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Nov 03
0

1107: How to Confront Your Inner Saboteurs with Shirzad Chamine

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Shirzad Chamine offers quick but powerful strategies to rewire your brain for better results.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you can’t think your way out of stress
  2. How to take command of your mind in just 10 seconds
  3. How strengths become saboteurs

About Shirzad

Shirzad Chamine is the author of the New York Times bestselling Positive Intelligence. Shirzad has lectured on Positive Intelligence® at Stanford University and has trained faculty at Stanford and Yale business schools.

Shirzad has been the CEO of the largest coach training organization in the world. A preeminent C-suite advisor, Shirzad has coached hundreds of CEOs and their executive teams. His background includes a BA in psychology, an MS in electrical engineering, and an MBA from Stanford.

Resources Mentioned

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Shirzad Chamine Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Shirzad, welcome!

Shirzad Chamine
Pleasure to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be talking about your body of work with regard to positive intelligence. Can you tell us what do you mean by that? And what’s a particularly fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans as you’ve delved into this research?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, what we mean by that is that your mind is very often sabotaging you. So, you spend a lot of your time in self-sabotage mode without realizing it. So positive intelligence is about how much your mind is serving you as opposed to sabotaging you. The higher your positive intelligence, the more you’re spending your time in the positive part of the brain, which serves you, as opposed to the negative part of the brain where you’re sabotaging yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now that’s an interesting distinction right off the get-go. Positive means serving you, negative means sabotaging, as opposed to positive means pleasant and enjoyable. Is that fair to say, we could be served by something that’s painful and unpleasant?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, definitely, serving you goes beyond just pleasant. Stanford kids I’ve lectured on positive intelligence, they call this work Jedi mind training. So, the reason they call it that is because they basically say what this work is about is the battle inside your mind between your inner Darth Vader versus inner Jedi. And so, we have both of those voices in our head. The question is, “How strong is one or the other?”

And we can talk about all the emotional experiences you would have if you’re in your inner Jedi mode, which are all positive experiences. Now the emotions can be empathy, curiosity, joy of creativity, being connected to meaning and purpose, being in calm, clear-headed, laser-focused, fearless action. All of those are modes of the sage where your mind is serving you.

As opposed to when you’re in inner Darth Vader, which we call the saboteur, part of your brain when you’re sabotaging yourself, you’re going to be experiencing negative emotions like stress, anxiety, frustration, anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, self-doubt, and all of those things. Your mind is not serving you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I mean, it sounds delightful to have some Jedi mind powers and to be less of a Darth Vader inside. Could you maybe share with us a story of someone who made a transformation and sort of what’s at stake and what could be possible for us if we get some great control over our mind and our inner saboteurs?

Shirzad Chamine
Well, I can tell you my own personal story, one of the most transformational days of my life. I actually started the software company that was venture-backed and I had attracted some of the luminaries of Silicon Valley to be my investors, board members.

Our first client was Hewlett-Packard. Everything was positive. Everything was awesome. I was a visionary leader starting a company. And then two years into this, the product was late, the customer was unhappy, a lot of our plans were not working, and so I was under a lot of stress.

And one day during lunch, I went out there and got my lunch, came back to our offices, went upstairs and where our offices was, and my heart sank because what I saw was the chairman of my board was sitting in the boardroom along with my president and my top VPs.

Basically, this was a palace coup. My president and top VCs had gone to the board and said, “We cannot work for Shirzad anymore. Under stress, he has become such a controlling, micromanaging, judging leader. We can’t stand working for him anymore. It’s either him or us. And he’s killing his own vision.”

So that was the most transformational day of my life, professional day of my life, and also the most painful because I had to figure out, “So, what’s happening here? Who am I? Am I that positive visionary leader that attracted all these people and investors to me to start the company? Or am I this negative micromanaging, controlling, judging leader that nobody wants to work for?”

And it just turns out, and it started my whole body of research here, and it turns out that I’m both of those. I have the Darth Vader inside, I have the inner Jedi inside, and the question is, “What conditions bring out my inner Jedi? What conditions bring out my Darth Vader? And how do I, instead of just letting it happen, how do I take command of that and make sure that my inner Jedi is running the show rather than the Darth Vader?”

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is high stakes, and thank you for sharing that. And I think you’ve already said it in terms of a lot of us, that is our experience in terms of the Darth Vader show up in a high-stress situation, either we’re just hungry and sleep-deprived, just very kind of biological, or the environment is full of stresses, expectations, pressure, too much stuff, and failures, disappointments, things just rock in our world. And so, in the midst of that, yes, indeed, what is to be done?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, so what we discovered, I mean, we have done a ton of research. My book is very research-based because I have more of a science, engineering background. And we did factor analysis with about 500,000 people from across 100 different countries. And we asked the question, “At the root of it all, what sabotages or what optimizes our well-being or performance?”

And from that research, we discovered there are 10 ways we self-sabotage. It seems like there are a hundred ways or a thousand ways we self-sabotage and screw ourselves up, but actually there are only 10 ways. And these are the Darth Vader’s. We call them the saboteurs, the ones that sabotage you. And they have names like the judge, the controller, the stickler, the victim, the avoider, the restless, the pleaser, and so on.

And most people have a few. Most people don’t have to worry about all 10, but so we do a saboteur assessment that, in five minutes, shows you how you self-sabotage. And these saboteurs go on hyper mode under stress. And so, stress brings, really fuels the saboteurs. So, if you have a controller, you become more controlling under stress.

If you have the avoider, you become more avoiding under stress and so on. And as you do that, these saboteurs actually generate more stress. So, they get us into a vicious cycle of deepening saboteur activation. And they have us generate some results, but we pay a huge price in negativity and loss of mental and emotional energy.

And, on the other hand, on the positive side, the Jedi side, we show you that you actually, your inner Jedi lives in an entirely different region of your brain. And we can help you energize that part of your brain, so instead of feeling stressed, you’re feeling empathy and curiosity and caring and love and creativity and all those wonderful things, you’d perform better and you feel better at the same time.

We can help you actually energize that part of your brain, build up your inner Jedi and quiet the saboteur region of the brain. It’s literally about brain rewiring.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so you’ve got 10 flavors of saboteur, and I did take that, your fun little assessment and it was quick. Avoider was my top. But I guess I’m curious to know is, we talk about brain regions, first of all, let’s just hear what are the names of the brain regions associated with sabotage and with the good part?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, there are lot of different components that go into the region of the brain that I call the saboteur brain. In my book, there’s an entire chapter on it. There’s a neuroscience, 20-page neuroscience white paper on our website on it. So, there’s not a quick answer to it. But what I can say is that the saboteur mind is generally a little bit more left-brained, where also your thinking mind lives, as opposed to the inner Jedi, the sage mind, which we call the sage, that’s a little bit more right brain.

And so, we have ways, we have 10-second techniques where we quiet the saboteur region and where a lot of your fear, stress originates, and energize the sage brain region. And we can practice some of those together.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So left brain, right brain. Sabotage is more right brain. And so, is that right? Is that correct?

Shirzad Chamine
The saboteurs are a little more left-brain, so they coexist with the part of the brain that the rational mind lives, which is one of the interesting reasons why, when you’re feeling stressed, you can’t think your way out of stress. The harder you think, the more you kind of dig a hole for yourself. So, the way out of a lot of this is not by thinking harder, but actually quieting the hard-thinking mind because your wisdom lives in a different part of your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, rational left brain. More, I guess, creative stuff, right brain. So, I guess maybe if I were to conjure up some images here, the saboteur is more like hard-charging executive, and the Jedi is more like artist, dancer, creator.

Shirzad Chamine
No, actually, so the saboteurs are quite different in their character. So, the controller is hard-charging, but the avoiders almost the exact opposite of the hard-charging controller. The pleaser is very different. So, there are 10 ways of self-sabotage. They have very, very different flavors to them.

And on the positive side, what our factor analysis research showed is that there are five Jedi superpowers, five-stage superpowers at the root of it all. The five core superpowers are: empathize, which is the ability to really feel empathy, love, and compassion for yourself and others; explore, which is about being in beginner’s mind, to truly explore what’s really going on with things, deep curiosity, beginner’s mind curiosity.

Innovate, which is the ability to really tap into that obvious out-of-box innovative thinking. Navigate, which is being connected to a deeper sense of meaning and purpose, having an inner compass of what truly brings meaning and purpose to your life. And activate, which is calm, clear-headed, fearless action. And as you can see, these are very different flavors of the sage.

And what we show you is that, depending on the challenge in front of you, you may need empathy or you may need curiosity, or the explore power, or you may need activate – calm, clear-headed, laser-focused action. If the house is on fire, you don’t want to empathize with anybody. You just want to run and take action.

Pete Mockaitis
“That sounds really hard. Your house is burning down right now. That’s a tough spot.” Okay. Well, so you say 10 seconds, that’s pretty cool. So, you’re saying that there are 10-second techniques we can use to tap into each of these five sage modes.

Shirzad Chamine
Yes, we can try one right now. Let’s practice this together. Hopefully, everybody in our audience is going to do that. So please take two fingertips and gently rub two fingertips against each other with so much attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers. So gently rub two fingertips against each other with such attention that you can feel the fingertip ridges on both fingers.

Now, this was about a 10-second, what we call a PQ rep. And each of these reps, if you had your head under a functional MRI machine, you would have noticed that what we just did ever so slightly quieted the saboteur region of your brain where all your stress and negativity lives and all your saboteurs live, and ever so slightly energized the inner Jedi, the sage part of your brain, but all of these, where you have deeper access to all of these five sage powers that I just told you about.

And so, one 10-second thing doesn’t change your life, but what if you did a lot of it? And what Harvard-affiliated neuroscientists have shown is that, with our body of practice that we show people, within eight weeks of practice, you will have rewired your brain so much that, in MRI imaging, you can see decreased gray matter in the saboteur region of your brain, increased gray matter in the sage region of the brain.

So, you literally are rewiring your brain so you have stronger Jedi and weaker inner Darth Vader’s, weaker saboteurs.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds delightful. And you’re reminding me of some of the studies on mindfulness meditation, I think, share similar-ish kinds of things in terms of there’s a rewiring of the brain and different regions look different. But I think a lot of people would have a much harder time doing the quiet breath meditation than they would feeling the ridges on their fingertips. So, I like having another tool in the tool belt here.

Shirzad Chamine
It’s exactly right. We even had a CFO of a company, a pretty well-known company, he actually taught, he’s a lifelong meditator, he used to teach meditation every weekend in his city and as a hobby.

And as he went through our training, he ended up saying it was life-changing and one of the reasons was, he said, “I’d learned to energize the positive part of my brain when I was meditating with closed eyes and mantra and music in my meditation room, all that stuff. But when I came to work, work was work. Work was stressful. I couldn’t close my eyes. I couldn’t do any of that stuff. So, I just didn’t know how to shift my brain activation where it counted the most, which is in the middle of meeting the challenges of my work.”

And what we have taught people is these 10-second exercises, and I just showed you one, there are many others. I can’t tell you how many CEOs, and I’ve been a CEO coach for many years, how many CEOs are sitting in boardrooms around the world and under the table, they’re gently rubbing their two fingertips against each other to make sure they keep cool and do well on a board meeting so they are very effective.

A vast majority of people who start meditation and mindfulness, a vast majority of them quit. They just don’t know how to sustain it. Nobody who has ever learned these 10-second techniques has told us they can’t do it. They continue doing it because it’s so easy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Shirzad, your fingerprints on the world, your legacy, that’s lovely. Well, lay some more of these on us, these 10-second techniques. I mean, I’m loving it. It’s quick, it’s effective. I can even feel it in myself in terms of, you know, we’re chatting, but there’s a little piece of my brain, which is like, “Oh, shucks, this is getting to the end of the day and there’s still a lot of stuff I got to get done.” You know, just a little bit of that, a little bit of that, you know, stress energy hanging out.

And just doing the fingertip stuff, there’s less of that. It’s like, “Oh, well, I will think about those matters later when I’m done speaking with Shirzad.” So that’s awesome. Let’s hear some more.

Shirzad Chamine
Okay. So, you have 10 beautiful toes, and try to find as many of your toes as you can. You may need to wiggle your toes a little to try to find as many of your toes as you can. So become really aware of your toes. Wiggle them if you need to. Try to find and feel as many of them as you can. You may not find and feel all of them, but as many of them as you can would be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so weird is that some toes really are much easier to find or have awareness of than others.

Shirzad Chamine
I know exactly, right? Some of them hide well.

Pete Mockaitis
Like the big toes are easy-peasy, but those middle guys have some trickiness.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly. Some hide well. But one thing you can do, so you have been listening to our voices right now, so our listeners have been listening to our voices, and now if you become aware of any ambient sounds in the room. So, you’ve been in whatever environment you’ve been in, but listening to our voices.

Now become really aware of all the other sounds that you can hear. So become aware of all the other sounds that you can hear while you’re also, of course, listening to us. And you’ll notice there are some sounds you have not been hearing, even though they have been all around you.

And now this becomes intentional attention. And, once again, it’s energizing the positive region of your brain and quieting the saboteur region of your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that a lot in terms of you’ve given me three exercises, and intentional attention does, indeed, seem to be the thematic link across all three of them, and I guess it’s making sense. As opposed to our inner mental thought spiral of, “Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do about the situation? And this person could be really upset with me for these reasons.”

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we turn the volume down on all of that and turn the volume up on finger ridges or toes or whatnot.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly right. And what you’re doing in all three of them, the reason we don’t use meditation mindfulness language is because who knows what meditation mindfulness is. So, the way we talk about this is for 10 seconds, you just took command of your mind. This is what we are building. This is what we are practicing.

Your mind is a dangerous and crazy place and it’s producing between 10,000 to 60,000 thoughts a day. Depending on which researcher you follow. That’s a lot of craziness because, I mean, think about how many of those thoughts are actually useful. A lot of them are a waste of energy and some of them are quite harmful.

So, the main thing we are doing here is saying, “Your mind is a crazy dangerous place, lots of stuff is happening there that are automatic and not really serving you. And it’s a very critical thing for you to learn how to command your own mind.”

So, when you command your mind to notice your fingertip ridges for 10 seconds, instead of thinking about yesterday and tomorrow, all the stuff that right now is not helping you, you’re becoming a commander of your mind and a commander of your life. And it is a literal muscle. It starts with the prefrontal cortex in the brain and then some other regions of the brain.

You’re actually energizing a part of brain and quieting others. You’re becoming commander of your mind and rewiring your brain to learn to be more and more in command in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Let’s hear some more 10-second exercises.

Shirzad Chamine
This one you can do with people, and so I use this all the time in interaction with people. Remember, these techniques we want to do in the middle of our life rather than when we are in a quiet meditation room.

So, you and I are talking right now, we are seeing each other on video, and so you and I can do this now. As you are looking at me, you have been looking at me, but now pay attention to something you haven’t really noticed in my face, so some real detail you haven’t noticed. Look at me, really look at me, and bring as much of your attention to looking. And in that you’re going to discover details you hadn’t noticed until now.

And as you do that, you are again energizing the positive region of your brain and getting more connected to me, getting more present and connected with me, which means we can have a better interaction. Now notice you can do this in the middle of having a tough conversation with someone. And you can quiet your angry mind or stressed mind by actually really, really looking at some detail in their face. What did you notice, by the way, Pete, that you hadn’t noticed until you started saying this?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I bet you’ve been through this many times, so you won’t be offended by anything I say. Well, I was noticing your beard has some darker portions and some lighter portions.

Shirzad Chamine
Aha. Okay, good.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, whether, what is it, the “Just For Men” or the “Touch of Gray” commercials. The dark says youth and energy, and the light says wisdom and experience. So, you got that going for you.

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, not offended at all. I love it. Awesome. So, you observed something that was…and now as you’re doing it, you were able to still hear me, be connected with me, but you were even more connected because more of your attention was present and connected with me. So, anybody can do this at any time.

And for those who are not in front of somebody to look at, what I would say is, right now, just look at something in front of you, whatever is in front of you, and see details in it that you hadn’t noticed until now. So, whether it’s your phone you’re looking at, your computer screen you’re looking at, the wall you’re looking at, whatever, just really look at some detail you hadn’t noticed until now. And notice what it feels like to be truly looking at things rather than kind of looking at things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s sort of fun about that is the word epiphany seems too strong, but there’s an emotional sense of surprise and novelty of discovery that somehow feels potent.

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah. Pete, I love how much of a lifelong learner you are. I love that you delight in this. So, let’s go further. Take a look at the palm of your hand right now. And so, everybody in the audience, please take a look at the palm of your hand, and look at it as if it’s the first time you’re looking at the palm of your hand.

And begin to notice all of the lines in the palm of your hand, small lines and longer lines, all the ways they cross-connect and cross sections. Notice that the palm of your hand is not of one color, but many, many shades. Just look at all the shades of the lighting and coloration of the palm of your hand. Notice it’s clearly not flat, but it has all sorts of hills and valleys.

And, very slowly, begin to close down the palm of your hand and see how many muscles get involved as you slowly close down the palm of your hand. This is an absolutely exquisite, exquisite, unbelievable, marvelous thing, creation that you’re carrying with you, the palm of your own hand, with endless beauty and fascination, and we just started really looking at it.

And imagine if there is this much more to discover and be fascinated by in the palm of your own hand, what else is there available to you if you really pay attention as you go through your day every day with yourself, with others, with events and life itself?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, what’s really interesting, Shirzad, as I do this is, it is amazing, the nuances of the hand. And then it’s so funny, is that my brain can almost, by autopilot, go into, “It is amazing. That’s probably why the Tesla people have such a hard time making that Tesla robot, that Tesla Optimus robot. I wonder how they’re doing with that? And I mean, some people say they’re just going to take over the world with these Tesla.”

And so, it’s like, I’m just, it’s a totally different vibe, imagining what’s going to happen with the Tesla Optimus robots as compared to looking at your hand. And to the point about 10,000 plus thoughts a day, I think many of those thoughts are just kind of superfluous and they’re a little bit agitated, you know, like, I’m not worried about the robots taking us over, but it’s like ping pong, pinball bouncing all over-y, and that creates a little bit of a – anxiety is a strong word – but less of a calm, settled, centered, present vibe.

Shirzad Chamine
There actually is a bit of anxiety to it because there is no solidity to it, because it’s all over the place, because it is so random and so all over the place. And we kind of, this is the opposite of feeling centered, opposite of grounded, of that stability that comes with a real presence in the thing that you want.

And I noticed, by the way, you had shared with me right before we started, you said one of your saboteurs was the hyperrational. And the hyperrational, and we just experienced your hyperrational, which is the rational mind is a really, really wonderful tool that you have. You have been partially successful because you have a good rational mind, the rational mind is very helpful.

And yet, in the moment where you’re looking at the palm of your hand in search of the beauty and discovery of this magnificent thing in the palm of your hand, the rational mind of, “I wonder what Tesla is doing with this?” is not really helping. It is the wrong time to use the rational mind. It’s just distracting.

And of course, the bigger challenge with the hyperrational is when it comes to relationships and when it comes to conflict, people with a hyperrational too often think, “Okay, we are having a disagreement here. Okay, I understand, here are the three ways we can fix the problem.”

And the hyperrational goes into rational solution creation for issues of conflict with another human being, paying not as much attention to what truly matters in conflict, which is how the other person is feeling, and really having them feel heard and acknowledged and cared for.

And in that, the hyperrational is trying to solve the problem, and the other person feels that they’re not being cared for, heard, and that there is an intellectual arrogance that’s coming across saying, “I have the answers. Let me tell you.” And it’s all unintended, right? We think, “A rational mind is a good thing. Let’s use it,” but it’s not the right tool at all times, and especially not in relationships and conflicts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and that is one of the themes inside each of your saboteur profiles is an overused strength.

Shirzad Chamine
Exactly. So the overused strength in the hyperrational is the rational mind being overused and abused. That’s what makes it a saboteur. Another saboteur you shared with me was your pleaser saboteur, which I share with you. I have that, too.

Now the strength that I can guarantee you, if I hear somebody like you has the pleaser saboteur, I can just tell you what I believe is one of your greatest natural strengths. I believe you were born with the predisposition to be very sensitive and kind and giving and empathic. Those are wonderful, wonderful qualities. And those are some of my natural qualities, too.

When taken too far, and overused and abused, they become the pleaser saboteur. When we give and give and give and have a hard time saying no, having a hard time asking, having a hard time setting boundaries, and have a need to be liked as we are giving and to please others, which, of course, again, it costs us and it costs the relationship. So, the overuse of that empathy strength becomes the pleaser. And we can talk about every saboteur in that context.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, with these 10-second exercises and your eight-week program, you mentioned rep, and so I immediately think about strength training, and there’s all kinds of studies about sets and reps and sessions and for maximizing growth or strength or endurance. And so, I’m curious, what’s sort of the volume, if you will, of reps that really makes an impact in reshaping our brains?

Shirzad Chamine
Yeah, what we have learned is that we need about six weeks of practice. In the book, I write about, you know, we have all heard about 21 days in a row of doing a new thing, begins to build enough neural pathways so that the new thing becomes a little bit more automatic, the old thing begins to take a backseat.

But that’s theoretically correct, but in practice what we find is that most people who start getting into a new practice, they have good days and bad days. So, they usually don’t go 21 days in a row doing the new thing and not doing the old thing. It’s a mix, back and forth. And so, what we find is we need you for six weeks of practice.

And during those six weeks, we need you to do about 10 to 15 minutes a day of these exercises of intercepting your saboteur, energizing your sage brain, and choosing more of a sage response. And then the positive ways of your brain have some fighting chance against the negative side because you’re laying neural pathways, building up muscles.

And this brings up the topic of, you know, we call our work mental fitness. And the reason we call it mental fitness is that we really want people to wake up to the fact that a lie you have probably told yourself all your life is that transformation, significant personal transformation, is mostly about insight, “If I do that, read that next book, do that next workshop, listen to that next podcast, and get the aha, I’m done. I’m transformed. I’m much better.”

But the thing is we all have experienced life-changing books, life-changing workshops, life-changing talks, where we say, “Oh, my God, this was life-changing.” Two months later, we are back to the same old behavior. Why? Because our old habits, which are the saboteur habits, they are automatic habits because they have been repeated enough so that they live in the brain in the form of neural pathways that automatically generates those reactions.

You can’t fight the muscle, and those are neural pathways. I call them the muscles and the mental muscles. So, your saboteurs have mental muscles. You don’t fight the muscles of your saboteurs with insight of your sage. You need to fight the muscle of your saboteur with new muscle of your sage. So, you need to build the muscles of your inner sage, inner Jedi.

And what we find is about a minimum of six weeks, about 10 to 15 minutes of practice for you to begin to feel the automaticity of the sage way of doing things against the saboteurs.

Pete Mockaitis
And are these 10 to 15 contiguous minutes or 10 to 15 interspersed throughout the day?

Shirzad Chamine
No, they can be interspersed. We created, when we found out most people can’t do it on their own because there are different things to do, and most people just can’t quite put it all together. So, we have created an app that a lot of organizations like Hewlett-Packard, Siemens, and others are giving to their employees.

The app guides the daily practice. So, we spend a whole week on doing these 10-second exercises, a whole week on focusing, a couple of weeks on focusing on our top saboteurs, and a few weeks of exercising our sage powers, each of the five sage powers, so that it all builds up into the new pathways. So that program ends up lasting six weeks.

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

Shirzad Chamine
Well, I would love everybody to know that there’s a free saboteur assessment, in five minutes, you can get your saboteur assessment results, see how you self-sabotage, and that’s on PositiveIntelligence.com/assessment. And then if you want to go further, there’s a six-week app-guided program that also is on our website, PositiveIntelligence.com.

And the main thing that I’d love for people to just take out of this is that there’s bad news and good news in the work that we do with you as you get into this, and whether you read the book, or do the saboteur assessment, or do our app-guided program.

The bad news is that, as you get into this, you’ll discover that your saboteurs are far more destructive and damaging to you, to your well-being, and to your performance than you had any clue. That was one of my discoveries, devastating impact. That’s what was happening in the day that I, in the palace coup in my boardroom, my saboteurs were basically destroying my career and they almost destroyed my marriage.

Now the good news is much better than, much stronger than the bad news. The good news is, once you tap into your sage powers, your inner Jedi, you realize you are far more magnificent than you had any clue you are. You really are far more magnificent than you had any clue you are. Your saboteurs have talked you into believing a lot lesser of yourself than you truly are.

So, part of our work is to help you remember who you truly are and who you truly are is far more magnificent than you can remember.

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

Shirzad Chamine
“All that is not given is lost.”

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And a favorite book?

Shirzad Chamine
I think The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle was one that oriented me towards these ways of thinking early on in my practice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a sound bite or a nugget you share that seems to get repeated a lot and retweeted, and folks are quoting back to you often?

Shirzad Chamine
“Take your hand off the hot stove.” And what we mean by that is that the pain is helpful for you for a second, a split second, because if you put your hand on the hot stove and you don’t feel pain, you’ll keep your hand there and it’ll burn to the bone. So, therefore, pain is very good for you.

Similarly, negative emotions are really, really, really helpful for you. Anger, shame, guilt, disappointment, stress, frustration, all these are very helpful to you as an alert signal that says, “Hey buddy, pay attention.” But if you continue feeling those feelings after that alert is delivered, you’re keeping your hand on the hot stove and wondering why life is so hard.

So, take your hand off the hot stove, feel those negative emotions, learn from the alert signal they’re delivering, then begin to do these 10-second exercises. Shift your brain activation so you shift to the positive part of the brain to figure out how to deal with the thing that’s causing you stress, upset, frustration, guilt, shame, whatever. Take your hand off the hot stove.

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

Shirzad Chamine
PositiveIntelligence.com and then PositiveIntelligence.com/assessment for the saboteur assessment. And then you can also, in PositiveIntelligence.com, see our app-guided program where you can actually build and rewire your brain.

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

Shirzad Chamine
You spend every day in some habits that you just assume that they are important for you. They are hygiene habits. You brush your teeth. You brush your teeth, hopefully. Take a shower occasionally. Do physical exercise. There are a lot of things we do, we spend time and effort on. And it is astonishing that we do not spend any concentrated daily practice on mental fitness. We do physical fitness, physical hygiene, but we don’t do mental fitness.

And it’s the big missing, it’s the big thing that we are bringing in. So, I’d love for you to just ask yourself, “How willing are you to actually invest in daily practices that build your mental fitness?” Because from our research, what we are showing is that your mental fitness is foundational to you optimizing, both your well-being and performance and healthy relationships.

Are you willing to invest 10-15 minutes a day? Not just for a day, or for a week, for 6 weeks, but for six years for the rest of your life because that’s what it takes to significantly elevate yourself to a whole new level of mastery and activating your actual potential. That’s what I do every day. It’s in my calendar. I am going to do mental fitness as much as I’m also going to do physical fitness or even these other habits.

So, my challenge to the audience is really look at yourself and say, how much do you want significant shift and transformation? If so, are you willing to build and maintain the mental muscles it takes? Are you willing to commit to mental fitness?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Shirzad, thank you.

Shirzad Chamine
All right, Pete. This has been a pleasure. Wonderful questions. I really enjoyed this.

Oct 30
0

1106: How to Rewrite the Hidden Beliefs that Hold You Back with Muriel Wilkins

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Muriel Wilkins uncovers the hidden assumptions that dramatically shape how you work and live.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to spot when a belief has stopped serving you
  2. The 7 key beliefs that hold you back
  3. The key to reframing your mindset

About Muriel

Muriel M. Wilkins is the founder and CEO of the leadership advisory firm Paravis Partners. She is a sought-after, trusted adviser and executive coach to high-performing C-suite and senior executives who turn to her for help in navigating their most complex challenges with clarity and confidence. She is the coauthor of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence and host of the award-winning podcast Coaching Real Leaders. She holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Learn more at murielwilkins.com.

Resources Mentioned

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Muriel Wilkins Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Muriel, welcome back!

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you. I’m delighted to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m delighted as well. Last time we talked executive presence, and that was very fun. And it looks like your executive presence and star has continued to rise and rise. So, congratulations on everything.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
You got a fresh book here, Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential. That sounds so important. And I would love to hear, for starters, what’s one of the most common beliefs you’re seeing widespread that is limiting a lot of folks’ potential in their careers?

Muriel Wilkins
I think, probably, the one, they’re all equal opportunity, but the one that I see that really halts people in their career is, “I need to be involved,” because it gets them involved in places that they actually don’t need to be involved in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we need to be involved, as in, “I’m reluctant to delegate, let go.” Or, what are the flavors of “I need to be involved”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I mean, it’s this unsatiating, almost compulsion to have to be engaged in all the things. So, it looks like, “I have to be at that meeting,” “I have to be cc’d on all the emails,” “I have to be the one that has the conversation,” “I have to weigh in on that document.” And what it does is, it does a couple of things.

Number one is it keeps you from being able to advance in a way that you need to because the more responsibilities you get, the more you would need to be involved in in order to deal with all the complexities of your job.

And, secondly, it actually creates a clog in the system, meaning it keeps others from being able to develop, because they then end up become habituated by the fact that you’re involved in all the things, so then why should they do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, and I’m thinking of yet another downside there is, I recall I was having chat with a fellow Bain colleague. We were talking about, “Oh, what have you been up to? What are you doing?” And he was looking at all kinds of cool opportunities at buzzy startups that had hefty funding and dozens of employees.

And there was one that he got pretty far in the interview process and he was considering it. And he told me he was leaning towards rejecting the offer because of one of several reasons. The CEO of many dozens of employee companies still wanted to review every email that went out to the users.

And I was really struck by that because it’s like, I’ve lived that myself, but then I have a much smaller team. I managed to let it go a long time ago and life has been so much better.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, look, the thing with a belief like “I need to be involved” is, at some point, it served you, right? That CEO, it probably helped him in some capacity at some point where he was cc’d or maybe he had had an occasion where he was not copied on an email and all hell broke loose as a result of that, or he thinks as a result of that. And, therefore, his mantra then became, “You’ve got to CC me on all the emails.”

You know, I think the point here is that just because it works in one situation doesn’t mean it’s going to work in all situations. And, certainly, from a leadership standpoint, there’s no way you can have the sheer physical capacity to be involved in all the things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us a cool story of someone who had that limiting belief and what they did to evolve beyond it and what, ultimately, happened for them?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking, even as you were sharing the story of that CEO, I’m thinking about a client that I had who, and this is something that I often find, particularly if you’re the founder of an organization or a startup, or you were there from the beginning, even if you’re not the founder, you were one of the early employees, where, quite frankly, it is required that all hands are on deck.

And so, this particular person, she had founded this nonprofit on her own, it was just her. And so, she was used to doing all the things. But then as the nonprofit grew, and again, she really needed to be focused on external fundraising and being motivating staff and thinking strategically and dealing with the board.

I remember one of the conversations we had, she’s like, “But I just find I don’t have time to do all these things.” And I said, “Well, what are you spending time doing?” And she said, “Well, for example, like this morning, I was checking the bathrooms to make sure that there was toilet paper in there.” And I said, “Is that the best use of your time as CEO?”

And it made her really think about it from the perspective of, “Why am I the one doing this?” Not to say that it shouldn’t be done, but that wasn’t where she added the most value. And so, it wasn’t that I was telling her it’s not the best use. I just asked her whether it was the best use.

And so, when she started shifting to “I need to be involved where it’s the best use of my time” it gave her an automatic filter for how should she be prioritizing where she spends her time. And I think that’s what we all need to be doing, is really thinking about it through a filter rather than a universal level of engagement that we need to have in all the things in order to keep things from going wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, now for just our human need to have stories completed, how did that toilet paper get handled in the end?

Muriel Wilkins
She delegated it. And what’s funny is there were people in her organization who wanted to help. But she also, it’s interesting because these beliefs never come from a bad place. She was also very concerned because they were doing a lot of work and they were a service-oriented organization.

She was also concerned about putting more burden, as she put it, on her staff. She did not want to burden them with more. So, she took it upon herself. She’s the one who would do all these things, but they were like, “Look, you’re better off going out and raising money for us because if you don’t do that, you’re the only person who can do that. If you don’t do that, we’re not going to survive as an organization.”

So, these little things, and the toilet paper was just one example, but when you add up all those little micro examples of where she was spending the time, and we started calling them breadcrumbs, right? Like, stop focusing on the breadcrumbs and focus on the loaf, the mana. Then she started getting it, and her staff was more than happy to focus on the breadcrumbs.

And you know what? They felt like they were adding value by doing that. And so, kind of it worked out. So, it required not only a shift in belief in her, but she needed to have some conversations, be clear around what she was delegating and ensuring that her staff was also aligned around those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the rundown of the top seven beliefs that limit us, as well as your approach for addressing them. But before we do it, I’d like to hear, any other surprising, fascinating discoveries you made as you were digging into this research?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so I think there were a couple of things that really struck me, two, in particular. The first is we just talk about beliefs, and what they are. Because when I say the word beliefs, some people are like, “What are you talking about?”

And so, when we think about what a belief is, it really is just an assumption we’re making or a story that you’re telling yourself. Like, are they true? I mean, you came out of consulting, so you know this. I did as well. We make assumptions when we model something or when we put a budget together. But do we know if it’s actually true? We don’t. It’s a hypothesis around what’s going to happen.

And if you put in one thing I learned in consulting was, you put in garbage assumptions to that model, that spreadsheet model, what’s going to come out on the other side is garbage. And so, one of the things that I really loved digging into was the impact of our thoughts and our beliefs on our outcomes.

And there’s been some interesting studies, everything from Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset to Ellen Langer and Alia Crum’s work around the impact of thoughts and beliefs on health outcomes that undeniably show that it’s not just what you do, but it’s what you think about what you do that has a huge impact on the outcomes you have. So that was number one.

I think number two, when I looked across all of my clients, or I looked at 300 of them, to see if there were some commonalities in terms of the types of beliefs that they had and, lo and behold, I did find that there were some commonalities, the one that surprised me the most is the belief of, “If I can do it, so can you.”

And it surprised me, Pete, because that is a mantra that we use, I have used so many times that I thought was like very motivational, very inspirational. And it can be, but it isn’t always. It can actually be quite debilitating and demoralizing and, quite frankly, get in the way of the thing that you’re supposed to do as a leader, which is to also coach and develop others.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I want to hear, when you mentioned huge impact that you’ve seen from the research, can you share with us any sort of eye-popping discoveries or experiments, pieces of research that made you go, “Whoa”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, my favorite, which I write about or summarize, synthesize in the book is the one by Ellen Langer and Alia Crum. And so, they were looking at, and they were at Harvard. But they basically looked at a group of hotel attendants, so the people that you see when you’re in a hotel cleaning the rooms, doing all the things.

If you’ve seen these folks, they’re on their feet all day or they’re pushing things. They’re doing very much physical labor for eight hours a day. And they ask these folks, “Do you believe that the work that you’re doing is exercise? Like, does it equate working out?” And most of them said, “No, we’re just doing our job. It’s not exercise. Exercise happens after this if I get around to it.”

And so, they introduced to them, “What if you just thought about your work as exercise? What if you just considered your work to be exercise?” which is a belief, right? It’s just a different assumption you’re making about your work. And then they tracked what happened. And what they saw that four weeks after introducing this notion, they saw material enough improvement in a bunch of different health metrics in the folks who they had assigned this new belief.

And so, their conclusion was, and that was the only thing that changed, Pete, nothing else. The work didn’t change, the people didn’t change, their uniform didn’t change. That’s the only thing that changed. So, the conclusion was, again, that it’s not the work that they’re doing, that necessarily just drives the outcomes, but it’s what they think, the thinking about that work, what they believe about that work that then also impacted outcomes.

You know, when I read this study, as well as again, the growth mindset study that Carol Dweck has done, where she did almost the same type of thing as it relates to education, I thought, “Well, my goodness, like, why doesn’t this apply from a leadership standpoint?”

And I have experienced in my own work, part of my frustration as an executive coach for the past 22 years is I would help my clients move to action, move to doing something different but they would always come back to the thing that was frustrating them to begin with or the outcomes that they weren’t getting to.

And what I realized is they were changing what they were doing, but they weren’t changing what was driving the behavior, which is the belief or the thought or the assumption or the mindset. But if we could change that or expand on it, I don’t even like to use the word change, it made it much more sustainable in terms of them being able to have new behaviors, new ways of doing things to then make the out more sustainable.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard of this study several times, and whenever it comes up, I just wonder, like, what is the intermediate mechanism by which that is occurring? And so, I can only speculate, and maybe they’ve got better speculations or you know, and you can solve this mystery for me.

But in terms of, if you think about it as exercise, you then do it differently and you actually appreciate, “Oh, my heart rate’s getting up a little bit.” It’s like, “Ooh, I’m going to have a little bit more gusto in the way that I’m moving.” And, thusly, there are physiological impacts of that? Or, what’s that sort of intermediate step?

Muriel Wilkins
Think about it in terms of, you know, if I am watching a scary movie, again, I’m saying scary. If we’re watching the same movie and my belief is, “This is scary,” how does my body respond? My body responds for me, I might sweat, I might go like this and hide my eyes. I might clench my fists and my heart might start pumping fast.

But if you’re looking at the same movie, let’s say Chucky, which was the first movie my husband took me on a date, I would say that was scary for me. He thought it was funny, right? So, what did his body do? His body, his eyes lit up, he was jittery in his seat, he was laughing. Same movie, different response based on what we think about what we’re seeing in front of that screen. So that is my anecdotal way of explaining it.

And I think the same holds true in anything that we do, right? We all might look at a situation and approach a situation, and certainly in the workplace. How we experience any workplace situation, in particular the challenges, is impacted by the way we think about that situation, by what we think about ourselves, about how we think about the other person that’s part of that situation, or what we think about the context.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. I’m thinking about perhaps giving a speech or presentation. Some people say, “I’m so scared. I’m nervous. I’m terrified.” Others say, “I’m so excited. I’m pumped up. This is going to be awesome.” And it just has that whole cascade of downstream effects there.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and, by the way, I’m not a person who sits here and say, “Oh, my gosh, just think it and it will happen.” Like, that’s not what this is all about. I think it’s much more about having alignment, right? If what you want to have happen is to show up as confident in that presentation, or what you want to have happen is the audience leaving feeling like you’re engaging, then you ought to work backwards and say, “If I want to show up as engaging to the audience, how would I need to act in that presentation?”

“How would I need to behave in that presentation? And if that’s the way that I need to behave, then what do I need to think in order to be able to behave that way? Or, how do I need to feel in order to behave that way? And if I need to feel that way, then what do I need to be thinking about the audience, about the presentation, about me, in order to increase the probability that I can actually feel and behave in that way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. So, working backwards there, in terms of my thought or belief leads to my feeling and then my presence, how I’m showing up leads to the impact or transformation. And then as you explore that chain, you could even see, “Well, I need to think or believe that,” I don’t know, “this thing’s really going to work.”

And so then, we’d say, “Well, what are my doubts? Well, why don’t I go investigate those? OH, hey, what do you know? It looks like the odds really are good that this thing is going to work, and that it will naturally flow through.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and it’s not to lie to yourself. It’s also the point that many beliefs can exist at the same time, right? And so, again, going back to the example of the presentation, yeah, I could still say, “Oh, my gosh, like, I might mess up my words.” That certainly could be true. We don’t know if it’s actually going to happen.

And I have this belief that, “If I mess up my words, people are going to think that I don’t know what I’m talking about.” And I can also believe that what I have to say is really interesting and that others will be interested in it. So, which of those two is best going to serve me if my goal is to be engaging in that presentation? The second one.

So, it’s not to say that the first one doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s not helping me right now. So why pick it up, right? It’s like if I’m trying to be healthy and in front of me is a carrot or a bag of potato chips, right? Both are good, and I’m making the choice based on the outcome of I want to be healthy, I’m going to pick up the carrot.

If it’s like, “Muriel, you just want to satiate your taste buds right now,” if that’s the goal, then I might pick up the potato chips. Just make sure that the way you’re thinking about something and the way you’re acting is aligned with the outcomes that you want rather than just based on default or habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you give us the quick, I don’t know, two- three-minute version of the rundown of the seven beliefs you highlight here?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, we already spoke about one, which is “I need to be involved,” which is basically, the way you see it is somebody just wants to be involved in all the things. I think the example of wanting to be copied on everything is a great one, and that’s a telltale sign that that might be there for you.

The second is “I need it done now,” which has a sense of not only wanting completion on all the things, but also urgently. So, there’s almost this, what it leads is what’s known as toxic productivity, which is everything needs to be done at any cost.

The third is “I know I’m right.” It typically shows up as the person who, you often hear them called as they always want to be the smartest person in the room. What’s tricky about that one is those folks actually do have an uncanny ability to know the answer and see around the corner. They’re just doing it in a way that doesn’t serve their goal, which is to also get other folks to align with them.

The fourth is “I can’t make a mistake.” And so, that’s pretty self-evident. It’s this belief that no mistakes are acceptable in any type of way. And it really is grounded in this notion of underlying it all, feeling like, “If I make a mistake, I won’t be able to recover.”

The fifth one is, “If I can do it, so can you,” which is, again, one of those that sounds motivating, but can be quite debilitating. We have, “I can’t say no,” as the sixth one. And then the last one is, “I don’t belong here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so what’s interesting is each of these has many particular flavors, variations, facets. For example, “I can’t say no,” I can imagine it’s sort of like there’s a, “Or, what?” And like the, “Or, what?” it could be totally different for people.

Muriel Wilkins
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, they’ll think I’m not a team player,” or, “I’ll get fired,” or, “I will miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that’ll never come back.” Just for one demonstration, can you give us a feel for the different variants of, say, “I can’t say no”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I think that’s a great nuance that you’ve pointed out, Pete. And I think, in order to understand the variance, because, by the way, you can have this belief and it shows up in varying ways depending on the situation or different even times in your career or your life. But what I think is important to understand is where these beliefs come from, right?

You weren’t born with them, they were learned. And they were learned because it is what got you through something, that got you through to the other side. They actually helped make you successful. A lot of times, in your family of origin or maybe in your schooling or maybe in your community or maybe just out in the world, but now in this particular context, it might not be helping.

Even though they are variants, they all have a commonality, which is, “What is the need that they’re trying to fulfill? What are they trying to make sure that you get?” Fundamentally, under each of these beliefs, we are all trying to get three needs met. The first is the need to feel worthy. The second is the need to feel connected. And the third is the need to feel safe, okay?

We all have these fundamental needs in the workplace, outside the workplace, when we were two years old, and when we are 55 years old, right? So, many of these beliefs come from a place of trying to get these needs met. So, the, “I can’t say no,” for example, well, when you dig down, when I work with my clients and we dig down and say, “Well, why can’t you say no?” They might say like, “Well, I don’t want to disappoint them, right?

Well, what would disappointing them mean? Ultimately, when you feel, you know, I remember my daughter told me once when she was younger, she said, “The worst thing that you could ever tell me.” She was like eight. She said, “The worst thing you could ever tell me is that you’re disappointed in me.” I said, “Really?” I said, “It’s not that I don’t love you.”

She said, “No, no, no. It’s that you’re disappointed in me.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I would feel like you’re literally just, like, turning your back on me,” which basically told her those words meant that she would no longer be, in her eight-year-old mind, would no longer be connected to me, right? And so that was her articulation.

But at the root of “I can’t say no” is a sense that, “If I say no, I will be disconnected from the people who I am trying to do something for, or from the work. So, yes, on the other hand, means that I am connected, right?” And so where might that come from? Maybe at some point in your career, in your life, or whatnot, you learned that saying yes kept the relationship going, kept the connection going.

But does it still serve you? And is it necessarily true, now, universally, that if you say no, it will destroy the connection? And vice versa, as many people find out later in their career, “Even though I’m saying yes to everything and taking all the things on, I still am not maintaining the connection. I’m still not getting the promotion. I’m still getting fired. I’m still the last one here and abandoning myself rather than being able to care for myself and care for the work at the same time.”

So, it’s not that, all of a sudden, I want people to say no, no, no, no, no, no, no all the time. It’s just understanding that that rule that you have in your head that may have served you at some point is not a universal rule. You have to be able to adapt and recognize “When is it helping you, and when is it not?” So, there are times with my clients where I’m like, “Yeah, you can’t say no. This is one you can’t say no to. You got to do it.”

But then there are others who’s like, “Really? What are your other options?” Well, you’ve got yes, you’ve got maybe, you’ve got a stream of other options that you can choose as a response. It doesn’t always have to say yes, be yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that. And it sounds like we’re starting to get into it a little bit, the process, your framework, when you are addressing these pieces. Can you walk us through these steps?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first step is that you have to uncover that there’s actually some place where there’s misalignment. And so, what I tell people and try to short-circuit it and I talk about it in the book is the minute you feel something is off, that’s the only way I can describe it. And that can come from an external cue.

Somebody’s not getting what they want or you didn’t get the promotion or you’re not getting the feedback you want or you’re not, something is off. There’s a gap between what you want, the outcome you want, and what’s actually happening. The audience seems bored. But there are also internal cues, and I would much rather people face the internal cues, because they usually suggest it before the external ones come up.

And the internal cues, you know, I’m pointing at my chest, my heart space here, is my chest tightens. Something feels off. I get like a little tingly. Something feels off. I’m worrying about something, but I don’t even know what I’m worrying about. Something feels off. So, the first question is, or awareness is, “Something doesn’t feel like it’s happening the way I believe it should be happening.”

And then the second question is you have to name what is the belief that might be driving that dissonance, right? So, “What is it that I’m believing?” And this is a simple question, “What is it I’m believing about myself? What is it that I’m believing about the situation? Or, what is it that I’m believing about the people involved or the stakeholders or whatnot that is contributing to me behaving or feeling in this way?” Okay? And so, that’s where the naming happens.

And what I found is that when we got down to it, it typically, at least for my clients, ended up being one of these seven. Those were the top seven. There are certainly others. And so, I’m not suggesting that these are the only seven. It’s that at least it gives you a jump start as to what they might be. Once you can name the belief, then you want to move to, before you move to action, which is, “Okay, well, Muriel, what do I do about it?”

You want to actually unpack it a little bit, and that’s step number two, unpack it. The unpacking is becoming friendly, getting to know that belief, because it’s been around a long time. You better believe it. So, you’ve got to look at it and say, “In what way has it helped me? And in what way is it not helping me? Why do you want to do that?”

Because this is not about getting rid of the belief. Again, it’s just putting it to the side so that when it is helpful to you again, you can pick it up. And the only way you’ll know when to do one or the other is if you become familiar with it. And just asking yourself, “In what moments has it helped me? And in what moments does it not help me?” you are then having more agency and taking control more about what your beliefs are and your thoughts and assumptions are, rather than just, again, looking at them universally.

Once you do that, then you can move to the third step, which is the unblocking. The unblocking has two pieces and it’s very important. The first step is reframing the belief. So, you’ll say, “Okay, well, if that belief’s not helping me, which one would?” And it’s just as a reframing. So, instead of, “I need it done now,” what if it’s, “I need certain things done now,” or, “I need the things strategic, that have strategic value done now,” or, “I need the things that are most important done now”?

Or, we even drop the now, “I need to focus on the things that are important for us to do.” And that little reframing, you can then channel into the last step, which is the actions. If that is my new belief, then how will I approach this situation or this work in front of me or my team or myself, right?

The issue is most people try, because we are so action-biased, most people try to short-circuit the whole process and go straight to, “Oh, there’s a problem? What do I do? What do I do?” And that works, but that’s the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach and it’s not sustainable. We see this happen all the time with people outside of the workplace, with people who try to lose weight, for example.

It’s, “I’m just going to start exercising January 1st.” Well, we all know what happens by Feb. 14, right? Valentine hits and it all goes out the window. Why? Because the action change, but the mindset around relating to exercise, relating to working out, relating to all those things are not sustainable. And so, you go right back to the actions you were doing before because your actions will realign with the way that you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, sticking with that example for a moment, let’s say that we’re faking it till we’re making it in the world of exercise, your diet, health stuff, what are some ways some of these particular beliefs show up? Maybe just walk us through that whole process in which someone is engaged in that but it’s not going to end well, tell us, how might the execution of the three-step framework unfold to land in a happier place?

Muriel Wilkins
I’ll use me as an example. So, I have wanted to build my strength for a while. I’m a cardio person. I have been a long-time runner. Did distance-running for a long time, until my hip gave out on me.

And I thought to myself, I’d been told for years, “Muriel, you need to balance out your cardio with strength.” Okay, I tried. I would say, “Okay, yep, I’m going to start this program.” Went to action, but never, mindset-wise, it was, “No, cardio is where the real value is at. Running is where the value is at.” So, guess what I did most of the time? I ran, and within a couple weeks I would give up my strength training regimen, okay?

Until I recognized that, because of my hip injury, a couple ortho doctors told me, “If you don’t strengthen your hip more and your muscles around it, you’re going to have some serious issues down the line.” Okay, so how do I need to rethink about this? I need to rethink about this not in terms of training for a race, I need to rethink about this in terms of longevity, right?

What do I believe about longevity? Oh, what I believe about longevity is both my cardio and my strength is equally important to contribute to the type of healthy longevity that I want. Reframe, okay? That mindset of training for a race, “Cardio is where it’s at,” was not helping me. Okay, that I realized.

Once I understood where that original mindset came from, which was past the uncover, I could move to unpack. Why was I thinking, why was it helping me all this time? I knew that my success had come from racing, so I wasn’t letting go of that being the belief. I became very clear. I’m not racing anymore. That got me past the second phase.

Third phase, reframe, I now have new ways of thinking about my exercise routine. Okay, now I’m thinking about it differently, I can move to action. And every time I slip up on the strength training, which I still do, I go back and I say, “Okay, how am I thinking about this? Why am I slipping up on the strength training? I’ve got to rethink how I’m framing it.” And I go back to the longevity piece, which helps me continue with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, perhaps we have an eighth major belief there in terms of this isn’t valid. Maybe that’s related to “I don’t belong here.” It’s like, “You know, doing the strength training thing, that’s not really me. I’m more of a cardio person, a racing person, not down with the gym bros grunting and doing huge plates and all that. So, I don’t see the value here.”

But then, when there’s a new belief, indeed, it is transformational. I think I felt similarly, in that having a bodybuilder-like physique, I think, once appealed to me as maybe a 16-year-old. Never really happened. But now that’s just, it doesn’t matter at all in terms of my interest. But when you talk about longevity, I think about Peter Attia, and Outlive, and some of his things.

It really is, “Oh, well, would you like to be able to play with your grandchildren in your seventies and eighties?”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, different outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to being sort of stuck in a chair the whole time, and I’m like, “Well, I would. I would like that.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, you mentioned him, but that is what changed my framing of thinking about this was actually reading his book.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a good one, Outlive.

Muriel Wilkins
And so, it was like, “Yeah, I want a different outcome. So, what do I have to do? I can’t keep thinking about it the same way. I’ve got to change the way I think about it or else I can’t get with this program.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think about beliefs about value can be interesting, in that you may come to the opposite conclusion in terms of, “Hey, you know what? This thing really isn’t worth doing. I could just stop beating myself up and trying to get back on the wagon and just let it go.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here’s the thing, and what really drives me, Pete, like we ought to work every single day or we have work, but work is part of our life, whether we like it or not. And it can be truly challenging. A big part of my career is built on the fact that work is challenging for people. I would be out of a job if they didn’t consider it challenging. And I want to be out of a job. I truly do.

And what I find, though, is that people do not give themselves credit for how much control they actually have about how they experience work. And this might sound very controversial, right. because we tend to say organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like we belong, organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like this, this, and that. And I actually absolutely agree.

I am not absolving any organization or system for making you feel a certain way. They have a responsibility. And you also have a responsibility for yourself when you go into that job or into that workplace. And so, your part of your responsibility is saying, “How am I approaching this? And how am I thinking about it?”

Because, again, what the research has shown is how you think about something does have an impact on how you experience it. And I don’t know about you, but if I know that I actually have half the currency to influence how I experience anything, why in the heck am I going to wait for somebody else to change my experience?

I’m going to at least try to make it 50% better, my part of it. If they don’t want to clean up, and I don’t want to rely on the other person cleaning up their side of the room, let me clean up my side of the room and at least know that I’ve shifted the energy a little bit by cleaning up my side of the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Muriel, could you give us another fun example of someone who worked through this kind of process of examining the belief, starting from sensation, and, in fact, saw just this outcome, a transformation of the experience of work into something much more lovely?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think one that comes up also a lot is the belief of “I know I’m right,” you know? And these are the folks who, quite frankly, they tend to be high achievers. They have been known as being very smart, particularly as they were growing up. They get things very quickly. I suffered from this one, quite frankly, and still have to manage it.

And so, I had a client where he received some feedback. The feedback didn’t say, “Oh, he knows he’s right all the time.” It didn’t say that. What it said is, “He talks over people. He interrupts in meetings. He makes people feel like they’re not smart.” I mean, so the feedback said, “You talk to him and you feel stupid afterwards because of the way that he responds.”

“He did not give a chance for people to come up with their own responses. He would question them in a way that, quite frankly, they didn’t even want to share what they thought out of fear that he was going to sort of come down on them.” And we’ve all experienced those individuals at some point in our life. I will raise my hand and say, unfortunately, I have at times been that individual.

And with my client, even when he got the feedback, he was very like, “It’s wrong. It’s not right. It’s not right.” And it wasn’t till, and I talk about this in the book, like he not only got it from people on his team, he got it from his peers, and that became an issue. And because they didn’t want to work with him, quite frankly, at that point, which was hard to then get the work done, because he needed his peers to get the work done.

And it wasn’t until he saw himself on a Zoom, we had recorded a Zoom meeting that he had been in, and he saw not how he was behaving, he saw how others were responding to how he was behaving, which was again, the interruptions, the constant “Got it, got it, got it, got it.” And, particularly, he saw the look of frustration from his boss, and he valued what his boss thought a lot.

And that’s when he said, “Okay, that’s not the way I want my boss reacting to me.” So that was the beginning, for him the large part was even getting the, like, “Yes, there is dissonance and I want to do something about it.” So, then we were able to name like, “Why do you think she responds that way? When you speak in this way in a meeting, what is going through your head…” that’s the question I ask him, “…when you interrupt, when you talk over people?”

And I remember, he just with exasperation, he’s like, “Because I know what we need to do.” He’s like, “I know what we need to do. I know what the answer is. Why are we spending time talking about this? We’re wasting time.” That was the belief. And he was applying it for everything. And so, for him, the unpacking piece, which is the second stage, came from this place of his whole life he had been valued for being right.

He was a top tier scholar. I’m not going to go into specifics because then he might be identifiable, but like, he was top of the top of the top. But anybody who has done well, particularly at school, and gotten rewarded for it, may suffer from this one. So, he understood that, while it may have served him well at school, or it might have annoyed other students, but he didn’t really care, it wasn’t serving him well in this role that he was in now.

And so then, we reframed it, right? And the reframe was based on, “What’s the outcome that you need to achieve?” And the outcome he needed to achieve was, “It’s not just about getting the task done. I’m now in a position where I also need to get buy-in from my peers, and certainly buy-in from my boss. And so, what would I need to believe? What would need to be my operating assumption and principle in order to show up in a way where I was more collaborative in order to get to that outcome?”

And it was, “My job is not to always give the answer. My job is to help guide people to the answer,” which then led to him being able to listen a little bit more, ask the questions, wait till at least people finish talking. Now, will he ever be known as the warm and fuzzy guy? No.

But was there a marked improvement in terms of how others experienced him? Absolutely. And he was able to then move through some of these projects that he needed to get done with others a little bit more seamlessly than he was in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like a lot about that story with uncover the blocker is there are perhaps many ways to illuminate this above and beyond simply introspection. It’s like here we’ve got some technology and work, a recorded Zoom meeting, “Oh, okay.” And that shows some things that you may not get with looking into the sky with a journal in hand.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s why I think it’s both sort of a mechanism of there are external cues and then there are internal cues. For me, personally, I don’t really care where your cues come from, know. As long as you are aware that, again, the math isn’t math-ing, what you want to have happen is not actually what’s happening, or something’s getting in your way.

And sometimes, again, you know, it’s nice to know about the internals because you can short-circuit that a little bit faster than waiting till you get, you know, so for him, what would have been an internal cue, an internal cue would have been able to read the room, not necessarily waiting for the Zoom. Now what’s interesting in this particular example is that, with practice, he became better at reading the room, right?

And that’s what I’m looking for. It’s not necessarily that you get it right every time. It’s that he got to a point, and that’s what I look for with each one of my clients and I look for, for myself, is the course-correction time taking less time. So, “Am I able to notice?” It’s, was he able to notice in the moment that, “Okay, yeah, I just interrupted for the third time, and that person looks a little exacerbated. Maybe I should switch course right now.”

“Yep, I’m totally anchoring in the ‘I know I’m right.’ I can hear it. Let me reframe so that I can be more collaborative in this meeting if, indeed, that’s my goal.” Because if that’s not your goal, if your goal is to come off as the smartest kid in the room, as the 360 said, then keep doing what you’re doing. We don’t need to do anything differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I’m thinking, when it comes to these reframes, so we move from “I know I’m right” to “My role is to help others find solutions, not to always give them the answers,” I think that, in my experience when making that shift, in the moment it can feel revelatory like an epiphany I’m kind of excited about.

And then, yet over time, it doesn’t really feel as though that is, in fact, the dominant operating model inside of my feelings, nervous system at work. Do you have any pro tips on reinforcing the enlightened reframed such that it’s really sticking and taking root?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, look, I think that what’s very cool about beliefs is that they’re so malleable, right? And so, I actually think that this model works if you are curious. And so, I encourage people to continue to be curious about it because that may not be it. The reframe might not be what’s going to last forever and ever and ever. You may need to reframe that even more.

And so, you want to constantly be asking yourself. The real rule of thumb is really keep being curious about, “What am I thinking in this moment?” And the more that you can keep thinking, or, “What am I thinking as I walk into that meeting? What am I thinking as I go into that conversation? What am I thinking as I’m about to do this presentation?”

And the more you can make that curiosity starting point, the beginning of your planning for anything, the more you will let those beliefs evolve even more so that you can discover, “Oh, that’s not it. Maybe it’s something else,” and that’s okay, right?

The issue is when you just are so attached to that one fundamental belief, one of the seven or whichever other one you’re tied to, that you end up not doing anything differently. You just keep doing the same thing over and over again, which as we know is the definition of insanity if you’re expecting different outcomes.

And so, the whole notion is, if you want to do something different, just being curious about what’s driving that doing. And continue to mold it, continue to, I personally practice this a lot and it comes a little bit more naturally, but it’s taken me years to master. I don’t even think I’ve mastered it, but years to kind of habitually be curious about what I’m thinking in the moment.

And I will be like, “Yep, I got it.” And then three months later, I’ll be like, “Oh, there’s another level to it. It’s not only this, it’s also that. Okay, that’s cool, let me try that one now.” And so, you have fun with it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Muriel, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Muriel Wilkins
I mean, look, I think the main thing is, that I would love for folks to take away is, again, this notion of you have so much more in control than you might give yourself credit for. And true agency is an ability to have a choice.

And one of the areas, and probably the primary area that I believe we all have a choice with is how we think about anything. And so, if you want to have a choice in how you experience anything, start with what’s most in your control, which is your thoughts, your assumptions, and your beliefs.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Well, one of the quotes that inspired this work, and is a favorite quote of mine, that comes from the world of Buddhism is, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And that’s the quote, right? Pain is always going to happen. Challenges are here and they will cause us pain. The goal is not for the challenges to go away. But how we respond to those challenges can either make us feel like we’re suffering or we can have a different experience with them.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Right now, my favorite tool is breathing. It’s, literally, recognizing and applying the fact that I can change how I experience anything by just changing the way I breathe as I’m going through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Muriel Wilkins
My favorite habit is every night texting my kids because they are now off to college, and I text them “Good night” and “Love you” every single night.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with the clients, they retweet you and you’re known for?

Muriel Wilkins
Every now and then we get we go there, and I said, “Listen, I’m not religious, but I’m going to drop some Buddhist knowledge on you, right?” And, yeah, I tell them like, you know, pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And you can just see in their face that they get it.

Again, this whole notion is they have more control around how they experience something. And, particularly, from a leadership position, if you’re in a leadership role, the way that you respond to something has so much impact on everyone else. And so, the ripple effect is real and be a good steward over that.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about all the things that I’m involved in, MurielWilkins.com is the best place to take a look. And I’m on LinkedIn at Muriel Wilkins, and on Instagram @coachmurielwilkins.

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

Muriel Wilkins
My final call to action is be curious about your mindset. Don’t go straight to doing. Take a pause and just be curious about how you’re thinking or what you’re thinking about what you’re about to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, thank you.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you, Pete. Always a pleasure.

Oct 27
0

1105: The Five Critical Roles of Every Winning Team with Mark Murphy

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Mark Murphy shares insights from his research on maximizing team effectiveness.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you don’t want a team of all “team players”
  2. The simple trick for more decisive teams
  3. How to get your team to generate 3X more valuable ideas

About Mark

Mark Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author, Senior Contributor to Forbes, and Founder of Leadership IQ, a research and training firm. His latest book is TEAM PLAYERS: The Five Critical Roles You Need to Build A Winning Team. Mark’s previous bestselling books include: Hiring for Attitude, Hundred Percenters, HARD Goals, Managing Narcissists, Blamers, Dramatics and more. 

Mark leads one of the world’s largest databases of original leadership research, and his work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, and U.S. News & World Report. He’s been a featured guest on programs including CBS News Sunday Morning, ABC’s 20/20, Fox Business News, CNN International and NPR. 

Some of his most well-known research studies include “Why New Hires Fail,” “Are SMART Goals Dumb?,” “Why CEO’s Get Fired,” “High Performers Can Be Less Engaged,” and “Don’t Expect Layoff Survivors to Be Grateful.” Mark has conducted training for The United Nations, Harvard Business School, Microsoft, IBM, MasterCard, Merck, and thousands more.

Resources Mentioned

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Mark Murphy Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome back!

Mark Murphy
Thank you for having me. I’m glad I got invited back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, you know, well, it took seven years. What’s that? It’s almost like a biblical punishment. You were exiled for seven years, Mark. But now…

Mark Murphy
I had to go wander out there for a bit and I made my way back now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about teamwork, team players. And could you maybe kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising, fascinating discovery you’ve made about teams in the seven years since we chatted last?

Mark Murphy
So, the biggest thing, one was not surprising, and that is there are plenty of people that find that the teams they’re on, that they’re forced to sit on every day, aren’t always great uses of their time. But the bigger issue was that, when we started studying this and we asked people, “Listen, is the team you sit on presently, is it actually taking advantage of your talents? Like, do you feel like you get to use your real abilities?”

And two thirds plus of people were like, “No, not really. Like, I’m forced to sit here. I have to go through, I’m part of the group and, you know, that’s good. But I don’t really get to use my strengths. I don’t get to do the thing that I am really well suited to.” And that led to the big kind of aha discovery about teams is that the most successful teams are teams that aren’t focused on trying to make everybody operate the same.

We have this kind of cliche definition of, “What is a team player?” Well, a team player, it’s usually like, they’re kind of outgoing, they’re very friendly, super agreeable, very conscientious, and they have high-end followership, they can get along, all that.

But it turns out that the best teams are more like a rock band, or a symphony orchestra, or an NFL team, or an NBA team. That is, if you look at an NFL team, you got some guys are like 350 pounds, you got others that are 220, some are six foot eight, some are five foot seven, some are really good at throwing a ball, some are good at catching a ball, some are good at pushing people, some are good at running fast.

There’s a weird mix of talents and abilities, and the best teams in business in the real world are ones that assemble sometimes weird seeming groups of people and let everybody do the thing that they’re really good at, rather than trying to stuff us all into a room and go, “We all got to act the same way. It’s all about cohesion. We can never say a cross word.”

Best teams are like, “Nah, no, no, this is, like, I need a center. I need a point guard. I need a forward. I need a shooting guard. I need a bunch of different talents. And y’all don’t have to look the same or act the same or think the same. In fact, it’s better if you don’t.” And that was kind of the big aha moment of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And to your point about high agreeableness, well, we’re going to get there in a moment in terms of the five critical roles, one of them is a trailblazer. And, indeed, they don’t agree so much, and that’s super useful. And I think that’s just great to highlight right off the bat in terms of being a team player does conjure up images of what that’s “supposed to be.”

And I think I’ve even had moments in team conversations where it’s like, “Hmm, this doesn’t quite sound right to me, but I don’t want to cause trouble and I want to be a good team player. So maybe I’ll just keep quiet for now.” And, occasionally that’s the right move and, often, that’s the exact wrong move.

Mark Murphy
We just are releasing a new study next week on teams, and one of the findings was, we asked people, “Have you ever had an idea that you raised to the team and the team rejected out of hand?” And that was like nine out of 10 people. Or, “Have you had an idea that you were afraid to bring up to the group because you were afraid how people were going to react?” And that was, again, like, nine out of 10 people.

And it’s like, “How many brilliant ideas and innovations are we leaving on the table because people in the room were just afraid to say the thing that the emperor has no clothes, or there is a way better, faster way of doing this, or we are heading down a path that is going to waste all of our times?”

And if the idea of having a team is to get the best thinking possible out of all the people in the room, well, what good is that if we have people that are afraid to speak up because we told everybody, “You know, you got to go along to get along”? No. It kind of runs counter to what a team is supposed to be in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we heard some of those messages before when it comes to the benefit or value of diversity is, “Hey, we get to have different people with different experiences and that’s great.” And so that’s why we can see some relationships between, mathematically, in research, associated with diverse teams and better outcomes. But my understanding is that you get none of the benefit of that diversity if folks don’t feel like they can, in fact, speak up and share from their unique different experiences.

Mark Murphy
That’s exactly the thing, is that you can even assemble a great diverse group, and all various kinds of diversity, you can have – racial diversity, gender diversity, cognitive diversity, take your pick. It doesn’t matter. But if there is not an environment where we are actively seeking out the input from those folks, or we are telling everybody, “Listen, this is what it takes to be a team player.”

And again, usually, whenever we use the word team player, we’re usually using it in a pejorative, like, “You need to be more of a team player, and here’s what that means.” And we’re trying to, like, sand off the edges of people. And, well, it’s like, “Listen, sometimes it’s the edges that give us the brilliant insight.”

So, if I’m not making it safe enough for you to actually come into this room and do what you do well, if you don’t get to come in here and use your strengths and leverage them, well, then, I’m not getting any of the advantages of having diversity.

And the other side of it is, one of the reasons that so many people, I mean, and every one of your listeners, I would venture to guess, has, at one point or another, sat on a team where they’re like, “Well, there’s an hour of my life I’m never getting back. And it’s like this is an absolute nightmare.”

And one of the reasons people will sometimes feel like that is, like, “I don’t know what I’m doing here because you’re asking me to either be something I’m not, or you’re ignoring the thing that I am. Like, I have this particular set of skills and talents. Let me use those skills and talents. And if you’re not going to let me use them, then I don’t know why I’m here.”

Pete Mockaitis
A particular set of skills. Shout out to Liam Neeson. Well, yeah, so your book, Team Players: The Five Critical Rules You Need to Build a Winning Team, whenever I hear a sort of a typology, like, the five, I have to grill you a bit, Mark. What is the underlying research that says, in fact, there are five and not nine and not three? And how do we know that there are five and that this is real as opposed to something that Mark slapped together because he’s got to get another book out?

Mark Murphy
Yeah, a great question and a very fair one. So, the way this all came about was we started looking at teams, really effective teams and really ineffective teams, let’s say nicely.

And we started to look at, “Okay, well, what are the functions that actually get fulfilled in this team? Like, is there a task function? Is there a decision-making function? Is there an interpersonal smoothing over function, kind of a diplomacy function. “Is there a brainstorming or an ideation, an innovation kind of function? Is there a tracking function like, know, to-do list, milestones, Gantt charts, that kind of stuff.”

And as we started to dissect the various functions, one thing that quickly became clear was that the best teams are pretty good at making decisions, and we didn’t even care at the moment who was making the decisions, just, “Do decisions get made? Okay, cool. Is there a tracking kind of function on this team? Like, do you have any mechanism for ensuring that to-do’s get met? Do you have any kind of a peacekeeping function? You know, is there anything where, when conflict arises or conversations get a little tense, etc.?”

And so, the first thing was we identified that there are five kinds of rough buckets. Now, you can cut these buckets more finely. At one point, we had these cut into like 13 different functions. And we looked at that and said, “Well, okay, probably half of those are like played by the same people. And so maybe 13 is a little much.”

And so, we threw some, not to go too deep into this, but through some K-means cluster analysis, we kind of distilled this down into five that were notably distinct from each other, kind of buckets of work. And then we started to look at, “Okay, who are the people on the team? And what roles are they actually filling?”

And that’s where we discovered that, most of the time, for example, there’s usually somebody on the team, and a really good team, who is capable of making a tough decision. Maybe the group can decide for themselves, they take a vote, “Poof. No fuss, no muss.” But when the rubber hits the road and there you get a sticking point, is there somebody in the group who’s willing to raise their hand and go, “Wait a minute, okay, we’ve debated this long enough. Here’s the path we’re taking, let’s just go.”

That role was often not the same person that was playing that kind of peacemaker sort of role. Because as you might imagine, to play that tougher decision-maker role is a different kind of personality than the person who is kind of smoothing over ruffled feathers and smoothing over hurt feelings and bringing people back into feeling safe and comfortable in the group. Those were very distinct personality types.

So that’s how we came up with the five. It really wasn’t about the people, initially, as much as it was, “What does a team actually have to do to be successful?” I mean, you can take any kind of team. If you can’t make a decision, hey, it’s not going to be a good team. If you can’t hit a deadline on time, not going to be a good team.

When things get really heated, if you don’t have a way to resolve conflict, team’s not going to work all that well. So that’s the origin of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, tell us a bit more about the subsequent research associated with the outcomes that teams that have these roles see better stuff than teams that don’t.

Mark Murphy
Then, once we had these five roles, and so the five roles are there’s the director, and that’s the person who makes those decisions when necessary. They’re not making every decision, but they’re capable of making that decision. There’s the achiever. This is the person that they don’t necessarily want to be in charge. They’re the person who’s like, “Give me a task. Let me go do some stuff, and I’ll be the worker bee. Okay, cool.”

There’s a stabilizer, and that’s like your to-do list Gantt chart calendar milestone person. Then you have your harmonizer. That’s like your peacekeeper. And then there’s the trailblazer, and that’s the person that, you know, will come up with the crazy innovative ideas, the out-of-the-box, even if it’s sometimes annoying and irritating, but they will shake things up a bit.

Now, when we had those roles, we then went back and started to look at, “Okay, the really effective teams versus the less effective teams.” And what we discovered was, number one, that the best teams, really, really good teams, if you ask somebody, “What’s the best team you’ve ever been on?” start there. And in 97% of those teams, all five roles were filled.

Then ask people, “Okay, well, what’s the worst team that you’re currently sitting on?” Okay, and look at those teams. And what you would find is only about 20% of those teams actually had all five roles filled. They were missing roles.

So, for example, if you think about a team that, when you go, “Hey, can your team, does it actually decide anything? Like, is it capable of just pulling the trigger and making a real decision?” and they say, “No,” well, nine times out of 10, that’s because that team doesn’t have a director. It doesn’t have somebody who is willing to ante up and say, “Even if this is unpopular, I will make that really hard decision.” Every team needs somebody.

Or, if you ask the team, “Hey, do you guys actually hit your deadlines? Like, when a team decides it’s going to do something, do you actually deliver that thing on time?” And people say, “Nah, not really.” Well, it’s usually because you don’t have that person, and every good office has one, it’s the person who keeps the calendar, and is like, “Hey, wait a minute, timeline here. We got a deadline to hit. Like, let’s move this along. Don’t forget the to-dos.” You need that kind of task master.

And when you find these lower-performing teams, the ones that kind of drive us all nuts, what we find is, overwhelmingly, they are missing at least one, sometimes two or three of the roles. And then on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes those teams had too many of one role. If you think about teams where the team is, like, always in a fight over what the decision is going to be and who’s going to get to make the decision, usually, it’s because you got, like, two or three or four directors.

You got like a bunch of people that all think they should be in charge of making the final decision. And then half your team meeting is spent with those people kind of fighting with each other over what it is we’re going to decide. And that becomes every bit as much of a nightmare as a team that can’t make a decision.

That’s basically it. Sometimes you will see in a team, like, “Yeah, we got 10 people who are great at keeping the calendar, but we got, like, nobody actually willing to roll up their sleeves and do the work. We just got 10 people who, you know, want to keep us on track, but nobody actually like doing stuff.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when you mentioned the effective teams and the ineffective teams, what’s the data set?

Mark Murphy
So, this was across, we started with about 1200 teams that we looked at. It has since broadened out to now we’ve got over 100,000 people, and that’s spread across, now I think it’s broken 10,000 various teams. But the initial study, well, the very first pilot study was about 400 teams. Then it went up to about 1200, and then it just started scaling up from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, but like where do you find the teams and assess the performance?

Mark Murphy
So, the teams initially come from either our research or our survey clients or our training clients. And so, we start with pools of people there. So, we’re dealing with organizations, so 95% of them are business organizations. And I say business because some of those are not for profit. So, there’s hospitals, there’s libraries, there’s a few government organizations.

But then the majority are your classic kind of for-profit, but it runs the gamut from organizations that, our initial cutoff, was an organization had to have at least a little over 50 people, and then all the way up to organizations with tens of thousands. And we set that limit, usually in studies like this, initially, because if you have a company with three people or eight people, and that’s like the entirety of the company, there can be a lot of confounding factors when you’re looking at a team.

So, we usually don’t touch the really small companies until later in the process, just because it’s, you never really know exactly what you’re getting because they’re so variable from each other. But then once you have a model, that’s where you can start to get some of the smaller shops.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And so then, how do we know? Part of it, I guess, you just recognize immediately from these descriptions, “Oh, yep, that’s a director. Yep, that’s a stabilizer. Got it.” But how do you recommend we understand and assess the makeup of a team?

Mark Murphy
Simplest, easiest way is at your next team meeting, go, “Hey, folks. Let’s try a little something. Here are these five roles. I want everybody to jot down, ‘What role do you think others would say that I play?’ and we’ll just go around, okay?” So, I’m Mark, I’m going to ask, “Okay, what’s the role that I think others would say that I most typically play on this team?”

“Okay, Jane, what about you? Oh, Pete, what about you? What role would you say people are most likely to say you typically play. Frank?” and we just go around, and we each identify, “Okay, what’s the role that we are probably most typically playing?” That’s one.

Once you have a pretty good sense of that, if you look around the room, and you’re like, “Huh, everybody said that they’re the director. Huh, we might have a problem here.” That’s step one, is just see what kind of distribution of people you actually have.

The second thing then is, based on those descriptions, is go, “Okay, well, what role really feels like it’s one that I would want to play? And maybe I’m not currently playing it, but what’s a role that maybe I would like to try out?” So, if I’m somebody that I am always in the role of stabilizer, I’m the one who is always keeping track of the deadlines and the to-do list and nagging people to get their work in on time, blah blah blah.

And maybe I look at this and I go, “You know what, I would love to just be the achiever. I would love to not have to manage the to-do list for this group, and I would love if somebody would just give me an assignment and let me go make the PowerPoint presentation. Just let me go roll up my sleeves and do some work without having to manage all of the other to-do’s for this group.”

And sometimes what you’ll find is that the role that we’re currently being forced to play isn’t the one that we necessarily really want to play, but we’re, for whatever reason, sometimes there’s just nobody else to do it, but we’re kind of forced into it.

But if you know, “Here’s the role that I’m usually seen as playing. Here’s the role that I most commonly play in the team. And here’s the role that I would really love to play,” it’s not that you’re going to magically be able to instantly do 100% of the role you would love to do, because you might still be necessary in the role you’re doing.

But if you can start to bleed this out a little bit and merge those two and go, “You know, some days, I want to be the stabilizer, but some days, I want to be the achiever. Some days, I want to be the harmonizer. Or, some days, I want to try that trailblazer thing.” Cool. Now you have a way to kind of identify something about the work you’re doing that might be more interesting to you, something that might get you a little more excited to go to this team meeting.

If your team can come together and say, “Listen, let’s give each other a chance to actually make sure, A, all the roles are covered, but, B, if you want to try and do something a little different in this group, okay, cool, try it. And let’s see if we can make it work because, if we can get you doing something that gets you excited, you’re that much more likely to be invested in the group and committed and feel good about the job.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s say we’ve done this good work, we’ve identified the roles where people are doing the roles that light them up, they’re feeling good about it, we’ve got a reasonable balance or mix on the team. Once that’s in play, what are some of the best and worst practices for really rocking and rolling together?

Mark Murphy
So, a couple of things, and these are going to, some of them are a little weird. So, number one, every group needs somebody to make decisions, yes. So, sounds like I’m advocating for some kind of hierarchy. But one of the things we discovered was that, in really good teams, there’s always somebody who makes the decision, but it’s not always the same somebody. And that was kind of the big aha moment.

So, if you think of it like this, you got a basketball team. You have your Hall of Fame, All-Star player. It’s three seconds left in the game. They’ve got the ball, but three defenders converge on them. They’re looking around, and they’re like, “Okay, I could try and shoot it, but there’s three defenders on me. This is going to go terribly.”

And so, they look around and they see that this guy on the other side of the court, who’s a good shooter, but is not a Hall of Fame, not an All-Star. And they pass them the ball, and they’re like, “You know what, you’re in the best position to take this last-second shot. You’re in charge. You take the shot. Because I got three other bodies draped on me. There’s no way, whatever I do, it’s going in. But there’s a chance that you could actually make the shot.”

That’s what we call an adaptive hierarchy. NASA, very famously implemented the idea of adaptive hierarchies. If there’s a rocket ship that is having problems and you got somebody on the team that’s, like, the expert in fuel cells and knows everything about rocket fuel, and they’re like, “Listen, all the rest of us are pretty good at trajectories and telemetry and all the rest, but we’re not the expert in rocket fuel.”

They go, “Okay, well, who should be in charge of decisions about the rocket fuel?” “I don’t know that person over there who’s the expert in rocket fuel. When it comes to fuel related issues, they’re in charge.”

But the thing that is cool, and this is one thing that makes groups really interesting when they’re really clicking, is that it’s not so much everybody gets a turn necessarily, because that’s not the idea. It’s that everybody who is the expert in that particular area, gets to take charge of that particular area they’re expert in.

So, it’s how you get a team that can always make decisions. They have a clear hierarchy, but it doesn’t feel rigid and like some, you know, royal family thing where I always have to bow and genuflect in front of so and so. No, it’s maybe today is my turn to be in charge of making this particular decision, because it’s an area that I’m really good at.

And so, that’s one big thing that you can do as a team that is trying this out for the first time is just go, “Let’s have whoever is most expert at this thing be in charge of making the decision for that thing. And tomorrow it’ll be somebody else. The day after that will be somebody else, but let’s rotate this a bit.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And you also mentioned in the book the research showing that teams generate three times as many valuable ideas when the rules are each thinking independently before coming together. And can you dig into that a little bit and give us an example of that?

Mark Murphy
Yes, it’s, you know, one of the things that every team has tried at one point or another is brainstorming, right? So, you all sit in a room and you just start ideating. There’s no bad ideas and we’re just going to throw some stuff up on the whiteboard and just toss as many ideas out there as you possibly can. Okay, cool.

The problem is that a herding effect starts to take place. And sometimes it’s known as a conformity bias, is that, as people start throwing their ideas up on the wall, it starts to become clear that some of these ideas are more kind of mainstream than other ideas are. And what ends up happening is people start to coalesce around a very narrow set of ideas. And the crazy ones, which might hold your best thinking, kind of get pushed off to the side.

So, what researchers discovered was that you would get much better ideas, when they put people in a room and had them brainstorm, okay, that was level one. But when you told people, “Okay, we’re going to come into the room and we’re going to have a brainstorming session. But before we do that, you think by yourself for 10 minutes, just come up with your own brainstorming ideas for 10 minutes, then we’ll all come into the room together.”

And what they found was that the ideas got better, more innovative, even more profitable and valuable when people took 10 minutes of thinking by themselves before coming into the room to do the “brainstorming” because they were not filtering themselves when they were thinking alone.

And so, the next time you have a team meeting, one great thing to try is tell your group, “Listen, I want everybody to think about this alone. And I want you to come in with your ideas written down.” One reason for making everybody write down their ideas, or type them up, whatever, before coming into the meeting is that they can’t say, “Oh, I didn’t have any more ideas,” because you wrote them down.

So, this way, it really forces everybody to have their crazy, big innovation ideas, whatever, out of the box, and put it down on paper, and then come into the meeting room. Now you know that you are not going to get people who are afraid to speak up. You’re not going to get people that are filtering themselves and holding back their great ideas because they don’t want to seem like a weirdo. You get all those great crazy ideas and that’s where some of the best stuff comes from.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Mark, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention?

Mark Murphy
I think the one other thing to think about is that, and this is just a way of making teams more effective, is going back to something we talked about earlier, Pete, is the, “Listen, what role would you love to play on this team?” I think this one is really important because, one of the things that I found when we were doing this research, is that there are a lot of people who are like, “Listen, I’m kind of quiet. I’m more introverted. I’m not predisposed to love groups necessarily.”

But when we found that even the most introverted of people, when they got to play the role that they were really good at, they’re like, “Yeah, I love groups. This actually isn’t so bad. This isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be at all,” just because they got to do the thing that really mattered to them. And it’s just such a simple thing, asking people, like, “What’s the role you’d like to try out in this group?”

Give it a shot because, if it gives somebody on your team that maybe didn’t love teams, the chance to actually enjoy working on a team, man, it can make all the difference in the world and it’s not that hard to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Murphy
Well, the one that relates to teams, and it’s going to sound weird, Michael Jordan was walking off the court one day after practice in the late ‘90s, one of his assistant coaches, Tex Winters, hollers out to him, “Hey, Michael, there’s no I in team.” And Jordan looks back at him, and goes, “Yeah, but there is in win.”

Now, what Michael meant by that was, “Yeah, you know what? I’m the most important person.” But what he later came to find was that what that really means is that, “I have a role I have to play, but you know what? I got to be willing to pass the ball to the other I.”

So, when he learned to trust Scottie Pippen, when he learned to trust Dennis Rodman, when he learned to trust Steve Kerr, for example, to take the last-second shot, all of a sudden, the idea that there are a bunch of I’s on a team that really do make a team successful, you know what, yeah, they’re not technically an I in team, but there is a me.”

And my whole thing is, listen, find the me’s, allow the me’s on your team to be themselves. And you’re going to have one heck of a higher-performing team.

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

Mark Murphy
So, one that I quote in the book, but it’s just such a classic study, Solomon Asch in the ‘50s did this study, and this speaks to what you were asking me about with brainstorming, for example. So, there’s eight people sitting in a room, and these eight people have to look at a sheet of paper and there are lines drawn on the sheet of paper.

So, like maybe one line is like the length of your thumb, and then another line is like the length of your first finger. So, there’s clearly a big difference in the length of these lines, right? And so, the people in the room, they were all asked like, “Okay, well, which line is longer?” Now, seven of the eight people in the room were actors. Only one of the eight people was the actual subject of the study.

And so, the seven people would go, “Well, the thumb length line, that’s the longer one.” And the eighth guy in the room, or gal, would look and go, “What? Are you nuts? Like, that’s clearly, that’s the shorter line. That’s not the longer line. Like, anybody could see this.” But because the other seven were like, “Nope, that’s the longer line,” they started to doubt themselves, even though their eyes told them crystal clearly, which is the longer line.

Three quarters of the subjects in that study changed their answers at one time or another through the course of the study to conform with the group. Thirty percent of all of the answers, people knowingly gave the wrong answer because they wanted to fit in. That, I think, is such an important study to bear in mind.

And even though it’s 70, what, 75 years old now, it is still as relevant today as it was back then. Because if you really want to get some innovative thinking in your group, and you want a team to perform, the last thing you want is somebody in the room to lie to you just because they don’t want to look, to be the only one who is willing to tell you the truth. That is just absolute death for a team.

So just always kind of think of that, “If seven other people are saying something, how am I going to get that one person to speak up?”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Mark Murphy
The one I love, still, is a book by Erich Fromm and it’s from 1940-41, somewhere in there, called Escape from Freedom.

And the book is basically an exploration about, “Why do, sometimes, people give up their freedom? Why do they not want to make decisions?” And it comes back to a lot of what we’re talking about here, is that sometimes, it can feel lonely to be the only person making this decision.

And while, you know, it’s, again, it’s what, 80-some odd years old now, there’s a lot of great wisdom in it. And while not everything in it is perfect, it does raise the question, I think, for every team leader is, “How am I taking this into account with my group? Am I making it okay for people to make decisions?”

Like, when we talk about adaptive hierarchies and rotating responsibility, all of this is to try and grow people that are more capable of making decisions so that I don’t have to do everything. I want people to have more freedom and autonomy. And to do that, I have to do some of these things.

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

Mark Murphy
So, there are a bunch. So, I’m going to give an AI answer and I’m going to give the either ChatGPT or Claude, but one of the things that we started doing with it was, so we have statisticians on our team that, when we create new studies, we’re running all of our statistics. But we started using ChatGPT and Claude, both of them, to model out different scenarios with our statistics, not just to get another set of eyes and error check it.

So, like when we, you know, “Let’s run the K-means cluster analysis and see how these groups come up.” But we can then run scenarios that, if we were doing it just like in SPSS or R or something, would take weeks. But now we can just throw it in and say, “Okay, here’s the model we developed. Here’s the statistical model. Here’s all of our data. Now, run this scenario this way. Now run it again this way.”

And so, we can model out a hundred different scenarios in a day, where it used to be, if we wanted to model out five different scenarios, it would take two weeks. And I know it’s kind of a weird use case, but one of the things that AI does exceptionally well is it will take an idea you’ve already developed, with data you already have, and allow you to play with, “What would happen if kind…?” of scenarios, “What would happen if these people weren’t in the study? What would happen if we had 10 more months that looked like this?” and just model out and do a little more scenario planning.

So, that’s one of my favorites, it’s a tool everybody has access to. It’s just, I don’t see as many people using it in that way, but it’s such a fun, cool use case for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Mark Murphy
One habit that I do try and maintain, even when I’m traveling, is just 30 minutes of showing up for some kind of exercise. Even if it is nothing more than squats and pushups and sit-ups in my hotel room, it is one habit that does help set the day on a more effective path. And it is sort of like, you know, when you hear retired military folks talk about making the bed.

It’s something over which I do have control and it is something over which I can do pretty much regardless of where I am or what part of the planet I happen to be traveling to. It’s even if it’s just, you know, 15 minutes of some pushups and then some squats and then even not good sit ups, whatever. It’s something. And it’s something you can check the box, and go, “You know what? That’s something done today.”

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

Mark Murphy
If you go to LeadershipIQ.com, there’s a Team Players section on the website. And one thing that I do encourage people to do is there’s a free quiz on there. It’s called, “What kind of team player are you?” Take the quiz and see what comes out. And then, listen, the thing is free, have your team take it, too, and see how you come out. There’s a bunch of different research studies and resources like that, but it literally takes less than five minutes. So, not that hard to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Mark, thank you.

Mark Murphy
Thanks again for having me. Hopefully, it won’t be seven years next time.

Oct 23
0

1104: Exploring the Timeless Principles of Influence through a Christian Lens with Brian Ahearn

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Brian Ahearn shares his strategies for people looking to create ethical and meaningful change–both at work and at home.

You’ll Learn

  1. How modern psychology and the Bible support each other
  2. How to build instant rapport with anyone
  3. The master key to cementing your authority

About Brian

Brian Ahearn is the Chief Influence Officer at Influence PEOPLE. An international trainer and consultant, he specializes in applying the science of influence in everyday situations. He is one of only a dozen individuals in the world who holds the Cialdini Method Certified Trainer designation. 

Brian’s first book, Influence PEOPLE: Powerful Everyday Opportunities to Persuade that are Lasting and Ethical, was named one of the Top 100 Influence Books of All Time by BookAuthority. His LinkedIn courses have been viewed by more than 400,000 people around the world.

Resources Mentioned

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Brian Ahearn Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Brian, welcome back!

Brian Ahearn
It’s great to be back, Pete. Nice to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s good to see you, and you shared earlier that you are now a grandpa.

Brian Ahearn
Yes, it’s so much better than people tell you. They tell you all these great things. The way I would equate it is people can tell you about falling in love. But once you fall in love, it’s so much better than anybody can describe, and grandparenting is the same way.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, I’ve decided to chat about your latest book, Influenced from Above: Where Faith and Influence Meet. Tell us, what’s the story here?

Brian Ahearn
Well, the story is a continuation of the book I wrote called The Influencer: Secrets to Success and Happiness. And it follows that main character, John Andrews, and he’s about 18 months into his retirement and he’s feeling a little empty. He’s had a great life. He’s done really well in business but he’s feeling a little bored, like, “There has to be more to life than just enjoying the fruits of my labor.”

And he, ultimately, gets involved with his church in a community center building project. And he has to begin to straddle the line of not only what helped him succeed in business, but also dealing with a faith-based community. And through his studies and interactions, he begins to see this connection between Cialdini’s principles of influence and biblical tenets.

And so, the story fleshes that out with a lot of different characters and some twists and turns and things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, intriguing. So biblical tenets, well, first of all, let’s address that right up front. For folks who aren’t so much into Christianity, or any faith tradition, do you see value in this book for them as well?

Brian Ahearn
Yes, because so many of the things that are talked about are timeless in terms of, they’ve been around as long as humanity. One example we know about reciprocity, if I do a good turn for you, you feel a sense of obligation to want to do something for me. That’s been around as long as human beings have been around.

Jesus said, “It’s better to give than receive,” and, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” so he was really talking about reciprocity. So, I think that the storyline will help people really see, whether they want to talk about biblical connections or, more generally, spiritual connections, I think that they will see that so many of the things that Cialdini and other social scientists have proven, via research and experiments, that these things have been talked about for thousands of years by very wise people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, then. So, these principles of influence are fantastic, and we’ve chatted about them a couple of times in the show, as well as we had Bob Ciadini himself also speaking to them. So, could you unpack a little bit about some of the extra ancient perspectives on each of them?

Brian Ahearn
To start with, as we were discussing before we jumped on air, what spurred this book on was my daughter’s question. She had seen me present here in Columbus, Ohio many, many years ago. And we had lunch and we had a great discussion about what I had shared. And then she asked this question, she said, “Dad, what I want to know is where’s God in all this? Where does he fit into the psychology that you are teaching people?”

And it was just an off-the-cuff conversation, and that was the genesis for the idea of the book. But one of the things I remember telling her, I said, “Abigail, in business, we may not talk about love. But if we employ this principle of liking the right way, we get pretty close to it. When we’re not looking to get people to like us, just so we can get them to say yes and move our agenda forward, when we instead focus on coming to like the people that we’re with, that’s what changes everything.”

Because, you know, Pete, the more that you see that, “Hey, this guy, Brian, he really does seem to care about me,” that’s what opens you up to whatever I might ask. But, at the same time, because I’m getting to know and like you, I do want what’s best for you. And so, we’ve really gone from transactional to relational in terms of our interaction. And, to me, that’s getting pretty close to love.

Love is about doing what is best for others, even at a sacrifice to yourself. And so, we can get pretty close if we choose to engage this principle of liking the right way. And then it transforms our giving, right? So, when we talk about reciprocity and I do a good turn for you and you feel like you should do something for me, but I’m not just doing something to get you to do something in return.

Because I’ve come to know and like you, now I really want what’s best for Pete. And so, therefore, I’m looking for ways to genuinely help you. And even if it’s not the right thing, there’s grace coming from you because you know that I like you and care for you and that I’m really trying to help you. I just may not understand exactly the best way to do it in that moment, but that’s the kind of thing that transforms the relationship.

And so, our conversation just started going down the line, talking about these different principles and why coming to know and like somebody, in other words, getting close to that love, really can begin to transform how we interact, how we do business, and how we form relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I’d like to go into some depth with each of the six principles there. So, we’ve touched a bit about reciprocity.

Brian Ahearn
We could talk about unity.

Pete Mockaitis
Unity?

Brian Ahearn
Yeah, unity. Unity is one of the relationship building principles. And so, it goes deeper even than the principle of liking.

So, when we know that there’s unity there, in other words, when we have a shared identity or a deep bond, that transcends liking. And the interesting thing about unity is we will do things for people that we’re unitized with, that we might not even do for some of our closest friends. I mean, you take, for example, if somebody needs a kidney, we’re probably going to help a family member first and foremost because we’re genetically wired to help our species go on.

And that is very self-sacrificing to do something like give a kidney to somebody else. You’re not looking for anything in return. But here’s the neat thing about unity is, when I’m helping you, Pete, and we have unity, it’s almost as if I’m helping myself. I mean, when I do things for my grandson, it does wonders for me, right? He is my flesh and blood relative and I will do anything for him. I will make any sacrifices for him.

And that’s the principle of unity, which I think really gets us even closer to love. Because, again, I said earlier, love is self-sacrificial. And another interesting thing about unity is we don’t always even have to like the person. But if we feel that deep sense of shared identity or bond, we are much more likely to do something to try to help that individual.

So now we’ve really gone deep in the relationship aspect, hopefully, starting with liking, but maybe discovering unity. And I think that transforms the relationships that we have on a personal and professional level.

Pete Mockaitis
Can we talk about some of the ways that unity comes about?

Brian Ahearn
Unity, first and foremost, by genetics, our flesh and blood, our family, we are naturally unitized with them. Another great example from my lifetime was my father who served in the Marines.

And one thing he said was, “I still value Marine friendships above all others, even if they weren’t from Vietnam. There’s an invisible bond that joins us forever. If a Marine has a need, others will step in and help. It must be the result of having gone through such terrible times together.”

So, my dad didn’t really know much about the principles that I teach, but he recognized there was this invisible bond, and that word bond is really significant to the point where if a Marine had a need, others step in. It doesn’t matter how well you know them. It doesn’t even matter if you like them, “They are one of us and, therefore, we will do whatever we have to for that individual.”

So, again, from my life that’s the best example that I’ve seen of the principle of unity outside of the family relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that notion is that, in some sort of groups, some folks will experience it and others will not. Like, I’m thinking in terms of, if it’s a faith community, if it’s being an alumnus, alumna, from a university, it’s interesting. Like, sometimes we feel it and other times we don’t. What are the core drivers behind that?

Brian Ahearn
Well, I think the proximity and the closer that you are to people. So, your example of like a university, certain universities have great reputation. They do a really good job of making people who go to those universities feel something special and significant.

Certainly, if you and I went to the same university and graduated in the same class, we would probably feel a deeper sense of unity than if I had gone to school with somebody who graduated 10 years before or 10 years after. We’ll still have it. It may not be as significant because you and I would have gone through the same things at the same time, maybe had the same teachers, remembered the same things that were happening on campus that create an emotional bond for us.

So, yes, there will be times whether it’s organizations or faith-based communities where you’ll have a unity but you can have it even stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. And then how do you think about the principles of spirituality within that?

Brian Ahearn
Well, there’s a verse in the Bible where it says that there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. We are all one in Christ Jesus. So that’s what Christ was pointing his disciples toward, that there was a sense of unity, especially before his crucifixion. He was praying that they would be one as he is one with the Father.

And so, that’s really how faith, I think, comes in. Again, we’re seeing this, thousands of years before anybody was talking about a principle called unity. But people who were extremely wise and connected understood that that was extremely significant. If those disciples were unitized, they were much more likely to be there and support one another in what became for, I think, virtually all of them, except for the Apostle John. It led to their own self-sacrificial deaths.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Now let’s hear some ancient depth and goodness associated with the principles of commitment and consistency.

Brian Ahearn
Well, with commitment, the Bible talks about, “Let your yes be yes and your no be no,” and don’t make vows that you cannot repay. So, again, to a personal consistency in that principle says that we feel an internal psychological pressure, but also external social pressure to be consistent in what we say and what we do.

So, first and foremost, if we are consistent, we generally feel better about ourselves, which is a huge driver. Nobody likes to feel bad about themselves. So, we work very hard to keep our word. But, nonetheless, we need to be taught that. From childhood we are taught about don’t lie and do what you say. And so, we begin to get that sense of how important it is to do what we said we would do.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, as you’re dropping some verses here, I’m forming some connections here. I’m thinking about, “The measure with which you measure will be measured out unto you.” So, we’ve got some sort of honesty, commitment, consistency, as well as reciprocity, it’s like, “Well, if you’re cheating others with bogus measurements, then, likewise, you might expect them to do so,” as well as in the “Our Father” prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” in similar format.

Brian Ahearn
Yeah, so in that case, we have been given something, and that is forgiveness. Now, God doesn’t need us to reciprocate that back toward him, but he encourages us to, then, freely give that to others because it was freely given to us. So, it is engaging reciprocity, but it’s more in the form of a pay-it-forward, “I’ve done this for you. I hope you’ll do this for others who are in need of this.”

And I think when we really start to come to the recognition that we do need forgiveness, then it becomes a lot easier to realize, “Well, other people are like me, and this has benefited me tremendously, this burden kind of taken off my shoulders. I should try to do the same and encourage others by being that kind of forgiving individual.”

And then, again, I am mirroring what Christ was teaching his disciples, “If you don’t forgive, how do you expect your heavenly father to forgive you if you won’t forgive those who’ve trespassed against you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and now perhaps a bigger question is, I think that it’s quite possible for folks to twist, to abuse the word in terms of thinking, “Oh, okay, so Brian says it’s all good according to God himself, to unload, rock and roll, with wild abandon, these influence principles.” What do you think are some of the key checks in terms of being genuinely ethical, moral, loving with the use of these things?

Brian Ahearn
I have an interesting quote in the beginning of the book, where I talk about that I don’t see faith and science as in conflict. I get excited when I see that science confirms what faith has talked about for thousands of years. And the example that I shared was from a book called Sway by Ori and Rom Brafman.

And they were talking about brain imaging studies that showed there were two distinct centers in our brain. One lights up, or is engaged, when we are doing things for an altruistic reason. The other is engaged when we are doing things for a reward. But never do the two things, or the two parts of that brain, engage at the same time.

In other words, you’re either doing it for an altruistic reason or you’re doing it for a reward. And that goes back to something that Jesus said too. He said, “You can’t serve God and mammon,” or money. “You will either love one or love the other. You can’t serve two masters.”

And so, when I read that study, I just thought, “Wow, this is so interesting that we were being encouraged.” And I know people might think, “Well, you know, I can do things to get a little reward. I’m okay with that.” It’s really about what you’re starting with, “Am I trying to truly benefit or help this individual regardless of what may come back to me or what it might cost me?” That’s really probably very close to the altruistic.

But if I’m doing something, like I could be giving a lot of money to a charity, wonderful for the charity, but am I doing it because I so believe in that or I’m doing it for a tax break? And we know a lot of people do things because they want the tax break. Well, you’ve just received your reward.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Or the influence or the cache or the praise, your name on something.

Brian Ahearn
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And then there’s also this notion, I’ve heard similarly with these brain studies, that under certain circumstances, the parts of our brain light up associated with sort of the using of tools and then people can sort of fall into that category, it’s like, “Oh, you are a means to my end.” And then that’s not such a great spot to be in.

Brian Ahearn
Yes, people aren’t tools. I look at them and I say, “They’re children of God, created in the image of God. And so, therefore, I should treat them as such.” And let me be clear about this, too. I am in no way perfect or even great at this. I mean, it is a process that you’re always going through. And sometimes you realize you could have done something differently with somebody.

I think the key to that is to just confess it, like, “Wow, I was really crappy there.” But at least confessing it, you may make a better choice the next time. But in terms of, I think if we engage, going back to liking and/or unity, if we engage it the right way, it starts to shift that individual as a means to an end, “Because I want to get the sale,” or whatever the case may be.

And I will give you an example that, many years ago, I have a client, they’ve been an awesome client, and as I was working with them, the person who’s the VP of sales, said, “Hey, I’m not sure there’s going to be any opportunity the way the economy is.” And I told him, I said, “That’s okay.” I said, “I really like you and I want to make sure we stay in touch.”

And so, we continued to do that. And after our daughter got married three and a half years ago, I sent an email, and said, “Hey, Abigail got married. It was one of the best days of my life so far,” and had a couple pictures. Well, he came back and said, “That is great.” He said, “I just got engaged. Would you come to Germany for our wedding?” I’m like, “Heck, yes. That would be incredible.”

So, Jane and I made our first trip to Central Europe and had a wonderful time. The wedding was incredible. Everything about it was great. So, our friendship got deeper at that point. And there were things that went on during the wedding, too, that I felt like connected us even more deeply.

Later, as we maintained our friendship and I did the natural, “Hey, you guys thinking about kids?” And then he said, “Yeah, but we’re going to have to try in vitro for certain reasons.” And I said, “You know what? Our daughter was born through in vitro.” I mean, now we are unitized because not very many people have gone through that process, but I was able to share with him the highs and lows and the success and the failures, and just be a friend to him.

By the grace of God, they’re pregnant. They’re going to have a little girl in December. But he and I, whether or not I ever do business with his company again, is almost irrelevant because of the connection and the friendship I have. But I also understand this, Pete, that if they have a need, they’ll probably turn to me because he knows I genuinely care about him as a person and I really care about the success of their organization as I’ve gotten to know about it and the individuals there.

So those are the kind of things, I think, that transform business and relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, let’s hear some ancient perspective on authority.

Brian Ahearn
A great one with authority was they said Jesus didn’t speak like the scribes and the Pharisees. He spoke as one with authority. And how often we fall prey to the belief that we have to have positional authority. I mean, it helps if you have the corner office, for sure. But what means a lot more, what we stress when we talk about being an authority is being a trusted expert. Because your expertise and your trust can transcend any role that you have.

And, obviously, that’s what Christ had. He had the trust of the people and he had the expertise with the authority, and he proved that by not only what he was saying, but then he backed it up by doing, right? “Anybody can say, you know, go in peace and be healed. Okay, you don’t think I have the authority to do that? Let me show you I do. Get up and walk.” And the paralytic got up and walked.

So, he is the example. And then the disciples became examples of that too, as many of them did miraculous things in His name.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I’m thinking about, when you think about authority and trust, there are many ways that trust is subtly built and eroded, in terms of your interactions and just sort of the life you live and what people can see from that.

Especially, I think when it costs us something. I think there’s a great degree of moral authority that shows up when people say and do things for a higher good at their own cost or expense. And maybe because it seems somewhat rare, that I just think, “Okay, that person is awesome.”

Like, they have stature in my eyes, they have authority, and there’s sort of a halo effect that goes on, in terms of, I naturally believe the things they are telling me are true and can be relied upon because I have witnessed virtue from this person.

Brian Ahearn
Aristotle, I’ve often used this quote, he said, “Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.” If we lose reputation because we’ve broken trust, it can destroy, I mean, you and I have lived long enough that we’ve seen this, it can destroy a lifetime of work. And so, therefore, we have to be very careful.

We don’t want to act like we’re walking on eggshells, but we have to be very careful about always doing right by people. And I always tell the people that I work with, “It’s not enough to tell the truth. We don’t hide the truth either.”

Because, Pete, if you knew that I was holding something back that was material to your decision-making, and then you made a decision and you would have made a different decision if you’d known that information, you will not be looking at me as a trustworthy person. You’ll be saying, “Brian, why didn’t you bring up this point?”

And for me to say, “Well, Pete, you didn’t ask,” is indefensible if I know that that would materially impact your decision. So, we tell the truth and we never hide the truth. And I think if we have that as a general way that we go through life, we are getting much closer to being that person of integrity that people will willingly trust.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now let’s talk about some social proof.

Brian Ahearn
With social proof, it’s interesting that a lot of the things that are talked about in the Bible are kind of steering you away from social proof because, in following God, you are swimming upstream.

And we know that we can be influenced by other people, what many others are doing or what similar others are doing. And so, a lot of the time, we’re having to actually warn people against that. You know, it says that, “The way to destruction is broad and many are those who find it, but the way to life is narrow, and few are those that find it.”

So, that one’s that we have to be very sensitive to how we use it. And even in today’s day and age, quite often, people use social proof incorrectly. Example, if somebody said, if they were a teacher at a university, and they were to say to students, “You know, I just read a report that says 65% of students will cheat by the time they graduate. If I catch any of you cheating, I’ll have you down in the Dean’s office and get you expelled.”

But what I’ve just done there is I planted a seed, “Two out of every three students cheat at some point in their academic career?” And then, all of a sudden, somebody is stressed. They’ve got a lot of things going on, and, “Well, I’ll just do it this one time.” But I have, inadvertently, set the stage to make it easier for them cognitively to make that decision.

So, it’s a very interesting principle. We have to always utilize it to guide people in a direction that we want them to go. So, if two-thirds of students were cheating, but that same report said, “Cheating is on the decline,” I’m going to talk about the fact that cheating is on the decline, “You know, every year 10% fewer students are cheating,” or something like that, to try to get people thinking like, “Oh, this isn’t something I should try. This isn’t something I might get away with.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, social proof is just in us. We tend to follow the crowd. And so that’s a good caution there, is to highlight that. And then, I guess, in a way, there’s also a little bit of a streak in maybe some personalities that they want to be elite, rare, special, distinguished. And so, I think there may be some personality type. Or, what would you want to call it?

Brian Ahearn
Contrarian?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. For that, a contrarian streak to them, were like, “Oh, well, then.” I think that’s people who like conspiracy theories, for example. I think that’s part of the appeal for them, it’s like, “Ooh, everyone is, the vast majority of people have the completely wrong idea, but I, and a few others, we really know what’s up here.” Although, I guess, in a way, that’s unity over there.

Brian Ahearn
Well, they can be unitized with that small group who believes as they believe, but they are also, in a sense, tapping into scarcity, “Everybody’s doing this, but this is the thing over here.” And, of course, that intrigues us. We are also naturally drawn to something that’s unique and different, rare, maybe not easily available. And so, it just piques our interest and, all of a sudden, you can take a step in that direction.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any other thoughts on scarcity?

Brian Ahearn
With scarcity, that’s replete throughout the Bible too. We’re told to, as long as it is day to work, we don’t know when night is coming. The Apostle Paul talked about the return of Christ, “Nobody knows.” Even Jesus said, “Nobody knows the day or the hour except the Father.” That wasn’t to scare people, but it was to get them to think, “You know what, I don’t want this, whatever, to happen tomorrow and regret that I didn’t take action today.”

And so, it really, I think it’s there to incent us to always be looking to do the right thing, to live godly lives, to do right by others, to love them and things, because tomorrow is not guaranteed for anybody. And one of the worst things that we can do is be on the deathbed and think about all the stuff we didn’t do that we wish we had. So, I think it’s a good way to look at life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, Brian, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention here?

Brian Ahearn
I think if people read the book, they’re going to start to see more deeply these connections, as John Andrews learns about these and has to deal with a faith-based community. It’s motivated differently than a secular community. And he’s dealing with trying to get donations and volunteers. He’s dealing with a city zoning board and the city council and having to also go there.

But in no case does he ever abandon one or the other. He’s always looking to say, “Okay, now that I understand that there seems to be this underpinning of these biblical tenets for these principles that have been so instrumental in my success in my career, how do I marry these two to be a more effective individual, whether I’m dealing with the secular or a faith-based community?”

Because in either case, we still, in large part, our success and happiness rests on getting people to say yes to us. But I hope people will see that we can go to a deeper level, a level that does right by people and allows us to feel really good about ourselves in the midst of that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite book?

Brian Ahearn
Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. And when Bob read the first draft of the book, he loved it. He said, “It’s totally unique.” He said, “I have never read anything that has tried to connect faith-based tenets to my principles.” And that was a huge compliment for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Brian Ahearn
A favorite habit would certainly be working out. Every day, I’m up for 4:00-4:30 and go for a long walk, and then I come in and I work out for about 45 minutes and spend time stretching and try to get all that done by 6:00-6:15. So every day starts with that.

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

Brian Ahearn
First would be LinkedIn. And so, if anybody is finding this interesting, if they start following me or if they reach out to connect, they’re going to see something every day to help them learn a little bit more about how influence can help them in terms of their professional success and personal happiness.

The other would be my website, which is InfluencePeople.biz. There’s just a tremendous amount of information for people to really whet their appetite.

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

Brian Ahearn
Well, I’ll say two things. One is, this isn’t really so much of a challenge, but I do want to make people know that if they order the book, which comes out on October 21st, if they send an email to BookLaunch@InfluencePeople.biz, and they tell me the name of the second chapter, I will send them a free e-version of the book, The Influencer, so the prequel to this book. They’ll get that for free.

As far as what I want them to take away from this, I would hope that it gets people thinking more about these principles beyond just, “How can I get what I want?” I mean, that’s very important. It’s very important to succeed at your job and all the benefits that that can do for, like, college education, vacations, all those things. They’re wonderful. But there’s something that’s more important. And I hope that, having listened to this conversation, they might start thinking more deeply about that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Brian, thank you.

Brian Ahearn
You’re welcome. It’s always a pleasure to talk with you, Pete.

Oct 20
0

1103: The Four Universal Patterns of Winning Innovation with JoAnn Garbin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Former Microsoft leader JoAnn Garbin reveals the patterns and principles behind Microsoft’s biggest innovation wins.

You’ll Learn

  1. What most people overlook about innovation
  2. The secret to getting executives on board
  3. The four patterns responsible for Microsoft’s success

About JoAnn

JoAnn Garbin is a sustainability and technology entrepreneur with a 25-year track record of leading teams “from nothing to something to scale,” creating numerous innovative products and profitable businesses. During her tenure as Director of Innovation in Microsoft’s cloud business, she guided her team in developing billion-dollar opportunities, including the Regenerative Datacenter of the Future. In 2024, she founded Regenerous Labs, a collaboration committed to creating cross-sector transformations. 

JoAnn is an active alumnus of Villanova University, where she studied mechanical engineering and philosophy. Her fresh eyes and thought leadership were instrumental in driving novel insights into The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft.

Resources Mentioned

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JoAnn Garbin Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
JoAnn, welcome!

JoAnn Garbin
Hi, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to talk innovation, and I want to hear your backstory. I understand, one of your earliest tech innovations occurred at a mascot-cooling system company. Tell us the whole tale, please.

JoAnn Garbin
Well, it was my company, a brave 22-year-old that I was, and it was an innovation that came out of being a mascot. And if you, which I’ve heard a rumor that you were a mascot, if you’ve ever been in a mascot suit, you know that it takes about two minutes before you’re completely overheated. And I was a mechanical engineering student, and I was, like, “I can solve this problem.”

So, what turned into a senior project with some friends, then after school, became my first company, and I actually managed to sell a few, which was really cool, including to the Seattle Seahawks, which, full circle, I live in Seattle now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was a mascot way back in, maybe seventh grade, eighth grade. I was the Holy Family Hornet. So, I don’t think I ever got crazy hot because I was mostly at basketball games, inside airconditioned gyms, as opposed to being in a brutally hot outside baseball, football stadium. Whew.

JoAnn Garbin
And you were in seventh grade, and we seem to be able to tolerate anything when we’re kids.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that, too. So, how does the cooling system work?

JoAnn Garbin
It was a passive system, which, today, when I look at the tech we use, so this is late, early ‘90s, we, as students, we reached out to DuPont, and they had just come up with this new fanciful material called wicking material, which is now in every sports garment you wear. And we reached out to this Danish company that had something better than ice, what’s called a phase change material, which is essentially a salt that has a higher capacity to absorb heat.

Phase change materials today are also in everything. Like, you can get a cooling vest for your dog that, from like Chewy or the local pet store, that is essentially what my classmates and I designed in the early ‘90s.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And just because I’m full of curiosity, we’ll get into how it could be more innovative shortly. But a phase change material, so does that mean it changes phase from solid to liquid at a different temperature, or it takes more total energy to pull off the phase change, or both?

JoAnn Garbin
Both. And so, the practical advantages of it, is that if I put ice packs against my skin and then put a mascot suit on, that ice melts in minutes, and now you’re carrying around pockets of water on top of, you know, already having this heavy suit on.

But this one, this salt pack that we found back then, if you put it in the Gatorade cooler on the football bench, so just iced water, essentially, it would refreeze.

And then because it had a higher capacity to absorb heat, you could wear it for two or three times longer than an ice pack before you needed to refreeze it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now I’m thinking about coolers. It sounds like we could probably do a lot better than ice, but I don’t see much stuff, according to America’s Test Kitchen, that freezing packs are performing any better than just normal ice.

JoAnn Garbin
I haven’t done the research since the early ‘90s. But I do know, like, I get meal kits delivered half a dozen meals a week so that I eat, and it comes with non-ice packs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the gel stuff.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah. And the really cool ones are the kind that, once they thaw, they’re biodegradable and non-toxic, so you can just pour them down the sink, so now you don’t have this massive collection of ice packs. We could talk all day about packaging innovation. I’m a total packaging nerd, but I would venture to bet that a lot of those gels are phase change materials.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’re a packaging nerd, I’m a packaging sucker, “Oh. that looks pretty. It must be a great product.” “That’s what they want you to think, Pete. Be a critical thinker.”

JoAnn Garbin
Well, that’s why YETI can charge what they charge.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

JoAnn Garbin
It’s not that dramatically different than a regular cooler. It just has the brand appeal of being a brand of mountaineers, and they use, this is marketing innovation, “How can I make you feel like a mountaineer? I can sell you the same cooler the mountaineer uses.”

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was with my buddy, who is a long-term Nike employee, and we were at the Nike employee store, which is fun because he’s got a big old discount. And I said, “Ooh, I really like this backpack. And it has these grooves in the back. And I wonder if that would facilitate airflow to cool my back down a little when I’m walking on a hot day and I got all that backpack sweat?” And he just said, “Hmm, do you perceive it to?” I was like, “That’s your whole game, isn’t it?”

JoAnn Garbin
That is a big part of it in a lot of products.

Pete Mockaitis
“Do you perceive it to?” Okay. Well, we’re talking more broadly and, hopefully, actionably about innovation. And, boy, you’ve spent decades directing innovation and teaching it and consulting on it. So, can you share with us, for starters, what’s one of the most surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made in your career about how innovation happens?

JoAnn Garbin
This is something that pops up every time I start a company, I join a company, I have a crazy idea and I start executing, but it’s really shown through in the book case studies, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft Dean Carignan and I, we studied all these cases across Microsoft history.

And, time and again, we go into innovation discovery thinking it’s that lightning strike. It’s that moment of genius where the dots just connect, that’s innovation. It’s totally not. It is the 99.9% of the sweat and effort that comes after that. That is the biggest thing that comes up again and again throughout innovation, that doesn’t surprise me so much anymore, but I think it does surprise people because we just get, again, perception is everything.

We get sold the story that it’s the genius idea, or the lightning bolt, but it’s actually execution. So, Dean and I set out to write a book on how to innovate. And one of the major themes that came out of it is, it’s all about execution.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what is that, was that Edison, the famous quotation, that, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”?

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, execution is where it’s at, and understood. Well, then tell us, what are some of the key places that folks go wrong when they’re executing, “Ooh, we got a cool idea. Let’s go make it happen”? What are some of the common pitfalls?

JoAnn Garbin
There are so many missteps to be made. And then there’s just bad luck, bad timing, bad environment. But if we look at the things we can control, one of the hardest things for the person with the insight, or the idea, to accept is that it won’t be so obvious to everyone else.

Just because you have connected the dots and are so psyched about this doesn’t mean your boss will be, your coworkers will be, your vendors or suppliers will be. And you have to recognize that it does take all of those people to bring something into the world. There’s a great quote in the book by the head of the developer division at Microsoft, Julia Elgluisen. And she says, “If your idea hasn’t made it into the world and isn’t changing someone’s life, it’s not innovation. It’s just a cool idea.”

So, when you frame it that way and realize just how many people it takes, the very first thing you have to do is get them excited about the big vision. Once you do that, and that’s, like, that’s not engineering, that’s storytelling, that’s, you know, passion, that’s meeting people where they’re at and connecting into what wakes them up in the morning, and gets them out of bed, not what gets you out of bed.

So, there’s a whole mechanism and process and tools for doing that. Marketers know this. This is how they get us to buy the YETI cooler. You got to tap into that skillset very early on so that you get the people you need on side with you. And then you got to give them a path forward. You can’t keep people bought in for the long run on a hope and a prayer, right?

You have to lay down stepping stones, little wins, quick value creation, things that return investment to the company right away, but are in the direction of your big idea so that you can point to it and say, “Look at what we just did. Isn’t that great? We’re on our way.” And then you do the next one. And those stepping stones give you the confidence, and your teammates the confidence, that you might actually get to that horizon point you laid out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And talking about that marketing skillset, it seems that many of the top luminaries, visionaries, billionaires, at the heads of tech companies that are super famous, that seems to be one of the top things they do, is that the storytelling and the framing of their thing. And I’m thinking about the TV series, “Silicon Valley,” and it’s almost sort of like a joke. It’s like, “And we’re changing the world.”

And it’s like, “Okay. Well, you know, it’s a website and people post their pictures and stuff.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re changing the world to be more connected.” And so, it sounds lofty. And yet, at the same time, this storytelling, this framing, it seems to do the trick for investors and for users and for customers to hop on board.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, it’s how we’ve communicated since the beginning of humanity. We’ve told stories, and there’s plenty of science and research to support it. Actually, one of my friends just has a new book out called Primal Intelligence, by Angus Fletcher.

And he’s a neuroscientist, and what he calls a professor of story-thinking, and he breaks down why we respond so strongly to stories, and how to construct stories to get people bought in and moving along with you, whether that’s external marketing or internal rallying for the troops and innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us any top tips or stories about stories that really got the job done?

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, one of the favorite examples is the original Nike “Just Do It” commercial. So, if you remember, it was an octogenarian, an 80-year-old marathon runner. And when the commercial starts, they zoom in and he’s running across the Golden Gate Bridge, and he’s shirtless and he’s got this big tattoo on, but he’s this older man and you’re already like, “What is even happening here?”

But you’re brought right into the middle of the action, and then they back up and they explain, “Here is this 80-year-old marathon runner who runs 17 miles a day, but he didn’t start running until he was 70. Just do it.” And now your brain is going, “Oh, what do I want to just do? What’s my future? How do I get there? If he can run 17 miles a day at 80, I can do it, too.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. It is, and primal, I think, is the word. It goes beyond an intellectual understanding of, “Ah, yes it’s possible even for someone who was elderly to embark upon ambitious endeavors.” It’s more of a, “Aargh, yeah. Let’s get after it.”

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah. So, Angus knows I love his book, so highly recommend diving into storytelling, story-thinking and all the tools around it.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. Thank you. Well, so could you share with us, perhaps the big idea in your book, The Insider’s Guide to Innovation at Microsoft?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes, of course. Dean and I set out, we’re both innovators at Microsoft. I was leading the data center of the future program in our cloud business. And my background is really as a repeat entrepreneur, figuring out a problem I want to solve, building a team, going out and trying to solve it.

So, I came into Microsoft, this big organization, I’m like, “How the heck does innovation happen here? I’m in an innovation role and nobody can tell me how it happens here for real.” So, I sought out Dean, we got to know each other. And as we started trading what we joke are war stories about innovation, because it’s often a rebel cause or a battle, we started seeing that we had a lot more in common than different.

So that set us on this path of there must be common principles and tools and processes and insights that just cut across industry, time, and business model, right? So, we set out to talk to as many innovators from past and present Microsoft as we could. The company just turned 50, so there was just this massive history of stuff we could dig into.

And we came out, you know, that was our hypothesis, “We’re going to uncover these commonalities.” So that’s what we set out for, and we were very pleased that it showed to be true. We ended up finding four big patterns of innovation.

And we broke it down into everyday things you do, things you do over the years to be continuously and adaptively innovative, how you innovate with everyone, which goes back to that storytelling, and then everything beyond technology, because, too often, we think about the lightbulb and we don’t think about the marketing and the pricing and the supply chain, and all of those things matter.

So, within those four patterns, we identify a set of tools and a way to put them into use together to go from what we call nothing to something to scale.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us the one-minute version of what are each of these four big patterns, one minute-ish each. No pressure.

JoAnn Garbin
So, no, no, no, I’ve read the book a few times. Everyday stuff is building up habits. So, you’ll hear this from coaches and leaders alike in all walks of life – musicians, artists, professional sports player. Anybody that has become a master of their craft, they will talk about the habits that they form and that they practice every day, so that what they’re doing isn’t something they have to write a checklist to do or think about doing. It’s just how they function.

So, the first pattern of every day is, “How do you do that as an individual? But also, how do you build that habit-building cycle into your organization?” Because it’s one thing for you to be doing discovery by design as an individual. It’s another thing if you have your entire company doing discovery by design. Or, another one is double-loop learning, where you don’t just iterate on the solution to whatever problem you’re solving, but you iterate on the assumptions that you’ve made about the solution. So, there’s a whole toolbox just to that.

Over the years is, “Great. You have all these habits now, and you have all these ideas.” But if you’ve paid attention at all, disruption comes all the time. So, the idea that you’ve set out five years ago is either dead or dying right now. It’s just not going to be what you can run your company on. So, we spend a whole chapter talking about that pattern of continuous innovation.

It’s the theme of the cover of the book, which looks like an infinity. And we talk about both how to stay on that curve and keep going around and around so that you, like Microsoft, can say you’re 50 years old and have done it a few times. But we also talk about how you get kicked off the curb and you end up in the very deep pool of companies and great ideas that came, died, and disappeared.

Then we have innovating with everyone. And I think, Dean and I talk about this. This is probably the most important of the four because it takes so many people to bring something into reality. And that’s recognizing that change is hard, that most people are not pioneers or cliff divers or adrenaline junkies, that want to be the first one out on the big wave or whatever.

So, you’ve got this whole group of people in your company, you’ve got to figure out what moves them and how to speak to them in their terms, and how to connect with them and bring them into your idea so that it’s their idea too.

And then, finally, is the last one, we have this predisposition to think that innovation is technology, but there’s lots of books beyond ours that talk about all the innovations that have happened throughout history. Most of the value has been created by everything upstream and downstream of the innovation. A simple example, Uber or Lyft, these rideshare companies.

They didn’t create new cars, new scooters, new bicycles. They created a new business model in the sharing economy and how to connect people to the mode of transportation that they need. That’s not technology. Like, their applications aren’t all that wild. It was thinking through the problem from a different angle. There are all these aspects to innovation, and that fourth chapter goes into that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s perhaps zoom into a typical professional, mid-level at a mid-size company, not necessarily a tech giant, and they would like more cool, innovative stuff to be happening more often. Do you have any top do’s and don’ts you’d suggest for right away today?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. First thing is you have to find your tribe. You’ve got to find other people looking to fix something that you think needs fixing. There is a lot you can do. You got to make time for learning and exposing yourself to what other companies are doing and the new science or tech or marketing. That you can do on your own.

But to really innovate, you’ve got to find other people that want to do it too, because that’s where the magic happens. Right now, it’s Hack Week at Microsoft. So, 70,000 plus Microsoft people are coming together in Hackathon to go from idea to prototype in one week. That started way back before Satya was CEO. He’s the CEO that brought Hackathon into being.

But before he existed, a bunch of people that just felt like the company wasn’t innovating enough at their level, at that mid-level, it was all like big guys coming up with ideas and passing it down the chain for execution, this group started what has now become the garage, but they called it a speakeasy.

And they would just get together and they would brainstorm and they would prototype and they would try things and they would bring other people in and tap into everybody’s skills to propose solutions to problems they saw every day. Again, practice, right? So, they started innovating by innovating. So, find a problem you want to solve, find some friends that want to solve it too and just start trying to solve it.

But then there’s the other side of it. No matter if you’re in anything other than a solo company, you’ve got to get buy-in from leadership. And every single case study, we’ve studied everything I’ve ever done in my career and Dean’s career, you have to have the executive champion. Especially, the bigger the initiative, the more important that becomes.

So, if you’re going to do the speakeasy in your organization, only push that rock up a mountain so far before you find your executive champion who can pull it to the top, because, otherwise, it gets a bit exhausting to keep pushing against what everybody else is looking to the leadership for what’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now in your book, you have many case studies. Could you share, which story do you think is perhaps the most illustrative and full of actionable wisdom for everyday folks looking to be awesome at their jobs? And can we hear that tale?

JoAnn Garbin
Everybody loves the Xbox story. The Xbox story is one of innovating culture. And what’s really cool about that one is that, at the time, this little team was challenged with creating gaming at Microsoft, actually, two teams were spun up to do it and one won out. That was the Bill Gates-Steve Balmer way is put people head-to-head and see who wins. But it was a productivity company. It was SQL Server.

It’s cubicles and, you know, pocket protectors and it’s not the thrill and the excitement of a gaming company. So, this group of people, from the very outset, had to overcome a cultural disconnect with the rest of the company. And they’ve had to do that four more times, if not more, since then, because of all the industries we deal with, gaming has changed the most and fastest. It’s always on the cutting edge of tech. It’s always using the fastest processors and doing the most incredible things.

And so, this little group of folks, back in the day, they first had a challenge, the perceived, things like Bill Gates saying, “I want this to obviously run on Windows. Like, our gaming platform is going to be a Windows platform.” And this group of people saying to Bill Gates, “Hmm, no, it can’t run on Windows. Windows is too bloated and slow. Nobody will want to play our games.”

So, those types of challenges are just so fascinating that you see in practice how having that tight-knit group of people that are passionate and productive in solving the problem can convince somebody like Bill Gates to invest in them.

One of my favorite pieces is, in the early days, they had this role, this middle management role called the business unit manager. And that person owned…

Pete Mockaitis
The BUMs, if you will.

JoAnn Garbin
The BUMs. I love that it was called the BUMs. And they had profit and loss control, right? Like, so each one of them had their own little fiefdom, their own little business. And Robbie Bach, who was the head of Gaming at that point, looked at it and said, “They’re all preserving their own fiefdom. They’re not working together because they want their P&L to look the best, get the biggest bonus, etc.”

So, he blew it up, and he said, “We’re going to have one P&L, the Gaming P&L.” And they got rid of the BUMs. And that changed everything at a critical moment for the organization to be able to come together and innovate cohesively, moving forward, without the inner competition between the teams.

And they didn’t know. It was an experiment. They didn’t know if those senior leaders, used to having P&L responsibility, would be okay with it being taken away from them. And once they put it out there and they did the storytelling and the reasons why, and they brought people along, all but one BUM transitioned, one left.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I also recall, I saw a YouTube video about the history of the Xbox, and I have all sorts of fun little memories associated with, I don’t know why, I guess it really left an impression, when Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on stage with Bill Gates, and they presented the first Xbox.

But I heard that, in one of the meetings, a transformational moment, to the point about storytelling and talking about what people really, really value and what moves them, is I heard, and tell me the inside scoop here, that Bill Gates was kind of on the fence, like, “Ah, okay, maybe, yeah.”

And then someone said, “What about Sony?” And then that was pretty transformational in terms of it’s like, “Well, we can’t let Sony just take this. Let’s go. Yeah, we got to do it.” And so, just like that. Can you share about that?

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. So, if you remember the old Microsoft mission statement, it was “A personal computer in every home and office.” Well, they were doing great with the work, and they were doing great at home, to a certain extent, you know, PCs were leading the way. However, you have Sony, all of a sudden, and they own the gaming console, the TV, the radio, like, all of a sudden, the living room is starting to be Sony’s world.

And what Bill and Steve Balmer heard from the team was, “All right, if you don’t want to do this for the opportunity, how about fear? Sony owns the living room. How long is it going to take them to move into the home office?” And that little nugget, that little insight was enough, I’m sure among a few other things, to get them over the hurdle, and say, “Oh, that’s an existential threat.”

And we actually saw that come up in other case studies as well, like the Bing case study. I love the Bing team. I am their biggest fan after I heard their story, just blown away by what they were able to do for the company that nobody even knows about. But one of the biggest things that answered a question that I long had is, “Why does Bing exist? Like, if Google owns 90% of search, pre-AI, why does Microsoft keep investing in Bing?”

But it was for the same reason they started Gaming. Google, owning all of search with no competition biting at their heels, that’s a bad thing for everybody. So, Microsoft has stayed in to just be a thorn in the side of Google for all these years, chewing away half a percent of the market share at a time, so that Google couldn’t just say, “Oh, well, we won search. Let us go win productivity and let us go win these other markets that are the Microsoft bread and butter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s interesting. The notion of winning dominance, influence, power, it’s a theme or a force or a motivator, I guess it’s primal, it’s emotional and present within some of the leadership there at Microsoft. And then I guess another theme is the being able to just jettison the old stuff that wasn’t working.

Because my understanding now, in the world of gaming, like Microsoft, as far as I know, is winning big with, like, the Game Pass and the monthly subscription. And part of that was they have chilled out a lot on the notion of, “We have to have these exclusive titles because we have to have them by the Xbox because they want the coolest games that are only available on Xbox.”

And now it’s shifted a bit to, “Yeah, we kind of don’t care what device you’re bringing to the table. We would just love for you to have a subscription to all these games, whether you’re playing them on an iPad or a TV or an Xbox or anything.” And it seems to be financially working out quite well.

JoAnn Garbin
Yes. And again, this is business model innovation, right? This isn’t technology. It’s actually decreasing the emphasis on the tech itself, because consoles, there’s only so many you can sell. There’s only so much diffusion of that tech out into the world.

And as Phil says in the book, Phil Spencer, the CEO of Gaming, “When you have 3 billion gamers, is there one device or one business model that is going to be affordable and enjoyable to everyone? No.” And, in fact, most games to this day are played on PC or laptops and mobile, not consoles.

So, it takes a lot of really good innovation discipline to look at your prized thing, like, in this case, a console, and say, “You got us here. You got us to a hundred million players, or maybe even 500 million players, but you’re not going to get us to three billion players. So, how do we get those three billion?”

And flipping those questions around, and it’s not, “How do we get more people to play our games, or play our games on our consoles?” It’s, “How do we get into the hands of three billion players?” Well, let them play games anywhere. Let them play any game. Let them play games with their friends that aren’t on the same technologies.

So, when you turn the problem around and really focus on how to win the gamer, not win the console war, it changes what you bring to market.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, JoAnn, tell me, any final quick tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

JoAnn Garbin
I’m going to steal from another friend who I think is brilliant, Michael Gervais. Michael Gervais has a show called Finding Mastery, and he’s the former advisor to the Seattle Seahawks, a theme that keeps coming up. And he’s a sports psychologist for high performance.

And again, we can learn a lot, looking at professional athletes because they’re at the top of their field. And it’s about breaking it down. Like, if you have an intention or a purpose, maybe your life purpose, that’s overwhelming. But if you can take that life purpose or intention and bring it back to, “What’s my purpose today?” and then live into that, “Tomorrow, what’s my purpose? Today, live into that.” And then gradually build that up into a weekly habit, monthly habit, annual habit.

This is the same thing we see in the innovation world of, “If my first instinct becomes curiosity, not assumption, ask more questions, don’t try to answer things right away, I’m going to be a better innovator because that’s just habit.”

So, I would say take whatever big thing you’re trying to do, bring it back down to those stepping stones, or what Michael calls the thin slices, and just start stacking them and make progress. And then congratulate yourself on the progress that you’re making, because that matters. You need to own up to what you do, both good and bad.

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

JoAnn Garbin
So, this is not a famous quote unless you happen to be in Goju-ryu karate. But the rules of the dojo that I practiced in with my oldest brother when we were teenagers and into college. They’ve really become guiding principles for me in pretty much everything I do. “Everyone works. Nothing is free. All start at the bottom.”

But those middle three, I see them again and again. And it just reminds me, when I’m not the best at something, I’m like, “Everybody starts at the bottom.” You got to do the practice, do the work, move up. “Everyone works.” You don’t age out of doing the work. You don’t get promoted up above the work. Everyone works and, “Nothing is free.” There’s always a tradeoff. There’s always a cost. You have to determine whether it’s one that’s suitable for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

JoAnn Garbin
My favorite tool is the question. I love, like, if I’m stuck on anything, I get a couple people together and we throw a hundred questions at it, and I never have walked out without some forward progress.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s beautiful. We had Hal Gregerson talk about question-storming and how transformative that can be to unblock things. So, it’s cool.

JoAnn Garbin
It’s one of my favorite practices. I talk about it in the book, and I’ve taken the class with Hal.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really love and quote back to you often?

JoAnn Garbin
It’s, “Say it ugly.” So, this is a mantra my teams use to remind ourselves that there’s no ego, there’s no holding back, no toes are going to get stepped on. Say it ugly. Put it on the table. We’ll pretty it up together. Because if you keep it stuck in your head, it’s not doing anybody any good. So just get it out quick and often.

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

JoAnn Garbin
We’re everywhere at this point, except TikTok, haven’t really.

Pete Mockaitis
You do some dances, get them worked up, some choreography.

JoAnn Garbin
Yeah, pull out the old mascot-ing moves. LinkedIn is our favorite platform, not just because Microsoft owns it, but because we are predominantly a business conversation. So, Dean and I are both on LinkedIn. The book is on LinkedIn and you can follow us there.

But we also have our website, InnovationAtMicrosoft.com, and we have a free Insiders Group where we share articles and new bonus chapters for free in the book. And we intend to keep it free forevermore. So, if you just want a place to go and continuously learn about innovation and meet other innovators, we would love to see you there.

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

JoAnn Garbin
Be honest with yourself. That’s the final call to action. Taking in all these things about building habits and thin slices and stepping stones, like really wake up every day and be honest with yourself about what brings you joy. And if you don’t have it right now, start laying those stepping stones down toward it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. JoAnn, thank you.

JoAnn Garbin
Thank you. Really appreciate you having us on.