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Sep 17
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606: How to Learn Faster so Robots Can’t Steal Your Job with Edward Hess

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Edward Hess says: "If you want to stay relevant in the workplace going forward... you've got to be able to do tasks that technology can't do."

Edward Hess discusses how to stay relevant in the digital age via hyperlearning.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you need to rethink the way you work 
  2. The secret to achieving inner peace 
  3. How to redefine your ego 

 

About Edward

Edward Hess is a Professor of Business Administration, Batten Fellow and Batten Executive-in-Residence at the Darden Graduate School of Business. He has spent twenty years in the business world as a Senior Executive and has spent the last 18 years in academia. He is the author of 13 books and over 140 articles and 60 Darden Case studies. His work has appeared in over 400 global media outlets including Fortune magazine, Forbes, Fast Company, and The Washington Post. 

His recent books and research has focused on “Human Excellence in the Digital Age: A New Way of Being; A New Way of Working; Humanizing the Workplace; and Hyper-Learning.” 

 

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Edward Hess Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ed, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Edward Hess
Well, thank you very much for having me. It’s wonderful being with you. I really admire what you do with your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I admire what you do here and I’m excited to talk about hyper-learning which is something I think I’m into and so are the listeners. First, can you tell us, what is that and maybe open with a fun story about a professional doing hyper-learning to see some cool results?

Edward Hess
Well, hyper-learning is the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn at a continuous high-level rate. It’s the skill that’s needed in the digital age where the digital age is going to, basically, technology is going to transform how we live and how we work, and the technology is going to produce so much new data and new knowledge so fast that basically whatever we think we know, and we probably don’t know what we think we know, but even if we did know what we think we know, the shelf life of that is going to be estimated to be two to three years.

So, we basically, have to become very, very adaptive. We basically have to be a continuous lifelong hyper-learner, and the big challenge to that is that we’re not wired to be a hyper-learner. And we’ll talk about that, but a good story, well, I’ve worked with a lot of people, a lot of companies that are embracing this. And I think one of the best stories was a company who got their leadership team together, and I spent a week with them, and we went into the details. I’m very granular on behaviors, as you know, and so we got into, “How do you be a hyper-learner and what’s the highest level of learning?” It means you’ve got to be a great listener. It means you’ve got to be a great collaborator. It means you’ve got to basically calm of what’s going on in your mind and body. So, we focused a day on how to listen.

And this guy was a senior executive and was sort of quiet. He was a technology guy. Quiet, but he was engaged. In the next morning, one of the practices of this company is have a check-in every morning, “Where are you? How are things fitting?” So, everyone went around the table and came to this guy’s time, and he said, “Well, can I share something personal?” “Of course. Of course.” He said, “I called home last night and I had the reflective listening checklist that Ed gave me with me and I put it by the phone, and I talked to my wife and talked to my kids, and the conversation kept going on and I kept looking at the checklist. And, really, it was sort of amazing. We talked like an hour and a half.” And he said, “That’s not usual.” And everyone said, “Oh, that’s good. That’s good.”

He says, “Well, my wife called me back after she put the kids together, and this is what she said. She says, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing at that meeting, but keep doing it because that was the best conversation you’ve had with me and our kids in a long time because you really listened.’” And the guy broke down crying in the meeting. That’s a wonderful story about how, if you will, changing one’s behavior so you can really be present and listen with a closed mind which is necessary to learn. Not only can it impact you in the workplace, but impact you in the home place.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful to kick us off, and I want to talk about, indeed, how was that done. I love your first chapter, which is “Achieving Inner Peace.” And we’re just getting started after that with a subsequent chapter. So, that is a key roadblock for great listening. So, yeah, how do we pull that off, first of all?

Edward Hess
Well, I think, if I can, let me lead into it this way. I think that people have to go and embrace hyper-learning come up with their own why, “Why should I be a hyper-leaner?” and that’s pretty easy. If you want to stay relevant in the workplace going forward, to have meaningful work, you’ve got to be able to basically do tasks that technology can’t do. So, everybody sort of knows what that is. The higher-level thinking, higher-level emotional engagement, etc., and so we can figure out the why.

But then the question comes down to, “Why do I need to change anything?” And this is the thing that’s the hardest for people to basically accept. And, basically, we’re all suboptimal learners. We are wired for efficiency, all right? We are wired for speed, right? We basically go out in the world and we process information which confirms what we already believe. We go into the world wired to confirm what we believe, to affirm our egos, and to basically validate our stories of how the world works. We basically see what we believe. That’s a scientific fact.

So, if you think about it, if everything is changing, new data, new knowledge is coming, new ways of doing things, and we’re going in the world looking for confirmation, we’re not going with an open mind, we’re not going to explore, wow! What are we going to do inside of ourselves to help us rewire? So, instead of seeking confirmation and affirmation and cohesiveness, instead of being a reflective thinker, if you will, as you know Daniel Kahneman called as lazy thinker, instead of being that, being an active, engaged thinker, what can we do to basically help us be that way? And it all begins with inner peace. And I finally got there. I’m sure you were wondering, “When is he going to get to inner peace?”

But inner peace is the answer or the pathway to beginning to take ownership of what’s going on inside of us, to take ownership of it. Ownership of our mind. Ownership of our emotions. Ownership of our behaviors. Not to be a reflexive reactive, so reflexive and reactive. And inner peace, I define it, if you will, as this state of inner stillness or calmness that enables you to go out into the world and embrace the world with your most non-judgmental fearless open mind with a lack of self-absorption.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds great. I’d love some more of that. How do I do it?

Edward Hess
Well, inner peace has four blocks: quiet ego, quiet mind, quiet body, and positive emotional state. And it all starts out with the quiet ego and the quiet mind. And how do we do that? And the science is pretty compelling that the best way to start on this journey is mindfulness meditation. All right? And then as you advance to add, if you will, loving kindness, meditation or gratitude meditation.

It also quiets your mind. It allows us to basically learn, “We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. And there’s not an automatic link between our emotions and our behaviors.” I can remember early on, and understand I wasn’t born with inner peace, and it took me a long time to get to inner peace, okay? So, I’ve been a work in progress for decades. But I could remember in younger age, my wife and I were having a, I’d just say, a heated discussion, and she interrupted me, and she says, “Excuse me, do you understand that there’s not…because you feel emotional, you don’t have to behave in that way? Do you understand that your emotions are not hardwired into behaviors?” And I looked at her, and I said, “No, I didn’t know that.” And she says, “Well, I think you need to work on it because you have a choice.” And she was so right.

And so, inner peace is taking ownership and managing what’s going on. We have a choice. We are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. So, how do you do it? I’d say start with meditation. That’s the best way to get there, and you’ve got to engage in daily practices: gratitude; visualization of how you want to behave; being very granular on coming up with “How do I want to go into the world? How do I want to behave today? How do I want to think? How do I want to listen?”

And the model is inner peace is the foundation. Then you need a hyper-learning mindset, the way to go and approach the world, then you’ve got to look at how you behave. And the book is really, the book plus a workbook, it’s an embedded workbook with lots of reflection times, with questions, and lots of workshops with deliverables. In fact, if people buy the book and they come to my website, the publisher will give everybody a free 140-page hyper-learning journal where you can take all the stuff, so it’s very action-oriented.

And so, there’s a whole chapter on hyper-learning behaviors, and there’s a diagnostic, and you would take…Pete, you’d take the diagnostic, the hyper-learning behaviors diagnostic, and grade yourself, and you would see, “Where am I the weakest?” And then you see how the behaviors fit into a format and to a pyramid, and you’d say, “What’s the building block I need to work on?” And the two building blocks that most people have, most males have to work on are quiet ego, and the second building block that everybody sort of has to work on is listening. Okay. Well, how do I listen?

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, just before we get in there, when you talk about mindfulness practice here, are you just talking about you sitting quietly at a relaxed and alert posture and focusing on your breath and returning your thoughts to your breath as they go elsewhere? Or what specifically are you thinking when you say mindfulness practice?

Edward Hess
Mindfulness meditation, yes. Mindfulness meditation, basically, focusing on your breathing, and, as you’re saying, when the thought comes into your mind, just let it go, don’t engage with it, and then take yourself back to focusing on your meeting. You can focus on your breath, you can focus on a body part, okay? Something that you’re basically, you bring yourself back to. So, mindfulness meditation, you can focus, if you wanted, on doing a meditation, a gratitude meditation, in effect, visualizing people that have helped you, etc. in expressing gratitude to them, or gratitude for people that are in your life that you’re thankful for. And then when your mind sort of wanders, you come back to that. But the key one is mindfulness meditation, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s say we’re doing that, it’s great, we’re on our way…

Edward Hess
And I would recommend highly, when you do your mindfulness meditation, to also, at the same time, do deep breathing practices. And you can either do the coherent breathing practice, which comes out of Columbia University, or you can use, if you will, some people may not want to, but the Navy has got some good deep-breathing practices that, basically, you calm yourself, and then you basically do your breathing. But you basically try to get your breathing where you can breathe in very deeply and breathe out very slowly, and the number of breaths you take per minute. And the goal is to get to where you can basically breathe comfortably and get down to two breaths per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
So, two full inhales and outhales.

Edward Hess
That’s right, in a minute, okay? And five is good, five is very good. But if you work on it, yeah, it takes a year basically.

Pete Mockaitis
I was going to ask about sort of like the dosage or time. So, that, I’m sure, it varies quite a lot but, hey, inner peace, mindfulness meditation, how much do we got to do and for how long till we get there?

Edward Hess
Well, it’s sort of like this, becoming a hyper-learner is like becoming a world-class athlete, or a world-class painter, or a world-class dancer. You got to work at it every day. There is no easy pathway to transforming us once we get to the age we’re at. And so, you start out with meditation, two minutes, you try and do it two minutes a day, and it’s hard, but you keep working at it. The book is based on daily practices, which you do rigorously every day, and then there are some practices that you sort of alternate.

But if you want to succeed on this journey, and many people have, and it is hard to express the power of what we’re talking about. It’s life-changing. It’s life-changing because you have this peace and you’re just not reactive. You’re able to sense things. Your thinking improves so much. You’re not so emotionally reactive. You can become a better collaborator, all of these things, but it’s going to be an everyday practice.

In companies that I worked with, I worked with some public companies. I can’t say their names, where every day before every meeting, they do a two-, three-minute, up to a five-minute meditation. In one company, worldwide, it’s a company that has blue-collar, white-collar, etc. workers, the first thing, every day, worldwide, there’s a 15-minute silence. And you can meditate, or you can think about the people in your life that you love, or you can give thanks to whoever you want to give thanks to, but it’s embedded. It has to be embedded in your life and embedded in the workplace to work.

And, yes, it takes time, but I do it with…some of my MBA students get into this, and they reach out years later. I just had one reached out. This was four years ago. He reached out and was just saying, “I just want you to know I’m still meditating like you said every morning.” And he said, “It is just unbelievable.” He says, “I’m so much more effective at work, a family life. This stuff is magic.” So, we’re talking about if you want to…we’re fixing to go into an era that is going to be as disruptive for us or even greater than the industrial revolution was for our ancestors.

In fact, I believe the era we’re going into where technology is going to take us, this is going to be every analogous to our ancestors long time ago who had to leave, if you will, the jungles of Africa because of, basically, mother nature, and earthquakes, etc. and actually go out into the fields, the savannahs. Our primate ancestors had to leave the jungles and go into the fields. The good news is the fields had big animals so there was lots you could eat. The bad news is the big animals were fast and strong and could eat our ancestors. They had to learn an entire new way of living in order to, if you will, not become extinct.

To some extent, that’s where we are. In order to basically have meaningful work and meaningful relationships and a meaningful life going forward, because automation is going to invade all of professions. Degrees are not going to protect people anymore. Nobody knows but very smart people say that people coming out of college today probably have six different careers, five or six different careers. We will have to continually be an adaptive human being. You don’t get that way being raised the way we were in our culture, survival of the fittest, and you don’t get that way by basically being wired the way we are.

So, the answer is, no, this is not easy. It takes self-discipline and practice but it’s not magical. It’s not hard. All you need to do, I mean, really and truly, if you spent, in the beginning, if you spent two or three minutes, I believe it’s very important to work up my daily intentions. My daily intention is my list of how I want to be today, how I want to behave today, and, “Do you want to be kind? Do you want to be caring? Do you want to be open-minded? Do I want to slow down once I feel my body going faster and faster? Do I want to, before I go into a meeting, take four or five deep breaths?” Whatever it is, you read those every morning, you visualize yourself doing it, and you go out. And then at night, you come back and you grade yourself, “How did I do? Oh, wait a minute, I forgot to do this in this meeting.” Okay, write this down.

Same thing with your meditation. If you start out at two minutes, then you go to three minutes, then you go to five minutes. It varies so much per person, but you can get to 20 minutes within, say, two months. And if you did 20 to 30 minutes a day the rest of your life, you’d be in good shape. You don’t have to do four hours a day like the Dalai Lama. Twenty to thirty minutes a day you’d be in good shape. If you really want to take it to a higher level, you do it in the morning, and you also do it in the evening, and you do a different type of meditation, either the gratitude meditation or the heart meditation.

And the other aspects of it are basically you get to be very behavioral. What behaviors, in order to be a hyper-learner, do you need to excel at? Well, you need to have a quiet ego because you need not to be defensive. We’re working on that with meditation. But what does that mean? Well, I got to be a good listener. Well, how does a good listener do that? A good listener is totally quiet when you’re speaking. He or she is not making up their answers. They’re not thinking about the next meeting. They’re not thinking about the last meeting. They are totally silent, listening to what you’re saying, fully, fully present. Well, that takes a while to get there. So, how do you do that?

Well, the first thing is keep your devices away from you. We have a way. I’m going to sit at the meeting, and both my hands are going to be on the table or I’m going to be sitting in this way. And you start figuring out, “How am I going to concentrate on what that person is saying?” And your mind is going to wander. Bring it back, that’s the meditation training. So, I’m fully, fully present. I call it the three R…the goal is 3RP: really, really, really be present.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, really, really, really be present.

Edward Hess
Are you having fun? Hey, you having fun, man? Huh? Are you having fun with this? I’m serious. How does it sound?

Pete Mockaitis
Very much, I am. I didn’t if you were demonstrating listening or if you’re asking me, Pete Mockaitis, real time. Yeah, I’m quite fascinated so I want to hear. So, being really, really, really present, you’ve said that listening conversation checklist was game-changing for that gentleman in the session. What are the things on this list that we should be doing?

Edward Hess
Well, this is from memory. One, don’t multitask. Two, make eye contact. Three, calm what’s going on, calm yourself. If you’re thinking about something else, take deep breaths, calm yourself. Smile at the person talking, and they’ll smile back at you. That basically generates positive emotions. When there’s positive emotions between people, you’re more likely to learn. When things come into your mind, if you start making up your answer, immediately try to turn back to listening. When your mind starts to wander, recognize it, go back, listen.

Very important. When the person stops talking, do not advocate or state what you believe. Ask a question. If you hold yourself to asking questions, that’s going to help you listen because you want to ask questions for two reasons. To make sure you understand what the person was saying so that when you respond, your response has a higher probability of being effective. But the other thing is, the most important thing, as we go into this digital age is understanding the concept of otherness. No one can excel at thinking in ways the technology can think. No one can excel in basically higher-order emotional engagement by themselves. We need others. We need others.

And we need others, a special kind of others. Others that trust us and that we trust. And trust comes from people feeling cared about. And the number one way that a person feels cared about is when you show that you have listened by asking good questions, when you say that “I want to make sure I understand you,” it says, “I care about you, I respect you. I respect you as a distinct human being.” And then you can have a conversation, if you will, if you disagree or you don’t disagree, why, but that conversation should be data-based and respectful.

The workplace is going to change in this area. If you work in a workplace that is a survival of the fittest, highly-competitive workplace, well, that organization is going to become extinct because you can’t optimize collective intelligence and people leaning together at their optimal level in teams in a very competitive workplace. I tell people, “Listen to learn not to confirm.”

And so, you go through this process. It’s a whole approach that, “Okay, wait a minute. I’ve got to learn how to think differently. Instead of seeking confirmation, I got to seek novelty and exploration and discovery. I got to actively go look for disconfirming information to test what I think.” How many people when they believe something go out and look for disconfirming information? Not a lot. I got to basically defer judgment instead of “yes, but” “yes, and.” I got to embrace differences and try to make meaning of those differences because, again, we process a very small amount of the stimuli that can come through our body from the world, and no one can process…it’s like less than 0.1%.

And so, in the digital age, we’ve got to be able to excel at not knowing and knowing how to learn. We’ve got to excel at going into the unknown and figuring things out. And that happens best with other people because they will see things that we don’t see. And so, a whole new way of working and a new way of being is what this book is about. How do you go out there with that new way of being? How do you bring your better self, work on your best self? How do I come to the table, to the meeting, to be off to Zoom, to whatever? How do I bring that best self here and be the most open I can be in order to learn but also to be a good teammate showing respect, and respecting the human dignity of the people that I’m working with, and understanding I’m not competing with them?”

The biggest competition in the digital age is Ed Hess, not Pete, not you, Pete, I got to compete. If I do my work on myself, I’ll be fine, and I know that I need you also, and I’ll help you work on yourself just like you help me work on it. No more is it Ed versus Pete. No more is it a zero-sum game. It all comes down to collective intelligence.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I love a lot of what you’re saying here in terms of, okay, so we start with the inner peace and the mindfulness, and we’re doing great listening and asking questions, and seeking dis-confirmatory evidence, and being curious and exploratory, and focusing on other people, and having sort of the multi-people intelligence enable the hyper-learning as opposed to digging deep on speed reading or memory tricks, the focus is on the human dimensions.

And so, I’m curious, so we’ve got “Chapter 8: Having High-Quality, Making Meaning Conversations.” So, we’ve already got a couple pro tips for the listening. Are there any sort of key questions or things that we should do in order to engage in these conversations that facilitate hyper-learning?

Edward Hess
Yes. So, let’s go back to the bases. First, we have the “come to the meeting with the right intentions about the meeting.” We have to come into the meeting as best we can with a quiet ego, a quiet mind, a calm body, not be stressful, and a positive emotional state. The highest levels of learning are enabled by a positive emotional environment.

The workplace people are going to need is, my good friend Amy Edmondson, psychological safety is a requirement. So, you got to ask yourself, “Okay, and if these not people that I work with all the time, how do I behave in such a way that Pete trusts me? Because psychological safety is built upon trust. I trust you’ll do me no harm. I trust that I can speak up, so it comes down.” And in the book, there’s workshops as to “If I want to basically engage in a caring manner with someone else, how do I behave that way?”

The book is very practical, “How do I have to behave so you care about me? How do I have to behave so you trust me? What would I do?” And when I do my work in this, I have teams of people that work together and they do exercises, such as “What does a person have to do for you to trust them?” And then you do the opposite, “If a person does X, how will that basically hurt trust?” And people have a conversation. So, they’re having a conversation, what caring means to them. How will they feel cared about? When would they trust somebody? And they’re learning from each other. And then they’re asking each other, “Okay, now how can I improve my behaviors? How can Jane improve her behaviors?”

Making meaning conversation is when people come together to learn from each other to basically make meaning of words which, in the workplace, we all take for granted. And so, for any conversation to make meaning together, you have to do what? You have to truly try to understand the other person’s point of view in a non-judgmental manner. You have to actually put yourself in their shoes. Then you have to evaluate their data, and they’ll evaluate your data. But the goal is to come to the best answer. And it sounds I know a little, I don’t know, soft. But you know what?

Pete Mockaitis
I think it’s dead-on. I mean, Annie Duke, a professional poker player, talked about this.

Edward Hess
It is soft. And, basically, if you want to go out ten years from now and say, “What’s going to be the most important human skill or what’s going to be the thing that we add to the world that technology doesn’t add?” It’s going to be emotions, positive emotions. It’s going to be emotional engagement. Emotions are going to have to come into the workplace big time, and that’s going to challenge a lot of organizations, a lot of people, because people are going to have to be very cognizant of setting the right emotional environment. But also very important, cognitive or working on being emotionally the type of person that people want to help and want to collaborate, because I keep coming back to the words collective intelligence.

Collective intelligence is going to be the difference between winning and losing in the business world going forward for organizations. And that means it’s not any one person. It’s a group. So, am I the type of person that people are going to want to help? Do I want to be the type of person that people are going to help? Then I got to get down and I got to think about, “Okay, how do I come across? Am I consumed with myself?” And you learn real fast that in order to be your best self, you have to become selfless, and you have to define your ego in a different way.

Most of us, and that’s the concept of new smart in the book, most of us raised in the education system, and basically up to about age eight or ten, young kids are hyper-learners. They have no fears. If you remember how you learned how to ride a bicycle. Somebody may be holding, it may have wheels, but someone helps you on, or you get on, they say, “Move your feet,” and you fall off. What did you do as a kid? Most kids, somebody may cry, somebody may not, but it doesn’t matter. They get up, they dust themselves off, and they get on it again. And they keep getting on it till they move that bicycle a little bit. They basically have the courage to go into the unknown, they have the resilience to bounce back, and that courage is to figure out how to make this work. Well, that’s what we’re going to have to excel at doing.

But about eight to ten, it starts getting schooled out of us, and we all get focused on grades, all on grades. And I‘m sure you made the highest grades in your class, but in order to make the highest grades in your class, what did you have to do? You had to make the fewest mistakes. So, we were raised to avoid mistakes. We were raised on being smart, and our egos started being identified with smart. And once we identified, and the older we get, with being smart, and we go up in the hierarchy in companies, we think we know things. We’re smart, we got the big office, and we’re very protective of our ego, and the fact that we don’t want to be wrong. And we’ll argue to Timbuktu on anything.

Well, that’s a pathway to basically failure because, in the world we’re going into, the change in the philosophy, we need to redefine our ego from that definition of smart to new smart. And new smart has five principles, but I’ll just share one. The number one principle, I’m defined not by what I know or how much I know, but by the quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating. I just changed the definition from a “how much” and a “what” to the quality of my thinking, listening, relating, and collaborating.

And if people take that approach, it makes it far easier to be an effective collaborator. It makes it far easier to build caring, trusting relationships, which are caring, trusting relationships are the condition precedent to the highest levels of making meaning together. You can’t make meaning together unless you trust each other, and you believe that the other person is not going to harm you, or use your mistakes against you, or ridicule you to the boss, or whatever.

And so, what this really means is all the political gains in business is going to basically go out the door. Basically, you got to take all that stuff, you get a giant trash bag, and dump it all in, tie it up, very, very tight, don’t put it in the dumpster. Actually, take it to the trash place and watch it shredded.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a powerful note there. And, yeah, I’d love to hear now if you could share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Edward Hess
I think so much of it goes back to the golden rule. I think the other thing, I think what’s so important, and I’m paraphrasing here, we have to accept the fact that no one, and this is from professor Barbara Fredrickson, no one achieves excellence by themselves. That, to me, is very powerful.

I think the other powerful quote that I keep in mind now is from Daniel Kahneman who predicted, I think it was in the summer of July 2019, that by 2030, there will be no cognitive function that a computer will not be able to do better than a human being. And the reason that’s such a powerful quote, it basically alerts all of us that we’re going to have to develop skills that are different than most of the skills that we’ve been developing in the past. And all of those skills are going to be the soft skills because the human part is going to be the part that becomes so very important in society.

And so, I think that I’m old enough that back when everybody served in the military, the quote, “Leaders eat last.” “Always take care of your team before you take care of yourself,” I think all of those are still valid. Leaders eat last. You don’t go to the head of the line. And some of the best leaders that I’ve ever had the privilege of working with were the most humble people who basically were other-centric.

Herb Kelleher with Southwest Air, Horst Schulze of Ritz-Carlton, the senior leadership team back when I was working with them at UPS, and Mr. Casey at UPS, it’s recognizing the human dignity of the people you work with, and that people are not just a cog in the machine. I think the other thing is that the industrial revolution model of humans being machines doing the same thing over and over again, technology is going to do all that type of work, and we basically have to get out of this machine mindset, and we need to basically figure out how we’re going to create the environment where people can flourish and have meaningful work and meaningful relationships that raises the big challenges for big companies that are basically focused on a model that’s command and control.

You cannot command and control somebody that thinks at their highest levels. I cannot say, “Pete, I command and control and direct you to be innovative. I command and control and direct you to be creative. I command and control you to think clearly.” That stuff doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. And so, for your viewers, and you’ve got a wonderful viewing group, the thing that I leave with them is I invite them to basically consider to become not just a hyper-learner but to become an awesome hyper-learner. Because I think, based on what I know from reading about your listenership, I think many of your people will embrace, if you will, the challenge that’s here, but also, they’ll have the right mindset, the right growth mindset, to go out there and say, “Let me try some of these things. Let’s try and see if it works.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ed, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best in your hyper-learning adventures.

Edward Hess
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me in. I wish you all the best and keep doing the good work you’re doing, man.

Sep 14
0

605: How to Stop Firefighting and Start Executing with Chris McChesney

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Chris McChesney says: "Get very comfortable with the currency of results."Chris McChesney discusses how to achieve more with your team by following the four disciplines of execution.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three roadblocks to execution 
  2. The only two things that create engagement 
  3. How to instill accountability in 20 minutes 

About Chris

Chris McChesney is the Global Practice Leader of Execution for Franklin Covey and is one of the primary developers of the 4 Disciplines of Execution. For more than a decade, he has led FranklinCovey’s design and development of these principles, as well as the consulting organization that has become the fastest growing area of the company. 

Known for his high-energy and engaging message, Chris has become one of the most requested speakers within the Franklin Covey Organization, regularly delivering keynote speeches and executive presentations to leaders in audiences ranging from the hundreds to several thousand. 

Chris, and his wife Constance, are the proud parents of five daughters and two sons. His love of family is combined with his passion for boating, water sports, coaching, and trying to keep up with his children. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Chris McChesney Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Chris McChesney
Thanks, Peter. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to hear your story about how you did not get a job at FranklinCovey but you faked an internship. How did this go down?

Chris McChesney
I think desperation is probably the best explanation for that. They were not interviewing. I mean, they would not interview anyone, and I just had an idea. Wow, this is almost 30 years ago. This was Stephen Covey’s company, the guy that wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and I was kind of a groupie and I really wanted to work for this organization. And I decided if they wouldn’t interview me, I‘d interview them, so I pretended to work for the newspaper and told them that I was doing an article on up and coming companies in the area. And I submitted the paper to the newspaper, they published it, so they kept me from being a liar, right?

I didn’t get to the man, I didn’t get to Stephen Covey but I got to his VP, and while in there, I said, “I needed an internship,” which that was a stretch. I didn’t really need an internship, there was no internship, and then I just stowed away. So, four months later, The 7 Habits, hits number one in the New York Times bestseller list, they had fired their publicist, and they looked at me, and said, “Hey, that kid is from New York. Let’s have him call Good Morning America.” So, here I am, unpaid something intern. Actually, there’s an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer actually goes to work for a company he doesn’t actually work for, but that was done after I did it. I want first billing on that.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog.

Chris McChesney
And that’s how I got started.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s so good. So, well, I was going to ask, you know, Stephen Covey, boy, what a legacy, and really, integrity is one of the first words that comes to mind.

Chris McChesney
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, to start with…well, what I like is that you’re working for the newspaper kind of on spec.

Chris McChesney
That’s one way to say it. That’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to just a complete fabrication. Boy, that’s beautiful. Also, then can you tell me of any stories about Stephen that really stick with you in his memory?

Chris McChesney
Well, it’s interesting that we’re having this experience because one of my jobs early on was to set him up for interviews like yours. And so, just like my guy gave me a list of some of the questions you like to ask people and things like that, he never wanted to see the list of questions, and he really liked to be authentic and sort of shoot from the hip, and much more of a character than people realize. He’s a bit of a clown when he wasn’t on stage, and he would either be super serious or a complete goofball. And sometimes you needed him to be series, and he wouldn’t be serious. It surprises people to hear that because he comes off so serious in his books and his tapes but, yeah, he’s a character.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man, can you give me a goofball anecdote?

Chris McChesney
Oh, I can and it’s almost unbelievable, but there’s a thing that he did with his sons. One of his sons felt really ignored by his father, David Covey felt very ignored by Stephen, and Stephen was on a phone call and so David got out, this is bizarre, but he got out peanut butter and jelly and started to spread peanut butter on his dad’s head, and then he put jelly on his dad’s head, then he slapped a piece of bread over it, and left.

And so then, they were two command performances of this, and, in your brain, you couldn’t get, you know, here’s one of the world’s leading thought leaders, having his son make a mess out of his head, and they just thought that was so funny. That was great. So, this family had its own brand of humor. But, yeah, that’s all real, believable or not.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. That’s good. Well, hey, sometimes some humor or peanut butter-jelly head sandwich can aid in execution, and that’s my forced segue, Chris, because that’s your claim to fame and your area of expertise is execution, and your book The 4 Disciplines of Execution. So, could you maybe start by maybe giving us a quick definition? What do we mean by execution?

Chris McChesney
That’s a really good question.

Pete Mockaitis
And then give us the lay of the land, like, how well are organizations and professionals executing today? Like, what are the measures? What’s the state of the union here when it comes to execution?

Chris McChesney
All right, so let’s do this. Because execution is one of those words that could mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? It could just mean getting everything I got to get done, done, but that’s not what we mean by it. What we mean by it is getting that thing done that’s not going to happen anyways. Most of us have a routine, organizations have an SOP, they have their day job, their existing processes, and it gets stuff done. We get stuff done. And then every once in a while, you’ve got a goal and it’s not going to happen unless it gets special treatment.

And, typically, the nature of these things, Pete, is that they don’t have an inherent in-the-moment urgency associated with them. They’re really important. And if you made me fill out a quiz on the most important thing to me, like it’d be right at the top of the page, but it’s not getting any attention, and weeks are going by and we’re not getting any traction.

Usually, when you say that, people identify with something, and that’s really the execution conundrum right there. What is that thing that is not inherently urgent? Because people are good at working on the urgent, and, “I have to get it done and it’s not happening.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, give us just a few examples of things that tend to fall into this bucket again and again.

Chris McChesney
Yeah. I had one the other day, there was an organization, they needed to get these jobs to find, and they needed to get work aides for their physical therapy group. They had about 50 physical therapy practices. And every year, they would put money in the line item, budget item, for this, and every year it didn’t matter that there was money there, it didn’t happen. And they could see so many things but never at one time, that might be an example, they actually pushed through and got a hundred of these things made.

An organization that wants to focus on customer satisfaction, and they know that’s so critical but there’s 20 things that happen over the course of a day, and everybody’s busy and we’re not getting to that thing, maybe it’s an improvement in quality. The Georgia Department of Human Services, 10 years ago, reduced repeat cases of child abuse by 60% by attacking some things that weren’t unknown, they were known things but they were the type of things that weren’t getting attention. And if you can put energy against certain activities, sometimes it can have shockingly powerful effects.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that really resonates, certainly rings true. And I think you’re right in terms of there are, boy, I tell you, there are systems and there are processes and things that just happen, and then there’s those that it’s like they fall through the cracks, or it’s not a recurring thing, and, thusly, it’s like you don’t get the scale for it maybe.

Chris McChesney
Yeah. And I tell you where it shows up, Pete, is leaders sometimes will have an agenda. And it’s a big deal when you get a leadership position, you get your first management role. It’s a big deal to you, it’s not a big deal to anybody else, right? And you really know where you want to make your mark. And what gets so many leaders so frustrated is there are so many people giving them the thumbs up and they’ll agree with you, and they’ll say, “I love this, boss. It’s key to our future.” And I just get people laughing when I’m saying this, and then nothing happens.

And it’s not that people are being deceitful or duplicitous, they bought everything that you said. They heard it. And then 45 seconds later, six crises hit their desk and they’ve been responsive. And so, for leaders to start to understand, “Geez, what does it take to get deliberate energy against activities that don’t act on people?” And, basically, let me sum it up this way. Executing strategies that require change in human behavior is kind of the whole topic or problem we’ve been in love with for 20 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so let’s dig into how that’s done. So, you’ve got a chapter called “The Real Problem with Execution.” Lay it on us. What’s the real problem?

Chris McChesney
We’ve kind of been talking about it. It is that there’s like one side of our brain that deals with importance, and there’s another side of our brain that determines how we actually spend time and energy, and they’re not talking to each other. In the moment, urgency is king. And if I’m busy all day long, and I’m active, and I just can’t work any harder than I already have, I’ll tell you, here’s how you could feel this.

Think about working on a critical job. Maybe it’s the most important project of the year, and you know it, and you’re like tying yourself to your desk. And the whole time you’re working, you want to get up and do seven different things during that period of time, and you think, “I must be out of my mind. And it can’t be 4:00 o’clock already. Where did that go?” That is the first. There’s a couple of real problems of execution. The first one is that urgency and importance don’t line up.

Number two is complexity. A lot of times execution does not like complexity too. Best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency. And our ability to sort of put so many things down that we want to accomplish. So, not only is it all the stuff that we’re responding to on a day-to-day basis, but then when we do go proactive, we try and bite off more than we can chew, and that is a whole conundrum in and of itself.

And then I’d say the third one is futility. And it’s the frustration that might be a byproduct of the first two. But when people start giving up, that’s when you see burnout kick in. It’s rarely a byproduct of actually the amount of work. It’s the feeling that I’m working and it doesn’t matter. So, urgency, complexity, and futility really do a lot of damage. And there’s ways to get around this but I think it starts with the question that you asked, like, “What’s the problem?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s really good, a really good synopsis of just kind of what makes stuff hard, in general, in terms of if it’s not urgent, it’s not sort of screaming to be at the top of your list, and, thusly, it can just keep getting pushed off and just doesn’t happen. If it’s complex, you’re just sort of like, “Well, I don’t even know how to start,” and it just sort of seems intimidating to approach it. And then, if there’s a sense of futility, likewise, that adds all the more psychological resistance to it.

It’s so funny, I’m thinking about we had a heck of a long hard time executing a shift in this podcast, which was we were mostly replying to incoming pitches. And we’ve been selective such that I thought we’re making great choices. But the consequence of that was the stuff we got wasn’t exactly what our listeners needed, and in the time they needed it. And so, we thought, “We really got a beautiful survey of all the stuff people say they need. Like, we just should be letting this dictate our agenda and our calendar.”

And we get emails just about every day from folks joining the email list, and they share their concerns. But it was hard to make that shift because it was not so urgent, it was sort of like, “Ah, okay. Hey, we say we have episodes two times a week, and so we got to get this calendar going.” And it’s a lot harder to…

Chris McChesney
The calendar was urgent. The needs and the specific requests, you had to go after that stuff. The calendar went after you.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was complex in that it’s like, “Well, geez, how do we reverse-engineer it such that we start with the request and then pursue the guest.” And then it wasn’t quite futile but it was, hey, I mean, someone’s got a book coming out says yes immediately. Someone who’s been like an expert on something for decades and he has all the press they ever needed is not as gung-ho to immediately reply to an invitation of the podcast, although most of the time they still say yes in their own time.

And also, some futility associated with, “Boy, how do we even do this? This is really tricky.” And I guess that’s ultimately how we just sort of got through it was we said, “All right. Well, we’re going to reduce urgency by getting ahead of the game a little bit. We’re going to reduce the complexity by trying to come up with a process, an acronym, or a framework.” And I guess we tried to reduce the futility by just acknowledging, “Hey, we don’t know what we’re doing yet, okay? We’re going to have to iterate a few times, and that’s fine.”

Chris McChesney
I really like what you just said. I want to press pause on what you just said. Sometimes, particularly in the area of new goals that you haven’t achieved before, you have to give yourself a little bit of slack because the real engine for innovation is trial and error. And there are certain aspects of your job where error is not acceptable. And because error is not acceptable in certain parts of your job, it’s sort of programs you think that error is always bad, and you have to give yourself a little bit of leeway around an area that requires innovation, otherwise you will not innovate. I’m convinced of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And so, I think, in a way, that was kind of a turning point because we got comfortable with this, like, “Okay, we’re going to make a process that’s going to be bad. We’re going to try it out and see why it took 12 hours to find some names, and then identify the learnings so that we can accelerate a bit and loop it through again and again and again.” And now I’m feeling pretty darn good about it.

Chris McChesney
Can I give you a podcast on this topic?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Chris McChesney
You just, a matter of fact, the last three sentences would be a brochure for this podcast. The guy’s name is Tim Harford, he’s a British economist. And the name of the podcast, if you just Google, “Trial and Error.” Not podcast. Ted Talk.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chris McChesney
TED Talk. Trial and error. Tim Harford. And, really, take 15 minutes and watch this. If you’re in a role that requires innovation and some breakthroughs, I think he struck a beautiful chord, very consistent with what we found in our work, and you just described it quite nicely.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Chris McChesney
Unintentionally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you just described some things nicely in terms of you’ve identified four specific disciplines for execution. Can you give us the overview, and then let’s dig deeper into some of these?

Chris McChesney
Yeah, all right. So, the first one is, let’s do this. I’ll give each one a word. So, the first word is focus, and I’ll come back to this so you’ll get them. I’ll just give a list right now. So, the first one is focus, the second one is leverage, the third one is engagement, and the fourth one is accountability. And you think of these four words as sort of a mechanism for breaking through the urgency trap. Like, you want to fly an airplane, there’s four words, it’s lift, thrust, weight, and drag. Like, you get those concepts down, you can put something in the air and keep it there. In execution, we’re about focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability.

So, the first one, focus, is getting, really, first of all, narrowing your focus between the one thing that this team that I run is going to deliver, and everything that’s day job, everything that operationally has to get done. And I’m going to tell you that your operational reality, arguably, is more important, like that cannot slip. But if that’s all you’re doing, you’re not going anywhere in your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re sort of on a treadmill. It’s like we’re continuing to do the things that we’ve done, and we’ll probably continue to get the results that we’ve got, and if you’re a big company, the results you’ve gotten are great. But, of course, over time, if you don’t innovate, you’ll kind of wither.

Chris McChesney
So, I’ve got a good one for you. So, the number two guy at Marriott, he’s retiring this year, his name is Dave Grissen. Marriott used this methodology for 12 years and they’ve improved their guest sat. every year for 12 years. The champion of this is now the number two guy at Marriott. When he was launching this 12 years ago, he told a group of leaders that were launching this process, he said, it was a two-part statement, he said, “First of all, if you want to keep your jobs at Marriott, just take care of the operation, just take care of the day job. We’ll never fire you because if we let you go, the next person might not take care of the day job. Like, you’ll always have a job here if you just take care of the day job.”

And then he gets this smirk, and he said, “But if you want to get promoted, give me one, give me your result, give me an improvement in arrival experience, give me an improvement in food and beverage quality, give me an improvement in everything in working order or event satisfaction. Call your shot and bring me something.” And it was his way of sort of communicating, I thought it was a great way to set, “Yeah, all right. If I just want to take care of the day job, okay, I’ll always have a job here. But if I’m serious about my career…” and then they backed it up. So, when a hotel manager applied for a general manager position, or vice versa, the first thing they would say is, “All right, tell me about your results. What did you target? How did you do it? Like, I want to know…” I think this is a universal principle for career movement, like, “I got to do those two things. I have to maintain the operation. That is job one. But if that’s all I’m doing, I’m treadmilling it. And then what is the one thing, what is the one result that I can deliver?”

And, by the way, that day job will take up 100% of my energy if I let it. I have to steal energy from that, and we say about 20%, to apply towards a breakthrough. So, figuring out what that is, defining it, giving it a starting line, a finish line, and a deadline, all of those things are part of discipline one and focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Chris, I love that so much in terms of it’s just a clear framework and it’s just true. It rings true in terms of, yeah, doing your day job, keeping the operations going, will consume you, and it is important, and it needs to be done, and yet, just as you said, you’ve got to have that result. I’m thinking here about I’ve coached a lot of people on their resumes and career strategy development, and that’s kind of how that’s always my interpretation as I’m reviewing resumes for like hiring someone or for helping them to make their resume better.

Chris McChesney
There you go. You’re looking for it.

Pete Mockaitis
If you just show me, it’s like, “Okay. Well, yeah, you know what, I think it’s accountants. Poor guys. They’ve got such great skills and some of them I don’t have. I love my accountant so much. He’s so valuable.” And then when I read some bullets from accountants’ resumes, it’s like, “Hey, did invoicing, or controls, or books, or reporting,” and it’s like, “Yeah, absolutely, that’s got to happen. It’s hard. I wouldn’t be good at it. I’m glad that you’re on top of that.” But to make me go, “Hmm, impressive resume,” I got to see results and improvement on something, like you revised a process, you reduced costs, you improved revenue, you made something that took a long time, now take a little bit of time. I got to see a result and, ideally, there’s a number on it from like a resume judging perspective.

Chris McChesney
Yup, there is a number on it. That’s right. And think about this, so the great management guru, like the guy that kicked all this off was Peter Drucker. Drucker has got this one statement that is money. Drucker says, “The hardest thing to get people to do is think about their jobs in terms of results instead of activities.” And you just described that really well, “I do this, and then I do this, and then I do this, and then I do that.” If that sits on a resume, yeah, that’s fine if I need one of those, but that’s a certain type of job. But if you start thinking in the currency of results, what did I bring?

So, I’ve got right now, I have seven children, my wife and I do. My oldest is married and my third oldest is married, and so I’ve got, right now, I’ve got half a dozen little people in my life that are in their 20s that are looking at careers, and I’ve been just really hitting this note that get very comfortable with the currency of results. Somewhere, your boss, let’s say you’re in front-line management or event middle management, start thinking, and I’m going to steal from Stephen Covey who we were talking about earlier.

Think about what’s outside your job description but within your circle of influence. The opportunity rarely lives inside your job description, but it is something that you could influence. It’s like, what is the one thing that your boss wishes we had fixed? What is the one thing that the organization needs? And can you bring that? Maybe it is within your job description. But thinking in terms of the currency of results when it’s not being asked of you is a mindset shift for most people but it’s incredibly enabling.

And here’s the other thing. No one is going to have a parade for you when you deliver results. It’s funny, you’ll actually be…I think you’ll be discouraged. Like, you’ll get this done, and you’ll get that done, the whole time you’re doing this. If you’re not careful, what you’re thinking is, “Geez, Mary doesn’t do this. Mark doesn’t do this. I’m doing all this extra work. I’m not getting paid.” That’s the other thing. You’ll always feel like you’re adding more value than you’re getting paid, and that’s exactly where you want to be. And you just keep doing these things, and nobody cared about them, like you get a pat on the head, and a week later, they forgot. You keep doing it, and then one day they’re thinking, “Hey, we need somebody. Do you know who’d be great for that?” And, all of a sudden, you’ve changed your brand as you’re a real hunter. You seek and you get results.

And it doesn’t take very long because not everybody is doing it. Like, I promise you. Everybody applies for the position. Everybody. I’ve gotten 14 jobs. I’ve never gotten one of them from an interview. It’s always been, “Hey, Chris, we’re thinking of something.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. That’s focus. All right. So, you’re focusing and then maybe say a little bit more. It’s often outside your job description but within your area of control. It’s about results. And any other little telltale signs, like, “This may be the thing to focus in on”?

Chris McChesney
So, let’s say be careful of going too big. We don’t emphasize this enough in The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and the second version is getting launched this spring, and we really hit this point. Like, I’m in sales so we’ve got to grow revenue. Now I know what the thing is, the thing is the revenue. Well, be careful. Revenue is the title of the book, whatever the macro objective is, think of that like the title of the book, and that’s not where I want you to go. I want you to look at the chapters that make up the book, and I want you to pick the one chapter where you go, “Oh, if we could only do this. This is one product we sell. If we could grow that one product, boy, the margins are better, those people stay with us, they buy our other products.” Like, where are you going to put disproportionate energy? Against which chapter are you going to double down?

And if you could come down to sort of one level of abstraction from the big goal down to the chapter, come down off the title of the book, look at chapters and say, “Oh, yeah. You know what, if we get our first-year salespeople to pay for themselves, we could grow this thing forever.” Like, there’s always that one sort of small target that if we could just get that, wow, we could do X, Y, and Z. like, those are the really good, what we call WIGs, or wildly important goals. They’re not always these macro huge things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s beautiful. So, it’s like a domino that sets it off, or the key that unlocks a whole lot more.

Chris McChesney
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right. So, we got the focus. What’s next?

Chris McChesney
So, the next one is the leverage one, what we call act on the lead measures. Think weight loss. If the scale is the lag measure or the goal, those two things are synonymous, the wildly important goal, or the lagging measure, the outcome metric is the weight, then if you want to lose weight, there’s two lead measures. Everybody listening knows what they are. It’s diet and exercise.

And you say, “Well, what’s unique about a lead measure from a lag measure?” Well, lead measures have two characteristics. I can influence the lead directly. You can’t directly affect weight loss but I can cut my calorie and I can burn calories daily. That distinction right there, folks, that’s the whole thing. A metric that can be directly affected. And then its other characteristic is predictive. Like, if I do that, I get the other. So, think of how a lever works. Rocks are too heavy to move but, you know what, I can move the lever, and the lever moves the rock. That is the idea.

And you want to prove this point, just ask people to think about someone in their life, and most people have someone, who’s lost 50 pounds. Like, there’s somebody they know, it wasn’t an accident, they deliberately set out to lose 50 pounds. So, everybody thinks of somebody, and then you ask the question, “All right. Was that person who lost 50 pounds, were they aware of a diet program and an exercise program, or were they counting daily?” And you do this in a room of 500 people, there might be one or two people that will say there weren’t counting. Everybody else it’s like it’s got to be like a 98%-99% statistic.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog.

Chris McChesney
Why is that? Because, otherwise, we lie to ourselves. So, finding the diet and exercise, in the goal. Like, it isn’t just diet and exercise, it’s any lead measures. And the most sophisticated processes on the planet, like people that are building fighter planes, and structural engineers, and people like this, can always get into this thinking of, “All right, what’s the lag measure and what are the lead measures? Where in the process of these things that we could attack?” And that’s what lead measures are, figuring out and measuring those things that I can directly influence that will move the outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, Chris, as you were saying this because I’ve had the pleasure, misfortune, I don’t know, of gaining and losing 10 pounds about three times now in life. And so, that has been my experience in that when I really am serious, I will use the Lose It! app or whatever. So, for real tracking, “How much am I exercising and how much am I taking in?” and not just falling into frozen pizzas multiple times a week, then it’s happening. And when I’m not, it isn’t. So, that’s my own experience on the loss.

Chris McChesney
Let’s put it in a business example. We got a hardware store. They want a likelihood to recommend number, and they’ve tracked it, and they said, “Look, if people will recommend our hardware store, if they’re likely to recommend, whether they do or not, if they answer that they are, you move that number, you see profits move.” Like, they know this is a really good chapter heading for wildly important goal. So, they’re like, “What are the lead measures?” What they find is, you know, there’s three things. When I go to a hardware store, I got to find what I’m looking for. Will someone talk to me? Number one. Number two, when I get to the aisle where the part is, do they actually have the thing I was looking for? Out of stocks. Number three. Once I got it, how quickly can I get out of the store?

Now, the group that we’re working with, the stores didn’t have to pick all three. They could pick one of the three, they could pick two of three, they have different teams working on any, but they had to have, and this is discipline three, is scoreboard, they had to create a compelling scoreboard out of the game. What’s the lag and what’s the lead? It’s a two-part equation. So, like, we’re going to try and move our likelihood to recommend, and we’ve never been able to move that score but we’re going after what we think are the three things that will have the biggest impact, and we figured out how to measure out of stocks, and we figured out how to measure how quickly we engage, and we know how to measure speed at checkout, and so we’re making the bet. In our store, we’re great at speed at checkout but we are terrible at out of stocks. And we’re going to attack that metric every single week, like somebody would attack running or whatever.

And this is where the trial and error comes in. Let’s see if that does it, and let’s learn from this. But if you can get, there’s an engagement dynamic here too, that when you can get people into the game of, “What will affect what?” It’s like a little riddle they’re trying to solve. And if they’re able to move a metric they’ve never been able to move before, you can get your team very engaged in, “All right, what was our score last week? We’ve been killing on out of stocks three weeks in a row. Do we do it four weeks? What the numbers are coming at?” And you could start to engage people in the work in a way, “Well, it was surprising to us. We weren’t expecting this. It’s not why we set out to do it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so good. And I think now we’ll talk about the third discipline with the engagement and the scoreboard is a tool for engagement. One of my favorite consulting projects, we saw exactly this. It was a customer service organization, they had six call centers, and we discovered that, “Well, hey, what we want is, like title of the book, lower costs associated with addressing customer needs.” And so, back it up a little bit, we see average handle time in terms of just how long they need to be on the phone with someone.

And then we’ve backed that up, we could see what influenced handle time is the experience of the customer service rep who those who know more, they’ve been around more, are able to quickly and knowledgably address the questions that come up. And then so we backed that up and we see, well, the attrition rate is horrible so that people are leaving fast and the average person is not very experienced. And so then, we backed that up and then we really kind of see, “Well, how are the supervisors treating, encouraging, motivating, supporting, the folks who work for them?” And then we see wild differences in that. So, those are some actions to take to reduce attrition.

Pete Mockaitis
And then the scoreboard is like, “The data was always suspect in terms of the attrition rates.” It’s like, “Well, you know, those were temporary. Those were college summer things,” and so no one every trusted the numbers, or could be held accountable to the numbers because they didn’t believe the numbers. And so, junior consultant here, it’s like, “That’s my job, is I’m making the real attrition numbers,” and then I get all these emails from people being asked to be added to the daily email about the attrition numbers that are the true numbers. And then it’s a game, it’s like they’re saying, “Hey, wow, this call center had their attrition go way down as compared to the previous month. Well, what the heck are you doing?” “You know, we tried this game where we offer this prize when they do such and such, and people are really getting into it.” It’s like, “Oh, okay, we should try that game too.” And it’s a beautiful thing.

Chris McChesney
All right. I got to dissect what you just said.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Chris McChesney
Because you hit a couple of really important themes right there. First of all, you had to get good data before this thing worked. So, think of any, I tell, athletics, I know people think that sports analogies are tired, and usually they are, but it’s really applicable here. Nobody is going to follow a game if the scoreboard is suspect for any reason. And so, “It’s not a first down. It’s somewhere between nine and 11 yards.” “No, it’s 10 fricking yards. Your nine and 11 inches, you’re going the other way.” And so, good data comes from good definitions.

So, I’m guessing, as you got into the data, you had to decide, “When did it really count as attrition? When didn’t it count as attrition?” You had to get very clear on the definitions that drove the data. And so, once you had a credible scoreboard, the next thing that you were able to show before people, I’m guessing, cared about it, is you had to show correlation. You had to show that when one number moved, another number moved. And so, this isn’t just something for analysts. Every business manager has to start understanding some basic correlations because, otherwise, you’re at the mercy of your business. “What do I put energy against that’s going to give me a return?” You stayed on that until you found.

Once you found it, once you saw a correlation, everybody wanted to see it. Everybody knew, right? Sometimes it takes a little trial and error, but you hit the two things. You had clean data, and you had cause and effect, then correlation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. While we’re reliving these moments, and we talk about correlation, that’s one error I think I met is I thought of correlation as, “Oh, you run the statistics in Excel and you get your R squared and adjusted R values,” but really, no, it’s just sort of like with stock outs, there was other project, it was sort of like for service of technological things. And it’s sort of like “Did the job get done right the first time in satisfaction?” So, you can run a big regression with all your variables and it wouldn’t look that compelling. But then if you look at satisfaction score in which the job was done right the first time on one half of the slide, and versus the job was not done right the first time, it’s like then it looks like it’s night and day, and that’s a way to make a correlation pop in my view.

Chris McChesney
Wow, that’s very well-said. We’ll do these meetings where we’ll get…and we like to get the action very close the frontline so we’ll work with leadership teams that are trying to do lead and lag measures three levels, four levels, above the frontline, and we’re like, “Sorry, let’s just break the goals down, let’s get those targets as close to the frontline as possible, and then we want to see half a dozen different scoreboards on a variety of things that are key bets for making the big number move.”

And then what we’ll do about three months in, four months in, we’ll do a report out. So, we’ll have the big bosses come down and talk to the managers and the teams, these are great sessions, and the teams will teach him what they’ve learned, like, “We tried this lead measure. I know we’ve been saying it for years. Didn’t have any effect. But, look, we just measured it differently and we did this, and now look at the results. Look, we got four weeks in a row, we’re moving the lag measure.”

And these VPs are seeing insights into the business and they get very excited about talking to what these frontline teams, and it’s a huge deal for the frontline teams because they’re getting some spotlight right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool.

Chris McChesney
Oh, I got a book recommendation for you if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Chris McChesney
A lot of people like Patrick Lencioni.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, we had him on the show. He’s great.

Chris McChesney
Okay, great. Yeah, he is great. Maybe his least-read book is my favorite, and it’s The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. He likes it too. He’s re-releasing it. He thinks the reason it doesn’t do so well because nobody wants to be carrying that title of a book around the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Get it on Kindle and hide it.

Chris McChesney
So, now he’s going to call it The Secret of Engagement, or something like that. But our 20 years on execution and his work really walked parallel paths. And the three signs of a miserable job are anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sounds miserable to me.

Chris McChesney
It sounds miserable. Anonymity, “Nobody cares what I’m doing.” Irrelevance, “It doesn’t matter.” And immeasurement, “I don’t know if I’m winning or losing.” And so, people don’t want oppressive data that doesn’t really tell the whole picture, and they’ll resist that stuff. But really helping, when they can actually influence creating a, and we use this words, high-stakes winnable game, you can get a great deal of engagement right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, let’s talk, finally, the fourth discipline here, creating a cadence of accountability. How do we do it?

Chris McChesney
So, this is one where it’s almost like if you think about disciplines one, two, and three as setting up the game. One is the target, two is kind of the how, three is sort of encapsulating it in a scoreboard, four is how we play the game. And now we’re going to go full circle back to the urgency thing. You can’t beat the urgency thing. You have to sort of trick your own brain. The way this works is everybody on the team makes a commitment during this little meeting, so every week at the same time, 20-minute meeting, Tuesdays at 9:00, it’s Tuesdays at 9:00, no matter what, you have to be kind of a freak about it, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chris McChesney
We’ve got this meeting around this scoreboard, call them WIG sessions. And everybody in that meeting reports on the thing they committed to do last week that would have an impact on the scoreboard. So, I take one commitment. Like, we have a lead measure of interviewing 80% of our first-time accounts. But I could tell now that the script doesn’t look really good, so my commitment for the week is we’re going to rewrite that script, or, “The rent of Solaire office is really struggling. I’m going to meet with Marty, and we’re going to go over such.” Something I’m going to do every single week. In that meeting, everybody has to say, “Here’s what I said I was going to do last week. Here’s the impact it had on the scoreboard. And here’s my commitment for next week,” and that’s all they say.

Next person, “Here’s what I did. Here’s what my scoreboard looks like. Here’s what I’m going to do next week.” Like, brainstorming, problem-solving, something’s come up, out of this meeting. This thing, you are in and out. If you can do it in 20 minutes, great. And there’s this sort of two things about this. One, the commitments can’t come from the boss. You pull this, you don’t push it. So, the boss sometimes sits there chewing their tongues out because they know what they want to have done but, no, no, you got to ask everybody, “Give me that. What is the one thing, Pete, you’re going to do this week that’s kind of the biggest impact on one of those lead measures?” It’s like just-in-time strategic planning.

And then you know next week, we have people say all the time, “You know what, it was Thursday night and I had that week session Friday morning, and I was up till 2:00 o’clock in the morning. Like, I was not…” People don’t want to disappoint their bosses.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Chris McChesney
They won’t disappoint their peers. They don’t like to disappoint their bosses. They could get over that. But we found that when it comes to peer accountability, they take it really seriously and you get really good commitments and you get energy. And then four, five, six weeks of non-urgent activity because these commitments would never make anybody’s to-do list but they’re the most important thing you could do to drive the lead measures. And so, that’s really the secret of the whole thing, is we just start to mind-harvest, pick your metaphor, energy against that scoreboard every single week until the team realizes, “We’re doing something nobody’s been able to do before, and it’s moving,” then we get the pop in engagement. That’s our story.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s exciting and, certainly, I see what you mean about tricking your brain with the urgency, is it’s now urgent in that you don’t want to look like a fool, you don’t want to let people down, and the clock is ticking that you’re going to have to say something on Friday, so, hopefully, it’s going to be a good something.

Chris McChesney
And the day job has all that stuff built in, that’s why the day job has its own accountability system called your neck. Like, you get a phone call, like people get mad at you, you don’t want that phone call, so we do that, right? But the goals, the goals need a mechanism to create the same kind of urgency that the day job has. And if you could do it in a way where people feel like they’re part of something, and this is what we found.

So, I gave you the quote on Lencioni’s book “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.” I’ll give you another one. It’s an HBR, Harvard Business Review, article, May 2011, there’s also a book by the same name called The Power of Small Wins, and it goes back to a research that was done in the ‘60s by a guy named Frederick Herzberg. And Herzberg said, those of you that have had MBA classes recently, his name comes up. He came up with this theory, and he said, “Look, the stuff that people quit over – pay, best friend at work, job conditions, benefits – does not engage them.”

I’m going to say that again, “The stuff people quit over does not engage them.” Don’t quit over pay, whether they have a best friend at work, whether they like…they’ll over quit all that stuff. There’s only two things that engage people, really create engagement, and it’s “Am I winning? Am I progressing? Is it working? Is there some progress?” and “Does it matter? Is it a winnable high-stakes game?” And so, what we tell people is, “Look, don’t get overwhelmed by this. If you’re a leader, your team doesn’t have to feel that way about everything. The day job, 80% won’t feel that way most of the time. It’s okay. But if you can create a high-stakes winnable game around that 20%, that one thing, it affects the way they feel about everything else.” And I would even say in raising teenagers, it’s the same thing. Find one thing in that kid’s life that they’re wining at and they feel good at, it has an impact on everything else.

So, I’ll tell you, after 20 years, that’s what we’ve learned. If you can create a high-stakes winnable game for people, it has a profound effect on morale and engagement.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love it. And I think it’s true all of life in terms of, in my own experience, it’s like, “I got to feel like I’m winning something.”

Chris McChesney
Yeah, right. Give me something, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I might feel like a lame dad or a lame husband, but if I’m winning at work, it’s like, “Okay, life has some color,” or vice versa, I might feel like, “Oh, man, COVID hits, my downloads are down. You know what, man, but I’m having a blast with my kids.” Like, you got to be winning at something.

Chris McChesney
Right. Right. Right. And so, that’s the question to leaders, right? Do the people who work for you feel like there’s some part of what you’re doing that feels like a high-stakes winnable game? And if they do, they won’t forget it. It’s a much bigger deal to people than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Chris, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear a couple of your favorite things?

Chris McChesney
That’s it. That’s our story.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Chris McChesney
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose, considered by yourself to be a worthy one, instead of being a feverish little clot of grievances and ailments, complaining the world will not dedicate itself to making you happy.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard that. I forgot who said it.

Chris McChesney
It’s on the tip of my tongue. That was the one that I was looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
It was nice. It was well-done. The clot grievances is always like, “Oh, man.”

Chris McChesney
Yeah, be a force of nature, right? Attack something. Bring something down.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Chris McChesney
You know what I’m reading right now? I’m reading the, the biography of Hamilton that Lin-Manuel Miranda based the Broadway play on. And my wife and I are just crazy for the play. And the biography is stunning, and it’s just a really inspiring story of someone who had no business having an impact on the world that he had. Chernow is the guy’s last name, the Hamilton biography. It’s fantastic.

Hey, on this topic, more to this topic, although I tell you, the book I read before that was Robert Greene on Mastery. And I actually had all my kids, we did at dinner, and you could only come to dinner if you had read at least the first chapter of Mastery. And it’s really an interesting perspective on the whole career conversation.

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

Chris McChesney
Waterskiing. I’ve got to do a lot of it because I haven’t been on the road, so this is my summer of slalom waterskiing. That’s my addiction.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks, they quote it back to you and they highlight it in your book, etc.?

Chris McChesney
There will always be more good ideas than there’s capacity to execute them.

Pete Mockaitis
I find that very comforting because…

Chris McChesney
Good, because you don’t have to bring them all down. Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, in a way, it really is a blessing. It’s like it’s such abundance. We can sort of enjoy that as opposed to be stressed out by it.

Chris McChesney
Thank you. Right. Because it kind of shames us in one moment. But, you’re right, it’s just great to realize. Because there is this onus sometimes when we think, “Oh, that. Oh, I didn’t do, and we didn’t follow up on that.” Like, yeah, trust me, you and everybody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. It’s so funny, sometimes when I have lots of opportunities, and I think even in business, it’s like I find that sometimes I get more stressed, and it’s like I’m enjoying my work less, it’s like, “What’s this about? Like, this is good. This is good.” So, yeah, thank you. It puts it right in the frame, right back where it needs to be. And how about if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Chris McChesney
All right. So, you go on Amazon and look up The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which is our book that has done way better than we ever thought it would with a title like that, with the words discipline and execution. If you don’t have high hopes, would you launch that book? It continues to be a bestseller to our delight and amazement.

And then if you go to, all one word, ChrisMcChesney4dx.com that will take you to my website and kind of the work that we do. Or you can go to the FranklinCovey website, that works as well, and you can find me 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?

Chris McChesney
I’ll just go back to the one I said a minute ago. Find something outside your job description, within your circle of influence, and get your team treating it like a high-stakes winnable game. If you can do that, you’re not a manager. You’re a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck.

Chris McChesney
Right back at you.

Sep 10
0

604: Closing the Seven Power Gaps that Limit Your Career with Kathy Caprino

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Kathy Caprino says: "Be strong, be confident, but that doesn't mean abrasive, aggressive."

Kathy Caprino discusses how to bridge the power gaps that hold you back from career success.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The seven most common barriers to career success 
  2. An easy way to start advocating for yourself more 
  3. The one habit that drastically minimizes your presence 

About Kathy

Kathy Caprino is a career and executive coach, author, speaker, and leadership trainer dedicated to the advancement of women in business. She is a former VP and trained coach and marriage and family therapist, a Senior Forbes contributor, and offers career consulting, executive, and leadership and communications coaching and training, as well as keynotes and workshops. 

She’s also the Founder and President of her own coaching and consulting firm, Kathy Caprino, LLC as well as the host of the podcast, Finding Brave. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

 

Thank you, sponsors!

  • Pitney Bowes. Simplify your shipping while saving money. Get a free 30-day trial and 10-lb shipping scale at pb.com/AWESOME. 
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Kathy Caprino Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kathy, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kathy Caprino
I’m so happy to be here, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m happy to have you. And I’m excited to talk about Bravery-Boosting Paths to Career Bliss, the subtitle of “The Most Powerful You.”

Kathy Caprino
It’s a bit of a mouthful but it’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a fun one to say. Well, how about you kick us off with an inspiring story of a professional who felt like they needed some bravery-boosting, and then they did some stuff, and they saw some cool results flow from it?

Kathy Caprino
Can I make it my story for two minutes?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Kathy Caprino
Okay. The hard thing is to keep it short, but I’ll try. Eighteen-year corporate career, successful on the outside, not successful on the inside, and I faced bumps, bumps and bumps. And when I hit 40, they were full-blown crises. Sexual harassment, gender discrimination, toxic bosses, actually narcissistic bosses, toxic colleagues, zero work-life balance, chronic illness, I had infections of the trachea every three months for four years. It was a mess, Pete, really. And I know a lot about this now because this is my work, but it wasn’t back then, and I didn’t know what hit me, and I thought I was to blame. It was a mess.

So, I didn’t really move forward. I didn’t move forward at all to change career. The last VP job, literally, I swear, I felt like it almost killed me. And instead of doing the right thing, which was to pivot or leave, I didn’t. And one month after buying a bigger house and more financial responsibilities, it was 9/11, and one month after I was laid off. So, talking about bravery and power, for 18 years I didn’t have it, and there’s reasons for that, which we’ll talk about, why a lot of people don’t have the bravery and power they need to change things.

But, often, human beings need a breakdown. They just have to collapse into a heap. It’s got to be a breakdown moment, and that’s what I had. And there’s a story in the book about I’m sitting in my therapist’s office crying because I knew I could never return to that life but I didn’t know what to do. And he said, “I know from where you sit, it’s the worst crisis you’ve ever faced. But from where I sit, it’s the first moment you can choose who you want to be in the world. Now, who do you want to be?”

And now I know why I didn’t have any answer, and so I went, “I want to be you.” That’s all. That’s all I knew. And he said, “What does that mean?” And I said, “I want to help people, not hurt people and be hurt.” So, flash forward, I became a marriage and family therapist, and that wasn’t the end destination. And, as we know, a lot of times we think, “Yay, we’ve made it. We’re done.” I wasn’t done at all. That wasn’t the final thing. And then I became a career coach for professional women. So, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years.

And there are stories in the book, seven different ones, of clients and course members that have closed these seven power gaps that we’re going to talk about, from “I don’t know how to speak up,” to “I can’t say stop to the mistreatment I’m facing,” to “I can’t even figure out what I want to ask for, let alone think I deserve it.” So, there’s really riveting stories of real-life people that have faced these seven gaps and overcame them and, in every case, it’s incredibly inspiring, because if we have these gaps, Pete, and 98% of the women I interviewed, I surveyed, 98% have one of these, and over 75% have three or more. When you have these, you cannot thrive at the highest level in your work or your life, so that’s that story.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. And our audience is mostly women. But as I perused these gaps, they’re certainly not exclusive to women.

Kathy Caprino
They’re not but I got to say, Pete, I think men do experience it, and they say, “Write a book for me, for goodness’ sake,” but they don’t internalize them and process them in the same way.

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha.

Kathy Caprino
They don’t, and I think I know why that is, but we’ll talk about that later.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, you got me so intrigued, Kathy. Bring it. What’s going on?

Kathy Caprino
Bring it on. So, what we have to know, and I mention this a lot, a few people have said, “Are you blaming the victim here?” And the whole point is to rise people out of victimhood, to let them take control of what they can control. But the reason, one of the reasons women have these gaps, and I’m not trying to paint every woman with the same brush, or every man, but it’s this – we live in a patriarchal world. It’s not to bash men, this is just to look to the system we live in. And in a patriarchal world, we split ourselves in half. We talk about the “masculine” and the feminine. The masculine is strong, dominant, not vulnerable, not emotional, gets it done, assertive, makes it happen. The feminine is soft, malleable, pleasing, accommodating, emotional.

Well, the reality is, when you grow up in a world that that is what is expected of your gender, most people live up to that, and it really starts early on. It starts, the research shows, that before age 13, girls and boys are really on par in how they feel about themselves as leaders, interest in STEM, raising their hand to share their thoughts. And at age about 13, girls start to go underground, and stay there. So, all of these gaps, I feel, are hitting women harder than men because we’re conditioned and trained that they should be, that we should not be speaking up powerfully, not asking for what we deserve, all of that.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Well, how about we maybe take one or two minutes to just hear the list of the seven gaps, and then we’ll dig deeper into a couple of them, shall we?

Kathy Caprino
I love it. And I’m going to give you the number, the percent, of the over 1,000 women who said yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love data. Thank you, Kathy.

Kathy Caprino
Data, yeah. Can I tell you? I’m not making this up, right? This is from 15 years of work, thousands of people I’ve worked with. All right, gap number one, not recognizing your special talents, abilities, and accomplishments, 63% said yes or maybe. There’s this underpinning of this, which is, “I don’t even know what I’m great at. And even if I did, I don’t want to say I’m great.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Kathy Caprino
Okay. Number two, communicating from fear, not strength, 70%. It means you weaken your message, you soften it, you apologize, you start your important messages with, “I don’t know if this is smart or…” You are communicating not on strength. Number three, reluctance to ask for what you deserve, 77%. “I’m not sure I deserve more. And even if I do, I don’t know how to ask for it,” is what they say in some way or another.

Number four is isolating from influential support, 71%. What this means is, “I hate networking, and I’m very uncomfortable networking higher, networking up to influential people.” Number five is acquiescing instead of saying stop to mistreatment. And by mistreatment, I mean everything we know: harassment, gender bias, racial discrimination. It’s, “I’m afraid to challenge the mistreatment I’m facing and that I see around me.” And, interestingly, 48%, that’s not as high as other numbers, say it. Frankly, after I get talking to women, every one of them. Do you know the research shows that eight out of ten women are going to be sexually harassed in their careers? And four out of ten feel they’ve experienced gender bias, so I think that number is too low because we don’t really recognize what we’re in.

Number six is losing sight of your thrilling dream for your life, and that is 76%. And what that means is, “I have no idea what I want to do for a career. I’m not meant for an amazing career, and I bailed on the dream I once have for myself.” Number seven is allowing the past, or past trauma, which is a word that therapists throw around a little more easily than non-therapists, allowing the past to define you still, and that is 62%. And, interestingly, so I worked with thousands of people around the world, almost all of them are being impacted by something that happened in the past but they don’t know they’re being impacted by it.

So, it’s only when I’m looking at their career path assessment, which is 11 pages of questions I wish someone had asked me 30 years ago, and if I’d answered them, honestly, I wouldn’t have made some of the mistakes I made. When I see their answers, I can sense there’s something more here. Something happened. Something happened in childhood. Something happened. And then they’ll sometimes mention it and sometimes it’s in the first call, I’ll say, “I’m really sensing something. Could it be this?” And if you were raised, I love to say this, you are what your childhood taught you to be unless you unlearned it. And for so many, Pete, including me, the messages I got, while they might’ve been coming from love and wellbeing, I mean, wanting us to have wellbeing, they got in in the wrong way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thanks for giving us the rundown there. I guess the percentages are somewhat similar when you bring up the low one to what we think the true number may be. So, maybe could you share, what do you think is perhaps the most debilitating in terms of finding career bliss and excelling, “Boy, this one really seems to pack an outsized punch for killing the bliss”?

Kathy Caprino
I have to say it’s number one where if you…I really love to talk about this because women are so tied up around this. If you cannot see how you are special, and there’s tips and strategies all over the place, like TEDx Talk talks about it. If you can’t see how you are different and how you are better than the competition, whether that’s, “I’m an HR director,” or, “I’m an entrepreneur,” if you can’t see how you’re special, number one, and you can’t leverage it because you don’t even know you have it, and part of that is talking about it. So, if someone says to me, and I use this example a lot, “Kathy, why should I hire you? There’s a lot of coaches.” I rattle off four facts.

Pete Mockaitis
Facts.

Kathy Caprino
They’re facts. So, I call this the process of 20 facts of you. Listen to this podcast, and this weekend, pull out a pad of paper, and for an hour sit with yourself, no distractions, and write down everything you’ve accomplished that you are darn proud of. Everything. And then I want you to kind of embrace how that was made possible through who you are, your ancestry, your cultural training, your interests, your passions, your failures, your miserable flops, your relationships, everything that’s made you you. What are the 20 facts of you?

And when you can say that, can I give one example? Would you mind? If someone says, “Why should I hire you?” And this is not a sales pitch. This is for people to understand what I’m saying. Number one I say, “I had an 18-year corporate career. I know the challenges mid- to high-level professional women face. Number two, I’m a trained therapist so I go deeper. I’m not just going to talk about your interviewing and your LinkedIn profile, I’m going to go deep, deep, deep.”

“Number three, I focused on professional women’s challenges and written the book, two books on it. And I, honest to goodness, think I probably know women’s challenges, professional women’s challenges better than most people on the planet.” That’s not a fact, but it’s close to it. “Number four, I’m an entrepreneur, and I’m in that arena of what it is to be brave and powerful. It’s not just me in my jammies not needing to be out there and run a business. It’s me speaking from…and I have my own podcast, and I’m speaking to amazing folks making a difference in a brave way.”

So, the question I have for people is, “Do you think that sounds like I’m bragging?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, especially not if you’re asked. It’s sort of like, “You’ve asked me a question, and here is your answer,” and it’s a darn good one.

Kathy Caprino
Well, thank you for that. But does it smack to you of, “Oh, she thinks highly of herself. Eeh.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, it doesn’t. And I suppose, I guess, it’s all about the context. If I said, “Oh,” if I met you at a cocktail party, it’s like, “Oh, hey, Kathy. Tell me about yourself.” It’s like, “Well,” and then you went there.

Kathy Caprino
“Do you have an hour?”

Pete Mockaitis
I would say, “Okay…”

Kathy Caprino
“She’s a narcissist.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I don’t know. That’s not quite what I was going for.” So, that’ll be a little off-putting in that context, but in a normal context, in terms of, hey, what are you all about, or an interview, or a performance review, or, “Hey, let’s have a conversation about which teammates should fill which roles,” it’s like, “Yeah, these are facts I want and need to know right now. Thank you.”

Kathy Caprino
But the way you said it, Pete, is so interesting. I want, if you don’t mind, go and ask five women in your life to do it. They can’t. It’s heartbreaking, “I don’t know, I think I’m kind of good at maybe analyzing systems.” It’s like that. Or, “I don’t know. I don’t know that I’d say I’m great, but I really listen well.” I’m like, “No, I don’t mean that.” And when I look at people on LinkedIn and I’ve got a big following there. I’m on it constantly. I love it. I can tell in five minutes what is holding someone back from a great career by looking at their LinkedIn profile.

Their headline is their job title. That’s not your headline. That’s not it. Or their summary is one sentence, or they have the jobs listed but no bullets, or they don’t share any thought leadership, they don’t share content that’s interesting to them, they’re hiding, or they’re confused. So, while it seems kind of straightforward to you, I think you’re going to be shot if you ask five women in your life, “Tell me what makes you great at work.” You’ll let me know if I’m wrong, but they pretty much can’t answer it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, that hits hard. Thank you for sharing. And I think that’s a brilliant technique into get those 20 facts, and then once you’ve got them, they’re there, they’re top of mind ready to go. Serve it up.

Kathy Caprino
That’s it. Weave it. I don’t mean you’re talking about your HR thing and you’re weaving into the story, “By the way, I’m this.” But use that. And when we talk about networking, which is another thing, women, especially introverts, it’s so hard for them, and here’s a little tip. When you hate what you do, you don’t want to network because what are you going to say?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Kathy Caprino
Right?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not fun, “So what do you do?” It’s like, “How do I talk about this? It’s not fun.”

Kathy Caprino
“Ah, I don’t like my vice president job. I hate the people I work with, and it’s putting out not so good stuff.” “Oh, very good.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beating it, Kathy.

Kathy Caprino
Right. “I’ll see at the bar.” But what’s cool is when you have those soundbites, even if it’s half a percent of what you do in this job. Like, I remember when I was laid off, I really thought I was a loser. Although a hundred people were laid off after 9/11, why did I internalize it? But it took me a few years, but then I went, “Wait a minute. I did some great things there.” And then you really pull them out and you do weave them into the story about what you love to do, what makes you proud. So, that’s that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so I’d love to dig a little deeper even. So, when it comes to your special talents, abilities, and accomplishments, one of the tricky funny things about strengths is that to you they may just seem normal, but to outsiders, they’re like, “Wow, you did this?” and you’re like, “Well, it wasn’t that hard. I just did…and then, hey, it’s all done.” So, that’s a great exercise with that reflection in that hour and the facts. How else do you recommend we surface that, “Hey, this is a pretty special thing about me”?

Kathy Caprino
Love it. Love the question. Ask people. So, I’m a big fan of giving recommendations on LinkedIn but also asking. The first time you ask, you cough up a hairball, it’s like, “Ewk, I don’t want to.” But then you get good at asking. And what people write back will blow you away. It won’t be what you think they loved about you. Like, this job that I keep talking about that was the death of me almost, I thought I was a lousy leader because I was getting my tush kicked constantly. I was not inspiring, and that’s hard when you hate who you’ve become.

On LinkedIn, somebody wrote me, a young woman, she wrote, “I was not in Kathy’s department, but she was always something…” and you can read it. That’s the first one I got.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m there.

Kathy Caprino
Something like, “She was always inspiring, and someone who always seemed calm and,” whatever, “someone I emulate or wanted to emulate.” I swear to you I cried when I saw that. It was a healing statement because I thought I was just the worst. So, people are going to tell you things you don’t know with language that you would never use, so ask for recommendations. Not randomly. Pick the 10 people you know who love you in the past five years or 10 years of working, and ask.

The other thing is, ask your family and friends. The really good friends who don’t just whitewash it will tell you, “You know what, Pete, like I have to say, even your prep work for this shows me a lot about you.” You want to know what it shows?

Pete Mockaitis
I hope that not that I’m anal.

Kathy Caprino
All right. Well, I wasn’t going to say that. No, it shows…I’m making this up. I didn’t think of this before. It shows how much you care about how good this is and how good your guest looks. You don’t want them to look bad. You don’t want them to sound bad. It’s not just about you. I see it. Also, you ask some really interesting things here that other people don’t ask. So, I do a lot of podcasts myself and I’m on a lot. You wouldn’t believe how many people just show up and haven’t looked at the material, and don’t know where to go. It says so much about you, about the level of work you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. You’re right. That feels great.

Kathy Caprino
Does that seem right?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. I care a boatload, sometimes too much, it’s like, I’m thinking about the podcast with my kids, it’s like, “Yeah, I got to try to turn that off and…”

Kathy Caprino
I dream about my Forbes blog, like writing it. I wake up and go, “Really? You didn’t need to do that at 3:00 in the morning. It’s terrible what you’re dreaming to write.” Anyway. So, ask people.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, Kathy, I just couldn’t resist, so I went on your LinkedIn, and I’m looking at your first recommendation, and I’ll go ahead and read it, and it is awesome.

Kathy Caprino
Read it. Who is it?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s Rica.

Kathy Caprino
That’s who it is.

Pete Mockaitis
“While I was not in Kathy’s group, she served as an example of how a professional woman should be in a corporate environment. Kathy was one of several female executives that I looked up to, and, on occasion, would offer mentorship during my career,” I’ll just skip the name. I don’t know. “To me, that kind of impression left on an up-and-coming professional in the marketing world speaks volumes about the caliber of work and motivation that a woman like Kathy leaves behind.”

Kathy Caprino
What year was that, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s 2008.

Kathy Caprino
I mean, I still get choked up because it healed me to read it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s beautiful. And I love…and it’s so powerful what you’re sharing here, is that you say you ask, and it was uncomfortable at first but then you got good. And then, sure enough, you got 61 recommendations, which is in the ballpark of the most I’ve ever seen, which leaves a huge impression and is something you can look back to if you’re feeling bombed on a given day.

Kathy Caprino
It’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
And it makes anyone checking you out, be like, “Oh, wow. Okay.”

Kathy Caprino
Thank you, Pete. Nobody’s ever read that to me. See? That’s so interesting. But a lot of people go, “Do we really need those? Why do we need those?” People, if someone can write something about you, that’s lasting as long as LinkedIn is going to be around. Why wouldn’t you want that?

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ll tell you this, candidly, people are making decisions about you and opportunities all the time. Sometimes we, most of the time actually, these days, we proactively seek out guests who match a listener request, like, their expertise matches what someone needs. But yours came from a publicist, and that’s the minority of guests these days, and so my team checks them out, including LinkedIn. And so, there it is, the fact that you’re here means you’re leaving great impressions.

Kathy Caprino
I passed. Oh, that’s nice to know.

Pete Mockaitis
Because you’re doing what you need to do to make sure that those special talents, abilities, and accomplishments are shining through and not hidden and invisible.

Kathy Caprino
Right. Thank you for that. And one final thing about that, now that I’m doing a lot more speaking, even virtually, if someone says, “Holy cow, that was fantastic,” I do ask them to write a speaker recommendation because they’re going to say it’s fantastic for a completely different reason from this bank or PayPal. So, yes, ask for them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, that’s beautiful. We’re just still in the first gap so there’s a lot of richness here.

Kathy Caprino
Do we have seven hours?

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re doing the 20 facts, some reflection time solo, and then you are asking people, and sometimes those asks can be in a public place, like a LinkedIn recommendation. Any other pro tips on identifying your strengths that may be hidden to you?

Kathy Caprino
Well, I love your point that what comes easily to us we don’t recognize. So, go back and connect the dots of who you always were that you let go of. So, for me, when I was 16 to 20, I was a competitive tennis player, went to the state of New York. I was a singer, I loved to be on stage, I loved to use the voice. I was intensely interested in psychology, “Why do people do what they do?” to the point where my dad was like, “Oh, here she goes with trying to figure out why mom did that, or whatever.”

Number four, I didn’t understand this but I had a therapeutic ear, so people would call me, young people, my friends, my peers, guys would say, “Can I come talk to you?” “Yeah. What about?” “Well, I really like Sally and she doesn’t like me.” I can’t tell you how many times people would want to talk to me about that. And I’d say to my mom, “Why are they calling me? I’m 16,” or 18. And I loved ideas. I loved books. My mom used to read literally a book a week, and when I was bored, she’d say, “Read a book,” and I would.

When I look back, it’s every one of those things that makes me love what I do today. But in 18 years of corporate life, none of that was being used. So, look at who you are now. A lot of people say, “Well, at 16, I was miserable, I was depressed. My parents were getting divorced. I didn’t know who I was.” Okay, I don’t mean literally 16. For me, 16 to 20 did it. It’s who I was and then I lost it. But look at when you were really rocking it. As far as you can remember, what were those things that people say, “Ooh, wow”? Like, the standing on stage, I think that’s number two in the most stress-inducing thing after losing a spouse to most people.

So, if you love it, people are going to say, “I can’t believe you love to do that,” or, “You love to write,” or, “You love to flip or horseback ride,” or whatever it is. Look back on those things because it’s usually the things that came so easily to you, you don’t see that it’s a strength, and then connect the dots and leverage that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. That’s great. Well, let’s talk about the second one here, communicating from fear and not strength, and saying, “Oh, I don’t know if this is any good.” I guess there’s a limited context where that is helpful in the sense that you don’t want to overpower or shut down free discussion in a group and you want to explore variance of diverse opinions. But it sounds like, in your experience, hey, the vast majority of the time it’s just the opposite. We’ve got folks who are sort of undervaluing, underemphasizing, underselling, what they have to communicate. So, how do you address that one?

Kathy Caprino
Well, I want to say this because it’s really important. I interviewed The Behavioral Science Guys, Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, in my Forbes blog, and the article, look it up, it was “Gender Bias is Real.” And what they did was take a video enactment of an actress, now we call them female actor, and a male actor, saying the same exact thing, and it was forceful. And they were in a meeting, at a table, and they said, “I don’t agree with the direction the team is going here.” Audiences, both male and female, when they looked at the woman saying that, her perceived competency and literal dollar value dropped exponentially. His dropped a little, so, apparently, we don’t like forceful people. Period. But hers plummeted.

So, what we have to understand here is we, women have been trained not to speak powerfully. If you ask the women in your life, I’m an assertive person, I have been a powerful person in the corporate world, I’ve been called, I can’t say it here, biatch. I talk about in the book, I had a senior vice president call me a, “Buzzsaw.” He goes, “You’re a buzzsaw.” And I said, “I’m speechless. Is that good or is that bad?” “It’s that good.”

Pete Mockaitis
You mean, you’re able to cut through large pieces of wood easily.

Kathy Caprino
“You get it done. You get it done. And where no one else does.” The thing is, would he ever have called a man a buzzsaw? No, I’ve never heard him use that word, and I don’t want to be a buzzsaw. But what I found is, because I was suppressed as a child, meaning I felt, and this is a fun story, but I felt like I had to be obedient for my mom and brilliant for my dad. I grew up with a Greek mom. You don’t challenge your Greek mom. And she came from an upbringing where you speak only when spoken to, and you don’t challenge authority. So, I could not speak up. Thus, the chronic infection of my throat.

When you come from that, when you’re trained that you’re going to be punished, and forceful women are punished. It’s just the way it is, we’re penalized. I mean, still today, I’m 60 years old and I still deal with, when I say very clearly, when I push back, whether it’s on my publisher or anybody, “This is what I need. This is what I’m asking for,” you can sense that they think, “What a…” not my publisher per se, but it’s just not accepted yet.

So, the first thing I ask women to do is just watch yourself in the way you speak for the next week. Now, I do want to say this. Being strong doesn’t mean harsh, mean, abusive, critical. It means strong. It means, “Hey, this is my view, this is what I’m thinking,” and, in fact, The Behavioral Science Guys, they did a research on “What statement can you put before a forceful statement that’s going to mitigate the backlash?” Brilliant. And the one that worked the best is if you put a value statement before.

So, in this case that I’m going to say, listen, people, and I’m on a board of a small singing group, I have to say this all the time that we don’t agree with each other at all, ideologically or otherwise, half the time. They say put the value statement. So, it might be something like, “Hey, folks, I really value honesty and transparency, and that is why I have to share that I don’t agree with the direction we’re going.” And what happens is…

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good.

Kathy Caprino
Is it that good? And part of it is human beings are fragile. If you bring up something, Pete, and I go, “Can I tell you I don’t agree with that at all?” you know, you’re going to be like, “Oh, okay.” But if I say, “Wow, I think that’s a really good point and I’d love to build on that. I see it slightly differently.” I mean, am I backpedaling? Am I making myself weaker? I don’t think so. I think I’m helping you hear it. What do you think?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think it’s brilliant in that it’s…you accomplish the goal of not getting people rankled…

Kathy Caprino
Right. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
…without saying less of what you want to say, so I think it’s landing excellently. And so, I’m sort of thinking, give us some more examples. I’m chewing on this real time. We’ve got a value and then a statement.

Kathy Caprino
All right. So, let me say this, so in this board meeting we were having we’re talking about…we’re singers so super spreaders, so we’re talking about what we’re going to do, and I won’t reveal, but this is what I said. We made decisions and we have to present these decisions. And what I’ve always found, and whether this is to your spouse, or your mother, or your friend, or your singing group, if you half-bake an idea and present it, “This is what we are putting forth as what we feel is the best decision, and we’d love to share it with you.” You’re going to get a heck of a lot more positive response and engagement than, “The board met. Here’s what we’re doing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, half-baked, not so much as you haven’t thought it through but, “We’re inviting additional collaboration and input.”

Kathy Caprino
Yes. And now somebody said, “I love you to pieces but, no. We’re the board and we’re going to say what needs to be said.” And, in fact, if they don’t agree, what are we going to do about it? We made the decision. I don’t agree with that at all. When you’re asking people to do things, like in this case it’s not what anyone wants. We want to sing together. Nobody wants to sing in a mask. And I believe in masks. So, if you’re going to slap them with some mandates, it’s going to make them angry.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Kathy Caprino
So, my view is, “Here’s what…” and we did this before. We made a big change, and I stood up there, and said, “Here’s why we’re thinking of this. Here’s what the research shows. Here’s what…” not about COVID and masks, but something else. And we expected, out of the 50 people, maybe five to 10 to be furious. Not one person was angry.

Now, some people didn’t like this change we made but there wasn’t that hysteria you get when you’re slapping someone with something. So, I feel like where you can make it so that it can be a dialogue and that you can…I think part of why people don’t like this is they don’t want to hear the feedback, they don’t want to have to deal. But if you’re a leader and you want to move something forward…Now, I’m not saying that every president who’s closing their offices for another three months is going to say they don’t invite a lot of feedback. But wherever you can, wherever there can be an open engagement of ideas, it’s better than the mandate, if you ask me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And even if you’re making, “This is the decision and this is what holds,” I mean, getting that input in advance is great both so you make a better decision and that people feel included. So, even if you get a survey in terms of like, “Hey, to what extent are you interested in returning to the office versus are you thinking, ‘Hey, working from home is awesome’?” Kind of collecting that is good to know, and makes people feel heard, and can influence some great stuff in terms of, “All right. Well, hey, you know what, there’s…” I don’t know, if it’s a walk-up office, you can have a limited number of spots available for those who really want it, and like you sign up on the system, and it’s like, “Okay, that’s cool. Thanks. Thanks for thinking about me there. It would be nice to get away from the kids here and there,” and that’s a possibility. So, I dig it.

Kathy Caprino
So, the point is be strong, be confident, but that doesn’t mean abrasive, aggressive, “This is what it’s going to be.” One more tip, I want women, and men, to watch how much they apologize. So, the study shows women apologize, I don’t even have the number in front of me, exponentially more. They say the words, “I’m sorry.” And my son, who’s now working right in the bedroom over there, says, “Oh, mom, that’s just like an idiom. It doesn’t matter.” It does matter.

And I say it so much. Here’s an example. You’re in line and someone cuts that line. How many people say, women, “I’m sorry, there’s a line here.” You’re not sorry. You’re angry. Don’t say the word sorry say, “Excuse me,” or, “Oh, I need to tell you there’s a line here.” Watch the words that come out.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I’ve thought about this in terms of, I think, it was years ago. Yeah, I remember I was headed somewhere and I was with my girlfriend in the car, and I was driving, and I don’t remember the specific context, but she was going to send a message to somebody that we’re meeting, and she started by saying, “Hey, sorry,” something, something, something. And I said, “Can we remove the sorry?” And she said, “What? Why?” And it’s like, “Well, I don’t think we’ve actually done anything wrong. We haven’t made a commitment that we’re falling short of.”

Kathy Caprino
Interesting. Interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
“It would be an unjustified expectation for them to have that we do…” and she was so surprised.

Kathy Caprino
And she was probably thinking, “For goodness’ sake. Just say you’re sorry already.”

Pete Mockaitis
Because I guess I just really like my words to have integrity, to be true, to be complete. And when I say I’m sorry to mean it in terms of like, “Hey, I’m saying sorry all the time.” But in terms of it’s like, “You know what, I did something that I shouldn’t have done,” or, “I didn’t do something that I should’ve done,” or, “I didn’t even consider that perspective of yours, and I really should have. That was inconsiderate.” So, that’s sort of how I view sorry. And I guess, in a way, there’s a balancing act. You don’t want to be stubborn or rigid or…

Kathy Caprino
Or narcissistic where you can’t say you’re sorry. But you said a key thing, Pete. You think of every word. You want it to be what you mean. And those of us in the media or when you write, I don’t even ever fire off an email ever. I don’t care how short it is. I look at it and I read it again, and I’m always editing. I didn’t mean I’m sorry, I didn’t mean thank you when I don’t mean thank you, because your words are powerful. And if you weaken them because you’re saying what you don’t mean, it’s going to weaken your whole impact.

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

Kathy Caprino
Can I suggest and ask that anybody listening take my power gap survey?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Kathy Caprino
And if you’re like 98%, you’re going to have one of these gaps at least, and do something about it. I have a free 7-Day Power Boost Challenge. Ooh, wordy. A workbook if you want to give it away, I’m happy to, and it’s a condensed version of the book where you can look at “What can I say to myself differently? What can I literally do differently in the external world in a positive reframe? How do I look at this challenge differently so I embrace it more fully?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds great. And how do folks get that?

Kathy Caprino
Certainly, if you buy my book you can get it. But I am putting up a page where people can just add their name and get it.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, now, can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Kathy Caprino
It’s Madeleine Albright. Let me get it right, she says, “It took me a long time to develop a voice. And now that I have it, I’m not going to be silent.”

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

Kathy Caprino
Okay. I don’t mean to sound it’s all about me but it’s the power gap survey because it showed me the incredible epidemic proportions of powerlessness that so many women have.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kathy Caprino
It’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Viktor Frankl.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Kathy Caprino
Oh, my gosh. It’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It is.

Kathy Caprino
I try to read it every year and remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I found it helpful actually with COVID.

Kathy Caprino
Really?

Pete Mockaitis
In that, oh, in some ways, I feel, not be melodramatic, but a bit imprisoned, constrained, many of the things I would like to do I cannot do. But then to look at what the man went through and survived and found meaning and value and enrichment for others from it, it’s like it just puts things in perspective.

Kathy Caprino
Yes. And the idea that you can choose. The one thing you can choose is how you’re going to respond. That’s all you can choose. So great.

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

Kathy Caprino
You know, this may sound boring but I’ve just recently used Slack, found Slack, with my team. I adore it. I have a small team, a team of four, but I feel like we’re in the fabric of each other’s lives that way. And it’s, to me, so much better than email or text. I adore it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Kathy Caprino
Okay, this is a little bit of a spiritual thing. But I do believe we have a higher self that knows more, that’s more connected to everything, to wisdom. And my favorite habit is, every morning, literally, I have a little candle here, fake candle but I love it. And I will look at it and think, I will say this to myself, “What is it that I need to learn today? And what is it that I need to let go of?” And I listen. And, usually, there’s a big nugget of truth there.

Pete Mockaitis
Love it. Oh, I was just about to ask you for a big nugget of truth. Is there something you share that people frequently quote back to you or retweet or highlight in your books?

Kathy Caprino
It’s something around this, “We are all like our thumbprint – absolutely unique. And there is so much specialness in that uniqueness.” And so, what I’m really begging people to do is love themselves enough to see that specialness and bring it forward, talk about it more, use it more, leverage it more, because the truth is, the world needs it. If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the world because, look at what we’re in here, we’re in a tough time, so we need your special talents, abilities, and gifts. And do not, for a minute, think you’re not great. And just look at your thumb and your thumbprint, and remember. That’s how special you are. Now is the time to use that in service.

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

Kathy Caprino
KathyCaprino.com. FindingBrave.org is my podcast, and you can find The Most Powerful You anywhere you love to buy books, audio, hardcover, wherever you’d like.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Kathy, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best.

Kathy Caprino
Thank you, Pete. Thanks so much for having me, and your really thoughtful questions. I so appreciate it.

Sep 07
0

603: Easing the Anxiety of Workplace Conflict with Liz Kislik

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Liz Kislik says: "The majority of workplace conflicts are actually about the work... not about a bad person."

Executive coach Liz Kislik discusses do’s and don’ts of conflict management and how to rethink the way you see conflict.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you don’t need to win every argument 
  2. The trick to stop conflict before it starts 
  3. How to make allies in every level 

About Liz

Liz Kislik is a management consultant, executive coach, and facilitator. For over 30 years, she has helped clients such as American Express, Orvis, The Girl Scouts, Comcast, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Highlights for Children solve their thorniest problems while strengthening their top and bottom lines. Her specialty is developing high performing leaders and workforces. 

She is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and Entrepreneur, a TEDx speaker on “Why There’s So Much Conflict at Work and What You Can Do to Fix It,” and has served as adjunct faculty at Hofstra University and New York University. She has also written for the European Financial Review and the Forward. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

  • Blinkist. Learn more, faster with book summaries you can read or listen to in 15 minutes at blinkist.com/awesome

Liz Kislik Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Liz, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Liz Kislik
Oh, Pete, I’m so happy to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I was intrigued to learn that your early career dreams included becoming either a rabbi or a popstar. Can you tell us about this?

Liz Kislik
It seems quite strange to me reflecting back because I’m a very deep introvert, but there are ways in which I like an audience. When I was a kid, I thought being a rabbi was one of the coolest things you could do because you took care of so many people, and you got to make these fabulous speeches, and it just seemed good. But at that time, it was long enough ago, that the conservative movement of Judaism was not ordaining women as rabbis. So, that wasn’t an option.

And then when I was in high school, I started writing music and I had a band, and I continued performing in college and, basically, did a show, a semester, sometimes with a band, sometimes solo, and I thought I might do that until I realized that, first of all, there would just be way too much drugs and other things on the road for my sensibilities, and also that you traveled all the time. So, I decided it wasn’t for me. But as a consultant, I travel all the time when it’s not the pandemic anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you touch audiences.

Liz Kislik
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And, specifically in the realm of conflict, conflict resolution, I’d love to start with all your usable work, what would you say is maybe one of the most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about conflict?

Liz Kislik
I think the thing that is so amazing is how most people really don’t ever want to have any of it, and yet we’re in it so much of the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well-said. Boy, and you said so much of the time with your TEDx Talk is called “Why there are so much conflict at work and what you can do to fix it.” Lay it on us, why is there so much conflict at work?

Liz Kislik
Oh, because we all need different things and have to take care of different things, and if you think even just in terms of having your calendar match with somebody else’s, it’s just tricky. There are so many ways we can vary in our opinions, positions, preferences, etc. The thing that is amazing though is that we don’t consider it a conflict if it’s easy and it doesn’t feel bad. We just think we’d work it out and it’s fine, we have a schedule now.

We consider it a conflict if we project certain ideas, like, “The other person is trying not to give me what I want, or they’re trying to make a problem for me, or they don’t care about me, or they’re against me.” It’s those ideas that make us feel bad and then we say we’re in conflict.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a great insight. And I venture to guess, tell me this is your experience, that most of the time those things are not true.

Liz Kislik
I would say most of the time they’re mostly not true.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Liz Kislik
Because once it starts to feel bad, people do get on each other’s nerves and sometimes they don’t mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s like, “I know you don’t want to hear this but it’s got to be said, so I’m going to say it.”

Liz Kislik
You nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Liz Kislik
That’s exactly right. It’s like, “I’m so aggravated already that if I poke you a little in the process, I won’t feel too guilty.” That happens a lot. A lot. A lot. Or just think of the term personality conflict. A personality is not even a physical substantive thing. It is amazing. It is as if two emanations could leave our bodies and fight in the middle of the room somewhere, which on its face makes no sense at all. It’s not that there is one personality that can never be at peace with this other personality. That’s just not true. It’s all the stuff we bring to it and layer on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I’d love it, before we get into the nitty-gritty of how this is done, could you share with us really, hey, what’s at stake in terms of for professionals, if they got a really great handle on conflict and managing it well versus not so well, what are the implications, repercussions?

Liz Kislik
That is a wonderful question. It goes in two directions. First, I’m going to tell you about what people often think is at stake.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Liz Kislik
That they will lose face, that they’ll lose status if they don’t get the thing they want, that they’ll have failed, that they owe it to themselves to triumph over the other person or other department. Those are the things we set up for ourselves. What’s really at stake is that if we approach differences of opinion as if they are pitch battle, we end up not making progress, our initiatives stall out, our teams can become dispirited or demoralized, people start getting caught up in the smallest of petty grievances and weird details. Basically, good work stops and people get caught up in this idea that they have to fight somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, there we have it. Those are pretty significant stakes, so let’s do it well. So, you’ve got a five-step process. Can you walk us through what those steps are and maybe bring it to life with an example as we’re walking through these steps?

Liz Kislik
Sure. I’m going to sort of use the steps from the TEDx. I may modify them, we’ll see.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Your latest take and we’ll take it.

Liz Kislik
Yes, I think about it differently all the time. It depends on like the last one I saw or that kind of thing. But the first thing I talk about in the TEDx is that you have to rule out the possibility that whoever your opponent is actually is the cause of the conflict, either because there’s something wrong with the way they’re approaching things, and this can be a real thing.

If the person you’re dealing with is actually incompetent, not skilled in the job, not skilled in interpersonal communication to an extreme extent, they really can be the cause of conflict. If somebody doesn’t know the right thing, that can be a real problem. Or if, for whatever odd reason in their history, experience, lifetime, whatever, if they truly behaved badly, if there is someone who really is a bully, who is a lifetime narcissist, sometimes they can be the source of a problem themselves that has nothing to do with the work.

And if that is the case, it is very, very hard to deal with that person. And if you are not the highest authority, you may need help from someone above you in the hierarchy to deal with this problematic person. But the majority of workplace conflicts are actually about the work, how we do the work, what we think we’re responsible for, that kind of stuff. It’s not about a bad person. Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, to that, I think that you say rule it out, and most of the time that’s not what’s going on there. Although I think we may jump to a conclusion that it is. So, how can we bring some rigor to that so we’re not jumping to a bad conclusion?

Liz Kislik
Good. So, the reason we feel like it’s that person is because humans are really good at pattern recognition, particularly when it involves some kind of potential danger. And we might notice that every time we go to a meeting and that person is there, we feel tensed or on edge, and so we assume that’s something about that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Liz Kislik
It’s like hearing the rustle in the grass, and you jump away before you even look to see what was there. So, that’s why we attribute it to a person. We think, as I said before, “They’re against me,” or something like that, “They don’t want me to get what I want. They’re going to favor my colleague over me. It will be unfair.” These are all things that we think of as existential and that they’ll ruin us.

And unless we can engage our curiosity to find out what’s really going on, we can just stick with that for the rest of the time we work with that person, years. I mean, there are people who, literally, have conflict for longer than a decade, which is kind of crazy if you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And that’s well-said because there is something emotional so it really connects inside of us, and it happens again and again when we’re with them, but it could be related to any number of factors. Like, they have, I don’t know, a cologne that we find repulsive, consciously or subconsciously. Or they came out strongly on an issue that negatively impacted us but they may well have had excellent reasons for doing so, and we just are kind of the collateral damage.

Liz Kislik
Correct. Correct. It’s really a tough thing to pull back from those reactions and try to figure out, “Why am I responding this way?” So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go on a different thought pattern and say that one of the things to do, because your example of the cologne is so spot on, like, “Who cares?” But that’s the kind of thing. You wrinkle your nose, that signifies to your brain, “Nose wrinkling. I smell something bad.” That is an archetypical neural response that often comes with a feeling of disgust. And if you have a feeling of disgust about a colleague, why would you ever try to work well with them?

So, it’s actually worth checking your physicality, and actually relaxing your body, and grounding yourself before you try to think logically about what’s going on, because we jump to conclusions all the time. So, pausing and letting that go, “Oh, I hate that cologne.” Oh, my goodness, Pete, you made me think about a guy I used to work with. I hated his cologne. This was when I was quite young and I ran a sizable operation, and he reported to me, and I don’t think he liked it very much. And he would come and stand over me. I mean, he was almost a foot taller than I was, and he would stand over me, and I hated his cologne. And it is so funny how you brought that back, so you see how strong these things can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we rule that out by checking ourselves and our patterns, and seeing, “Hey, what’s really going on here? And is this person truly a bully or a narcissist or socially inept in a big way.” And assuming that, “Hey, you know what, they’re okay. I just don’t like their views.” Where do we go from there?

Liz Kislik
So, then it’s looking at, “What is the issue at hand that we actually need to be solving? Is there a real problem or are we just feeling like we have a problem?” And digging into whatever is in the situation that we’re confronting, and not just the top layer of it, which might be about, oh, take a classic sales and marketing versus operations and production kind of conflict. Is that a good one to use?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Liz Kislik
Okay. So, if I’m on the sales and marketing end, in general, I want the production department to do whatever I need to keep my customers happy so that they will continue to buy, be happy with me as their salesperson, I’ll be successful, the company will have money, and from my perspective, everything will be perfect.

But if I’m the operations or production person, I’m worried about, “She wants all these variances, she needs stuff customized, that’s very expensive. I don’t have the right tools or I don’t have the person with the right skillset to take care of it. So, how am I suppose to get that done? It’s going to be too expensive. We can’t do it.”

So, you often see this kind of charged-up salesperson and you can just picture the ops person with their arms folded, rolled back in their chair from the table. And then you need a deep discussion about, “How is it that we want to serve customers? What are our goals? What are our values about, could be anything from the level of service we provide and how we want customers to think about it, to the requirements for gross margin?” And all of these are factors in the workplace that are a kind of mental overhead.

We think about them but we don’t necessarily think about them while we’re having the argument. But if we could lay them all out, then we might be able to make choices together about what’s the best mix of factors.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. And so then, that step there, asking the right people the right questions to get that, what are some of the best ways to do just that?

Liz Kislik
So, this depends on who you are. For me, as an outsider coming to diagnose these things, I often have access to anybody who’s involved, and that’s really what you need because what sometimes happens is you’ll get two department heads who are accusatory about the performance or dedication of each other’s teams, and the two of them are having an argument, and what you really need to do is to back off from that and actually ask the team members what is and isn’t working for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Liz Kislik
And at some level of granularity because you often find out it is very small stuff. Somebody has to submit a form on Tuesday when their information is never available till Wednesday.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Yeah. And you got to get granular, as you said, or else you wouldn’t know that, and you’ve got to have that deep understanding of what exactly is their life and work like in practice.

Liz Kislik
Yes. So, in general, the lower in the organization you can get these things resolved, the better off you are. But there’s often a countervailing pressure that is coming from more senior leaders based on they’re trying to defend their own turf and their own beliefs about how things should be, and sometimes they don’t let the people who are actually doing the work work it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about the third step, making sure folks are aligned.

Liz Kislik
So, that is really about ensuring that there is clarity about what the responsibilities are, who has which ones, where they’re shared, and that people agree that they’re going to operate on that basis. They have to understand what’s expected of them and commit to delivering on it. If you don’t have both those things, the understanding of what’s expected and the commitment to deliver, it’s very likely that somebody’s going to drop the ball at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in practice, to get that, is it just as simple as, at the end of the meeting, it’s like, “Okay, here’s my understanding of the next steps, A, B, C, D. This person is doing this by then, and that person is doing that by this time. Are we all good?” Is that what you do in practice or how do you recommend getting that alignment?

Liz Kislik
So, that often is enough in the stuff is straightforward. I believe that at the end of every meeting there should be a readout just of that kind, either at the meeting or immediately after, so that people can then say, “Oh, no, no, that’s not what I understood. I thought we said X.” Or if there is a one-on-one kind of meeting, somebody should send an email after that, saying, “Here are the things we said we are going to do. Is that what you meant?”

I think that kind of documentation is extremely helpful not only for the kind of, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s what you said audit trail that some people use it for,” but actually to lay out what we committed to each other. Because when it’s clear, say something goes wrong, then we can come back and say, “I know I committed to doing these things. Here is the outside influence that got in my way. Can you grant me extra time, extra funding, etc.? Or can we negotiate a new agreement?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That sounds good. Okay. And so then, the next step is finding allies at all levels. How do you recommend we do that?

Liz Kislik
So, this will sound so simplistic as to be almost dumb, but the first thing is actually to behave nicely to everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense. No wants to ally with the treacherous.

Liz Kislik
Correct. And people don’t…this is so funny, Pete. People don’t like to be known as the friend of the creep. So, it just makes sense to have good behavior. When you have good behavior, and you show interest in your colleagues, then people think, “Oh, that’s a nice person,” and so they’re more inclined to want to be agreeable and support you. So, that’s one thing.

A second thing, though, is looking for ways to help other people and back them up. If you’re in a meeting, and your colleague makes a statement about something, say, that isn’t going very well to the senior leadership, and you know it’s true, instead of hiding in the corner hoping the senior leadership won’t be mad at you, if you back your colleague up when she’s in a tight spot, when you need something, your colleague is much more likely to ride to your defense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very clear and real, because the temptation is like, “Oh, boy, I don’t want to get in the middle of this.” But it may not be so scary, it can be just as simple as like, “Yes. Oh, I’ve observed similar things.” Like, “Hey, there it is.”

Liz Kislik
That’s exactly the right language. It’s backing up the factual quality not necessarily, say, your colleague was getting a little intense as she was explaining this thing because it is so important to her team and making sure her area is well-ran, etc., and we’ve all been in a meeting where we heard that sound in somebody’s throat that says, “This is really important to them.”

Pete Mockaitis
Can you make it for us?

Liz Kislik
Oh, I don’t know. I would have to get really tense and talk for a while, and start to sound kind of a little louder and with a little bit of edge, you know, like when it’s really important to you and it’s urgent, and you think someone’s not listening. Is that alright?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty good. Thanks.

Liz Kislik
Okay. See, I don’t like making that sound. It makes me tense because you only make that sound if you feel under threat, which is part of how you got into a conflict in the first place. So, we get that kind of intensity when we feel like we have to justify ourselves, and we don’t have confidence that we’ll be heard. And if you have a comrade at arms who says, “Oh, yes, I’ve observed the same thing. Isn’t that interesting?” without a charge on it, then the senior leadership doesn’t hear this sense of danger and threat so they don’t have to minimize the issue. They can just say, “Oh, that’s interesting. We weren’t aware of it. Give us some more evidence.” And then there may be no conflict at all. That’s something an ally can do for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And then the final habit is to teach new habits, step is to teach new habits for managing differences. What are some of your top habits you recommend?

Liz Kislik
So, a couple that I love, really love, one is what I, and now, numerous of my clients call playing an elephant card, you know, the expression of the elephant in the room. And, very often, people will be in a meeting, and it’s like there’s a silent agreement that we’re not going to talk about a certain thing even though we know it’s the real problem. That’s sometimes called an undiscussable.

And when there is an undiscussable issue in the room, whatever else happens around it, you’re not dealing with the real thing. So, there may be a stated agreement that includes, just as you said before, the dates and the costs and the who’s doing what to whom, and all of that, but everybody knows it’s not real because we didn’t talk about the fact that you can’t actually count on Joe. So, everybody knows it’s not really going to happen, and that’s a kind of passive-aggressive culture where we don’t want to say publicly the thing we’re all afraid of. So, playing an elephant card means there’s something up we’re not talking about, and we know we need to talk about it to move on. That’s one favorite.

Another thing that I do very, very often is I ask, and this is a different circumstance. This is a circumstance in which you and your team are together and, basically, you’re complaining about the other team or the other person. And to break that habit, I like the habit of asking, “Why would a smart person do a stupid thing?” because as soon as you acknowledge that the other person has a real reason for whatever makes them seem to be against you, then you can uncover what their issue is and the real content and you don’t just continue in the fight.

Pete Mockaitis
And now is that a question you ask internally to yourself or out loud?

Liz Kislik
Oh, I use that all over the place, internally and aloud, because we’ve all been in circumstances where somebody does something that just makes no sense. And it could be a very small thing. I’m thinking of a client who, he’s just not skillful with his language in the sense that he can’t seem to hold back. He interrupts everybody, and so people sometimes treat him as the disliked person. They don’t want to be with him because he has this constant stream of language and nobody else can talk, and his issues have to be handled, etc.

But when you ask, not his direct colleagues, but other people who have to deal with him and think he’s a problem, he’s so smart. Why would he have that stupid annoying habit? Why would he do that thing? And then they realize it’s because he cares about it so much, so then they can forgive him a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha. Okay. Lovely. So, that really reframes things in a great way. And I’m curious, we talked about…I love to hear good phrases and bits of verbiage that can make a world of differences, and one was “Why would a smart person do a stupid thing?” Are there any other key questions or statements you think are just powerful and you recommend people use them again and again?

Liz Kislik
Oh, yes. Here’s one I love. I’m smiling because I am picturing one group of clients that quotes it all the time, which is, “That’s accurate but incomplete.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Liz Kislik
We all see things from our perspective, and it is totally accurate but there’s more there, and so it’s worth going to look for it. And that little phrase reminds us that we have to take things into account besides our own opinions.

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

Liz Kislik
I think one of the…I want to give you one other habit, if I may, and that’s to think about how the other person will actually hear what you’re planning to say to them, because they won’t hear it the way you hear it because they’re not you. So, to remind yourself that before you go to the meeting and take something on, to really look at it from the other person’s perspective, and how would your language play, and how will your tone play, and how can you reorient yourself to speak or write or communicate in a way that sounds, at a minimum, neutral, but, if at all possible, caring and concerned about the other person, you’ll generally get a better hearing.

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

Liz Kislik
Yes, there are two that I like a load. One is Maya Angelou who said, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” So, that gives you credit for earnest effort, but as soon as you know it could be better, you’re obligated to do that. And that relates to a Talmudic quote that I love, which says, “You are not obligated to finish the work, neither are you free to desist from it. You have to do your part.” You may not be able to fix everything, but if it’s in your control, you have to step up and do it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Liz Kislik
You know what I like? I like the idea of one percent improvement. Are you familiar with this?

Pete Mockaitis
Like the compounding there?

Liz Kislik
Yeah. Yes, that it compounds, and that doing a little bit just adds up in a way that having a great idea but not getting to work on it doesn’t get you anywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Liz Kislik
I recommend The Art of Possibility which is by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander. He has a very, very well-known TED Talk, and it is about looking at the world from a perspective that there is hope and possibility and resources that you didn’t know you had, and that you’re probably doing better than you think if you let yourself.

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

Liz Kislik
My website is great, if they come to my website. There’s loads of material that may be useful to your audience, Pete, because I’ve been writing a blog for ten years, and they’ll also find a free ebook there that’s about the interpersonal aspects of conflict at work.

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

Liz Kislik
I would say that there is always something you can do, that the one thing not to do is to feel helpless and hopeless, even if you have to pause. Sometimes the one thing to do is to stop in your tracks and not react at that moment. But there is something that you can do that will improve the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Liz, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck in all your adventures.

Liz Kislik
It’s been so nice to talk to you. I really appreciate it.

Sep 03
0

602: Finding Greater Enjoyment and Fulfillment through Capacity Building with Robert Glazer

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Robert Glazer says: "You got to know your values."

Robert Glazer discusses his simple framework for achieving greater clarity and accelerating your development.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to know if you’re living below your potential
  2. How to clearly define your core values and purpose
  3. The small wins that lead to tremendous growth

About Robert

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards two years in a row. He is the author of the inspirational newsletter Friday Forward, author of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, Elevate, and of the international bestselling book, Performance Partnerships.  He is a sought-after speaker by companies and organizations around the world and is the host of The Elevate Podcast. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

Robert Glazer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Robert Glazer
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to dig into so much of your wisdom. But, first, I got to hear, you biked from London to Paris within 24 hours. First, how is this possible with water? And, second, tell us the story.

Robert Glazer
Yeah, our London team created an industry event, it’s a fundraiser, to bike in 24 hours. I get to hang out with the London team, support the industry, so I flew on the first day of school. So, yeah, you bike from London to the south, and then we slept on a ferry for what I thought was three hours but we lost an hour, so it was even less than I realized. And then, basically, like pitch black at 5:00 in the morning, we were on the other side and started biking, and you wake up and you realize you’re in the middle of Normandy. So, it was pretty crazy. It’s technically 23 because of that hour. We finished right down the Champs-Elysees, and right under the Eiffel Tower, so it’s a pretty iconic finish. I had never done anything even half that amount of distance.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Very cool. And can you orient us a bit, for those who are less familiar with you, in terms of the London team and the industry? Where are you situated there?

Robert Glazer
So, yeah, I run a company called Acceleration Partners. I founded it, it’s a marketing agency, and we manage what’s called affiliate programs, large-scale affiliate programs, so kind of digital partnerships between brands and all kinds of different publishers. And we’ve been expanding in Europe, and I built up a Europe team. Our MD in London is a big cyclist so she had this crazy idea. But it was awesome. I mean, from a bonding standpoint, there were some people I was biking with in the middle of the night, in the middle of the morning, and had some great discussions. It was actually a really cool experience.

It’s not something you can do without the infrastructure, so there’s a company that sort of provided the infrastructure, but it was awesome. I tell a lot of people: good learning. I didn’t really read very much, like I’m not big on instructions, like I didn’t read a lot of the instructions and what we were doing until I was packing. And then I was like, “Crap. What have I signed up for?” So, it’s good learning there. Sometimes it’s better to just sign up and say yes and not know all the details because if I had read all the warnings and the things and the rest, I would’ve probably scared myself out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really true. I think in terms of if it’s…I guess if you don’t have to have a lot of technical knowhow, like just keep paddling or pedaling, that works in terms of if there’s a risk of you psyching yourself out, that might be wise. Well, very cool. So, let’s dig into you make great promotions happen and you pulled that off with your book Elevate. What’s the big idea behind this one?

Robert Glazer
Yes. So, Elevate came out of something called Friday Forward, which was a note that I started sending my team about five years ago every Friday. It was originally called Friday Inspiration. It had tips, self-improvement. I decided to improve my morning routine, and was told to read something positive, and a lot of the positive stuff I was reading was a little rainbow and unicorn-y. It didn’t do it for me.

So, I decided I would write something that would encourage our team to kind of want to get better, do better. It wasn’t about our business. And it started to get shared outside the company, I realized it, because…

Pete Mockaitis
Without your permission.

Robert Glazer
Without my permission. The teammates would write back and they’d say, “Yeah, I did that. That’s really cool. But, also, I shared this with my husband, and he shared it with his company.” And I sent it to a few entrepreneurs after a conference because I said, “I’d been doing this with my team and I’ve gotten really great feedback, and I’ve enjoyed doing it.” And they said, “Yeah, well, send it to us,” and it was like four entrepreneurs, “and we’ll take a look. Maybe it’s a great idea.”

And one started his own and has done it till this day, and the other three are like good entrepreneurs, said, “This is great. We’ll just send this to our teams on Friday.” That made me think that it might have value outside the company so I sort of opened it up so other people could sign up for it, and renamed it Friday Forward because it had been forwarding. And I look up five years later, and there’s a couple of hundred thousand people in 60 countries reading it on a Friday, which is just totally crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
That is awesome. Well, so then what are some of the main sort of themes and messages that are resonating so much and being useful for people here?

Robert Glazer
So, now, I realized I failed to answer the question. So, I went to write a book that was sort of a synopsis of Friday Forward and an agent sort of pushed me to what was the story. And what happened was I spent some time thinking about “What were we doing as a company to grow so quickly? And how were we investing in our people? What did I do? What have I done to really make huge changes in my life a couple of years since I’d started it? Why were these notes having an impact on all these strangers that I didn’t know? All these high-performing people I saw, like what do they have in common?”

It really all came down to the same thing, which is this concept of capacity building, about how you get better, and these four elements of capacity building which are spiritual, intellectual, physical and emotional. And it was a framework that, for me, covered all of self-improvement and showed you kind of clearly like how it was connected and where you might be doing well and where you might be out of whack. So, I’d say nothing in it is new itself. I just think the framework has not been presented in that way for people to understand “Here’s how you can actually get better in service of what you want most.”

And that was, as I said, that’s actually the approach we took with our team which was “How do we invest in them holistically and build their capacity, and get them to grow along with the business rather than just trying to make them better at their jobs because their jobs would change as the business grew?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, there’s so much in there that I love. So, let’s just sync up on a term for a moment. When you say capacity, I have a definition in mind for that. What do you mean by the word capacity?

Robert Glazer
There’s a long definition but I actually think capacity is how we get better, that ability to. One key though, it’s not more. I think one of the aspects of building capacity is like, intellectual, it’s like getting a faster chip, is that you should be able to do the right things faster and with less energy. I think people correlate it with volume versus it’s really more of ability. How do you increase your ability in these areas to do more, think smarter, and act faster. Physical capacity, we understand, like that bike race. If I trained an hour a day for 60 days, suddenly I have the capacity to bike 170 miles which I did not have before.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, it’s just sort of like your ability, what you are capable of pulling off, and so that’s exciting. Well, lay it on us then, you mentioned you get an understanding of where you might be doing well or not so well across each of these four dimensions. And how do you gauge that? Like, hey, spiritual is rocking and intellectual is lagging. How do I get to that conclusion?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. Well, would it help if I define them first?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Robert Glazer
So, spiritual capacity is not religious. To me, this is just your north star. It’s usually core values or purpose. Like, what is it that you want and who are you? And if you don’t have clarity on that, you probably are already very wobbly because you may not be going in the right…. You may not be wobbly. You may actually be doing a great job going in the wrong direction. So, to me, that’s first.

Intellectual capacity is how you plan, learn, think, execute with discipline, accountability, set goals. So, now we know what we want, and this is like, “How do we get smarter and faster and better in pursuit of that?” Physical capacity is kind of your health, wellbeing, competition, resilience. How does our body hold us up in this process? And then emotional are the things outside of you. So, your relationships, whether those drain energy or bring energy, and how you react to external events and things that you don’t control.

So, yeah, I think my example before, it’s probably more rare. But if someone hasn’t figured out who they are and what they want, they may be considered successful but they may be like crushing intellectual, physical and emotional capacity in a direction or something that gives them no enjoyment. They’re doing what their parents wanted them to do, what teachers and the society, and they’re just…they’re a world-class doctor and they want to be a writer and have a house in Montana and a cabin. And so, it just doesn’t provide them fulfillment.

But for most people, I think, you got to know your values because that drives your key decisions, then you get excited about what it is that you’re going to accomplish, then you pay attention to your emotional and physical capacity. So, physical capacity is the easiest one because this is out of whack I think when we’re tired, when we’re stressed, you think about that like you lose control of the big picture, you’re not learning as much, you tend to fight and argue with everyone. So, that’s when you can see it’s out of whack.

And if your emotional capacity is maybe out of whack, maybe you’re probably on an island, you’ve been kind of detaching yourself from the world and from other people and just trying to go at it, and you need those people in order to have the kind of success that you want to have. So, I think sometimes it’s easier to notice where we may feel a little bit out of whack. Intellectual capacity, COVID is a great example, right? Restaurant industry, you had people shut down overnight, and there are people who sort of give up their hands and say, “Well, guess we can’t be a restaurant.” And there are others who are like, “We’re going to figure out what we’re going to be to keep people employed,” and they learned delivery the next day, and they setup meal kits, and they just dove in and said, “We got to do what we got to do to keep our people employed.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Well, so then let’s see. So, thinking about our audience and your people in terms of professionals, is there an area you tend to see more often than the others popping up as needing more of a boost than the others?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I think physical is the one that we particularly now that can easily get out of whack on. It’s like the chiropractic fix of getting back into that. Spiritual is not one you kind of fall in and out of. For most people, they just haven’t done the work. If you ask most people, “What are your core values?” 98 out of a 100 would look at you with a blank stare, or maybe sputter out a word. Two of them will say…

Pete Mockaitis
Integrity.

Robert Glazer
“My core values are A, B, C, and D, and my core purpose is X.” And I promise you, they’re on a really definitive path. So, I think a lot of people, they know it. I always say it’s self-discovery. They know when they get into situations where their core values are violated, but they don’t have the language to make those decisions and stay away from their electric fence until they cross it. And so, they make a lot of bad or wrong decisions on the journey. So, I encourage a lot of people who want to get better to make sure you figure that out because I think it’s really hard for you to live somewhere, have a relationship, have a job that’s fundamentally misaligned with your core values.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we talked about values a few times, and I love the different angles that people sort of approach it from. So, could you give us some examples of, well, I guess we can hear yours in terms of purpose and values, as well as where do people…? It sounds like you’ve done the research, 98% of people just sort of have nothing.

Robert Glazer
Better than scientific but, yeah, for most.

Pete Mockaitis
But we’re pegging you, we’re citing your name in studies with the parenthesis (Glazer 2020). So, yeah, let’s hear, like, how do you get there? And if you have 20 values, you sort of have none is sort of the way I view it.

Robert Glazer
Yeah, like if you have 20 goals, you have none, right?

Pete Mockaitis
And I think Brene Brown said in one of her books that she did some research that most superstars have like one or two or three, it’s a very small number, and then they have real directional power. So, lay it on us, some examples, and how we get there.

Robert Glazer
Yes. So, less is more in this, and we’ve done this with our leaders at Acceleration Partners for years. Actually, I had a hard time, I went to a pretty hardcore leadership thing. I was determined how values were important and to figure it out, but they actually didn’t tell us how. And so, I went through a process over a year or two, and then started doing that with my team and built it out. I’ve actually just turned it into a course that’ll launch in a couple of weeks because it’s the thing I get asked most about in Elevate. There are some tips in Elevate to get you started.

But my core purpose is to share ideas that help people and organizations grow. That’s why I’m on this podcast, that’s why I’m writing these books. And my core values are find a better way and share it, health and vitality, self-reliance, respect for authenticity and long-term orientation. And I think there are a couple principles to values. And there’s a way I figured out kind of how to get it out of people, but they need to be definitive. Like, things like integrity, it’s like a company. They actually need to describe how you’re different, and they also can’t be one word because I talk a little bit about in the course about the core validator, and there are a couple things like what makes it a good core value.

So, you got to be able to look at it and say, “I’m doing a good job with this,” or, “I’m not doing a good job with this.” It’s almost like your report card. You’ve got to think about the inverse value of that and it should really rub you the wrong way. And then, also, could you make a decision on it? So, when somebody says something like visionary, you’d say like, “Well, was I being visionary last month? I don’t know. If I have a choice, did I make a visionary decision?”

So, when I came up with a long-term orientation, I realized that was something that was really important. I was thinking about that. That’s usually a really good test. Like, if I have a choice of a partner, an investment, or something I can think about, how is this…what is the long-term aspect of this decision? Am I thinking about the long term? Have I done a good job doing that? And that counter core value. If I’m at a party, I always say, “Imagine the sort of inverse of your core value as a character.” And I’m talking to short-term Pete, and Pete’s talking about, “Oh, I’m making all this money on the…”

Pete Mockaitis
Bitcoin.

Robert Glazer
“…investment stuff, and I’m driving a bus through this…” and just everything Pete is doing is like taking advantage of the short term before it ends. Like, I need to get away from him as fast as I can. That’s a good test of that person actually. The archetype of that person embodies the violation of my core values.

So, one of the tests that we do when we’re trying to see if it’s a core value is we sort of tell someone to come up with that inverse person, “How do you feel when you…?” Some people picture a relative, literally, because the whole thing about a core value when violated, it’s just you’re not comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think integrity is sort of everything. When I think about values, I think my first kind of aha moment with values, it’s funny, from a business perspective, my company mission is kind of similar to yours – to discover, develop and disseminate knowledge that transforms the experience of being alive. And I really do. I get jazzed about that, and it doesn’t happen very often. And when it does, these interviews don’t air. Don’t worry, you’re going to make the cut. You’re good.

Robert Glazer
I had a couple of these, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
You know what, I don’t think we didn’t really discover anything, we didn’t really develop anything, this isn’t really worth disseminating. I’m just going to have to let it go. And that feels uncomfortable in terms of I’m a bit of a people pleaser. But it’s necessary, otherwise I would feel bad, I would feel very yucky if I created something lame, and consumed people’s time, which is so precious, on something that was inadequately valuable and they regretted spending that time. I regretted spending the time watching the movie Uncut Gems, personally.

Robert Glazer
I was just talking about that yesterday. I think it’s pretty dark.

Pete Mockaitis
It didn’t do it for me. But more to the point, I remember I was a senior in high school, and I was in my car, just parked, eating ice cream from the Custard Cup in Danville, and I came to realize that, yes, when I’m living in accordance with values, my sort of baseline how I feel outside of some really good news or really bad news, it’s good. I’ve just got kind of happy groove. And when I’m not, it’s just kind of blah.

And at the time, they were one words at the time. I think they were defined as integrity, service, growth, and optimality. And by integrity, it really means like not being sort of shady, or deceptive, or lying. And there’s many shades of dishonesty, like not just saying no when the answer is yes, but like what you omit and what you imply. What did Bill Clinton say?

Robert Glazer
“I did not…”

Pete Mockaitis
“I did not perjure myself. My answers were legally accurate but they were misleading.” I was like, “Okay. Well, you’re right. There’s many flavors of dishonesty here.” So, that’s great. So, in terms of the report card, I’d love it, so how do you, I don’t know, measure or score or quantify for your kind of reporting? Do you do check-ins? How does that work?

Robert Glazer
For reporting on like…?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, you do a report card on your values, like, “Hey, how am I doing this month or quarter?”

Robert Glazer
Oh, yes. So, to me, it’s actually when I say the report card, it’s if I had to look back on a decision, like could I have objectively used that as a decision point? And so, that’s why I kind of try to push people. Again, if I had time, I’d go through with you against the word integrity. I could probably get a little more out of you on that, and you could say, “Did my decision to go on that podcast or not have that personal podcast have integrity?” or probably some other phrase that really nails down what that is for you.

So, the report card is pretty binary, as you said. You’re going to feel really good when you’re doing things in service, and you’re going to feel pretty bad outside. So, if you’re in an environment, if you live in a place that people don’t share the values, if you’re in a relationship, or if you’re in an office environment, that’s a really hard thing to work its way around. But if I have a decision, if I’m looking…my decision to continue with Friday Forward when I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know how it would make money or anything, I sort of scanned across, I’m like, “Is this encouraging people to be healthy? Is it finding a better way in sharing it with them? Is it encouraging self-reliance? Is it about being respectfully authentic? Is it about long term?” Yeah, it’s all of those things. So, I should keep going with that.

And that was a huge inflection point when I said, “Why am I doing this?” Similarly, I think there are some other things you could look in your life and say, “Wow, it’s zero out of five for me. Like, I got to stop that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, how about we just, you know, let’s get into it a little bit, shall we, in terms of integrity and saying, “All right, we can do better than that”?

Robert Glazer
Do better than that? Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it live. See what we can do.

Robert Glazer
All right. So, you gave some descriptions but I always feel like it needs a couple words. So, when you say integrity, integrity is also really tricky because I think there’s cultural implications, and there’s people who have different definitions of what’s integral. So, what is the core aspect of integrity? Can you think of a situation or a story where you’re like saying with Clinton, but a personal one where you’d say, “That one is against my values”?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. I guess I’m thinking about times someone asked me a question, and I knew what they wanted to hear, and I told them a version of things that was sort of shaded than what they wanted to hear, as opposed to the most factual, clear picture of reality, and that felt yucky. I don’t care to do that.

Robert Glazer
So, I often gear people towards because mine is very specific, but the word authenticity has a modifier. It tends to work better than integrity, because I think a lot of people, it’s like mine is respect for authenticity. The core values is a unique blend of, and you can see this in my report card, I’m on five, and you can see some of the things we’ve done. I like being honest with people, I like being direct with them, but also respectful and in a way that is helpful and not like…so a lot of people who are direct, who sort of don’t mind hurting people or leaving them in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
“Robert, you suck! Fix it.”

Robert Glazer
Versus like, “You might not have a career in this. Let me figure out how you can have a career in something else.” So, it’s important for you to be authentic. It sounds like it’s important in your voice. Why, in that case, did you tell the person not what they wanted to hear?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess it’s the temptation towards people-pleasing as well as sort of maybe there’s kind of opportunities that I want, and I don’t want to see it disappear.

Robert Glazer
You probably actually will have the rarer thing, and this is very similar with someone on my team that had…you’re going to have core values that are in conflict, and so you need to be clear about hierarchical.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Robert Glazer
So, being authentic, she had something very similar, “Like I like to please and make people feel good, and I like to be authentic.” And I said to her, “So, what happens when… What if telling them the truth means not making them happy in the short term, and she was really clear that if push came to shove, it’s the other one. So, probably similar for you in terms of verbiage but you have one around making people happy or making them feel welcome, or something like that. And, usually, that will tie to something childhood, like direct experience, or something maybe where you weren’t welcome, or your feedback wasn’t welcomed. But then that authentic piece will conflict with that sometimes a little bit too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. So, let’s maybe completely shift gears in the sense of so we talked about values and purpose, and how that takes some deep reflection and work to arrive at it and get it. What are some of the quick wins, the tips and tactics and practices that can give us a boost to some of the other dimensions of capacity in a jiffy?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, like I said spiritual is one that requires some work. The other ones you can kind of make some quick wins each day. That one is kind of different. And I do think that’s a process you should go through each day. You make a list, you do that. In the book, I explain about how to start the list, building, and look for themes. But a common one in intellectual is just changing your morning routine. Getting up, not turning on the TV, not turning on the news, not turning on the phone, reading, writing, making maybe a list of the top couple of things you wanted to do today, kind of improve your morning so that you improve your day. I think that’s a quick win for a lot of people on intellectual capacity. If they haven’t tried journaling in the morning, or haven’t tried meditation, or just not waking up to the kind of onslaught of everything coming at you.

Physical capacity, similar to what I said before, one of my biggest hacks there, and not that people are joining gyms now, but the best investment you can make is put down 50 bucks on some event four months in the future, whether it is a 5K, a 10K, a London to Paris bike ride, because that’s going to create this future commitment for you that encourages you to do the work the next couple of months. And it’s actually the training and the practice, not the event, that gives you most of the value. And if you’re running or training or going to something that really helps build your resilience and your capacity, you’re going to feel better.

And then really easy one on emotional capacity is this concept called a relationship dashboard. One of the things I’m talking about is the notion of these energy vampires. Like, do you have people in your life, family, business, where you feel worse after spending time with them? You actually feel worse. And make this list. I wouldn’t leave this one on your desk necessarily.

Pete Mockaitis
“What’s this?”

Robert Glazer
I’ve done this with people. So, just five names on each list. Who are the people that you need to spend less time with? This doesn’t mean you need a breakup. This doesn’t mean you need to have a whole thing. It just means like, “I’m doing the thing every four days with this person and I’m fighting. I’m just going to slow down the cadence, remove some energy, kind of pull away from that.” And who are the five people that you feel awesome when you spend more time with, you learn, it’s great, and you just haven’t had that time? And you reallocate that, and you send them an email, and you set up a phone call, or you set up a coffee or beer with them outdoors, and you really just reapply that energy towards the people who are really pulling you up, not dragging you down.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s excellent. And so then, I’d love to get your take then, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Robert Glazer
No, I mean, it’s an ongoing process. I think one of the things about capacity building, and when you sort of read about how I describe it, is I don’t think you ever master it. I think there’s a shift, you get out of whack, you notice. Even COVID, I’ve had a really hard time with physical. Both times that I’ve gone to launch my books about capacity building, I’ve burned out my physical capacity in the name of doing that. So, you don’t win this. I think it’s this constant recalibration just to make sure your ball is gaining momentum and rolling down the right hill for you.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is, and I heard it in a yoga class years ago, and I always gave credit to teacher in yoga class, but then I found out it was actually a pretty famous quote. But it’s, “How we do anything is how we do everything.”

Pete Mockaitis
Whew! Yup, I can sit with that for a while. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Robert Glazer
I’m fascinated with all the research on cognitive dissonance, and I think one of the best books I’ve ever read in terms of real-world applicability is called Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). It’s on cognitive dissonance. And it actually kind of explains I think a lot of what’s going on in society now with our entrenched positions and our sort of defense of the indefensible sometimes, which is that one of the things they show is that when you’re kind of in too deep on a position, you need an out because you don’t want to believe like you’re a fool.

So, cognitive dissonance is our inability to hold these two incongruous ideas at the same time. So, one of the things that she notes in her studies is that when these come out and predict the end of the world, you know they’ve done over time, and all of the followers sort of follow them, and then the world doesn’t end, and they say, “Oh, I got it wrong,” and they pick the next date, everyone doubles down on them.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Robert Glazer
Because it’s psychologically…when you think about it, your choices are, “Oh, they got it wrong and whatever verse is like. Oh, I was a total idiot, and I was duped by this person.” So, it’s really…I actually think that…

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s eye-opening.

Robert Glazer
…everyone should study cognitive dissonance because if you’re dealing with other human beings, and you understand…The other study from that book that I found equally interesting was that when DNA evidence came out, and they went back and let people out of prison who had been wrongfully put in jail for life, the prosecutors who were all retired, who put these people in jail, came out of retirement, doubled down and tried to prove that they were guilty even though there’s evidence exonerating them.

And it’s the same concept because they were saying these two ideas is like, “I’m not a bad person. I wouldn’t have put the wrong person in jail. Therefore, they have to be guilty,” right? That was the only way that they could reconcile that, not that they had made a mistake but that something was wrong with the DNA evidence so they were going to double down and try to prove that they were guilty.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s such a wakeup call in terms of like our humility and being able to adapt and change our view, and to be able to say, “I was wrong.”

Robert Glazer
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s that, as a human species, we don’t do that so well. Like, that’s eye-popping, that stat. I thought half-ish of folks would say, “Oops, wrong guru. Boy, is my face red. I guess I’ll go find somebody else.” But, no, you’re saying just about everybody stuck with them.

Robert Glazer
They doubled down. And think about this, think about what we’re seeing now with COVID-19 and globally, there’s some pretty clear playbooks about what works. But how many leaders just want to make up their own thing and say that they didn’t know? It’s kind of fascinating how much reinvention of the wheel there is, and sort of denial of reality, and, “I didn’t know.” And you say, “Look, call Taiwan and ask them how they have 200 cases and 4 deaths in a country of 25 million and their plan.” I just think a lot of leaders have gotten themselves stuck in this rut of wanting to think that they know the better way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Boy, I think it might’ve been the movie or documentary The Fog of War which talked about like military leaders and just sort of the hard reality that you’ve got to face up to is that over the course of your career, you’re going to make mistakes that get people killed, and that’s the weighty responsibility that’s on you there. And to not sort of sugarcoat it or run from it or justify. Ooh, this is…you’re giving me a lot to chew on already from a quote and a study.

Robert Glazer
That is part of this thing called the Stockdale Paradox from Jim Collins, which is Admiral Stockdale who survived, I think, 10 years in a labor camp and tortured, and he just said he was resolute that he was going to get out, and it was going to be the defining part of his life. But he was always realistic as to that it was going to be bad. And everyone who didn’t make it through was overly optimistic. So, he always talked about the remaining optimistic in the long term but sort of accepting the brutal facts and the reality. Yeah, a lot of people have made mistakes in this, and certainly they should make mistakes in something that’s totally new. But very few have been willing to say, “We made a mistake and we’re switching it,” or, “That was wrong,” or there’s just that dissonance of “I wouldn’t do that.” I think we would understand how people who’d did something they’ve never done anything before would make some mistakes.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think we remind them all the more for their courage and humility and honesty. Well, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Robert Glazer
I do love that book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me). That’s the one I tend to recommend. Also, I like Atlas Shrugged, I’ve read it twice. It’s such an amazing story if you haven’t read Ayn Rand’s book. It’s just great. I know some people don’t agree with her philosophy, but I just think her writing and character development is amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool? You’ve got a book about how to make virtual teams work, so I imagine you’ve seen a lot of tools. So, lay it on us, what are some of your faves?

Robert Glazer
I’ve always loved my OneNote or Evernote, I mean. It’s amazing how much if you organize something, you always go back and find it. But in the virtual world, I actually think some of these video software, asynchronous video, where you can send someone a note, reach out to them. People use it for sales and for marketing, and it’s always very personable. I’ve even used it because the need for communication in virtual environments goes up, and there’s things you need to communicate, and it’s nice to have the context of the meeting, but I don’t need to get everyone on that to listen to a monologue. So, sometimes I’ll just record the pitch I want to give and the note I want to give, and just send it out to everyone to listen at their own answer.

Or, someone wrote me an email a month ago about a really complicated issue. I had been doing more of this asynchronous email. I realized that that email reply was going to take an hour because it was like it had to be delicate. I just turned on the video and I said, “Hey, X, I know this is complicated, but I’ve been thinking about it. I really want us to do this. Here’s why I love it.” And it doesn’t have to be clean in a video. I’m not going to send an email with tons of mistakes or uhms or whatever. So, just that five-minute video, she went back, she’s like, “I got it. We’re on the same page.” And that’s when I started to realize just changing some of the modalities about how we communicate in that environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, totally. And from a word count perspective, most of us can speak about three-ish times faster than we type. Automated dictation isn’t the best. So, for asynchronous video, I’m loving Loom, my stuff. What is it that you’re using?

Robert Glazer
We use Loom. Vidyard is another one that’s popular.

Pete Mockaitis
Digger?

Robert Glazer
Yes, it’s called Vidyard.

Pete Mockaitis
Vidyard, okay.

Robert Glazer
I think V-I-D-Y-A-R-D. I might have the exact spelling or pronunciation wrong. Sometimes I’ll just pop on Zoom and record.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Robert Glazer
But, yeah, Loom. Our team has used Loom. And you stand out. I mean, think about all the sales pitch emails and the stuff you get today. And I’ve always laughed when someone sends me a video, or it’s interesting, or it’s personable. Look, in a tough time, it is better doing something quality at a lower volume than relying on low quality, high automation. It just doesn’t…

It’s funny, for about two months into COVID, I feel like people laid off their automation and felt a little bad about it. Then they just started like throwing, “I know these are difficult times for you, but are you interested in a blah, blah, blah?” You’re saying about the spirit and the letter of the law, I know you just threw the sentence in there, but you really didn’t seem very authentically like asking me how things are going for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. Very good. And a favorite habit?

Robert Glazer
Favorite habit is I think journaling or morning routine. And even for me the Friday Forward. Anything that can become that keystone habit in your life where you do it really well and improves all of your other habits.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, people kind of highlight a lot in your books, or tweet back to you frequently?

Robert Glazer
No, I think the one thing is they just appreciate, particularly in everything that’s going on, focusing on the aspect of building other people up and trying to help them be better. We just have a massive, and I just get lots of thank you notes, they take the time to do that. When you think about what’s going on in social media these days, it’s like everyone’s tearing each other down. And just think about how much energy that takes versus if you were to go online and actually try to prop someone up for a day, and the vicious circle versus the vicarious circle.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah, so I’ve got everything all integrated at RobertGlazer.com. You can get and try the Friday Forward there, see the books, join my podcast and some other articles and interesting stuff there.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah. I like “How do you anything is how you do everything.” I think, really, take the little stuff, the thing you don’t want to do, just do the little things better every day. And one of my favorite stories of Friday Forward is Ann Miura-Ko who’s actually going to come on my launch party, one of the top female venture capitalists in the world. She got a big break like as an intern in an engineering office, her dad was always about doing everything well. Like, I was going to make really good coffee, really good donuts, and she got asked to give a tour, and the guy turned out to be the CEO of HP, and he invited her to come for an internship, and it really like kicked off her whole career.

So, just always reaffirms to me, you have the ability right now in what you’re doing today to do a good job at it, or the ripple effect, or sort of mail it in and then have the ripple effect of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that so much. It reminds of my mom’s story. She worked at Credit Union, and then she noticed that the CEO of the Credit Union was vacuuming the floors after work, she’s like, “Why not? I vacuum floors.” And so, she volunteered to vacuum the floors. And because she showed that initiative, she was just like above everybody, and, thus, was sort of selected, groomed, to be the successor, and it just shows what that can do when you put in that extra effort and go for excellence there.

Robert Glazer
Absolutely. It’s actually often the little stuff that sort of builds our personal brand, and that we’re definitely living in a world of personal brands these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Robert, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck with Elevate and all your adventures.

Robert Glazer
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.