we hate listening to you. You’re such a downer.”

But it revealed two things to them. First, it revealed to them that they were, in fact, incredibly biased on that dimension, and that they were steamrollering the outlier. Rather than making the most of the diversity in that team, these two individuals who could have helped highlight some real problems before they emerged and blew up, they were majority-ruling and, basically, going with what everyone else who were these risk-seekers decided was better for the company.

And through this kind of conversation, it was like, “Well, all right, we need to make the most of the diversity on the team. Even when you don’t like to hear it, they’re probably telling you something really important. And, oh, by the way, if you’re one of those risk-spotters, you probably need to learn to raise issues in ways that those people can understand what you’re talking about, you’re not just shooting down every idea.”

But what was powerful as well is that the group then realized that, because they were so similar on multiple dimensions, there was something really flawed in the organizational processes that meant you kind of had to be one of these cowboys in order to make it onto X Co. And they looked back at all of the succession planning and everyone coming through the ranks, and they figured out that they were more or less weeding out people who didn’t fit the mold at most rungs of the organization.

And it was a very powerful experience for them, again, once they had the data in front of them, they could visually see how skewed they were in certain behavioral terms that it wasn’t productive for them and actually signaled more root-cause problems throughout a lot of their systems and processes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful, and a pattern, I think, we see quite often. I’m thinking about administering the Myers-Briggs type indicator to many groups, and it’s almost like folks are closeted, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m secretly an introvert, but it doesn’t feel like that really works here, so I put on my extrovert hat around the sales and marketing deal-maker-y people and do that, or I prefer sensing in terms of like getting to the real facts of things as opposed to always imagining these cool possibilities and ideas, and I get called a wet blanket and such.”

Heidi Gardner
Exactly. And what we have worked with groups on, and this can be corporate boards that are a dozen people, it can be functions and departments and business units, what we can do when we help people understand their own natural tendencies is to figure out how to use those as a strength, “How do you bring your voice into the room, especially if you’re the outlier? But, in any case, how do you interact with other people? How do you raise concerns? How do you spot opportunities? How do you engage with people and keep them motivated in ways that are really authentic to you?”

Because I think that is a problem where oftentimes people feel that they have to fit in, they have to mirror somebody else who’s already successful there, and they, of course, are facing a huge burden then because, by not being able to be themselves, it’s really quite painful and draining, but the organization loses out.

There are huge amounts of research showing that when you have people who are genuinely different from one another and can play to their unique strengths, they’re more innovative, they’re more likely to spot both problems and opportunities, they’re better able to customize and tailor solutions to complex problems.

And so, that feeling of needing to fit in, whether it’s how you look and dress and sound, or what kinds of problems you’re attracted to, not being able to foster diversity and true inclusion in terms of bringing those people’s diverse efforts into the room and valuing them, that’s a real process loss for a lot of organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you, well-said. Well, tell me, any key things, Heidi, you want to make sure to mention in terms of top do’s and don’ts for collaboration before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Heidi Gardner
Well, one of the most important things I think when an organization is embarking on this journey of smarter collaboration, they say, “Okay, I get it. We need to really leverage all of the different perspectives we’ve got. We need to break down some of the barriers and the silos inside this organization. How do we get started?”

And we have done research with well over 10,000 senior people across organizations around the planet, and we know there’s five, six, maybe seven common barriers that come up from one place to the next. But what’s unique is…or not unique probably because there’s not an infinite combination. But what’s different for each organization is the prevalence and the importance of those barriers.

And so, for example, one of the barriers is competence trust. If I’m going to bring you into my special cherished project, I have to believe in your competence. I have to think you deliver high-quality, on-time on-budget, that you’re actually really good at what you do, but it’s not enough. Another kind of trust is essential, that’s interpersonal trust. Even if I think you’re a guru but if I think you’re a jerk, I’m still not going to work with you. And so, we know that interpersonal trust, or lack of it, or lack of competence trust, those spring up in most organizations.

But, depending which one really matters, which one is really standing in the way of people working across silos, that is the factor that needs to determine what course of action you take. Because if you’re trying to generate greater competence trust amongst employees, you’re going to go down a path of maybe learning and development, and helping people establish some curiosity in what other people do, and helping people hone their elevator pitch so when they’re talking to somebody, they can describe in compelling ways how they add value to problem-solving or whatever. But if you need to fix interpersonal trust, you need to go down a completely different route.

And so, the point of this is anyone looking to improve smarter collaboration in their organization, they have to start with a database diagnostic. They have to have some objective way of figuring out what stands in between them and really effective collaboration, and then make sure that the solutions they’re developing are tailored to those problems.

Because, all too often, we have worked with leaders who say, “I know exactly what’s wrong here,” and, actually, most leaders are pretty biased in their views of what goes on inside the organization. Nobody refuses to collaborate with the CEO, go figure. So, they don’t see that it’s a major problem, and they don’t understand how their position of authority and a whole lot of other things actually skews their perception of what stands in the way for an average person inside the organization. So, I would say find ways.

We have a toolkit coming out. We codified a methodology to do this after five or six years of doing it ourselves. We’ve now created a toolkit that will be published by Harvard Business Press as companion to our book, where people can use this methodology. We tell people in a very step-by-step kind of way how do you collect the data, how do you analyze it, how do you draw conclusions from it, how do you present it back to executives, and what do you do about it. And I’m hoping that that’s what people use in order to really create and craft a collaborative solution that will drive the kinds of outcomes that we know are advantages of smarter collaborations.

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

Heidi Gardner
My favorite quote is the one that we used as the dedication in our new book. We’ve dedicated the book to our two daughters Anya and Zoe, and all of the smarter collaborators of their generation. And the quote we used is, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” And that quote really resonates for us in this rush, rush world wherein sometimes we feel like taking shortcuts, and, “It’s just going to be better if I crack on and do it myself.” And that works some of the time, but if what you really need is a great solution, if you really want to go far, finding ways to engage in smarter collaboration is absolutely essential.

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

Heidi Gardner
One of my most recent favorite studies was done by Dr. Randall Peterson who’s a professor at London Business School, and he engaged in a very ambitious study of corporate boards.

And so, these individuals, board chairs and independent directors participated in his research and went through this rigorous methodology where they helped him understand in very objective ways what were the dynamics inside the board.

For example, he found that boards that are truly inclusive of women have much better and very different styles of problem-solving and conflict resolution. So, for example, boards that are very male-dominated tend to vote and to cut short discussion and majority rules, and it stamps out dissent and curtails the discussion of unpopular options or opinions. Whereas, boards that are more inclusive of women tend to talk things through in a more substantive and holistic way.

And fascinating discovery is that boards, therefore, with more women on them and where women’s opinions and contributions were more valued, actually were linked to significantly less shareholder dissent. Now, shareholder dissent is something that every corporate board cares about because if their shareholders are creating formal actions saying that they don’t have faith in the way that the board has operated, that’s hugely problematic for governance.

And Dr. Peterson’s research was able to link the way the boards interacted with the gender composition with that very important outcome. And it was a first, not only in the corporate board space but also in helping us understand why it is that gender inclusion is so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Heidi Gardner
I’m going to go way back to a book that was incredibly eye-opening for me. It was called The Russians by Hedrick Smith. And I read this book when I was 15 or 16 years old, so that was in the mid ‘80s, and it was the height of the Cold War. And I had only ever thought about the Russians as a block of people, sort of the Commies, the bad guys. They were featured in all of the movies as the one that Rocky wanted to pummel, or the idea that the US hockey team had to beat the Russians.

And I read this book as part of a summer program that I was about to attend, and it opened my eyes to the idea that the Russians weren’t a monolithic block. They were humans just like all of us Americans. And although it’s incredibly simplistic conclusion, for me, having grown up in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where it was not the most open society or community, and we looked at anybody who was foreigner with a fair degree of suspicion, humanizing the “enemy” was incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Okay. And can you share with us a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Heidi Gardner
Well, I have to go back to the Smart Collaboration Accelerator. It’s not just because we developed it. It’s the psychometric tool that’s science-backed, and it has helped so many organizations and teams and leaders fulfill their potential. It’s incredibly powerful. And we’ve now got 150 people around the world, accredited coaches and professional facilitators and consultants who are trained up in using it. And we are bringing the power of those improved dynamics and self-awareness to create smarter collaborators in a whole range of industries and generations.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Heidi Gardner
It’s hardly novel but exercise is my favorite habit, particularly walking. And I walk as much as I can, even conduct most of my internal meetings and some of my external ones from my treadmill. There’s a fair amount of good research that suggests that walking helps to stabilize some of the rhythms in the brain.

There’s a great deal of research that shows that walking is related to expansive thinking. And I didn’t know the research when I got so into walking, but started holding walking meetings with colleagues, and with family members, and with a whole variety of people where we would try to hash through different kinds of ideas. And now when I get to a new place, walking is the first thing that I try to do. And if I am stuck on a problem, I get on the treadmill.

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

Heidi Gardner
One nugget that came out of our research, we did a study of how smarter collaboration benefits individuals. And, initially, it looked as if people who had bigger networks were better off. And as we dug further, we realized that bigger isn’t better, better is better. And we can now quantify what it takes to make a better network in smarter collaboration terms, and it means accessing a variety of different kinds of not only experts but people who think really differently about problems and about solutions.

And it also means keeping ties open, at least to a small degree, so that you don’t need to be constantly in touch with people. They don’t need to be your best friends in order to contribute a brilliant idea, but they do need to be just warm enough that if you ring them up, or drop them an email, or however people communicate, that they’re going to respond and they’re going to help you solve that problem, or they’re going to give you their own nugget that will help you break through.

And that idea that people don’t need big networks, introverts make brilliant high-quality networks, and they don’t need to be the life of the party. So, the idea is better is better when it comes to forming a network, and the diversity is really key there.

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

Heidi Gardner
Our website is GardnerAndCo.co, and we have all of our studies and our books up there. And speaking of books, our new one Smarter Collaboration has just come out, and we encourage people to take a look at that as well.

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

Heidi Gardner
I want people to take a few minutes every week and just reflect on whether anything has surprised them. This is a question I ask my executive participants in programs at Harvard. I teach at the Business School and the Law School at Harvard, and, usually, by sort of day three or four of a program, I ask “What surprised you about being here on this program?” And often people are stumped but then the ideas start to flow.

And what we realized is asking about surprises forces people to confront what they have taken for granted or what they had expected. And I encourage people to stop every week at some point and just look around and say, “What has surprised me in the last few days?” because that will challenge us to think about what we do take for granted, what we had expected to happen, and it will raise our antenna up to being more curious about the world.

It will prompt us to ask better questions or engage in conversations that might take us to places that we weren’t open to hearing before, or we might tune in to a different kind of podcast, or a different news station, or new source that we would, otherwise. And if we seek out surprises, I think it really opens our mind. That will be the challenge I’d offer up to people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Heidi, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun collaborations.

Heidi Gardner
Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.

Dec 05

822: How to Take Your Next Best Step When Life is Uncertain with Jeff Henderson

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Jeff Henderson shares powerful principles for shrinking the risk of your next career move.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The most important networking question you can ask
  2. How to turn every “no” into powerful motivational fuel
  3. The three things that shrink risk

About Jeff

Jeff Henderson is an entrepreneur, speaker, pastor, and business leader. For seventeen years, he has led three of North Point Ministries’ multisite locations in Atlanta, Georgia—Buckhead Church and two Gwinnett Church locations. He has also helped launch North Point Online, which now reaches over 200,000 people. His bestselling book, Know What You’re FOR, launched a movement in nonprofits around the world and has become a focal point for many businesses. As the founder of the FOR Company, Jeff’s aim is to help organizations build a good name where purpose and profit grow together. Jeff was recently named by Forbes Magazine as one of twenty speakers you shouldn’t miss. Prior to working as a pastor, Jeff started his career in marketing with the Atlanta Braves, Callaway Gardens, Lake Lanier Islands, and Chick-fil-A, Inc., where he led the company’s regional and beverage marketing strategies.

Resources Mentioned

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

Jeff Henderson
Pete, it’s so great to be here. I really appreciate it. Been looking forward to this for quite a while, so thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting with you and hearing your wisdom and some insights from your book What to Do Next: Taking Your Best Step When Life Is Uncertain. Could you share with us a time you had to figure out what to do next when life was uncertain and had to take a next great step?

Jeff Henderson
I’ve had four of those, actually, over the last 20 years, and part of that, Pete, was just I was intrigued with the next possibility, but every next possibility comes with a certain amount of risk, so I’ll just start with the one that happened, really was the biggest one over the last few years in terms of the first big risk and trying to figure out what to do next, and that was when I was working in marketing for Chick-fil-A, and my wife and I felt called to help start a nonprofit in the Atlanta area. And we went from working at a multibillion-dollar company with career trajectory to taking a massive pay cut and working for a nonprofit.

And so, you have to ask yourself, “How do you eliminate this risk?” And the reality is you don’t eliminate risk. You shrink this risk. But we were so intrigued with the potential of doing this that it kind of ruined where we were. And I don’t like the word ruined but we were so intrigued about it, we said, “If we don’t go do this, if this nonprofit were to work, we will always look back and regret it.” And that was over 20 years ago, and it was just a formative decision.

And over the course of these 20 years, I’ve made some similar decisions and I began to get questions, such as, “Hey, what was the decision-making process? And how did you know that this was the thing that you were supposed to do?” And so, I began to realize that there were some principles and strategies that I used to help make these decisions. And little did I know that, especially over the last couple of years, people have been asking the same question of themselves, “Hey, what should I do next?”

So, when I left Chick-fil-A, that was a big, big deal, especially moving from for-profit to nonprofit. But as I look back over the course of the years, Pete, I’ve been able to really serve business leaders and nonprofit leaders because I’ve lived in both of those worlds. So, that was a big decision for my wife and me, but we certainly don’t regret it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you tell us, what are some of these core principles that helped you figure this stuff out?

Jeff Henderson
The first one is one that I think a lot of times we overlook, and that is the better you finish your current season, the better you begin your next season. And we really need to start talking about finishing well more, I think. Typically, when people think, “Well, I’m going to put in a two-week or three-week notice. What are they going to do? Fire me?”

I think we have to realize that how we finish well honors the people but also honors the work that we’ve done over the time that we’ve been there. And certainly, for some people, next happens to them, right, the company gets downsized, new leader comes in, I get all that. But I think how we finish that current season is really, really important.

That said, one of the principles that Wendy and I really leaned into is understanding that with many advisors, plans succeed, but with few advisors, plans fail. So, we developed a personal advisory board, people that we trust, people that we look up to, that we meet with on a regular basis. And it’s not just about this decision. It’s about parenting, and marriage, and all sorts of decisions.

And, yet, when you get to a decision like this, about what to do next, making a career change, you want as much possible great wisdom that you can possibly get. So, over two years ago when we made this current season, when I left being a pastor of a church, to now serving businesses and nonprofits in a much broader scope, they were the ones that said, “Hey, you guys are going to be empty-nesters in about 18 months. What are you going to do in that season?”

And that was a great question because I’d not really thought about that, and they helped walk us through the decision-making process about how to figure this out. So, who you listen to is a preview of the future you. And then, also, and we’ll talk about this a little bit down the road if you want, but I really do believe in side hustles, experimenting with some things, trying to figure some things out that may or may not work, but you’re going to learn some things, and it might lead you to the next opportunity.

And then the principle that we’ve all heard is who you know is often more important than what you know. Who you know is often more important than what you know. In your personal network, in building, in enhancing and leveraging your personal network is so important. In fact, Pete, when I talk to people and they call me, and they said, “Jeff, I just lost my job, the company got downsized. What’s the first thing that I should do? Should I update my resume?” That’s an important thing, but, no. “Should I update my information on LinkedIn?” That’s important but, no, that’s not the first thing that you should do.

The first thing you should do is look at your phone, look at your contact list, and make a list of the top ten people that you’re going to call immediately that you can meet with to see if they can help you, because I do believe, Pete, that we are about four or five people away from that next opportunity. So, those are a few strategies, and we can talk about more or go more in depth with those. But the overarching principle is when it comes to what to do next, finding it when you’re uncertain, so often I will hear back from people, going, “I just don’t know what to do and I’m a little stuck.”

And the principles that we talk about is don’t let what you don’t know rob you of what you can do. There are some things that you can do. Focus in on that. And when you do that, you’ll be surprised how much that action can propel you forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a nice set of principles there. So, could you share with us, when it comes to some of these relationship pieces, the advisors and the people that you know, any pro tips associated with really developing those relationships well so that they could be of service when necessary?

Jeff Henderson
Let’s talk about building your personal network. I think asking people, contacting them, and saying, “Hey, can I sit down with you for 30 minutes? I want to ask you about your story, I want to ask you about your career, and then I have a question for you.” I think a lot of people are happy to talk about themselves, talk about their career. And I would say, “Hey, how did you get where you are? Tell me your career trajectory. Tell me your career story.”

And then, as you hear that, at the end of…and then, obviously, asking great questions as they tell you, “Hey, I went here, I went there, and how did all that work,” but at the end of the meeting, ultimately, where you’re wanting to lead them to is this question, and that question is, “Who do you know that I need to know? And will you contact them on my behalf?” And not every time someone will say yes but, more often than not, they will say yes. And I believe that person knows someone that can help you.

And then another pro tip would be either show up with a gift, maybe it’s a book that you could give them, a gift card, write a follow-up thank you note, but that is so important because you’re trying to leverage their network, and you’re also trying to add value to them which is why you want to bring a gift.

So, that question, “Who do you know that I need to know? And will you contact them on my behalf?” that’s so helpful. It’s gold, actually, in terms of building your network. And, again, they may say, “No, I don’t know anybody right now.” That’s fine. Every salesperson would tell you, “You got to get through some no’s to get through some yeses.”

But I think what you’ll discover is, more often than not, people will say, “Oh, absolutely. You know, I’m just talking to this guy the other day.” Or, even if they say, “No, there’s no one that I can think of.” “That’s okay. Well, when you do, or if you do, don’t forget, this is how to get in touch with me.”

Now, here’s the other pro tip, Pete, if you can do this while you don’t necessarily need to do this, that’s even better. Building your personal network while you might not actually need it because you don’t need a job right now, you got a job, you’re fine, but I’m telling you, it’s kind of like health insurance or life insurance. This is work insurance. If you have a well-built personal network, it will always come to be beneficial for you in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And if we have any emotional resistance, reluctance, jitters, like, “Oh, I don’t know if I could do that, Jeff. It feels sort of sales-y or pushy or, I don’t know.” Any perspective on that?

Jeff Henderson
You’re listening to fear. You’re listening to doubt and insecurity. And I totally understand this, by the way. In fact, my kids, they’re 23 and 21, and they’ll say, “Dad, we don’t want you to contact this person on my behalf.” And I totally understand that. They want to earn their own way, and I get that. But, at the same time, I’ll say, “Hey, guys, this is how the real world works, and leveraging the people you know, and I know you might not want your dad to call, but there are other people that you can contact that can help you find that next opportunity.”

It’s kind of like this, Pete, one time I was sick, had a cold, and I kept complaining to Wendy that I’m just not feeling better, and she said, “You know what you ought to do? Here’s a radical idea. You might consider going to the doctor.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, I don’t want to go to the doctor.” And she said, “Okay. Well, but here’s this, if you’re not going to go to the doctor, you forfeit the right to complain about being sick, right?”

So, what I tell people when they say, “Oh, Jeff, I don’t want to contact somebody. That’s just a little pushy, a littles sales-y,” I get that. I get that. If you don’t want to do that, you forfeit the right to also complain that you don’t like your job, you don’t like where you are, you’re not sure what to do, “I don’t know how to figure out what to do next.” Okay, if you’re not going to push yourself and push past the fear of this, then you get to stay stuck where you are but you don’t get to complain about it anymore. You’re going to have to push forward. You’re going to have to take action.

But here’s what I’ve discovered about taking action. Even if they say no, the fact that you took action, it’s going to plant a seed that you may never know what comes out of that. But even if someone says no, who knows when they may see or meet somebody that has a job opening, and they remember your email, or your text, or your question, or your phone call. All of that is so, so important, so you got to push through the fear and listen to whether this is real or is this an excuse. And we’ve got to stop being victims and we have to stop listening to our excuses.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that notion that even if they say no, you’ve gained something. And I think you gain something even internally emotionally. This reminds me of my younger days, asking for dates.

Jeff Henderson
Absolutely, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Even if she says no, there is an internal victory associated with having summoned the courage to do so, and, in that way, I am a winner even if I have lost the date that I was seeking.

Jeff Henderson
Absolutely. You feel better about yourself because you stood up, you did something hard, and that gives you a little step of extra courage, whether you get a yes or no, it’s just so important. I’ll give you a quick example along those lines. When I served in the nonprofit world, I had to raise money, and I would sit down with people over coffee and I would cast the vision of, “This is what we’re trying to do and this is our vision of how we’re going to help people.”

And then I would ask them this question, “Will you help me?” and then I would be quiet, and I would just let the silence fill the coffee shop. And you have to do that, Pete. You have to let that awkwardness of the silence kind of fill the space. And then they would say one of three things, they would say, “Yes,” “No,” or, “I’ll think about it or pray about it,” which is also no. So, two of the three are no, but my responsibility was to make the ask. It was their responsibility to provide an answer.

And what I discovered in helping myself to be a better fundraiser is I decided I’m no longer going to answer for people. That’s actually rude for me to rob them of the opportunity to provide an answer. What I’m going to do is I’m going to make the request. And if I do that, whether I got a no or not, I just felt a little stronger that day because I was doing my job trying to raise money.

Well, the same thing is true if you’re trying to build your career or trying to figure out what to do next. You’re going to feel stronger even if you do get a no. Yes, we would like a yes. Absolutely. But even if you get a no from someone that you’re trying to build your network, it’s still going to make you a little bit stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. You’ve also got a cool concept called the career risk calculator. How does this work?

Jeff Henderson
Many people, Pete, as I mentioned earlier, say, “Hey, I want to make this move but I’ve got to eliminate risk. It cannot be risky.” And I tell them, “Wow, you must live in a different world that I live in because you don’t eliminate risk. But what you can do is you can shrink it.” And so, when it comes to making a career decision or a life decision about what to do next, it doesn’t have to be a leap across the Grand Canyon but it can be reduced to maybe a leap over a mud puddle. You might get wet and muddy and fall and get wet, and no one likes to do that, but you’re not plunging thousands of feet below.

So, what we wanted to do is to help people think through that, so we created, as we called it, the career risk calculator. What we’re trying to do is ask questions to see what kind of level of risk someone is at. So, from 25 questions, and, ultimately, you get a red light, a yellow light, or a green light. The red light is not a pass or fail. It doesn’t mean you failed. The red light simply says, as a red light says when we’re driving around, “Whoa, stop. Before you take another step, you need to think through a few things.”

A yellow light says, “Okay, you’re making some progress but here are a few other things to think through.” And a green light doesn’t necessarily mean, “You have to now move.” It means you’ve done the hard work, here’s a couple of other things that you might consider. And this is just a free resource that we provide at my website JeffHenderson.com.

But once you get that light, once you get that information, we give you a few other things to think through. And part of this is designed for another action statement that I learned from John Maxwell. Early on in this new season of mine, what I’m doing now for two years, my first month, it’s brand new, I’m trying to go out and speak, and it’s COVID and all this kind of stuff, and it’s kind of crazy, but I was at a conference where John Maxwell was speaking, and John said this, and I’ll never forget this, Pete. He said, “I never had a clear vision. I just kept moving forward.”

And that just totally floored me in the best of ways because, I thought, “Wait. Here’s John Maxwell, he’s sold literally millions of books, he’s this leadership guru. You look at somebody like that and think this guy has it all going on. I understand a mere mortal like me, I don’t have a clear vision, but he didn’t have a clear vision? So, I just got to keep moving forward? Well, what are those one or two next steps that I can take?”

And a lot of times, it’s not this gigantic leap. It’s just a small step, picking up the phone and contacting someone, or doing a side hustle, or sending an email, or trying to get my finances together, or getting wise people and say, “Hey, what would you do if you were me?” And so, the career risk assessment basically gives you some small steps to take so that you can keep moving forward. And as you keep moving forward, you’re going to shrink the risk. You can’t eliminate it but you can shrink it. And so, that’s what that career risk calculator is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Well, can you tell us some of the best ways we can shrink it?

Jeff Henderson
So, first of all, really get to understand two of three things, two of these things that you have control over and one that you really don’t. So, what I mean by that is a lot of times folks will come up to me, Pete, and say, “Hey, I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.” So, what do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Well, when you don’t know what to do, there are three things to pay attention to. The first one is your gifting. Do you know your strengths? Do you know what you are good at? Because what to do next is usually going to come down that pathway. For example, you’re not going to see me launch a country music career. There’s no musical background in my history. So, I mean, maybe for some people do that but that’s not a gift of mine. So, gifting is really, really important.

The second thing is calling. What breaks your heart? Or, what are you passionate about? And if there’s nothing that you’re passionate about, okay, that’s all right. Well, let’s go out there and let’s try some things. But there’s understanding your gifting and understanding your calling. And then the third thing that is a little bit of the most frustrating thing for folks because they don’t have the most control over this, and that’s timing.

But when you understand your gifting and you understand your calling, what happens is the timing eventually shows up. And it’s kind of a Venn diagram, you have three circles. The first circle is gifting, the second circle is calling, and the third circle is timing. When those three connect right in the middle of that, is how you figure out what to do next.

And a calling often asks the question, “Somebody should do something about that. Who will do something about that? Somebody should start a company that serves customers this way. Somebody should start a nonprofit that does this.” So, that’s kind of a calling. Gifting says, “Somebody should do something about that, and I wonder if that person is me.” That starts talking about gifting.

And when I decided, eventually, to leave Chick-fil-A, I knew that the gifting and the calling were there, it took me a little bit longer to figure out the timing of it. And, generally speaking, it usually takes a little bit longer than we think. That’s why trying to figure out what to do next, it’s something that all of us should be on a journey of because I’m not trying to convince people to quit and leave their job today. I‘m trying to convince people to keep growing to bring the best next version of them to their organizations and to the people in their lives.

And if you continue to do that, even if you stay in the same organization that you’re currently in, you’re going to get better at serving them. And when you get better at serving them, you’re going to get bigger and better opportunities, and that’s what I’ve seen throughout my career. So, I think understanding gifting, calling, and timing, that will help you, especially if you say, “I just don’t know what to do.”

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

Jeff Henderson
Well, I think it’s important to understand that there’s a certain level of emotional awareness that comes into with understand what to do next. Understanding that, especially if a lot of transitions are tricky. As for me, I didn’t leave organizations that I didn’t like. I left organizations that I dearly loved. I left people that I dearly loved, so there’s a lot of emotions that’s associated with all of that. So, I think it’s helpful to process that out, especially if you’ve been downsized in a company, obviously, there’s emotion there.

So, we’ve talked a lot of technical skills and all that today, but I would pay attention to what’s happening internally inside of you because that grief of leaving and the emotions of leaving, it’s a real thing. So, just pay attention not only to the external applications, like, build your network, and sign us and career risk calculator, but also pay attention internally to what’s happening to you because that’s really, really important because the best gift that you can give the organizations and the people you serve is the best emotionally healthy version of you.

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

Jeff Henderson
A favorite quote for me is, “There’s not a limit to what a person can do when he or she doesn’t care who gets the credit.” Now, I think humility is a gamechanger but the reality, too, is we can’t say, “Hey, guess what, Pete? One of the best things about me is my humility. I’m so humble.” At that point, I’ve already forfeited. So, humility isn’t something that I think about. Humility is something that I practice. But I love that quote that there’s not a limit to what we can do if we don’t care who gets the credit.

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

Jeff Henderson
So, for me, I love the research that talks about the fact that if I assume the best for someone, it’s a marriage study and they looked at healthy marriages, and then if there was something that happened, the husband or wife or the partner would say, “You know what, I’m going to assume the best about that,” instead of the fundamental attribution error, which would say, “I’m going to assume the worst about that.” And even if they were wrong, the fact that they assume the best about that particular situation was so helpful and healthy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Jeff Henderson
I would just tell you, from a history standpoint, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin, it’s about Abraham Lincoln and how he hired many of his presidential rivals to be on his cabinet, and how that ultimately led him to abolishing slavery with their help. It was the movie, that book was actually adapted into a movie, Lincoln that Steven Spielberg produced. And I would say a leadership book would be The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell.

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

Jeff Henderson
So, for me, goodness, technology is just rampant, but I created a tool for communicators. I believe leadership comes with a microphone. And it’s called “The Four Presenter Voices,” and it helps me understand what my voice is and how to leverage my voice. So, when I’m preparing for a talk, I go back to that, and go, “Okay, I have this particular voice. Here’s how I need to prepare, and here’s how I need to make sure that the weakness of this particular voice allows me to avoid the weakness of that voice, and to leverage the strength of that voice so that I can communicate the best that I can,” because, again, leadership comes with a microphone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Jeff Henderson
I really do believe I’m trying to get better. I really do believe the better we finish the night, the better we begin the day. A way to say it is, “A great day begins the night before.” And so, I try to write down three things: one, “What went well today?”; two, “What could I do tomorrow that will move me forward?”; and, number three, “Who could I encourage tomorrow?” And a great day begins the night before. So, I’m trying to be more consistent about doing that, and shutting off technology, reading, and getting really set because the day doesn’t begin when I wake up. Great days begin the night before.

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

Jeff Henderson
There’s a question that I’ve asked over the years for leaders, and the question is for them, or the challenge rather is for them to ask their teams, “What’s it like to be on the other side of me?” That’s going to give them information that everyone else has but the leader, and it’s going to be challenging. They’re going to get some encouraging information, they’re going to get some surprising information about themselves, and they’re going to get some information that will hurt their feelings.

But this is one of the most healthy and emotional awareness questions, I think, that you can ask, and it’s going to help you get to be a better leader. But I challenge people and say you don’t have to do this and you don’t have to ask that question. You just have to know that if you don’t, and if you don’t have the courage to ask that question, you’re going to be the only one that doesn’t know the answer to it, “So, what’s it like to be on the other side of me?”

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

Jeff Henderson
JeffHenderson.com. You’ll see the free assessment that we talked about earlier. Actually, the voices assessment is on there as well, it’s just free. And then you can follow me from there on social media.

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

Jeff Henderson
So, I think in terms of being awesome at your job, the challenge that we need to be mindful of is, ultimately, there’s a wake in our leadership. And I think we need to look back and go, “Is the wake of that leadership, are we making the people in the organizations better?” My first business mentor challenged me with this, he said, “When you leave here, I want you to leave things better than when you found them.”

So, one of the ways that we can be awesome at our job is to know that we will not always be at this job. We’re all one day closer to leaving wherever we are. But when we leave, there is a wake that follows that, so leave things, leave the organization, leave the job, and leave the people better than when you found them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jeff, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish much luck and joy in each of the things you do next.

Jeff Henderson
Thank you so, so much, Pete. I’m honored to be here.

Dec 01

821: How to Keep Calm and Defuse Tensions in Conflict with Hesha Abrams

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Master attorney mediator Hesha Abrams shares her tried-and-tested strategies for navigating conflict with ease.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to actually calm people down in an argument 
  2. The four part process to defuse any situation
  3. The magic phrases that help any conflict 

About Hesha

Hesha Abrams is an internationally acclaimed master attorney mediator, with a unique talent to manage big egos and strong personalities and a keen ability to create synergy amongst the most diverse personality types, driving them toward agreement. Specializing in crafting innovative solutions for complex or difficult matters, Hesha has resolved thousands of cases in every conceivable area during her career including over the secret recipe for Pepsi. She coaches executives in politically difficult situations to prevent conflict and speed resolution.

Resources Mentioned

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

Hesha Abrams
My pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear some of your wisdom about Holding the Calm: The Secret to Resolving Conflict and Defusing Tension. Could you start us with one of the most tense situations, negotiations, mediations you found yourself plunged into, and tell us the juicy dramatic details of the story?

Hesha Abrams
Oh, goodness. I have so many, it’s hard to choose. But the one that people seem to like the most is that I mediated over the secret recipe for Pepsi.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, do you know the secret recipe for Pepsi?

Hesha Abrams
I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Hesha Abrams
I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it just carbonated water and high fructose corn syrup?

Hesha Abrams
No, I’m sworn to secrecy. I’m sworn to secrecy. But what’s interesting is that the recipe is different in different parts of our country and in different parts of the world. So, what it really is, is a trademark for Pepsi, Coke, things like that. It’s really their trademark that they have to protect so they can’t allow anybody to use a recipe and then change the trademark and be, let’s say, “Pakistani Poopsi tastes like Pepsi.” And that would be disastrous.

And so, that was a very juicy, very interesting case. But I’ve done cases for Google, and Facebook, and Verizon, and Yahoo, and Nvidia, and IBM, and Microsoft, and all the major players, and then tens of thousands of individuals trying to find some level of justice. And that’s why I joke when you said, “Share your wisdom.” What I want to say is it’s battle-tested.

I have been boots not only on the ground but in the trenches of human conflict with blood and guts on my boots. And there’s lots of good books out there that talk about theory and philosophy and ideas about resolving conflict but I wanted to write a tool book, “What do I do with my idiot brother-in-law?” “What do I do with this horrible boss?” “What do I do with this terrible neighbor, or friend, or supplier, or client?” fill in the blank. What are the things you can do right now to improve the situation?

And, literally, that’s why I wrote the book. This shouldn’t be for professionals only. This should be for everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful stuff. And, Hesha, we can edit this out if we need to, but am I to understand you’ve literally had human entrails on your boots in a wartime scenario?

Hesha Abrams
No, I’m being very overly literal, and I like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there’s a dramatic story. I think that’s the one maybe that we needed to…all right. We’ll see.

Hesha Abrams
We should not edit that out. That’s terrific. But I have had people spit.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Hesha Abrams
I’ve had people get into a fistfight. I had two oilmen once that were both billionaires fighting over, whatever it was, I don’t know, $10, $20 million, which is pocket change to them, want to come to blows, and I literally put my body in between them. So, things get pretty intense when you’re dealing with amygdalas being triggered and bumper kart egos, and, “Mine, and you’re not going to take mine.” Well, we act at our most cavemen/cavewoman best, is what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Hesha Abrams
And it’s normal. Every single one of us. You poke on amygdala enough; people are going to roar. And so, the question is, “What do you do when someone’s poking you? What do you do when you want to poke someone else? How do you get out of it?” That’s the thing, is how do you freaking get out of it? And I have easy tools, easy ways to do it, and I’m so glad your listeners are listening so we can talk about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m glad, too. So, tell us, is there anything that’s particularly counterintuitive or that most of us get wrong in our conception of conflict?

Hesha Abrams
Yes, and that’s a great question. So, let me give you an analogy that I use. Spaghetti sauce. You drop it on the counter, you take a wet sponge, you wipe it right off. No big deal. You leave it overnight; you’re scraping it off with a spatula. You leave it three or four months, it’s old and moldy and nasty. And that, my friends, is conflict.

And so, why don’t we just wipe it up when it’s wet? That would be so easy. Well, we don’t because we’re afraid, we don’t know how. We’re afraid it will get worse, we’re afraid to know how to handle it, and so we close our eyes kind of ostrich-like, and just hope it’ll go away, and hope it’ll get better. And I’m here to tell you it doesn’t get better. It just gets old and moldy and nasty, and it finds a way to erupt at the most inopportune times because all conflicts, 100% of it starts with tension. Every single one.

Even if it’s the silent, “Mm-hmm” thing. We just don’t notice it because we’re not trained, we’re not taught, we don’t have these Holding the Calm tools to know how to wipe the spaghetti sauce off when it’s wet, so it’s harder, it’s older, and nastier and harder. And to stay with the analogies, sometimes people pee in their own bathtub, and you can’t get it out. You got to drain the whole tub. So, how can you avoid it and then how can you drain the tub when you actually need to? So, those are analogies between spaghetti sauce and peeing in the bathtub people aren’t going to forget.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, just to be really clear here. I’m getting the message associated with the spaghetti sauce in terms of addressing it quickly. Now, the peeing in the tub, what are we saying there? It’s like that seems another metaphor. I’m thinking it’s like, “Oh, I shot myself in the foot,” but maybe you’re getting at it’s hard to separate urine from bathwater once they’re intermingled.

Hesha Abrams
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very visceral imagery. Thank you. Okay.

Hesha Abrams
Which means we won’t forget it. You’ll think about it now. We can always say, “Oh, don’t put your foot in your mouth,” right? But we all do, we’re all humans, and we do. What do we do to get out of it? How do we get out of the doghouse? How do we avoid getting in the doghouse to begin with? That’s what this Holding the Calm stuff is about. And it works with giant CEOs of giant Fortune 100 companies, global conglomerates.

Why? Because those guys and gals have egos just like the rest of us, and they want to win, and they want to not lose, and they want to look good just like if we’re fighting over a hundred bucks or a hundred million. It’s honestly the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, maybe before we go into some of the detail tools, is it a general principle, like the spaghetti sauce, you recommend we go ahead and address stuff quickly before it becomes extra, like it will have a tendency to grow nastier and more vitriolic over time? Is that the general pattern you see over and over again?

Hesha Abrams
Well, it depends. Yes, often that is the case, but a lot of times, just again, I give so many analogies because people will remember the analogies of what we talked about. Let’s say there’s a bomb in the town square. That guy waddles out his Michelin soup. He doesn’t just start cutting wires. He looks. He diagnoses it. Is it pressure switch? Is it chemical switch? What is it?

And what tends to happen is that we react, we don’t diagnose. We don’t take a step back. If I’m in conflict with an extrovert, that is going to be a different set of tools than when I’m in conflict with an introvert. Just that simple thing right there. Also, what if somebody is a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner? That’s easy. It’s just one, two, three. And if I can give you a list, there’s an example of that. It’s paying attention to the verbs.

“So, I see what you’re saying. That looks good to me,” somebody is a visual learner, I’m going to use visual cues with them. “I hear what you’re saying. That sounds right to me,” they’re an auditory learner, I’m going to speak auditory words to them. Kinesthetic means that you touch and you feel, and they’re going to say, “I don’t get it,” or, “That doesn’t feel right to me,” or, “It’s not good in my gut.” All right, that’s a kinesthetic learner.

So, when I’m talking to them, it’s just like, a Samsung versus an iPhone. They’re both smartphones but completely different operating systems. So, when you’re interacting with someone, the first thing you do, like the bomb detector, is you look at them, you listen to them, you let them talk for a minute. And while they’re talking, you’re listening to content, of course, but I’m going to say to myself, “Are they introvert or extrovert? And are they a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner?” That’s it.

Now, I have a wealth of knowledge. Which tool am I going to use? Am I going to use a scalpel or am I going to use a sledgehammer? Am I going to delay or am I going to push? Am I going to deal with feelings and emotions or am I going to deal with tasks, process? It’s not hard once you know to look for that, and that’s what I go over in Holding the Calm is the easy simple ways to be able to do that, and sentence them so that you can just simply ask, and then people will reveal themselves to you easily.

And then when you respond to them in their own operating system, they’re not going to say, “Oh, thank you for noticing that I’m a visual learner and speaking to me in visual words.” No, they’re just going to go, “He gets me,” “She gets it,” “I feel heard. I can trust her,” “I can believe in him. He’s got integrity.” That’s what they’re going to say.

And all it is is that you met them where they were. You hit them with their frequency, and you resonated with them. And all it takes is a few moments of holding the calm, stepping back, and diagnosing. And it’s incredibly simple. And that’s what some of the things that I lay out in Holding the Calm.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so we take a step back, we listen, we diagnose, we see, “Are they introverted, extroverted? Are they visual, auditory, or kinesthetic?” And then we just use those types of words or visually words versus auditory words? And just like that we have an extra degree of rapport in the room?

Hesha Abrams
Indeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that sounds easy.

Hesha Abrams
Indeed. It honestly is.

So, there’s a corollary story that I wanted to add here. I heard this on NPR’s Hidden Brain. There was a couch company that sold bespoke customized couches, $20,000 and $30,000 for a couch, custom arms, custom piping, custom fabric, blah, blah. People will go through the process, and a huge percentage of them at the point of sale would not complete the sale. Well, the company was very frustrated.

So, what do we normally do when we have a problem? I joked that we have flat foreheads because we smash our heads against the wall all the time. So, you usually have gas in the car or you have a brake. And what we usually do is we do gas, we push forward. So, the company did more sales, more promotion, more discount, more marketing, and it didn’t do anything.

Finally, they put on the brake. Remember the bomb detector analogy I gave everybody, stepping back and diagnosing? And they had somebody call all the people that didn’t complete the point of sale, the vast, vast majority. Do you know why they didn’t buy this $20,000 couch? Because they didn’t know what to do with the old couch.

So, the solution now is obvious. “When you buy the new one, we take away the old one,” but it didn’t dawn on them because they hadn’t taken the time to diagnose and to find out and to put the brakes on. That’s a huge beautiful example of holding the calm.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re a pro.

Hesha Abrams
So, one of the things, the way I designed the book is I didn’t want to make 15 volumes. I’ve got 35 years, like I said, in the trenches of doing this. What would be immediately accessible for people? So, I wrote 20 tools in 20 chapters, each one with stories and anecdotes. And I’m going to give some of them today on our talk, and I give them away to people. I say, “Take my stories. These are battle tested. They work. Use them with other people.”

Just imagine what happens. Somebody says something, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to school you. We’re going to tell you where you’re wrong, how you analyze it incorrectly. We’re going to bring you additional data. And everything we’re doing is like that finger-in-the-air schoolmarm going, “You’re not right.” And what does the person do? He just shuts down, not listening to a doggone thing you say because no one, even if they are wrong, responds to that. It’s just not going to happen.

So, what you do is you build some kind of rapport, and you can do it with, “Oh, well, you’re a golfer, I’m a golfer,” “We both like to bake.” But then the person has to be self-revealing to tell you stuff about themselves, and in conflict, they’re not going to. So, all you have to do is listen, like that bomb detector in the town square, and as they’re talking, you’re going to hear these things. So, now, I know how to speak to you. Now, you feel listened to and heard. Your amygdala calms the heck down because never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down by being told to calm down.

And they actually train cops and police officers in that. You don’t walk into a volatile situation and say, “Calm down. Calm down.” All you’re saying to somebody is, “Whoa, you’re out of control. You don’t know what you’re doing. I do. I’m going to take power and control from you,” which just freaks them out more. So, you back off, let the person breathe, lets you breathe, and, now all of a sudden, you’re an ally instead of an enemy, and all kinds of magical cool stuff can happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds beautiful. Can we dig into some of these 20 tools? Are there a few that leap to mind in terms of having a really good bang for the buck in terms of, “Oh, this is not very hard, and yet it makes a world of difference in these situations”?

Hesha Abrams
Indeed. So, chapter one is speaking to the ears that are hearing you, and that we just talked about and there’s more, obviously, than what I can do right here, but that’s at least giving you a start. Let me give you an advanced technique that’s not as easy. It takes a little more effort but not very much, and everyone is going to laugh when I say this. If you’re dealing with somebody difficult, VUC them. I was going to with…

Pete Mockaitis
With a V.

Hesha Abrams
Yeah, “What did she just say?” I’m going to say, yeah, you VUC them because they can’t VUC themselves. And it’s V-U-C-S, and I came up with that purposely because everyone knows what they’re thinking they thought I said. Now, you won’t forget it. So, V-U-C-S. The V is validate, the U is understand, the C is clarify, the S is summarize.

It’s a four-part process to defuse anything. And when I say anything, I’m not using hyperbole. Anything. I’ve mediated multibillion-dollar cases. And late at night, you know what we’re talking about? The CEO is asking me about his idiot brother-in-law that he’s got to deal with, or a problem at work, or a problem with his private school kid’s coach, a Lacrosse team or something like that, and how does he handle that. That’s what we’re talking about.

So, this is a human being thing. It works for all of us. And that V of the validate is the number one. It’s the WD40 of interpersonal relations. But where it gets hard is that if you can validate, sure, go ahead, “I see your point of view. I can understand why you’re so upset. What happened to you was wrong,” blah, blah, blah. But let’s do the advanced class. Let’s say you can’t do that because you think the other person is wrong or an idiot or arrogant, self-righteous, stubborn, misguided, I mean, fill in the blank with whatever you want. How do you validate then?

Here’s the trick. You name the emotion. That’s all you got to do, “Wow, you sound angry.” “I’m not angry, I’m frustrated.” “Okay, you’re frustrated.” Now, I got data, don’t I? “Okay, help me see that. I want to understand.” Now, I’m going to say, “Help me see that,” if they’re a visual person; “I want to hear more about that,” if they’re an auditory person; “I want to understand that more,” if they’re a kinesthetic person.

And I’m just listening to them, and then using verbs. Literally, verbs. And someone may say listening to us, “Ugh, that sounds a lot of work. That’s too much.” Really? I can do it in two minutes. Or, you can spend the next hour fighting with somebody. What’s less work? And by starting with just the V, validate if you can, and if you can’t, just name the emotion, hear what they’re saying, let them talk. Then the U is the understanding part.

Unless someone is completely psychotic, really ridiculously psychotic, they have a point. You may not agree, you may not understand it, but they have a perspective and they have a point. So, dismissing them as, “Well, you’re just an idiot,” or, “You’re stupid,” or, “You’re misguided,” or blah, blah, blah, and, unless again, they’re psychotic, they’ve got a point I want to understand so I’m going to ask some questions.

And I have all kinds of sentence stems in the book that I tell people, write them down on a Post-it note and stick it by your phone or your computer, or put it in a note in your phone so you have it at the ready when something like this happens. And they’re wonderful because they just let people start to talk, and that’s the U for understand. Because when you do that for somebody, they’re going to feel understood.

Then the C is to clarify, just ask questions, “Okay, how would that work? Under what circumstances would that happen? Does that always happen?” those kinds of questions. Then, at the end, you can summarize, “Okay, so what you’re concerned about is this, and you feel like it’s unfair, or you don’t like the way this happened, and you’re looking for this kind of a response.”

In a complicated situation, that’ll take me 40, 45 minutes. In a more simple situation, 15, literally. Or, you can spend the next two days fighting with somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, the whole V-U-C-S taking 15 to 45?

Hesha Abrams
It depends on the complexity of the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you.

Hesha Abrams
And how well you do it, quite frankly. The better you do it, the quicker and easier it is. And the bonus is, at the end, the person is not going to hate you, they’re not going to think you’re awful, or you’re dismissive, or you’re disrespectful, or you’re offensive, or all the other things that people think when they’re not listened to. They’re going to feel like, “You get it.”

And often the position will soften because someone is actually listening to them. And people will start to say things, like, “I know I said that but, you know, it’s not really that bad,” only because you defused the tension. You wiped the spaghetti sauce up when it’s wet. You off-gassed the tank so that it wouldn’t explode. Just that simple stuff is wet-spaghetti-sauce wiping, which maybe should be the title of the next book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, perhaps. And can you give us some examples of these stems?

Hesha Abrams
It depends on the situation. That’s why I have them divided throughout the book because it depends on the situation. So, let’s say you’re having to deal with somebody that is just obnoxious, or all of these DEI stuff we’re talking about these days. You think he’s racist, or sexist, or homophobic, and they’re just saying stuff, and you’re taken aback. You don’t know what to say or how to say it.

You can say, “Did you intend to offend me with that statement?” You will see backpedaling like you don’t want to know. No one’s going to answer, “Yes, I intended to offend you,” right? And if they are, then I’m going to VUC them, I’m going to say, “Well, you’re really passionate about that. I want to understand why.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Hesha Abrams
Now, all of a sudden, I have another tool that I can use. And let me give your listeners what to do at the Thanksgiving table or the Christmas dinner table with that one relative that just always says nasty stupid stuff, either because they really mean it or because they just like to get your goat, and you know that happens at the table.

A great one is to turn to them and say, “Do you know what I admire about you?” Freeze. Everybody pauses. That guy will pause, ears, boing, are going to open, and then you can say anything you want, “Your passion, your curiosity, your ability to hear both sides of an issue,” whatever you want to say, there’s no retort to that, there’s no answer to that, so it stops and everyone else around the table will smile and nod, and say, “Thank you for shutting that down,” and then you go back to eating turkey.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking if it’s the person who just says stuff, it could just be, “Your courage. I would feel sheepish and embarrassed to spout the things that you’re saying.” I guess you don’t say it that way. But I guess that is something I would admire in terms of I tend not to say things that will trouble people willy-nilly because I’m scared.

Hesha Abrams
But that’s the whole reason why I wrote Holding the Calm for everybody because that’s the wet spaghetti sauce. We don’t say anything because we’re scared and we don’t know how to do it. But if you say to somebody, “You know what I admire about you?” how is that bad? It stops the conversation immediately.

And then find something to fill it in with, “That you’re so passionate,” or, “That you’re so punctual, you’re always on time,” or, “You always dress so well,” or, “You bring the best potato casserole,” or, or, or, whatever you can actually say. You can make it harder and firmer or you can make it gentle and easy, but either way, it stops because nobody is going to say, “Oh, I don’t want to hear the rest of that sentence.” “What I admire about you,” “What I respect about you,” “What I like about you,” nobody is going to say, “Eh, don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it doesn’t need to be at all related, it doesn’t need to be at all directly related to what they’ve just mentioned?

Hesha Abrams
Exactly, isn’t that great?

Pete Mockaitis
You could just absolutely, “You’ve got great taste in earrings.” Okay.

Hesha Abrams
And it shuts it down because, let’s say it’s something weird like that, “You have great taste in earrings.” How do you respond to that? What are you suppose to say? It just stops the conversation. So, holding the calm is pragmatic. It’s not Kumbaya, “Let’s hold hands and walk through the meadow together.” We live in a jungle, there’s predators out there, there’s real-world stuff we have to deal with.

So, I wanted to make this book extremely practical for real-world stuff. So, sometimes all I want to do is get you to stop because that’s all I can do. Sometimes I want to get you to understand. Sometimes I want to get to make a cold peace with you. Sometimes I want to get to make a warm peace with you. I want correct a misunderstanding, repair a relationship, move us forward. That’s sort of the spectrum.

You choose whatever it is you want to do, whatever your courage wants to do, whatever your need is. Maybe you only see this person once a year at the holiday dinner, or you don’t have to see your boss very much, or your neighbor, or, let’s say, your spouse, those kinds of things. You figure out what it is you want and then apply it however you want.

And then what you’ll find is it’s so easy that the more you do it, you’ll say, “Oh, hot darn, those were like magic beans. They worked. All right, I’m going to try something else. Oh, look at that.” That’s how it actually happens. I got 30 years of doing this, and I’m telling you the same techniques I’m teaching all of you. I walk into a conference room, and one guys says, “Give me $100 million,” and the other guy says, “Here’s $100,000, hands down.” How do I solve that?

Everyone’s got fancy schmancy lawyers, they went to Ivy League schools, that are everyone smart, and they’re arguing over all kinds of stuff. How do I get that settled? With all the stuff I’m telling you, because it’s human beings, whether you’re wearing a T-shirt or a $5,000 suit. It’s exactly the same.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then it sounds like, in that particular scenario that you highlighted, in terms of there’s a huge gap associated with the financials that people are willing to go for, you’re not so much, it sounds like, getting into the particulars of how one arrives in an appropriate dollar amount technically, financially speaking, so much as the human emotional side of things. Is that fair to say?

Hesha Abrams
Again, I hate to keep saying it depends on the circumstances. That’s why I go through that in the book so that it’s not one-size-fits-all. Let me give you another example. There’s a guy named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and they were psychologists. And before them, Adam Smith’s rational man was the way economics was built. Human beings are rational, we make rational decisions, it’s all databased. And those of us in the social sciences know that’s just not true. It’s just not true.

Well, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky proved it mathematically and scientifically, and they won a Nobel Prize in economics for proving that. And it’s absolutely brilliant how they do it, and so I’ll give you a quick short example. Bananas, 25 cents each. I’d buy a couple. I’m going to make a banana bread. Bananas, four for a dollar, 35% boost in sales.

Now, that’s just dumb. Why would it make any difference at all, and you want an extra 10% boost in sales? Limit two. That guys is going to knock at my bananas. I may have two bananas that rot and get all brown and nasty, and I got to throw them away. But look at that, how it works on the human brain. And people that are trying to sell us, the data people, the retailers, they know this stuff. That’s why you see price points the way you do.

It used to be that 4.99, people will see it as $4 not $5. $499, they will see it as $400 not $500. Even at 4,000 versus 5,000, that’s how the human brain works. Now, we can say, “Oh, you wouldn’t fool me with that. I look at 499 and I know it’s 500 bucks. I get that.” Not your brain, not the part of your brain that makes decisions. It will see it as, “Ah, that’s pretty reasonable, it’s about 400 bucks.” No, it’s not. It’s 500.

But that’s why they keep doing it that way because they know how we think. And you know who are masters at this kind of stuff? Casino owners. Do you ever notice in a casino, there’s no clocks, there’s no windows? They want to have people not know what time it is and not have anything about the outside world. They want them completely total captive audiences, and the drinks flow freely. That’s not because they’re being generous.

They want to keep you at the table because they know the odds are they, of course, are going to win, and they’ve absolutely figured out mathematically how often the slot machines need to ching, ching, ching, ching, ching and have somebody win, and how little they can have the win before it will hit the dopamine receptors in their brain like a chicken in a pen hitting that pellet to get that pellet out, they know it mathematically. That’s how amazing it is because we take human beings, and we put electrodes all over their heads, and shove them in MRIs. We know all kinds of stuff about the human brain works.

Scientifically, it’s just that normal people haven’t been able to catch up to how it is so we still think, “All right, you know, bananas, four for a dollar, that’s a good deal, even though I only need two.” So, to understand how human beings think, honestly, is a way to serve them better. Now, of course, people can manipulate, a fork can be used to eat or stab you, so every tool can be used different ways.

What I try to do in Holding the Calm is it’s very ethical and there’s high integrity to it, and the basis of it is service, “How can I serve you better by understanding you, by being on the same wavelength as you?” It’s better for a negotiation, it’s better for problem-solving, it’s better for team building. This kind of stuff is used for all of that. All of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’d also love to hear a little bit more about some particular words and phrases. We’ve heard some about matching the visual versus auditory versus kinesthetic. We heard saying “Calm down” never does the trick. And we’ve heard “You know what I admire about you…” is magic. Any other magical words, phrases that you love or really hate?

Hesha Abrams
So, I have a whole chapter on percentages which I find so interesting. People will speak in superlatives or in generalities, “We always do this. We never do that.” And 20 years ago, I’ve done a lot of…I probably made 10,000 speeches in my life, and I’ve consulted and trained all over the world. I’ve done a lot of this stuff. And I would have big groups, and I could guinea pig and try different new things and see how they would work.

And so, one day, I just thought of that. And so, I had a large group, and I said, “What percentage of the time does always mean?” And then I had people write it down, and then we facilitated up in the front on a big flipchart. Always goes from 100% down to like 65. Now, the people that say always is a 100 think the 65-ers are idiots. And the 65-ers think the 100s are extreme.

How about with never? You think never is zero? Au contraire, monsieur. It is not. To a lot of people, never is 20%, maybe even 25%. The same with rarely and a lot. So, I have a whole thing in there where I call it “Always Never, Rarely A Lot.” People will use those four words all the time. And by all the time, I mean 100% of the time.

So, if somebody is being adamant with you, “We never do that,” let’s say you want to return something, you just practice easy negotiation, and you go return something at a store, “We never do that.” “Oh, what percentage of the time is never?” “Well, it’s like 80%.” “Oh, so what are the exceptions that fall into the 20%?” Bing, bing, bing, bing. Now, I got information. Now, I got data.

People will say that, “Oh, we never do salary raises,” or, “We always do salary raises, or salary evaluations at the end of the year.” “What percentage of the time is always?” Now, if you get 100%, okay, now, you have information and you can feel comfortable, “Right, it’s happening at the end of the year. Well, I think 75 or 80% of the time.” “Oh, so what do we do the other percentage of the time? What would be the reasons for that?”

Now, it’s a pathway in and you have information. And look at all you did. You asked a clarifying question, “What percentage of the time is always, never, rarely, a lot?” and you’ll like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, Hesha, well, one, that’s eye-opening, like, “Wow, I never would’ve guessed,” so that’s insightful and powerful right there. Thank you. I guess I’m thinking I am in the camp that always does mean 100% and never does mean zero percent. And if you asked me the clarifier, “What percentage is always?” I’m almost insulted, like, “Well, of course, it’s 100%. That’s why I said always. Otherwise, I would’ve said often or frequently or most of the time.”

Hesha Abrams
Isn’t that great?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, now I’m intrigued. That question doesn’t rub people the wrong way or do you have alternative variations you recommend?

Hesha Abrams
Well, what’s interesting is sometimes it does. And then let say it does, “Really?” and then you ask somebody else, “What percentage is always to you?” And, guaranteed, even with CPAs, even with accountants who are very numbers-oriented, it will vary. And then somebody else will say it. So, if you’re afraid you’ve got somebody like that, you ask a couple people in a room.

And it’s a technique that I use often if I have to do large groups or if I’m meeting with a board, for example, and I’ve got a bunch of people. I don’t want to say to people, “You know, we all have different perspectives, and we all think about things differently, and we have to be open to blah, blah, blah” That’s like nauseous. No one wants to hear that kind of garbage.

But I say, “You know what, who wants to do a fun little exercise?” No one’s going to say no, and I do this little exercise. And you can do it on one of the words. I would do it on at least two or you can do all four. And then as people go around the room, and they say different percentages, then somebody like you, Pete, will go, “Huh? What? No. You think that always is 80%? How can you think that?” “How can you not think that?”

And then, all of a sudden, a new interesting conversation opens up. And it’s a way of having people see for themselves we are very different. We think very differently. It’s not just a visual, auditory, kinesthetic, introvert, extrovert. Baskin and Robins have 32 flavors for a reason. There’s a lot of different things that people want.

And even something silly. Let’s say I’m in a more casual group and I want to do an icebreaker thing. I may say, “Okay, choose, salty or sweet?” And sometimes people go, “Huh? What?” “If you had to choose, potato chips, French fries, or cake cookies?” You will see people divide up instantly into their salty-sweet teams. Instantly.

And then you know what kind of happens? “That other guy across the room who I hate, he’s a salty and I’m a salty, he’s a sweet, I’m a sweet, are you kidding me? How can I have anything in common with that guy? And what if we’re the only two in the room that both think that? Oh, God, now I got commonality with that guy?” It begins to bridge some of that.

I’ll give one more thing just because I’ve done so much of this. I experiment and then I come up with new ways of trying to make these points because people will get it better if they can get it themselves. It’s the whole “teach them to fish, don’t give them a fish” thing. So, I once did this just on a lark, literally on a lark. I was on a big Zoom conference call probably 10 years ago. I was doing Zoom a long time ago, and I had all these people and they looked super bored and disinterested, and, “Okay, I’ve got to get these people attached.”

So, I said, “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” And everyone went through it, and, all of a sudden, people started having conversations because, “Ooh, the vanillas are purist,” or, “The chocolates like it to be decadent,” or some of them wanted the gooey, chocolatey, ribbony, nutty, rocky road-y thing. And then people couldn’t stop talking and it created this commonality between people.

And at the end of the training, when they did the evaluations and they’re all saying, “Oh, it was so great.” “What was your favorite part of it?” A huge percentage said the stupid little ice cream exercise that I literally made up on-the-fly. And that’s because it was so personal to them, “This is me. See me. Hear me. Validate me. And now let me bond with you. I don’t care what I bond over. It’s ice cream.” It’s a sports team, it’s a politician, it’s a food restaurant.

Human beings have this clannish desire to bond and connect with each other. And when you create and foster ways for that to happen, I’m telling you, barriers fall down, things break down. It doesn’t have to be this big huge fancy schmancy stuff. In fact, the big huge fancy schmancy stuff doesn’t really work. It’s too big. It’s really the small.

I have a whole chapter in the book that I call “Small Winnable Victories,” that you don’t solve problems with big huge things. You solve them brick by brick, stone by stone. You dissolve problems from the outside so that they melt in. You create commonalities to where, “You know, I really thought I hated you and you were an idiot. But it turns out you’re not so bad, you know.”

And I’ll give your listeners a quick easy, easy way to deal with somebody you absolutely dislike or despise, and you got to deal with them. Look at them, ask yourself one question, “Would they pull my kid out of a burning car?” And if the answer to that is yes, which 95% of the time it will be, they’re not so bad. There’s something redemptive.

And if, in fact, they did pull your kid out of a burning car, you’d have a very different relationship with them. So, we start from that place, and it just lets walls start to come down so solutions can be found, team building can happen. This stuff works, I’m telling you. It works.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s so funny, it’s like as I think about that question and folks I might be at odds with, it’s sort of like my bias is tilting or slanting me so it’s just like, “Okay, statistically, yeah, maybe 95% is probably the overall view. It’s like, but I’m really not so sure about this guy.”

Hesha Abrams
That’s marvelous. That’s marvelous because it means that you’re demonizing him or her unless and until they do something redemptive, and they may not, so you pretend. And if you can pretend, it’s like the placebo effect for your mind. If you pretend that they actually did do something redemptive, all it does is give you more avenues and ways to deal with them because in Alcoholics Anonymous, they have this great saying that says, and I’m not sure if they originated it or not but I’ve been told that, that, “Resentment is poison that you drink but expect the other guy to die.”

Think about how amazing that is. Poison that you drink but expect the other guy to die. And what happens with this paradigm-shifting technique I’m teaching you is it stops the poison, and you get to a point where, “You know, you’re still a jackass but you don’t bother me anymore, you don’t affect me anymore, you can’t harm me anymore.” There’s tremendous freedom and power in that. Tremendous. Tremendous.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, Hesha, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Hesha Abrams
Well, I wanted to remind people I created a website HoldingTheCalm.com. And my goal with this is to just get this out into the world because I feel like we were all cavemen, cavewomen shoving food in our face, and I want to give people a fork, a knife, a spoon, chopsticks so we have better ways to handle things.

So, I put all my podcasts on there. I’m doing webinars. And I’m just putting everything free. Just download it and take it. And I’m doing this little one-minute videos. So, people don’t have time, and we’re all so busy, so it’s a quick one little minute video on a little topic with one of these techniques or one of these ideas that you can like or forward it onto someone else, and say, “Hey, this might be good for you, too.”

So, I have that, and I have a discussion guide in the back of the book. And, originally, the folks wanted me to sell that as a separate workbook, and I refused. I said, “No, I’m giving this away for free, and I want it in the back of the book,” so that if you’re an organization, or a company, or a church, or a homeowners’ association, or a family, any group of people, and everyone gets the book, you can go through the discussion guide which is like five pages, so it’s nothing.

And you just start asking questions of each other, then it makes it real, and it makes it to be, “What percentage is always for you? What percentage is it for the other guy? Really? How can you think always is 80%? I don’t understand that.” Then you’ll learn something about them. They’ll learn something about you. It creates this team-building bonding thing that actually creates a little bit of Teflon against conflict, which is really pretty magical.

So, that’s why I did it that way because my goal is to just get it out there and help people learn to do this better because we don’t teach this in school. We’ve got people running around shooting people because they’re so angry and mad, and write nasty things on social media because there’s no off-casting valve. So, anyway, this is my little tiny contribution within my sphere of influence to try to help make the world a little bit more harmonious, so that’s my message. And if it resonates with you guys, please, take it, use it.

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

Hesha Abrams
Well, I’m a major Trekkie, so I love Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he said, “Only impossible until it’s not.” And I like that. And I would tell you, I have one more that I put in the book, actually, both of those are in the book. My husband has a friend who’s a Navy Seal, and Navy Seals, as part of their training, have to tread water for, like, ever, and they’re supposed to do it until they die is the concept.

And so, my husband asked this guy, “So, how long can you tread water?” He said, “I don’t know, I’m not dead yet.” And I think about that, at least for myself and for everyone else, “How big can I get? How smart can I get? How loving can I get? How forgiving can I get? How graceful can I get? I don’t know, I’m not dead yet.”

And I feel like if we all sort of be continuous learners, which everyone has to be listening to your podcast, they’re continuous learners, and they’re committed awesome people or they wouldn’t be listening to this kind of podcast, how big is big? I don’t know, I’m not dead yet. So, let’s get big, everybody. That’s the goal. That’s my little inspirational speech for the day.

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

Hesha Abrams
Well, I love the Daniel Kahneman-Amos Tversky thing. I love there’s a chapter in the book I have on politeness and stability matters because there was a study done in England, literally, scientifically, about “Does politeness actually get you anything? Can it actually work?” And it does. And they figured out, neuroscientists have found that there’s 187 cognitive biases in our brains, and one of them is called the bias of reciprocity.

And, again, unless you’re a sociopath, and you’re just like a normal person, which is the vast majority of us, if I do something for you, you kind of feel compelled to do something back for me. You get invited into someone’s house for dinner, you bring a bottle of wine or flowers. There’s this, “I don’t want to be in debt to you. I want to do that.” That’s what politeness does. Simply being polite and civil in engenders politeness and civility back. And I love that study.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Hesha Abrams
Oh, God, I have to many. Should I be a dork and talk about my Star Trek books that I read like candy? I consume the right candy.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued. What’s the dorkiest Star Trek book you own?

Hesha Abrams
Oh, God, they’re all marvelous. I just got done finished reading one on Kathryn Janeway called Mosaic by Jeri Taylor that was just fantastic. I really like that one. But I read a lot of neuroscience stuff. I just got done with Erik Barker’s Plays Well with Others which was just fantastic, really marvelous. I read – what was that other book about – Influence by Robert Cialdini, of course, is marvelous, the Ken Blanchard books are always good because they’re trying to make the world a better place. So, I have the nonfiction stuff that I enjoy, and then I have my guilty pleasures.

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

Hesha Abrams
HoldingTheCalm.com, it’s got everything you need.

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

Hesha Abrams
Oh, what a great question that is. The Navy Seal analogy. I would suggest that what you do is write down on a piece of paper why you’re good at your job. What is it that makes you good at your job? And then, tomorrow, do it better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hesha, thanks. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and fun in your conflict resolving.

Hesha Abrams
Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.