Tag

Career Management

May 07

296: Working with a Recruiter 101 with Korn Ferry’s Julie Forman

By Podcasts 2 Comments

 

 

Julie Forman says: "Be confident, know what you're worth, what you can do, and where you can go."

Korn Ferry partner Julie Forman shares how to leverage recruiters and executive search consultants as you manage your career.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Pro-tips for becoming more visible to recruiters
  2. Do’s and don’ts when speaking with recruiters
  3. When a pay bump isn’t worth it

About Julie

Julie Forman is a Partner with Executive Search Firm, Korn Ferry International where she is a member of the Firm’s Global Industrial practice and Marketing Center of Excellence.

She joined Korn Ferry following a 15 years career with GE where she’s held senior roles on both the Industrial and Capital sides with her last position being Head of Strategic Marketing for GE in Canada.

She focuses today on recruitment and leadership consulting mandates for industrial organizations going through critical inflection points requiring upscaling of strategic capabilities, shift in focus and transformational leadership. She is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt and Change Management Coach.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Julie, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Julie Forman
Thanks, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited for this chat. And I’m curious to learn, first of all, since you’ve hunted many heads, recruited many people, how did you end up finding me?

Julie Forman
Well, it is through the beauty of LinkedIn. I was looking for some various leadership experts and your name came across. And I thought you had an interesting background, and just sent you a request to connect to keep you in my network. And you had started a conversation, which I happily took part of.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it’s so fun because usually LinkedIn connection is just like, “Okay, cool”, and then maybe they sit there for a long, long time. But right away, you were so interested in engaging and shared some great tips. And I’m eager to dig in and share them with the broad world.

Julie Forman
Excellent. Well, I’m looking forward to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I understand you’re often asked so I’ll ask as well. What made you leave GE where you were for quite a while and go on over to Korn Ferry?

Julie Forman
Well, so as a lot of people in the executive search business, sometimes some of them, they’ve grown up in the industry, others have come from management consulting, and others, like me, have had an executive career before. And in my case, although I loved GE and spent many years and had an awesome time, at one point, I live in Montreal and with the company’s evolution, there just weren’t anymore roles that I thought would be my next stop here. And so, I had to take the leap of faith and follow one of my ex-colleagues who I happen to love, and who sometimes knows me better than I know myself, and thought that this would be a perfect job for me, a perfect follow-on career. And he is right. It is great. It leverages a lot of the skills that sometimes I think I didn’t even know I had myself. So it’s a lot of fun every day, and I get to work with one of my great friends, so that’s an added bonus.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I have great respect for Korn Ferry, and we had your CEO in episode 273. And I’m excited for our conversation because it sounds like you have shared a lot with people in terms of working with a recruiter 101.

Julie Forman
Yeah, for sure. One of the aspects of having had a corporate career before as myself when I switched careers, I didn’t realize how little I knew about the industry and how invisible I actually was. And so, as I go through working with different people, obviously I tend to work with C-suite and above, but I love working with up-and-coming talent as well and telling them how to leverage recruiters and executive search consultants, and how to think about it as you manage your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe let’s start real basic from the beginning. You said “recruiters” and “executive search consultants” or “headhunters.” Are these terms interchangeable, or how would you orient us to the words themselves?

Julie Forman
So the industry’s pretty wide, and it’s one where there aren’t a lot of barriers to entry. So I think one of your previous guests had mentioned 16,000 executive recruitment firm placement agencies. Basically, when you look at the ecosystem, there’s two different models. There is the contingency model – basically being paid when you place a candidate, which tends to cater to more staff-level positions. And then you have the executive search group that is a retained model, so more closely aligned to management consulting, where we are tasked with building specific strategies, solving talent challenges for our clients. And so you will find different firms that focus on the different types of recruitment. Now, obviously there is overlap, but typically, the more senior positions will be on the retained model.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say “retained model”, that’s just how folks get paid a flat monthly fee for your ongoing services?

Julie Forman
Well, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of different variation to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Julie Forman
But it’s more like consulting. So, when you hire a consultant and you have them redesign your whole plant, whether or not you implement those changes, you still owe the consultant for the work. So it’s the same way we do, it’s the same thing in recruitment – there is that notion of upfront work. Now, obviously we wouldn’t be in the business if we didn’t end up placing people, so we tend to be very successful at finding what we’re looking for. But the idea is there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And so, maybe we’ll start really basic. So why would a typical professional maybe not yet at the executive levels choose to use a recruiter? They might say, “Oh, we’re just putting another middleman in between me and the job.” Is that helpful, and why?

Julie Forman
Well, so typically, a recruitment, let’s say we talk about search consultant.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Julie Forman
So search consultants — they work for the client, and that’s something that’s very important. So often, we get calls about candidates saying, “Well, I’m trying to work with a search consultant”, but actually, the model is where we’re hired by a client and we will find you in a sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Julie Forman
When you are more earlier in your career, more of a professional level, then it is worth it to think about who I want to work with, because at a contingency level, a lot of the value that these consultants bring is knowing the candidates and being able to present them quickly to the clients, because there is that element of speed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and so then I’m thinking if I am a professional and I am getting some inbound requests or information from a recruiter, how do I know how to sift through that a little bit and know, is this someone who has really cool opportunities or not as cool opportunities? Or you just have to kind of get deeper into the conversation to know.

Julie Forman
Well, the first mistake that I always see people make, or most people make, is that they are on a search mode only when they are actually looking for something, when there are not happy, when they want to move. When in reality, the conversation about your career should be ongoing. So when you get these calls, when you get these opportunities to have a conversation, you should take them. Have a conversation, learn what is out there, learn what these firms are working on, get a sense for what clients are looking for in candidates. And always make sure that you know the market in which you are, so knowing which firms are the ones that you definitely should strike up a conversation when they call, and that you should get to know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and so there is a nice listing in a Forbes article that I’ll put in the show notes. Any other kind of resources you might recommend to get oriented a little bit to, who are the names, who are the players? And you said, “They’ll find you”, but if we want to find them, what should we do?

Julie Forman
Well, you mentioned it. So there is a list there, and those lists, and I think on the website you’ll share, there is both the professional recruitment and also the executive recruitment. Most of these firms will have an area where you can upload your information so that you are on their radar. So that is something that’s very important. The other part is also looking around you. So when somebody has a new role, ask them was there any headhunter involved, any placement agency, and try to get their feedback for the level of service that you felt, the experience that you felt as a candidate. And that’s something that’s really important – using your network.
But most of all, I think it’s about being receptive. Sometimes people feel that, “If I dare to answer a recruiter, I am breaching this loyalty I should have to my employer, and I will be tempted to do something that I do not want to do.” Well, that’s kind of not true, right? This is just about talking about your career opportunities that may or may not appeal to you. And it’s important to have those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well then, how would one make themselves more findable? I understand there is a LinkedIn feature that explicitly says, “I’m open to chatting with recruiters.” Or what do you recommend?

Julie Forman
Well, LinkedIn certainly is something that a lot of people use, so making sure that you have a very professional LinkedIn profile. And there are tons of resources out there that explain how to do it, but that’s certainly a number one. And not just listing the title; it’s really giving an idea of what you’ve done, what you’ve accomplished – that’s really important. That’s certainly a first part. Making sure that your resume is up-to-date and ready, not just as though I’m going to write up my resume because you want to find a new job, but because you’re ready to, if you want to engage in something, that you have it ready and at hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you said there’s a number of these LinkedIn resources. I’d love it if you could name one or two, and maybe just a couple of quick do’s and don’ts that you see all the time.

Julie Forman
Sure. So the first one is making sure that when you describe your position or the positions you’ve had in the past, you are not generic. A lot of people, they write their accomplishment or their responsibility in such a generic term that it could be anyone. And so it’s important that you think about, what is my value proposition, what have I done that is valuable to an employer, and how can I create, I’d say, the feeling that somebody wants to call you and learn more about you, because that’s what LinkedIn’s all about.
The other thing, make sure you have professional pictures. That’s always very important. Make sure that you have – if you’ve done any major transformation, any major initiatives you worked on, things that are very relevant in your industry, make sure you highlight it in your LinkedIn profiles because those are the things that are picked up. And never forget that LinkedIn is a keyword-based search engine, so make sure that whatever keyword you would see in a position spec that you would be interested in, that that is somewhere in your resume, so somebody can find it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so then it sounds like – we talked about generic versus specific, and the initiatives and transformations – that there could be a fair bit of content, a pretty hefty word count then on your LinkedIn profile. Any thoughts on how much is too much?

Julie Forman
Well, I think you need to put enough to be able to create the curiosity. You have to bring enough to distinguish yourself from others. Obviously, you don’t want to have a five-page LinkedIn profile, but you want to put enough. Most people do not put enough. It’s not clear the scope of their responsibility, it’s not clear what they’ve done. And it’s just not, I’m going to say “salesy” enough, right? But I would certainly advocate to put more than less, especially if you’re looking for a role.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  So maybe, I don’t know, just to frame it a little bit – two or three bullets or accomplishments per role, or is that about the right amount?

Julie Forman
About two or three where you… And it’s important as well to say if you are leading a team, how many people are you leading; if you have a sales responsibility, give me a scope of how much; if for example you’re working in a specific vertical or industry, what is that experience; if you’ve worked with major clients, what are the types of clients that you’ve worked with; if you’re working in sales and you’ve done through channels, which channels do you know, because those are the aspects that clients often will ask for.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And I have advised many clients when it comes to, say, working on a resume, that numbers do really work wonders, in terms of if something is significant or large – what do you mean by significant or large? Can you put the millions of dollars or numbers of people?

Julie Forman
Yeah, exactly. Or somebody in finance that says on the resume, “I was responsible for closing the books every month.” Well, yeah. Whether they were closed properly or not, that tends to stay out.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and I think that specifically for a moment, folks in accounting roles, I think, sometimes those resumes are kind of tricky to showcase some real results in terms of like, “We kept things moving well, and appropriately, and sensibly, and according to GAAP, and nothing broke.” It kind of doesn’t have as much of a flash or an enticing element as, “Discovered acquisition opportunity that yielded $200 million of transaction”, or something. So I’d love to get your take there, if that is the nature of your role and responsibilities, like you’re responsible for keeping things moving and operating and humming, as opposed to generating new explosive initiatives that are game-changing – any pro tips on that?

Julie Forman
Well, you probably hurt the feelings of a lot of accounting people out there.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so sorry, accountants. I love my accountants, and you have skills that I often do not. And I value your contributions, all accountants out there. I want to make sure these accountants are getting their credit, their props in any way possible.

Julie Forman
Absolutely. I’m just kidding. But what may not sound exciting to somebody that is not in finance can be very exciting to somebody in finance. I think finance is one of those areas where nobody is looking for somebody who just stamps paper or closes the books. We’re always looking for people that add value, that are business partners. That’s what we’re looking for. Just calculating numbers and presenting them and making sure they add, it’s not value anymore.
So it really is about, when you think about your role, is how do I add value, how what I do every day distinguishes me from somebody else, and why would somebody want to hire me and not somebody else? And if you have no answer, I would say, change it. Do something. Think about how you can change it up. Challenge yourself to go above and beyond. And find those bullets that are going to go on LinkedIn and make a recruiter say, “Hey, I’d love to get to know this person because they’ve just done what my client is really looking for.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that turn of phrase there, “Find those bullets”, because that is powerful both in terms of representing yourself to the outside world, but also the internal representation for promotions and performance reviews and those kinds of things, is to proactively seek them out. And in college, I was a little bit of a… I was maybe a little bit of a prestige hound in the pejorative kind of interpretation of it, or a very shrewd strategic career planner in the kinder interpretation, because I was. I was thinking, “Okay, what is this bullet going to be that is going to sound awesome to impress McKinsey, or Bane, or BCG?”, because I was hungry and focused. That’s what I wanted post-college.

Julie Forman
No, managing your career is certainly about creating those experiences that are going to impress people. But more and more, managing a career isn’t something that’s linear. Before, it used to be you need to impress your boss, you need to impress your boss. But today, those people who are going to help you along and accelerate your career are all over. They’re everywhere. They’re your colleagues. They are your direct reports. They are everywhere. So it’s important that we stop seeing it as such a, “I need to impress my boss”, because that’s not what cuts it anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you there. So let’s say you’ve done some smart networking, you found some recruiters, or you’ve been found by recruiters by having an excellent LinkedIn profile that has the great keywords and great distinguishing accomplishments. What are some key things to think about, or goals to have in mind when you start having the conversations with these folks?

Julie Forman
So, it’s important to know what you’re all about, what you’re like, what you want to do, what you have been successful at, and what you want to develop. When you enter in a conversation, that’s the really important part. Too many people, they don’t think about it, and then they get pinged on an opportunity, and they’re just like, “Hey, it sounds fun. I’m just going to go there and explore it.” And they really don’t have the control of the conversation. So thinking about what you want to do is really important.
Another thing as well is what you want in your career, what you want in life. Every so often, you hear these conversations on, “You should not have your email during the weekend. At 6:00, close everything down.” But the reality is some jobs, you cannot do that. Whatever people say, I can guarantee you that does not exist. It doesn’t mean that you should do it. It means that if that’s a value, a preference that you have, then maybe those jobs aren’t for you and you should look elsewhere. And you could be successful doing something else. But understanding who you are and what you like is something that’s really, really important to find the career success that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s a really good point there. It’s not just having a clear understanding of what you want, but also what you don’t want. And I have had some conversations with guests about establishing boundaries and that can take you so far. But as you said, in some roles that is just not going to fly, no matter how diplomatically brilliantly you engage in that discussion.

Julie Forman
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So then you’ve got some goals in mind, you’ve got some clear self-knowledge, and then you’re entering into the conversation. What are some maybe particular do’s and don’ts to think about as you are having conversations? You’ve got a relationship with a recruiter, and you are having some back-and-forth. Are there some things that people do that just are delightful to search consultants and just dreadful, like, “Oh my gosh, I hate it when people do this”?

Julie Forman
Well, so I’m going to talk from the perspective of a search consultant. It’s probably a little bit later in your career, although these apply to any level. The first part of it is really to engage in a conversation. You mentioned LinkedIn, and the reality is most of our sourcing, most of the way we find candidates isn’t LinkedIn. Most of it is our network, the network of consultants of the firm, and also, a lot of executives that we know and we ask them, “Hey, who do you know and how? I have this particular challenge. How would you tackle it? What kind of person do you think could tackle it? Do you know anybody?”
And so one of the things when you get into these conversations is to think about, first of all, “Is this something that I am qualified for, interested?” That obviously is the first question. And then if the answer is “No” to either of those questions, “How can I help the person? What do I know about the industry? How can I help, maybe with a contact, with an idea, with a place I would look?”, because that’s really important.
The other thing that’s really important is as a lot of management consulting happens, we’re not alone. So although I don’t do a lot of the work, the work is done by senior associates and research associates – all these awesome people who reach out to folks and who are often the first entry point.  And so make sure that you network with these people, that you are very kind and nice, and take their call and return their call. So that’s really important. Another point that is also something that we talk about and there’s a lot of different points of view, is salary. Do you answer when somebody asks you how much do you make?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s hear that.

Julie Forman
That’s a big one. And there’s certainly a lot of different points. Salary, it has changed a lot. 30 years ago, 40 years ago, your salary – the salary you got from your job – often was your only source of revenue, and that kind of dictated where you were on the ladder of life. Today, you have people that have side jobs, and they create apps, and they have this, and they have that, so salary becomes one of the ways that you create wealth. And so I think that as a lot of things in these days, transparency becomes more and more, that you should find a way to figure out to test, how much do I make and how much does this job pay? And benchmark where you’re at, and think about it that way.
So, it really is a matter of personal preference and where you’re at, but obviously when you are in search and you call someone and you want to know, “Are we in the right ballpark? Does this make sense? Could we create an opportunity that would be compelling for this person?” So when people are super cagey, it’s not the best. And they don’t have to tell us, but they have to tell us what they want. And that’s the problem. The reason we ask for salary is people don’t know what they want. So it’s like going to a store and saying, “I want this. How much is this?” “Well, I’m not going to tell you how much.” It’s like, “Okay.” So it just doesn’t work. So either you say what you make, if it’s actually allowed, because a certain US state now prohibits it, or you say, “You know what? This is what I’m looking for. This is the range that I’m looking for.” And you have to have the confidence to say it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I’ve heard that tip shared and it resonated with me. When asked the question, “What are you currently being paid?” the appropriate answer is, “I am targeting a range between X and Y.” So it’s a little bit of a dodge, but I think it still accomplishes the goal you spoke of, is, “I need to know what works for you.”

Julie Forman
Absolutely. And you need to know how do you relate. And when you have these conversations, it’s a good time to ask, “Hey, I’m at this point. Does it make sense? What do you see?” Not obviously with everybody who calls, but when you’ve established that relationship, when you have this person you spoke to two or three times, and you’ve met them, you can ask. It doesn’t change anything. At the end of the day, whatever offer you get, you can say “No”. But the problem is people think that whatever is put in front of them, they just have to take it.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very wise. And I want to dig a little bit more into – you said people don’t really know what they want. Could you be a little bit more specific, in terms of maybe precise questions within that realm of “What do you want?” that you often see people just don’t have answers to?

Julie Forman
Well, I think a lot of people, they start in a career, they get paid a certain amount, and they don’t talk about it at all. And so they have no idea whether or not they’re fairly paid for what they do. So, it’s about knowing, getting a little bit more information, educating yourself to know, “Okay, so what does an average role pay?” And sometimes getting a $5,000-$10,000 raise is not worth changing the job. But sometimes having that information helps you think about, or gives you the confidence the next time you’re in front of your boss and you need to negotiate that raise, knowing what is it that you’re worth out there, what are similar jobs paying. And it doesn’t mean you’re going to leave, but it means that you have at least that information.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. And I’d like for you to speak a little more to that. You say sometimes a 5 or 10K bump is not sufficient to exit. And I can think of many such reasons why that’s the case. Could you elaborate on some of the biggies?

Julie Forman
Well, so especially when you’re earlier in your career. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. So you need to think about what is it that you want to develop, where do you want to go, and what is the best environment to develop that? And is it worth $10,000 if you just leave what you have and go? Sometimes you’re not in the right environment and you need to leave, and you’re not going to reach your goals where you are, but saying that just money is enough to motivate a move is rarely the right decision. It needs to be a package.
So, getting back to your question – you have a support environment in your role, where they are coaching you to get to the next level, you’re in an industry that you’re passionate about, and you’ve worked many years to develop, let’s say a clientele, and it’s just starting to work out for you. That would be too bad to let that aside to go to something else. So there’s a lot of reasons, but typically, people know. You get that good feeling on whether or not you’re doing it for, really, the holistic value of changing, or really if it’s just the appeal of a little extra cash.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And I’d also like to get your take when it comes to, you said we’re looking at keywords and does it seem to have a fit based upon distinctive experience. I also want to hear from you in terms of, are there some things associated with attitude or demeanor or some sort of other universal things like, regardless of I am trying to find someone in marketing or finance or if it’s in airlines or high-tech, everybody loves a candidate who, blank. Could you fill in some of those blanks?

Julie Forman
So the number one attribute, I would say, is somebody who’s agile. And agility is about the ability to take everything you’ve learned in the past and kind of rearrange it to deal with a new situation. The reality is the world is unpredictable. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. There are shocks every day, and so you can’t be prepared for everything that is going to come in front of you. But you can be prepared in developing a lot of different skills and having that ability to put them together to face whatever situation’s in front of you. So that’s definitely one.
The other one that’s very popular, and for good reason, is authenticity. So the ability to really embrace who you are and who people are, and find your real strength, and knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not so good at. And that has a lot of different flavors, you can call it self-awareness, but that’s really important – knowing what it is that you can do and being upfront and honest about it.

Pete Mockaitis
And I can see how the authenticity piece, you can kind of get a quick gauge if you’re talking to someone, if they seem to say that they are great at everything, it’s like, “Maybe, maybe not.” But we’re not maybe getting the whole story or the full truth, in terms of seeing that self-awareness or that authenticity. I’m wondering from your vantage point, how do you get a read on if someone seems agile?

Julie Forman
Well, so that’s a good question. I think it’s when you speak to somebody and they talk about their background, there is a lot of creativity in how people approach problems and create solutions, and they’re always on the lookout for something new, something different. They’re not afraid of trying different things, and they’re not afraid of changing industries, or changing roles, or they see more of the positive than the potential challenge.
So that’s typically when somebody is very agile. Now, there is a scientific measure taken from it, and we could certainly measure it. Each time we do interviews and we meet with candidates, it’s really something that we measure. But on a high level, it really is that ability to be creative on how you tackle problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you got me so intrigued now. Scientifically measuring this agility, I know Korn Ferry has some tools, instruments, assessments along those lines, but from a mere conversation you’re getting a gauge and taking that into a number. How does that work, to the extent that you’re not disclosing super proprietary things here?

Julie Forman
No, so to get into levels and numbers, those are very complex assessments that are done, and so we certainly don’t do it by just a conversation. But I mean you get a feeling. I think it’s the feeling of when you think about those contests around the world and you’re a team of two and you have these challenges that you’re not too sure about. I think it’s Amazing Race. Well, who would you like to be on with Amazing Race? Who would you feel that whatever’s thrown at you, you will kind of manage it through? And it’s that feeling that we tend to look into in candidates, somebody who you would feel very safe in whatever situation, you know they’ll figure it out. And so we don’t come out of an interview with a number, I’ll tell you that much. It’s more of an impression.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice image there with the Amazing Race piece. Well, I guess now I’m thinking about in the consulting case interviews, in terms of we say, “Okay, we’ve thrown several business scenarios at you, where you’re able to crack them again and again.” And so, I’d be curious to hear in terms of, not to go too deep into interviewing, but when it comes to questions posed, are you seeing any kind of mistakes happening again and again that candidates can just easily avoid?

Julie Forman
Yes, definitely. So the biggest mistake that people tend to do is, they are not prepared. And they haven’t really been thoughtful about, once again, what is their value proposition, what are those great examples in their career that really showcase who they are and what they can do. And so what that creates is that when you’re in an interview, somebody will often spend too much time explaining the context, and then they get in the weeds, and there’s too many details. And they forget that this isn’t about the price of oil in 2012; this is about, what did you do about it?
So if you think about a minute, let’s say, or two minutes to answer a question, you don’t want to spend a minute and a half talking about context. You want to give it quick, have that elevator speech of, “This is what happened, this is the gist of it, and now I’m going to tell you what I did about it and that why I was amazing in this situation, why you want to hire me.” But most people haven’t practiced it, and that really shows in an interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also want to get your take here – you’ve recruited at multiple different levels of seniority for clients. Can you share some perspective in terms of what do you see those who are rising, they’re flourishing and seeing a really cool career progression. What sorts of, I don’t know, knowledge, skills, abilities seem to come up again and again? We mentioned the authenticity and the agility. Is there anything else in terms of themes you’re spotting?

Julie Forman
Definitely the ability to learn, and also the confidence of knowing, of being able to come out and meet with us, and have the conversation, and take the information, and really have that level of gravitas that we look for. So, gravitas is something that’s really tough to define. It’s tough to define, yet it’s so easy when you see it. And I think that one of the ways that you develop that is often by being surrounded by people who have great executive presence. But executive presence really is when you meet someone, and they have a good background, and they know how to conduct a conversation, and you feel like this person can handle a lot of challenges. That’s certainly something that we look for.

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

Julie Forman
Well, I think it’s really going back to trying to develop the best that you can be. Many years ago, developing your career was about being the best. So if there were five vice presidents or five directors or five managers, you wanted to be the best manager to get the promotion to director, and then the best director.
Now things have changed. People come and go, there are no long-term careers anymore. So you need to make sure that you work on yourself to be a director, whether or not it’s a director in your company, whether or not you get your boss’s job, all you need to do is make sure that you are director-level. And if that position is not there, then you’ll get another position. And I think that really is a shift in mindset, where you need to work collaboratively with your colleagues, you need to make sure that everybody gets to be the best they can be. And at the end of the day, everybody’s going to win by doing so.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice final note there. So now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Julie Forman
Well, one of my favorite quotes is actually by a great Montrealer who died last year, Leonard Cohen. And he sang in one of his songs a verse that says, “There is a crack in everything. That is how the light gets in.” And I think that Leonard Cohen wasn’t somebody who spent a lot of time explaining how he came up or what anything meant, so it’s open to interpretation. But to me, it really means that there’s nothing you can’t crack, there is really an opportunity everywhere, and that once you find that little piece of light, that’s when everything gets better. So it’s the continuous pursuit through imperfection that you get perfection.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite study or a bit of research?

Julie Forman
Well, study – I would say at Korn Ferry, as you mentioned, we have a ton of research. We have lots of information on executives that are successful and what makes them successful. So we’ve been looking at studies on what makes great Chief Marketing Officers and what distinguishes customer-centric leaders. And so we’re in a lot of that analysis right now, so certainly, if your listeners go on our website, shortly you’ll have all those findings.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so it’s in process as we speak?

Julie Forman
It’s in process, definitely.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, alright. And how about a favorite book?

Julie Forman
Well, I read so much for my job that I don’t think I have a favorite book recently, but what I’m going to suggest is a favorite podcast. I assume everybody listens to podcasts. It’s actually an HBR limited series called Women at Work. It is a six-episode that they ran about, I’d say, six months ago. And it’s a conversation between Amy Bernstein, who’s the editor, Sarah Green Carmichael, executive editor, and Nicole Torres, a younger associate editor. And it talks about issues that women face, but it is done in such a pragmatic way and away from the conciliation work and family that basically a lot of us are sick of hearing about. But it really goes into really more interesting and useful subjects, so I definitely recommend listening to those.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And how about a favorite tool?

Julie Forman
So a favorite tool, I would say… So I bought this nifty little whiteboard peel-off that I stuck on my desk, and tons of dry erase pens. And every morning I do my to-do list, and then I have the pleasure of just wiping it off as it goes through. And it’s great. At the end of the day, when you take that eraser and you just wipe it clean, you have a feeling of accomplishment. So hey, you take what you can, right? [laugh]

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. I think that Caroline Webb of How to Have a Good Day, in a previous episode, really kind of emphasized that, in terms of when you are getting the pleasure of checking something off, maximize it. If it’s digital, it should have a big swoosh, or an “oink” noise, or a gray strikethrough, or a disappearing animation. And if it’s paper, it should be a big thick line through it. And you’ve taken it farther with the erasing – that’s cool. So you say a “peel-off.” What exactly does that mean?

Julie Forman
Well, so it’s a whiteboard material but it looks like a big sticker. So it’s the size of a sheet of paper, and you just stick it on your desk. So there is no way… I tried the notebooks, but then the notebooks, you forget. Papers, you have too many of it. This is just in your face, so if you decide not to strike something off your to-do list, then it’s on you.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And does it actually stick to the desk?

Julie Forman
It does, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Julie Forman
Well, it’s removable, so if there’s any furniture-lovers out there, it’s not going to damage it. But it’s like $10. It’s actually really cheap on any place where they sell stationery.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s held up. One peel-off has stood the test of time.

Julie Forman
It does, definitely. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, alright. And how about a favorite habit?

Julie Forman
A favorite habit, I’d say, is going paperless. So I have my iPad and Apple Pencil, which I absolutely adore, because I can’t get into the habit of typing everything, I still love to write. And going paperless is something that’s really great for me. It allows me to carry all my notes everywhere, it keeps them confidential. And I think that’s really something that takes a little bit of getting used to but now makes for a much cleaner desk.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you write with an Apple Pencil and iPad as fast as you can with a normal pencil and paper?

Julie Forman
Absolutely. It’s even better, though, because you can download some documents and then just mark on them. So it’s great when you have resumes and you want to keep that for posterity.

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

Julie Forman
I would certainly point them to connect with me on LinkedIn. So I love building my LinkedIn profile with great people. Also Korn Ferry, our website. Korn Ferry’s coming out with great tools for even people at all career levels, so it’s certainly worth it to go and have a peek. It’s called Korn Ferry Advance, so that really is a great tool that’s coming out. And that’s it. And watch out for Korn Ferry Institute, where we have tons of great research paper that’s backed from our experience, both on the research side, but also the pragmatic part of being in search and seeing talent every day.

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

Julie Forman
Yes, make sure you’re visible. Be out there, network. Even if you’re super happy in your job and you think this is the best in the world and you couldn’t be better, you never know what changes and you never know what’s out there. So be confident, know what you’re worth and what you can do and where you can go, and make sure that you can test that regularly on the market.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Julie, thank you so much for sharing this. I think that many folks have finally had this question demystified. So, very much appreciated, and keep doing the great work you’re doing.

Julie Forman
Excellent, thank you so much.

Apr 30

293: Body Language Insights that Get You Promoted with Dr. Denise Dudley

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Denise Dudley says: "Be that person who expands others, [so] that... they walk away feeling better about themselves or the situation."

Denise Dudley goes deep on the science and practice of optimizing your body language for making a powerful impression at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to smile more genuinely
  2. Postures for enhanced communication
  3. The powerful impact of speaking with a lower pitch

About Denise

Denise Dudley is a professional trainer and keynote speaker, author, business consultant, and founder and former CEO of SkillPath Seminars, the largest public training company in the world, which provides 18,000 seminars per year, and has trained over 12 million people in the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Denise holds a Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, a hospital administrator’s license, a preceptor for administrators-in-training license, and is licensed to provide training to medical professionals in the United States and Canada. She’s also a certified AIDS educator, a licensed field therapist for individuals with agoraphobia, and a regularly featured speaker on the campuses of many universities across the US, and the author of Simon and Schuster’s best-selling audio series, “Making Relationships Last.”  Denise speaks all over the world on a variety of topics, including management and supervision skills, leadership, assertiveness, communication, personal relationships, interviewing skills, and career readiness.  Denise’s latest book, “Work it! Get in, Get noticed, Get promoted,” is currently available on Amazon.com, and is receiving all 5-star customer reviews.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Denise, thanks for joining us.

Denise Dudley
I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re going to have a ton of fun. You have taught many people many skills, but I want to talk about one of your skills from back in the day and that is your ability to catch snakes. What’s the story here?

Denise Dudley
Well, I will tell you first of all that of the many interviews I have done in my life, no one has ever asked me this on air.

Pete Mockaitis
I love hearing that. Thank you.

Denise Dudley
It’s a brand new question. I love new questions.

I really am a tomboy. As much as I’m dressed up in front of audiences all the time and all these sorts of things, in my real life, my real Denise is somebody without makeup on, with my hair tied up in a knot, outside looking under rocks, having fun, looking at frogs, playing, swimming in lakes. That’s who I really am.

As a kid I had a great father. My father is passed away now, but he was an adventurer, actually a jeweler. By trade, he was simply a jeweler/watchmaker, but he knew everything about the out of doors and everything that did everything. He knew how ducks flew and how things swam. He taught me how to catch snakes because we just found every creature on the earth to be interesting.

I learned how to be a really good snake catcher. I can dazzle my friends because a lot of my friends really don’t like snakes. I can actually catch snakes very well and hold them for a while and tame them and then pet them and share them with people, pass them around. My one rule though, of course, is that-

Pete Mockaitis
They appreciate that.

Denise Dudley
Oh yeah, they love that. Yes. Some people won’t even go near the snakes I catch, but they’re kind of interesting creatures.

My one big rule which I’ve taught – I have two boys who are now in their early 20s. Of course, I’ve passed on the trade so they know how to catch snakes well as well, but I’ve always said “But whatever we catch and look at, we must put back exactly where we found it,” so everyone gets to go back unharmed no matter what it is we examine.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Could you tell us are there a couple pro tips to bear in mind should we want to go catch snakes after this conversation?

Denise Dudley
Yeah, so let me teach everybody how to catch a snake. There are a couple methods but the best way is to make sure that you are wearing first of all long pants and shoes because snakes really don’t want to be caught. They don’t seem to enjoy it so to speak.

When you’re first running up to them, getting ready to catch them, they will sometimes turn around and snap at you. But of course, I don’t catch poisonous snakes, obviously. I’m not a crazy person. It’s not really going to hurt you if they bite at you, but you still don’t want to be bitten.

If you’re wearing long pants and shoes, what you do is you get up and just gently, and I mean really gently, just lay your foot down on top of the snake as close to its head as you can get so that you’ve trapped it. You’ve got your foot not on it in any harsh way, but just kind of gently keeping it from moving and then you’ve got to get in there and get your fingers, your thumb and forefinger, right behind the snake’s head, right behind its jaws. At that point it can’t turn.

There’s a point where the snake’s head, because of its skull, is fixed. If you catch a snake farther back on its body, it is perfectly capable of whipping around and biting you and you don’t like that. It doesn’t feel good. But if you catch it right behind the head, you can hold into it.

Then all snakes, it’s very strange, if you hold them long enough, they finally just decide that you’re okay. Then you can let go from behind their head and then they just kind of crawl around on your – I guess they don’t crawl, do they? They slither around on your arm and just seem to be quite happy to be with you. It just takes about usually three to five minutes and then they just decide that it’s okay to be captured. That’s how you catch a snake.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that you went there. It’s thorough.

Denise Dudley
Yes, yes. Well, I’m a teacher, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I practically feel like I can do it.

Denise Dudley
I think you should try it.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t think my wife will like it, but I’m intrigued to try it.

Denise Dudley
Give it a whirl and call me if you have any problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Can do, can do. Now, your most recent book is called Work It. I’d like to hear a little bit about – what’s the primary idea of this one?

Denise Dudley
Absolutely. Sure. This is my most recent book. It actually is an act of love. I’ve been working with a population recently that is not the population I’ve worked with for most of my adult life. Mostly I’ve worked with adult learners teaching assertiveness training and management, communication skills. I really work mostly with communication skills in my career.

But I’ve worked most recently now just because of a few invitations I’ve had to come into high schools and colleges, I’ve worked with a lot of people who are graduating from both high school and college and heading out on their first, I’m going to call it, career job.

I always try to say your career job is to be distinguished from when you delivered pizza in high school or whatever it was you did back then. This is the job that you really think might become the thing that you could do for a very long time and hopefully aligns with your interests and passions.

I’ve been working a lot with that population of students and loving it, by the way, so a lot of times at the end of the talks I’ve been giving about how to put your best foot forward in an interview or how to discover what your passions are and people will come up and ask me for some kind of a reading resource and I didn’t find one that I thought really fit all of what I believe, so I wrote one.

It’s one of those, there didn’t seem to be one, so I wrote it. I wrote Work It. It’s called Work It: Get In, Get Noticed, Get Promoted for young people who are just entering the career market. It is a gift of love because I’m donating all of my royalties to youth organizations throughout the country. It’s my latest little passion right now.

[6:00]

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. That’s cool. We have listeners often say, “Hey, how do I stand out? How do I do the get noticed part of this?” I’d love to get your perspectives here and feel free to not be limited to folks who are in their very first career job, but those that are some years in. What are some of the top principles when it comes to getting noticed and standing out?

Denise Dudley
Absolutely and I would want to point out just as you’re sort of implying, that really when I wrote this book, a lot of people came to me who were well into their careers and said, “I needed this book just because I’m changing careers and I wanted to really learn what I needed to do to polish up my resume and do all the things that you need to do if you’re going to get out there even in your mid-career point.”

Here are the things that I usually talk about. For one thing, I think that it’s important to – I believe that almost everything in the world actually stems from excellent communication skills. I could talk about this for hours and hours, but I believe that the way that we stand out, the way that we can get noticed and the best way is to make sure that we have command of all of the vehicles that we use to communicate ourselves to other people.

When I talk about communication, I don’t just mean sitting here talking. I mean facial expression, eye contact, what you’re doing with your hands, your actual vocal tone and loudness. I like to go into details about all of those things and make sure that I do my best when I’m working with people to bring all of the communication components into alignment so that someone really is an excellent, I always call it a walking, talking, audio/visual representation of who you are.

To master those sorts of skills, I think helps just about anyone to stand out. Good communication skills, being able to say what I want, to be positive, to be willing to take on projects that I’m asked to  do, that kind of moves over into having a positive attitude, having a can-do attitude. I think that helps us to get noticed, if we’re going to be hired to be promoted within the jobs we already have.

A lot of it has to do with our intentions I guess I would say. When I approach a job, when I approach a task that I’ve been assigned by my employer, do I approach it with a “Sure I’ll do that. I’ll take care of that,” sort of an attitude? Do I look like I am someone you want to be around? I think that has a lot to do with it too.

Even the crabbiest of employers and supervisors do prefer to have people around them who have more of a positive personality. Showing our positive sides I think also helps us to get noticed .

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could maybe unpack in a little bit of detail here. When it comes to folks doing it wrong, what are some things that I would say show up frequently and are easy to overlook and what are the fixes for it?

Denise Dudley
Oh great, that’s a great question.

There are few things that I think that people initially do wrong. Again, going back to communication. Let me just break down communication for a second and then I’ll address this.

When I talk about you, your overall you-ness, as I would call it, I like to talk about, as I’ve mentioned a couple of these already, but I want to mention all of them. I like to talk about your facial expression, what it’s doing; you’re eye-contact, what’s happening with eye-contact. I like to talk about your posture, where your posture is; your use of hands, your hand gestures. Those are your visual representations.

Then there are three auditory ones: your voice tone, what the tone sounds like; your voice loudness, how loud you’re being; then finally, your verbal content, the actual words you’re using when you go to talk to people. Within those seven components, there are things that people do right and wrong within each of those. Let me just start with facial expressions .

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s do them all. A wrong and a right for all seven.

Denise Dudley
With facial expression, what we want to do is we want to start with what’s called, technically there’s a word for everything, what’s called a neutral to positive open-facial expression. Now what does that mean?

It means that when you first look at me, I’m looking open. I look approachable. I have a neutral toward positive expression on my face, which means I’m not scowling but I’m also not smiling wildly because if I smile too soon and too much I look kind of scary in a way, like you might not want to approach me. I work toward neutral toward positive, skewing slightly toward positive when I first see you, when I first approach you .

When you first look at me, we know from a bunch of research here about first impressions. There are really two important first impressions.

There is a first impression that’s been really chronicled very recently, which now apparently occurs within about one second, actually under one second, a flicker of a first impression. Of course, a first impression that is found within one second can be only your facial expression. It can’t be anything else because I haven’t talked to you yet, I haven’t opened my mouth. You don’t know what I’m going to say.

Facial expression is the first first impression. It’s important to make sure that it looks open and not closed, not unfriendly, and not wildly smiling because that, as I mentioned, looks a little weird.

The things that we do wrong are sometimes we don’t pay attention to that very, very first facial expression moment when I have the opportunity to impress you toward the positive.

We know another thing about first impressions and that is that once you’ve made a first impression, it is almost impossible to alter it, almost impossible the research shows.

I mentioned that there are two first impressions, that one second first impression and then another first impression occurs within about, we believe, five to fifteen seconds of meeting someone. I personally think it’s within about ten to fifteen seconds that we’re making that first impression, which is now based on a little bit more.

I can see your face moving. It’s a little more plastic. I can see you smiling at me, which is the next thing I think is important to make sure after I presented that initial neutral to positive open facial expression, that I immediately go into a smile.

A smile is a very, very important personal trait to have. I usually spend a lot of time talking to people about the importance of smiles. We know from all sorts of research, which gets reported quite a bit in Forbes magazine and every other place.

We know that smiling does all kinds of things for our bodies, lowers cortisol, brings up serotonin, lowers blood pressure, lowers our body temperature actually, lowers heart rate, does all kinds of things for us, the people who are smiling, but it also transmits to the person we are smiling at. It actually allows the other person to experience those positive sorts of effects as well.

That smile is an important thing to cultivate. I sometimes come across people who decide that their personal shtick is that I’m too cool to smile. Have you ever met somebody like that? Like, “I’m just not going to smile. I’m not smiling.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like they’re brooding and they’re sipping a latte. They’re thinking some deep thoughts.

Denise Dudley
Yeah. Exactly. They’re deep and they’re edgy, so smiling doesn’t really fit in. I try to tell people, “Look, really, smiling is one of the best things you can possibly do.”

Also, research shows there’s a lot of crazy research out there on smiling, research actually shows that people who smile, rather than seeming less intelligent or less with it, we actually – we receive the benefit of the doubt, that we probably are smiling because we are intelligent, we are in control, and we do know what we’re talking about. Smiling is an important thing.

The next mistake I want to talk about, of course, is the reverse of that, just thinking I’m not going to smile because it’s not worth it. I’m too busy or I’m too cool.” I think that’s a big mistake. Facial expression, very, very important .

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to talk, if I could at first.

Denise Dudley
Yeah, please.

Pete Mockaitis
About when it comes to smile, I think some people would say, “Hey, I’m not anti-smile, but it just doesn’t seem authentic or genuine and can’t you kind of tell when a smile is real or if it’s fake based on wrinkles elsewhere in the face that appear or don’t appear.” What are your thoughts in terms of smiling naturally and cultivating a more sort of natural smile that is real?

Denise Dudley
Good question. Of course, I don’t know if you’re referring to this or if you know about it, but there have been a bunch of studies out there that talk about real versus fake smiles and that technically when we put subjects in a room and show them smiling faces, they’re pretty much able to tell whether it’s a fake smile or a real smile on the photograph of the person they’re being shown.

This is where I go with that. We do know that fake smiles, fake smiling is better than not smiling at all.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Denise Dudley
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, insight

Denise Dudley
Yeah. For a couple of reasons. One of them is that such cool stuff by the way. I don’t want to get all geeky on you.

Pete Mockaitis
Please do.

Denise Dudley
But we know – here’s some cool things. We know that there is a brain-body connection. There just is. We know it from lots of ways.

For instance, if I were to sit here right now and tense up every muscle in my body and I held it, and held it, and held it, and held it. Pretty soon my brain would start to assess what my body was doing and think “Something must be wrong. We’re all tensed up.” I can actually talk my brain into experiencing anxiety simply by tensing my muscles up.

Conversely, we know through meditation, deep relaxation that if I meditate or if I think of a relaxing thought, I sit in a room, I quiet my mind, I can actually do things like relieve muscle pain and actually lower heart rate because my body is basically listening to what my brain is thinking and saying, “All must be well. I guess I can relax. I guess there’s no danger here.”

This brain-body connection is quite real and verifiable. We know that smiling, when we smile, what happens is that our brain is monitoring what our body is doing. Our brain actually senses the muscles of our face coming back in a smile and it senses that those muscles are coming back to smile and says, “Something nice must be happening. We’re smiling.”

That brain actually releases serotonin, the feel good hormone, simply by sensing that the smile muscles are being pulled back.

There is a very interesting study that was done. This was by a man at Stanford. He’s passed away now. But he actually did a study. This was a while back actually. Then there were several others that have been done since then using other methods.

But what he did was he had people, he had subjects at Stanford actually make two different sounds. He just simply had them make these sounds. One group of people was asked to make the sound of e, eee, a long e, eee, which mimics a smile, eee. Then the other people-

Pete Mockaitis
Eee. It’s like you’re talking to a baby.

Denise Dudley
Yeah. Eee, eee. And it pulls your mouth back. Then he had another group of people make a u sound, uuu.

Pete Mockaitis
Uuu.

Denise Dudley
When you do a u, your mouth turns down, uuu. It looks like it’s sort of a downward turned mouth. So eee versus uuu.

Based on what they were making, the sound they were making, they were asked to rate their moods. The people who were making the e sounds were actually rating themselves as much happier. They felt good after making that sound and not so much with the people who were pursing their lips. They didn’t feel as good doing that. That was just simply with making sounds.

This man, by the way, if anybody wants to look up cool research projects, this man’s name was Robert – if I say his name, I’ll have to spell it for everybody because I believe it was pronounced Zajonc, but he was – I think he was Yugoslavian or something. It’s actually spelled Z-A-J-O-N-C, believe it – it looks like Zajonc, I think, but it’s pronounced Zajonc. Don’t ask-

Pete Mockaitis
That makes me smile saying it.

Denise Dudley
Yeah, I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Zajonc.

Denise Dudley
Zajonc, yeah. He did all kinds of interesting research projects with how people feel based on body language.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. It sounds like part of the equation is, so a fake smile beats a no smile, but a real smile is even better.

Denise Dudley
Much better.

Pete Mockaitis
And we can get there by sort of just naturally putting our body in the spot, whether that’s meditating or having some quiet time or saying eee. Are there other sort of quick hit tactics that just kind of put you in a naturally smiley place?

Denise Dudley
Yeah. Good question. One thing that I suggest is that when you first meet somebody, in order to think of a genuine smile, I happen to be a really smiley person. I like to smile. I think I must know the benefits of smiling because I do feel good when I smile and I do smile genuinely at people, but for people who are thinking, “Eh, humanity. Eh, not another person I have to smile at.”

If you’re just not feeling it or if it’s not inside of you to smile, I always try to suggest to people, well, as you’re meeting somebody just think of something about them, if you know anything about them or you’re even looking at them, think about the most positive thing you either know or see about that person.

Just go ahead and as you walk up to someone, it’s just a good way to focus. It’s what I suggest to people. Just to say as I walk up to someone just think, “Beautiful red hair,” or just something, just track on whatever you can. Or, “This person just received an award,” so whatever it is I know about this person that makes me like them or feel good toward them.

It could be superficial like red hair or significant like something that they achieved, but one way or another if I can track on some truly personal thing about that person I’m about to smile at, it will certainly make my smile more genuine .

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. I like that. Thank you. Alright, we talked smiles in depth and I love it. Maybe we won’t get through the seven and that’s fine.

Denise Dudley
We may not.

Pete Mockaitis
But let’s hear about eye contact.

Denise Dudley
Eye contact, very, very important. There are a couple things that people do wrong with eye contact, things that we do right with it. I spend time talking about eye contact even though it’s in a sense part of facial expression because it has its own personal set of important rules.

For one thing, it’s very important, no matter how shy we are or reluctant we might be to do so, it’s very important that we make eye contact with people we’re interacting with, very important, whether that’s our boss, our coworkers, our children, our spouses, people we’re interacting with in the subway, whatever it is we’re doing. If we’re going to interact with someone, we want to make that eye contact.

There are a couple of times when it’s absolutely imperative and that’s when you’re either giving information, sharing some information with someone like, here are directions on how to do something or when you are giving instructions.

If you have a position at work where you need to orient someone to a job or tell them how to do something, very important that you make eye contact with the person at that point. It just helps lock in, “Here’s what I’m telling you. Please pay attention.” Eye contact, very, very important.

But the other part of eye contact is sort of a rule of eye contact, is that we make it, but we also break it. We mostly make it and then we look away for a little flicker of a moment and then look back again. We want to make direct eye contact, but that we break eye contact as well.

Now some people will ask me, “Well, when I look away, where do I look?” Well, anywhere. It won’t matter, just look away for a second and then look back. If you don’t break eye contact whatsoever, you’re going to appear one of two ways. There are two types of people who don’t break eye contact.

The first would be an aggressive person, someone who is intimidating me. If you think about somebody, whoever it is you might be thinking of right now who might have made eye contact with you and never looked away, just looked at you, and looked at you, and looked at you, it starts to get intense and it starts to become uncomfortable unless you just look away for a second, just break it and come back.

The other set of people who don’t break eye contact are people who are in love. If you’re in love with someone or you’re romantically inclined. Just think back to if you’re in love right now or if you’ve been in love, how you just don’t want to look away from that person’s eyes.

That’s a good thing. It’s an energy exchange. But when we’re first meeting people out there in the world or working with people at work, we want to break that eye contact so as to not appear either romantic or aggressive. Now, I believe that there are some people who use eye contact quite deliberately to be aggressive and know that they are showing you that they are in a position of power by not breaking it .

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I believe there was a – maybe an Office episode about this. Don’t break eye contact and don’t break the handshake-

Denise Dudley
Yes, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
As a means of showing your power and your authority there.

I guess I look away maybe more than is optimal just because I’m thinking hard about like what they’ve said or what is the implication of this stuff. Any thoughts associated with the ratio? It sounds like you’re saying you pretty much want to be on eye contact with brief breaks. How do we think about thinking when it comes to conversing with someone while also making eye contact?

Denise Dudley
Well, if you’re someone who looks away a lot, one of my suggestions – because some people do that. Some people want to close their eyes in fact while they’re thinking. I suggest that if it’s a really important conversation that’s going to continue for a while, that you do what I call pre-calling it.

I always suggest to people that if you have some kind of thing that you really want to do that steps slightly outside the norm of what a normal interaction might look like, that you just pre-call it.

That you say, as Pete, you say, “You know I really want to focus hard on what we’re about to discuss this afternoon and I want to tell you that sometimes if I’m not looking at you and I’m looking down it’s because I’m thinking very hard about what you’re saying to me. I just want to let you know that that’s just something I do in order to truly absorb what it is you’re saying.”

I think it’s okay to say that sort of thing. Then the person goes, “Oh, alright. Okay,” and they kind of get it.

Because a lot of times if we look away, one of the things that if I’m talking and you look away for a long period of time, it tends to make the speaker run out of energy. I start to lose my energy because I’m thinking – I sort of trail off a little bit like, “Well, okay, is he still here. Is he not?” I’m not getting that feedback loop.

Continuing that eye contact with the person we’re speaking with is actually completing a communication feedback loop which is telling me as you look at me, I am with you. I am with you in this conversation. If you tend to break it a lot, I would just pre-call it and say, “This is what I do in order to concentrate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. When it comes to making the eye contact, are you looking right at one eyeball, you’re shifting two eyeballs?

Denise Dudley
Sure, so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Which eyeball should we look at? Eyebrow? Nose?

Denise Dudley
You’re so good. I love your questions. Okay. This is going to take hours. Let’s have like a five hour interview because I love these questions.

There are a lot of things about where we look. For one thing, we want to try to look at both eyes. Now, the closer we are to someone, if I’m sitting very, very close to you, you can tell that I’m shifting from eye to eye. If we’re eight feet away, we’re not really actually shifting eyeball to eyeball. We’re just looking at the person’s eye area.

If we’re way, way, way back, like 50 feet away, then actually eye contact gets perceived in the upper third of the face. We know that from research. Anything in the upper third of the face is perceived as eye contact, but the farther away we are from someone, the more it seems like eye contact, the closer we are to someone, the more important it is to look directly in the eyeballs.

We do our best to move back and forth between the two eyes. However, I always suggest to someone, this happened to me the other day. I was talking to someone who had one eye that was impaired. It was clearly not a functioning eyeball, so I didn’t want him to feel self-conscious.

We were standing very closely together in an art gallery actually, an art museum. This was a guard and he was telling me stories about the art work. I wanted to make sure that I just focused on the eye that was working because I didn’t want him to actually think I was assessing the other eye, so I stayed on that eyeball really out of politeness plus it’s the only one that’s functioning. If he wants to see me as looking at him, I’m going to need to look at that eyeball.

I actually tailor it to what’s happening with someone if they have any kind of a visual impairment. Otherwise, looking back and forth at both eyes is probably the best idea. I love that question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Thank you. All right, we’ve got the facial expressions. We’ve got the eye contact. How about posture?

Denise Dudley
Posture. Posture says a lot about us and there’s some weirdly interesting studies about posture.

Posture says a whole bunch of things that we might or might not expect. A lot of times we might assume that posture might tell others that we are attentive or that we are organized. It also, for some reason, makes people decide whether we’re intelligent or not. Good posture is associated with intelligence, which is not a bad thing to have is that kind of association.

Posture tells us everything. You have posture whether you’re seated or standing or walking. You always have posture .

A few things about posture. One of the things is that sometimes I like to talk to women just for a moment and then I’ll bring men back in.

But a lot of times women got taught, especially older generations of women, far older than you or I are, a lot of older generations of women got taught to stand somewhat sideways in what was called in the 1950s, model’s pose. Model’s pose said that we put our feet together very closely and then we turn slightly sideways in order to show off the most pleasant and slender aspects of our figure. How’s that? Boy, a little bit of sexism from the ‘50s here.

That is not a powerful posture however. If I were to stand kind of sideways while I talk to you, it would look weird in modern day world.

But what we want to do instead is to stand, I like to call it architecturally, so that my feet are slightly apart. My most powerful position for posture is to stand with my feel slightly apart, so I don’t look like a big tall thing that comes down to a tiny little point, so feet slightly apart.

Then I want to make my upper body match my lower point, so I bring my shoulders back and into position so that I’m standing in a very comfortable but we’ll call it spread out sort of way so that I’m not deliberately trying to look tiny.

Now with that shoulders back suggestion there, a lot of times women like to wrinkle their noses at me if I say that because women become self-conscious about their chests.

I generally like to tell women it doesn’t matter if your chest is big or small, you like it or you don’t, no matter what it is you think about it, I promise that you will look better, more powerful, more assertive, more in charge of yourself with your shoulders back than if you’re slumping forward and trying to cover up your chest. You will simply just look better.

Taking that position is very, very important. Taking that position of I am here. I am no bigger or smaller than I really am and I own my own space. It helps you to assume that everyone in the room understands that you’re here and you’re here to stay.

Back to the brain body thing for a moment because I think this is interesting stuff too. A very interesting study was done with shy people. Shy people were asked, in this case, to sit in a meeting. You know how a shy person might sit, kind of folded over, minimizing themselves so that they don’t appear to really be present.

They were told by the researchers to sit in this meeting, you don’t even have to talk, just sit there, but in this case spread yourself out, just spread out a little bit. Spread your legs out, put your arms on the arms of the chair, put your shoulders back, own your space in the meeting. You don’t have to do anything but that.

Then they were asked after this meeting to self-rate their own ability to be assertive and when they actually spread their bodies out, their brains basically listening to what the body was doing, the brain thought, “Wow, you’re sitting there as if you own you space. You’re sitting there as if you’re a person who knows what he or she is talking about. You must be feeling good about yourself.”

They rated themselves completely more in control and more assertive just by spreading out their bodies.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. All right, so shoulders back, own your space.

Denise Dudley
Shoulders back.

Pete Mockaitis
Anything else on posture?

Denise Dudley
Sure. You have posture when you’re seated as well, so when you’re seated you want to make sure you unfold your legs if at all possible and put your feet on the floor. That’s the most positive and powerful position to sit in when you are seated.

Making sure you do all those things, arms at your side when you’re standing or arms on your lap or on the top of the table or on the arms of your chair if you’re seated, not fidgeting, not playing with your cuticles, not doing any of those sorts of things, but making sure that you look like you are comfortable and calm with your arms and your hands .

Pete Mockaitis
Anything else associated with hands?

Denise Dudley
Oh yeah, we can talk about hands next. Your hands are saying tons of things about you.

Generally speaking I would say that you probably, all your listeners out there, are probably using their hand motions perfectly correctly unless you’ve received some kind of feedback to the contrary, which could be that somebody says to you, “Whoa, you sure use your hands a lot,” or if they just start watching your hands while you’re talking and it looks like there’s a bumblebee between the two of you, then you’re probably using your hands in excess.

What we want to do with our hands is to make our hands match our message. We do want to definitely use our hands because hands help to describe what we’re talking about. They actually help our brains to continue thinking right.

For instance, if I were describing to you a beautiful park with a lake and swans on it, even as I’m sitting here talking to you right now, I’m actually moving my hands because I’m thinking about a park and a lake and swans. It actually helps my brain to visualize what I want to describe. Hands actually help guide our words in ways.

But we want to use our hands because it also helps the listener if they’re looking at us to know what we’re talking about. If I kept my hands right at my sides and I never ever moved them it would look stiff and rigid and it would look like I wasn’t coming across in a natural way.

Another thing about hands is that we like to take a tip from newscasters. Newscasters know to use their hands, but they keep their hands within a fairly small area because they really are in a box basically. When we view a newscaster on television, we see a talking head, as we call it, sitting in a box. If they were to gesture way, way, way outside of that box area, we would lose their hands, so they stay within a small area.

I always suggest to people that you do the same, that you keep your gestures within about we’ll call it a foot and a half area outside of your own body.

Pete Mockaitis
This is so good. Thank you. I’d love to talk about voice, but I’m also watching the time. Maybe you tell me is there anything else you really want to make sure to emphasize before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Denise Dudley
I would like to mention, if possible, voice tone because I think it’s very important. Again, just knowing what I know about working with people and doing so much work in communication, it’s a very good idea for all of us, men and women both, to stay in the lower ranges of our voice tone .

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Denise Dudley
Yeah, okay, I’ll do this. That’s the problem. I don’t want everybody to now start walking around talking like a truck driver who smokes a cigar, but we want to stay in that lower range because that’s our power range. That’s where we sound more like we know what we’re talking about.

Speaking very quickly to women, women have something that’s called a widely varying intonational pitch pattern. Isn’t that something? It means that we go up and down and up – it’s very, very musical, very melodic, but that upper most pitch pattern is where we lose our power, where we go, “Well, hello,” and it’s really high.

We want to stay in that lower range because it lends more credibility to what we’re talking about. Cultivating a lower pitch pattern is a good idea for men and women both .

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

Denise Dudley
Okay. Gosh, I have so many. The most obvious one is really a quote that comes from Mahatma Gandhi because it is really what I believe and it’s one that gets quoted a lot. Then I’d love to give you a second one which is really my voice. It’s something that I say that has helped me so much in life.

But the one that is really in my soul is the idea that we should all be the change we want to see in the world. I think that says so much because sometimes, even I, I get out there all the time and I’m working with people, I work with young people all the time, and sometimes I’m even in my hotel room and I’m thinking, “I’m just one person. Maybe I did talk to 100 people tonight, but that’s just 100 people and how many millions of people are there.”

I start to think about one little tiny drop of water in the ocean. Then I think, “No, no, by behaving this way, by being the change I want to see, if we all did that, we would create an amazing movement of change.” I’ve always loved that particular quote. I would want the world to know that that’s what I would love to live by is that idea.

But I also want to tell you another quote because it’s something that is really my quote. It comes from my life experience and I’ve told so many people this. It’s actually in the book too that I wrote.

That what I believe is that there are definitely times in your life when you cannot tell the bad news from the good, especially when you’re stuck right in the middle of a situation. And you could think that the worst thing in the world was happening to you and lo and behold, it’s about to become the best thing that ever happened to you.

I like to encourage people to know that you don’t know the bad news from the good until you get down the road a little bit and figure out what the repercussions are from whatever it is you’re experiencing.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Thank you. Now you’ve said a lot of studies. Do you have a favorite?

Denise Dudley
I was kind of a study junkie because of what I teach.

We’ve already talked a lot about the smiling studies and there are a lot of them about lowering blood pressure and I even know – these are legitimate studies, so I don’t ever quote studies that I can’t really find the abstracts on.

But recently, since we’ve already covered smiling, I have been enjoying so many studies out there on walking. I’m talking to lots of audiences about walking. We kind of know intrinsically how walking works. It’s just a great thing to do, but it’s a mood enhancer and it’s a creativity enhancer. It does all kinds of things. There are some great studies.

There’s one that came from – well, from the Midwest, not so far from Chicago, from Iowa State University. There was a study that they did of getting people to walk, subjects to walk. All they needed to do was walk for 12 minutes, so this isn’t very long. It’s just getting up and moving.

They called it – in the study it’s called incidental ambulation. Don’t you love that? Incidental ambulation, which means walking without a purpose I believe, but they just got people to get up and walk.

In this study they even told the people in the study, “Okay, we want you to get up and move around for a little bit before you come back to the task at hand,” which was really a fake task. They were testing walking, of course.

They even told them, “When you come from walking, we’re sorry, you’ll probably be tired and you might not really be in the mood to finish this test, but we just want you to get up and take a walk for a moment,” so they even negatively biased the experience of the walkers.

But, of course, when the walkers came back, their mood was improved, they were better able to focus on the test they were taking. All good things happened from that in a mere – in 12 minutes basically.

There are a whole bunch of other ones. Walking tests recently – walking research is amazing. Stanford University figured out that walking for just five to fifteen minutes increases what’s called divergent thinking which is what they mean is creativity. It also helps with plasticity of the brain. Cognitive performance improves while you’re walking.

Max Planck Institute did a whole bunch of studies on it and found out that cognitive – basically just thinking, the ability to think improves while you’re walking. The only caveat there is you need to walk at you own preferred speed. It creates a rhythm in your brain that your brain enjoys, which facilitates thinking.

I’m loving studies recently on walking because they are reminding me to get up and walk every now and then.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Now, how about a book?

Denise Dudley
Well, I probably could be quoting business books, since this is a business, but my favorite books are really not business books because sometimes I just need to get out of my own head.

One of my favorite all time books is The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. It’s reportage at its best. It’s before Tom Wolfe ventured over into novels and fiction. He was really one of the best reportage writers in the world.

The Right Stuff actually reviews our space program in the United States. A brilliantly written book, just a fun book to read and so interesting, just about what astronauts had to go through. I’m loving that book.

Another one I want to give a shout out about I read two summers ago and it’s Bill Bryson. I happen to love Bill Bryson’s writing. He wrote a book called One Summer: America, 1927. It’s a factual book about all the things that happened in America in 1927 and it is a crazy good read. It’s exciting all the things that happened back then. I recommend that book as just a great book to relax with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Denise Dudley
I’m an article reader. I know that there’s the movement out there, what they call the TL;DR, which stands for too long, didn’t read world, where “Oh, that’s too long. I’m not going to read it.” That’s not why I like articles, although articles really are quick as opposed to books.

I like articles because I can sample a lot of different ideas in a short period of time. If I have an hour to read before I go to bed, I can read articles and learn ten different things about science and about dinosaurs and about human emotion and whatever else if I just read the right article.

For me, since I’m an article reader, I happen to like Pocket. I subscribe to Pocket. Pocket sends me all great kinds of suggestions. I don’t read them all, but I like it.

I love Reddit. There’s no doubt I like Reddit even though people kind of laugh and yes, sometimes I click on the funny tab for Reddit to look at funny things because I think that’s good for my soul.

I also like to read outside of the United States about the United States because it’s a very interesting perspective. I discovered it when I have to travel a lot for work and so sometimes I’m reading about the US while I’m sitting in London, so there’s a different perspective when you’re not the US, talking about the US.

One of the newspapers I like to read is called the Globe and Mail. It’s Canadian, so it’s very close to us but it has very interesting US perspectives. I like the Globe and Mail.

Then finally I like something called The Browser. In this case it costs money, whereas Reddit and Pocket and StumbleUpon are all free. I think The Browser is about 35 bucks a year or something, but they send me really good suggestions for articles to read as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Thank you.

Denise Dudley
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences?

Denise Dudley
Yeah, when I am working with audiences, the thing that I say that I think most people resonate with, and it’s usually after of course I’ve been talking to them for a while, is this.

I tell people “In human relations, in communication, in your life as you walk around and illustrate who you are, everything counts.” I even have a slide at the end of most things that says everything counts: how you talk, what you do, what you look like, how you interact with people, how you think, your work product, your actions, your thoughts. Everything counts. Everything is you.

You don’t ever get to get away from you. You don’t really ever get to do something that doesn’t represent you even if you wish you could. Whatever it is you’re doing, it counts. I think that that’s good news. I would say that if everything counts, from my facial expression to how I treat people, then why wouldn’t I want everything to count in a direction that makes me the very best possible person I could be.

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

Denise Dudley
I’ve got a website. It’s DeniseMDudley.com, like for my middle initial, M, so DeniseMDudley.com. Of course, I’m also on LinkedIn and Facebook, and Twitter, the usual.

I’m also the founder of a very big training company called SkillPath Seminars, which is a very big company. I’ve sold it, but I’m still quite involved in it all the time. If there were no other way that you could remember to reach me, you could call SkillPath and they could put me right through. Those would be good ways to reach me.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Do you have a final challenge or a call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Denise Dudley
Yup, I do. I thought about what I’d want to say and it’s this. I’m a huge believer in this.

I want to strive for myself and my call to action for everyone else is that I guess I’ll describe it this way, that there are times when you meet somebody and you’ll think of someone right now. When you meet somebody and it could be in the grocery store checkout line, it’s somebody you work with, it’s someone you’re related to, but when you walk away from them, you feel better about yourself or you feel better about the world or you feel like it’s not such a bad place or something.

I call it being expanded, that somehow I feel expanded because of having been in the presence of a certain person.

Then there’s the other type of person where when I walk away from then and, again, it could be an incidental interaction in a grocery store, I feel, what I call, contracted. I feel like my energy has been sucked out of me and I have to sort of tuck in and make myself small for a while in order to protect what energy I have left.

Expanded or contracted is what I call it because it feels like that to me. My call to action for everyone is to be that person who expands others, that by the time you finish an interaction with someone, no matter what that interaction is, that they walk away feeling better about themselves or the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Denise, this has been so fun, so helpful. Thanks for going into the depths with the research and the goodies. I wish you tons of luck with your book, Work It, and all you’re doing.

Denise Dudley
Thank you so very much. Gosh, I hope everybody gets out there and catches snakes and does everything else as a result of this.

Apr 25

291: Deciding Whether to Stay or Go with Pete Mockaitis

By Podcasts No Comments

 

Pete Mockaitis says: "Which elements of work drive happiness for me?"

Pete inserts himself into the show format, sharing his approach to tackling your next career decision.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 8 step-by-step questions that determine whether to stay or go
  2. Whether the grass is in fact greener
  3. Pete’s favorite things

About Pete

Pete Mockaitis is an award-winning trainer and coach who helps brilliant professionals perform optimally at work.

He’s delivered 1-on-1 coaching to over 700 leaders hailing from world-class organizations (such as Google, FedEx, the United Nations, Anheuser-Buesch, and Apple), 50 countries, and every Ivy League university. His work has been featured in numerous publications including the New York Times, Forbes, and Inc.

He began his career at Bain & Company and currently hosts the How to be Awesome at your Job podcast. The show receives millions of downloads from delightful people with excellent taste.

Pete lives in Chicago with his wife and new baby!

Items Mentioned in this Show:

I’m so fired up to dig into this stuff. I wanted to start by sharing a little bit about why is this something worth going after in the first place.

The reason is because I’ve done many coaching sessions with many folks and I found myself saying the same things kind of often and wondering, “Is this super cost effective for folks? Is there a better resource I might be able to point folks to?” At the same time I also found some gaps there in terms of the tools available or some questions I did not yet have great answers to and I had to dig in a little farther to come up with them.

Beyond that, in talking with listeners, it seemed like this was a strong issue that was recurring again and again for people, saying things like, “Boy, I have a stable job. It would be kind of stupid to leave. At the same time, I’m not really happy here. Well, isn’t that work? Is the grass really greener anywhere else? I don’t know. Oh, I wish I wasn’t so wishy washy. Oh I’ve got mortgage. I’ve got a family. I’ve got responsibilities. I shouldn’t entertain leaving, but at the same time I’m not happy here. But would it just be the same in another environment?” a whole lot of pain and consternation.

It’s a tricky question and one that cannot be answered with a quick Google search or an internet listicle and instead really requires going into some real depth. It has taken thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to craft a course that can aid in this tricky decision.

I want to share with you some of the greatest hits, tidbits, and those eight key questions that unfold step-by-step in order to aid you if you find yourself in this trick spot, trying to make the decision.

I’m going to talk through each of these questions, which build upon each other one by one.

You might have a decision by the end of this podcast episode or at least have some great things to heat up to take further action and finally make some good practice if you’ve been stuck on the matter for a while. Let’s get into it.

The first question to consider here is what’s the ultimate goal. The short answer on that is arriving at a decision with clarity, with confidence, with conviction.

I’ve already had folks share with me as they’ve worked through some of the modules that they feel so much better about their current work because they just didn’t just have a knee-jerk reaction, they didn’t just focus in on the part of the job that they hate and sort of bemoan it and say, “Oh, this sucks. I want to be out of here,” but they realize, “Huh, after having taken a look around, I realize things aren’t perfect here and I want to try and make some improvements, but it’s not so bad.”

That’s a great victory right there, a decision that for now I’m going to stay and that’s cool. I’ve got some clarity, some confidence, some conviction around that, so that’s handy.

The ultimate guiding light I suggest in terms of how do you arrive at reaching such a decision is to do so based upon happiness. Some of my favorite quotes are that ‘happiness is the ultimate is the currency.’ We heard Gary Burnison say, “Start with happiness.” And that with Shawn Achor all the research when it comes to positive psychology, conveys that happiness is linked to performance and then is broadcast to others and impacts them and the work environment.
That’s the fundamental guiding light I suggest that you look at if you’re making this decision is to start there. That sounds kind of obvious, but the challenge is that a lot of times our thought processes get derailed by a lot of shoulds and buts before you even really get started thinking about it.

It can sound like, “But I’ve got a mortgage and a family. It would be irresponsible to quit. But I’m not going to find this kind of money at another job. I’d be kind of stupid to leave. But I feel guilty abandoning this important work that we‘re doing here. But I don’t want to lose these precious relationships I’ve formed. Maybe it’s just me.”
Or, “Maybe things will get better. Maybe I’m just not good enough. But I fear the unknown. How do we know if the next job is going to be any better whatsoever?” I give some quick take answers to each of these concerns if that’s showing up for you in an upcoming video that is going to speak to them. You can get access to that by going to DoIStayOrGo.com to sign up for such videos.

For now I’ll just make a quick point about the money. When it comes to, “I’m not going to find this kind of money elsewhere,” I just want to plant a seed that it’s very possible, if you think of happiness as the ultimate currency, to switch jobs and get a different job that pays less and for that to actually be an upgrade for you.

I’ve got a friend of a friend right now who is taking on a bigger position. There’s a whole lot more responsibility, a whole lot more stress and substantially more money and yet she is miserable. She’s been crying and she’s been begging to get a demotion and to be paid less money. That happens.

In the professional preferences assessment results only about 9% of folks had an upgrade in compensation as one of their top three happiness drivers. It didn’t make the top three out of 15 compensation for 91% of folks.

Interesting paradigm shift there. It’s not just about the best job is the one with the best money. No, no. It seems that in fact, in our experience, that is clearly not the case for the majority, but, nonetheless, it can be sort of lodged into the brain as the thing that is to be optimized and maximized above all else.

The second big question is which elements of work drive happiness for me. The short answer is it is a combination of 15 happiness drivers across the area of rewards, experiences, and demands. These really do vary substantially person by person which we’ve seen time and time again when folks do the assessment, which you can do at DoIStayorGo.com.

Now some folks are all about the compensation, the security, the advancement potential, the prestige. Others are more into the people stuff, the appreciation, the warmth, the purpose, the trustworthy colleagues. Others are more into the learning, the compelling tasks, the styles of alignment, the autonomy or the time load or the flexibility.

It really does vary person by person. But the tricky thing is because no job is perfect and all jobs have these tradeoffs, you’ve got this bundle of tricky decisions with everything in terms of well, what really is most important here.

What’s cool about the assessment is we take each of those 15 happiness drivers and they all square off against each other. You are choosing between time load and appreciation or compensation and purpose. They are all squaring off so you can see ultimately having made 105 little decisions the aggregate results of what that looks like in terms of stacked top to bottom.

It can be pretty powerful and eye opening for people. We had a great kind, encouraging word from Jenny who said, “Wow, Pete, you’ve done it again. So many of the nagging desires that have been swirling around my head for years are now laid out neatly on your bar graphs.” Cool. Well, I’m so glad that was working for Jenny and for many others who have taken that.

It’s still available for free, so check that out. It’s at DoIStayOrGo.com, the assessment. Pretty cool stuff that can spark a whole boatload of clarity in a hurry and cut through a lot of the morass that might be in your head right now.

The third question is, is that grass really greener elsewhere. The short answer is a definite maybe. The scoop is it really goes both ways in terms of some people they are in their jobs and they get so caught up with the thing they don’t like when they stop and take a look and see, “Hm, how does this opportunity really stack up against alternatives.” You see, “Hey, it’s actually not so bad.”

Other times it goes just the opposite way in terms of folks are so accustomed to the toxic bad stuff that’s going on they think, “Oh yeah, this is just normal. This is just what work’s like.” Then you take a look around, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, not at all is that the case.”

Here we borrow a little bit of a page from Consumer Research in terms of saying for like a given brand, what are the most important features associated with it and then how is one brand performing on that.

If we were looking and comparing say fast food companies together, we’d first determine for consumers how important all the different factors like speed, health, cost, the freshness, the customization, the clean environment of the restaurant. Then we’d also take a look at and how well does this particular restaurant do, McDonald’s versus Wendy’s versus Burger King to kind of get a lay of the land and see where should we focus.

Likewise we do the same with happiness drivers in your current job versus others, and getting a little bit of benchmark context to say, “Okay, well, what’s this look like elsewhere,” and some fun facts like for learning. Well, 32% of people have a mentor at work.

For the alignment of work styles, about 52% of folks say their meetings are effective. For time load, well, hey, we’ve got quite a range with 13% working 7 or fewer hours in a day and 13% working 12 plus hours a day and then the bits in the middle you can see.

By getting a little bit of that context and then doing a rating, you can see, “Okay, on the dimensions that really matter for me, how is my job stacking up?” If it’s not stacking up so well as compared to what’s out there, you’ve got your answer. Yup, that grass is substantially greener elsewhere or, “Oh hey, it looks like we’re doing okay after all.”
The fourth question is how can I improve right where I am. The short answer here is by changing either your mindset or your extracurricular activities outside work there or reshaping the work situation itself.

You can make a world of difference giving yourself a boost in these areas of happiness drivers if you 1) just think about things differently. For example, instead of thinking about how this is all bull crap that you have to deal with all this stuff, reframing to who is this helping and serving and how and that can spark something.

Or when it comes to extracurricular activities, if you feel like you’re not getting enough purpose or warmth in your work environment, well, you can find that elsewhere, whether that’s volunteering or making more of a special effort associated with seeing your cool besties and getting those exchanges going.

Or when it comes to reshaping the work environment, talking about pushing back diplomatically, tactfully, how to make that happen successfully as well as prudently and shrewdly assessing are things likely to change here if I take a lay of the land and see how feedback requests and suggestions and those sorts of things have gone historically. We can just get a bit of a lay of the land for how that works.

Having established those three strategies, we then look to applying them across each of the 15 happiness drivers to generate over 100 starter ideas for inspiration. Just to zero in on one or two that you can truly commit to do to improve your work situation happiness right then and there.

One of my favorites is when it comes to compelling tasks, you can actually just proactively swap tasks with someone else at work. We heard this tip from Lisa Cummings in the Strengths episode. If you can zoom in on, “Hey, I like this and I’m strong at this and you like that and you’re strong at that, why don’t we just quietly, informally do a little switcheroo?” It’s a fun win-win for everyone there.

That’s just one idea. Maybe that works, maybe it’s doesn’t. But after cruising through the 100 and pondering you’re on, you come up with a few things, one or two at least, that will really make a world of difference for boosting your happiness right then and there in your current work environment.

The fifth question we tackle is what would be the most amazing work ever. The short answer to get there is we first release some constraints to thoughts. Secondly, we kind of dig deep into your youness and what makes you tick. Third we do a quick assessment for is that thing likely to be so amazing.

For releasing your constraints, often before an ideation, a divergent thinking, brainstorming process even get started, we tend to short change our self, like well the job has to have at least 80,000 dollars or it has to be in this location.

We go through a little bit of an approach for breaking that down which includes, thinking through well, why must that be the case, is that a valid value underneath the why and is there an alternative means of satisfying that. It’s kind of cool what can come up in terms of alternative means so that you feel a bit freer to dig and really think about what would be the coolest work experience ever.

From there we dig into your psyche, your personality, your youness asking provocative questions like, “What did you like to do as a kid? What made you weird as a kid? Describe your ideal day from top to bottom and how does that fit into it? If you think about some of the greatest days of work, what made them the greatest days of work?”

Getting that introspection going to see what is potentially an opportunity that would have all the cool goodies and lots of it and then to take a quick look and say, “Well, is that likely to really be the case or is that a fantasy land,” and just consulting the crystal ball or the time machine if you will by just imagining yourself in that scene. What do you see?

Getting a quick sense for what a day in the life looks like via some research approaches and just getting yourself, “Why was this the most amazingly awesome perfect decision ever and why was this a terrible decision? What did I overlook?” or, “What must be true for this to be a good move? Then how can I test that?”

We get a real quick sense for loosening up, coming up with the coolest work experiences you can conceive and then taking a quick look, “Huh, is that for real? Is that likely to be the case?”

The sixth question is who really has the answers about whether or not an alternative opportunity could be superior. The short answer is interesting, helpful people at interesting organizations. Here we talk all about how do we surface such interesting organizations and then people within them.

This is fun and I get to get dorky and tactical looking at databases and listings and services there, whether it’s the Hoovers’ Avention Dun & Bradstreet, … database that can surface all kinds of different organizations from different industries or it’s using GuideStar Foundation Center along the lines of NTEE codes to find the coolest nonprofits who are getting grants and are large and growing and substantial.

Or whether it is getting jiggy with the lists from the Fortune 500 or the Inc. 5,000 or the TechCrunch, Crunchbase …. Oh wow, there’s so many cool organizations out there I had never even heard of. They’re doing exactly what I want to do and have money and are growing.

Those kinds of things can be rather intriguing. It’s like oh well, then once you find them, how do I find the specific people who are there using things like a Tweeple search in the Twitter bios, like, “Oh, hey, here’s somebody who works there and says right in their bio that they work there and freely tweets things associated with it. Maybe they would be open to a conversation.”

Or getting jiggy with some LinkedIn approaches to surface folks and then related folks and your connection to those folks. Getting some specific names here associated with “Well, there is a person right there whose name is John Smith or whatever who would actually have an answer for me.” Then we end there by having a list of great names at great organizations.

The seventh question is how do I get such people to talk to me. The short answer is by finding their contact information and sending them an optimized digital message.

For finding their contact information, there’s a number of interesting tools such as Hunter.io, which will tell you specific names and emails associated with a given domain or URL or even just the structure. Is it first initial dot last name? Is it first name last name no dot? Is it first name dot last name? You kind of cut through that ambiguity, so you’ve got just the one.

Then we talk about what is the optimal message to send and some principals associated with making it super short, super easy to say yes to, and then some encouragement that even if you don’t have the optimized message, your response rate will be pretty good.

I share the full text of an email or LinkedIn message I got from someone who was asking about consulting, which was okay. I don’t think it was an optimal message. I provide some thoughts for how to tweak it.

But what is intriguing was this dude, Casey, ended up taking very close careful notes associated with what responses he was given when he was requesting total strangers to chat with him about career stuff. Casey’s results were that 28% of the time, total strangers agreed to say, “Oh yeah, sure. Let’s have a coffee. Let’s have a chat. Let’s discuss your career stuff and I will give you free advice along those lines,” which is pretty cool.

Over one and four complied and he had done this reaching out hundreds of times. One dude’s decent, acceptable cold message got the job done over one in four times.

I think that’s really helpful in terms of if you are reaching out to many folks, some of them will talk to you and they will give you the time. Then you just ask them the optimal questions that matter the most to you given your happiness drivers and you start to paint a picture for how these options are looking for whether you stay or you go, which is looking like a rosier, happier scenario.

The eighth and last question is what is the final answer, synthesizing it, putting it all together. This is fun. We consult both the hard data and the heart date, a turn of phrase I heard from a client I really liked.

The hard data is we put together this spreadsheet which is pretty cool in terms of figuring out a couple things. One taking a stab at quantifying your happiness at a given opportunity based upon your happiness drivers and how highly a given opportunity rates on each of those 15 happiness drivers. We can sort of consolidate that into a rough aggregate happiness number.

Also, a cool number called a give per take ratio in terms of jobs vary wildly in terms of the compensation they deliver as well as the time, the sheer hours they demand of you both on the job and commuting and maybe some extra expectations for social functions or whatever.

When you put it all together with the commute, and the compensation, and the value of the bonuses and your tax rate, and all that stuff, what is the give per take, the wealth created per hour demanded for a given job?

If you look at those side by side alongside the happiness drivers, you get sort of a hard data, a quantitative view for, “Hm, my current job looks awesome compared to these other things,” versus, “Wow, it is really falling short if I look at the projected happiness number as well as just what I’m getting for the time I’m investing there.”

Then we consult the heart data, what seems good and right and true for you in your intuition, in your gut, in your belly. We’ve got a number of really cool approaches to get a quick read on that.

One of my favorite little ones is – and don’t skip right to this. I think that it’s best done once you’ve sort of taken a good clear look around is you flip a coin and when you flip that coin, you can say, “Okay, heads I’m going to stay here, take it head on and tails is they’re going to see my tail as I walk out the door and say goodbye.”

You decide, “Okay, heads I’m staying, tails, I’m leaving.” You flip the coin, you turn it over and here’s a trick. Rather than look at it, see which one you are hoping for it to be. That tells you something.

Anyway, that’s just one fun little trick associated with consulting intuition and getting a sense for what’s deep down there. We’ll talk about a few other approaches for tuning and listening in to see what you see there.

Once you consult the hard data in the spreadsheet and the heart data deep inside, you’ve got a pretty clear sense. This is sort of what needs to happen. I am going to stay. I’m going to make the most out of it in these key ways or I’m going to begin pursuing opportunities in A, B, and C.

Even though you don’t have a job in hand yet there’s huge power in the decision and the conviction, in the clarity and the confidence that’s happening right then and there. Either way you win, whether you stay or you go by methodically working through these key questions.

Again, if you want some extra goodies here, you’ve got DoIStayOrGo.com. I’m releasing three videos shortly to discuss this and then inviting you to enroll into the course. I hope you dig it, whether you choose to enroll or not, this content is handy for you and it’s something you can reference back when the indecision is getting a little bit more intense and you’re starting to wonder all the more frequently.

That’s my story here. Now I’ll share a few of my favorite things, turn the tables a little bit.

For favorite book, I’m going to go with How to Have a Good Day by Caroline Webb. We also had her on the program and I like that it seems like she shares stuff that makes a lot of good sense, like, “Yeah, that makes sense,” she shares the research associated with it like, “Oh yeah, that checks out,” and she shares a very simple implementable step-by-step approach to tackling it and it’s all about how to enjoy a day of work more.

I’ve got many, many favorite books. I think this one is particularly applicable to the topic du jour and very enriching. I’ll say that one. I’ve been listening to it on audio and I’m thinking I just have to buy the real thing because there are so many notes and flags I want to highlight and underline that the audio alone is not doing it for me.

For a favorite quote I’ve got, “I cannot give you the formula for success, but the formula for failure is trying to please everybody,” by Herbert Bayard Swope.

I find that quote so helpful for me when I get a little bit hung up in terms of, “Uh oh, someone probably doesn’t like this.” Because I guess I am a little bit of a people pleaser and I do love feedback and sometimes I take it a little more personally than is super helpful.

I was actually recently even in a Subway, the sandwich shop, and I started to feel a little bit weird or bad or guilty because of the person behind me in line I thought, “Uh oh, I’m taking too long in selecting all of my condiments,” because I kept getting all of the stuff: the lettuce, and the spinach, and the tomato, and the green peppers, and the oregano, and the parmesan, and the pepper, and then the – I put a lot of things on.

I was like, “Oh boy, she’s probably getting irritated with me because I’m getting so many things. Oh, I feel bad about that.” It’s sort of funny. It’s like wait a second, Pete, that’s quite silly. First of all, she probably didn’t even notice. She’s probably focused on her own stuff. Secondly, that’s just sort of how sandwich making works in Subway.

This has been a source of a helpful reminder and touchstone for peace that trying to please everybody is a recipe for failure as well as recipe for anxiety I would say because it’s impossible and counterproductive to what your ultimate aims for true success will be for you.

For favorite study, I’m really in to the Walter Mischel Marshmallow Test. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s when the children were presented with a marshmallow or tasty treat of sorts, maybe it’s an M&M or a Reece’s Pieces or whatever, but it doesn’t matter, only that it is tempting and interesting to them.

The rules of the game go if you’d like, you can eat that any time you want, but if you hold out and wait for up to 20 minutes, when the experimenter comes back, you may receive two of that treat. It’s all about self-regulation, self-discipline, can you handle the wait.

Go figure, they discovered that the children who could handle the wait and were able to self-regulate and go the distance to get the two treats had all sorts of other positive life outcomes whether it comes to schooling or other things.

Very impressive how that little indicator tells so much. Also very interesting how it’s quite possible to build these skills.
He said that some of the strategies the high-performing children used in order to wait included, looking elsewhere, playing a game, covering their eyes, and what wasn’t such a winning strategy is looking very closely at the marshmallow, maybe tasting the powder off of your finger, smelling it deeply and repeatedly, sort of that was contrary. Environment shaping maneuvers you have available to you are powerful.

My favorite habit is something I do almost every morning and it is sort of like a multi-mega habit that merges a few things into one. That is I like to do a nice walk, usually on my treadmill, sometimes outside or sometimes just back and forth in my home.

I like to do a good walk for about 30 minutes in the morning and while drinking my Klean Kanteen 27 ounce bottle, while also getting some bluelight exposure in terms of whether it’s outdoors or with this Philips blue light device that I use. Also, engaged in prayer.

I particularly like to be thankful and express thanks for sort of the five great things that happened in the last 24 hours because there’s cool psychology research pointing that to putting you in a more appreciative, and grateful and positive mindset, as well as some other areas of coverage there.

It’s really great to in the first half hour of the day to get all of these things going. It upgrades my body from, “Oh, I’d kind of really rather still be asleep,” to, “Oh boy, let’s get after the day. What’s next?”

For a favorite tool, I’m going to have to say OmniFocus. I think it is super handy. It is a task management application that is so powerful, robust and full-featured. What’s cool is how I can ubiquitously capture anything anywhere in the app.

It is right on my homepage. I can push it, put it in there, include a photo, include an audio description or just make a Siri command to add an OmniFocus item and then from there it’s in my OmniFocus inbox, which can be processed associated with the context or the project and the deadline and then reviewed. It’s so cool.

I never miss anything cool when someone says, “I read a really interesting book,” it’s like, what is it? Bloop, then that’s there for later processing. I can continue the conversation, capture it, and then later on go investigate, “Oh, is that a book I should read?” Yes or no and make a good decision.

I’m having a world of fun with that as well as in the mornings for creative time it’s cool to see, “Oh there’s my OmniFocus inbox,” a bunch of random, cool ideas I had or suggestions I heard, which brings just a lot of richness to life in terms of in that creative time for me in the morning, here’s some creative seeds that I collected previously and let’s see what happens. It makes it kind of fun.

Favorite way to be contacted? Anytime, please. What are you thinking about the show, feedback, tips, suggestions, stuff you want to hear? Pete@AwesomeAtYourJob.com.

Parting challenge or call to action, I just encourage you, don’t accept just the default state when it comes to your job situation. Take a quick glance and think through, “Is this really the optimal spot for me in terms of happiness.” Not to spark discontent within you but just to make sure that you’re making a contentious decision as opposed to just reverting to the default, which is continuing to do the thing that you’re doing.

A great first step to that is to visit DoIStayOrGo.com. Take that assessment to see which of your happiness drivers is top for you, and then think through “How’s my job doing on these. You know what? Pretty darn good.” Awesome. You can feel good and just be grateful for that’s where it is.

Or, “You know what? There are a few things that are very important to me that this job is falling quite short of. Maybe I should start thinking a little bit more in depth about if it’s time to look around and explore that do I stay or go in a bit more detail.

That’s what I got. I look forward to catching you on the next episode. It is Oren Jay Sofer. I discovered him from the Simple Habit Meditation app and he just I think has got some little distinctions, some nuances about this mindfulness, this meditation stuff that are well worth hearing to bring a little bit more peace, a little bit more compassion, a little more ability to focus with intention with what you’re up to.

I hope to catch you there and peace.

Apr 20

289: How Executives End Up in the C-Suite with Cassandra Frangos

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Cassandra Frangos says: "If you're passionate about what you do and you love what you do, that's going to show through."

“Executive Whisperer” Cassandra Frangos outlines what it takes to become a Chief Something Officer and how to garner needed  support along the way.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When to follow—and when to disrupt— company culture
  2. One thing our listeners and most CEOs have in common
  3. How to pick up on social cues that can make or break your career

About Cassandra

Cassandra Frangos, Ed.D., is a consultant on Spencer Stuart’s Leadership Advisory Services team. She collaborates with Fortune 500 leadership teams on executive assessments, succession planning, leadership development and top team effectiveness. Previously, Cassandra was the head of the global executive talent practice at Cisco, where she was responsible for accelerating the readiness of the talent at all levels of the organization to transform the business and culture. Through partnerships with the executive team, she deployed innovative approaches to organization design, succession planning, assessment, coaching and development programs to drive business results and innovation. She also played an integral role in the 2015 succession planning for Cisco’s CEO, one of the most respected and longest-tenured CEOs in the tech industry.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Cassandra, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Cassandra Frangos
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a little bit interested to hear your story, how you made the leap from being a vice president of Global Executive Talent at Cisco over now to your current role.

Cassandra Frangos
Yes, so it’s actually a funny story, where I actually worked with Spencer Stuart at Cisco.  I worked on our CEO succession, and C-suite succession.  And Cisco was really just I think a great company that was able to partner with many firms, and in my role of Executive Talent I did a lot of executive assessment and succession myself with my team.  But when it came time for CEO succession, I really wanted an external partner and Spencer Stuart was that for me, and just was fabulous at helping me think about, how do our internal candidates compare to the outside and what are some other things we should think about as we go through the CEO succession process?
So we became friends and partners along the way, and then a few years later, after Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, was well established, Spencer Stuart came knocking at my door and said, “We’d love to have you as part of the team.”  And for those listening, they did not violate any non-compete, so it was all above board.  But yeah, I was happy to go work with many of the people that I had worked with previously.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s excellent.  And I’m sure, boy, with that role, doing talent at Cisco, I’m sure you must have just learned so many things and seen so many things, in terms of applicants and interviews and just the whole process of folks coming on board.  I’d love it if you could maybe just share a tip or two, when it comes to, “Hey, as someone who’s done a whole lot of hiring and supervising of hiring, here are some do’s and don’ts”.

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I think part of it is, there are so many ways that people look at you in terms of your brand internally and externally, and people have ways of being a few degrees of separation.  So sometimes you think, “Oh, they haven’t called my direct boss”, but actually someone has called your direct report from few jobs ago to find out who you are as a leader.  So, I think the world is hyper connected and just know that don’t burn any bridges as you go along in your career, because that is so important.
And as I was in the role of talent, that was always a key part, is, what’s this person’s brand and what would they bring to a company like Cisco?  And then even as they were looking at internal jobs in Cisco, what was their brand in terms of the last team they worked with or what were they like as a young manager and what would they be like as an executive?  So there’s always interconnectedness there.
And then always just be mindful of how you treat people.  I think that’s always something where, how did you treat the person who actually walked you into your interview, or the admin who was helping you get everything scheduled?  How you treat those people is actually even more important as you think about even marketing yourself for a new job.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.  And I’d like to follow up on your point about not burning bridges there.  In putting together this course about changing jobs and whether or not you should stay or go , it’s been interesting how a lot of listeners have said they’re really scared to burn bridges and maybe they ought not to leave as a result.  And so, my intuition about this is that there’s a good way and a not so good way to leave, and burning bridges specifically refers to kind of leaving people in a tight spot.  So, any pro tips for exiting gracefully and how to not let that fear stop you from taking the opportunity?

Cassandra Frangos
Right, it’s a good question.  So my advice would be, if you’re a senior and you’ve got a huge team that you’re responsible for or a large part of the business that you’re responsible for, is always be thinking about your own succession.  That’s one way to not leave a company in the lurch.  So many senior executives are constantly thinking about their own succession, so that they’re not leaving a company in the lurch.  Or even if they move on to a different internal role, there’s somebody who is really ready to take over the business or take over the team so there’s some continuity there.
The other is, I always like to give people the advice of, leave a job on a high note.  Don’t think about leaving the job when you are on a downhill.  Think about changing jobs internally or externally when you really feel like you’ve maxed your potential, everything is running well and it’s a good time to hand off to somebody else.  Don’t necessarily think about leaving it when it needs a big turnaround or it’s a mess, because chances are you’re going to need to be fixing it and it could burn a bridge if you’re leaving it into complete shambles.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, that’s helpful.  And so, let’s talk about your book here, Crack the C-Suite Code.  What’s the main idea here?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, so it’s actually inspired by a lot of executives or aspiring executives that I’ve worked with over the years who kept asking me, “So how do you get into the C-suite?”  It seems like this mystery of a question sometimes, and I felt bad that everybody thought it was such a mystery.  So I just wanted to write something that outlined different paths to the C-suite and make it inspirational, in the sense that there are many paths, many different ways to get there and it doesn’t have to be just one answer for everybody.  It can take many different turns for each person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well, share with us.  What are some of the main insight takeaways here?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, so there are a few different paths.  One that you would probably think of is, stay at a company for a really long time and reach the top.  There are so many executives who have inspirational stories where they started out on the front line and then reached CEO, or they started out really not qualified for some of the jobs that they had and they ended up in the C-suite.  So tenured path is certainly one that I talk about in the book.
The second is you’ve reached maybe a peak at your company and you say, “I really, really want to make it to the C-suite, but I don’t think I’ll make it here.”  And they jump out and actually become part of the C-suite of maybe a smaller company or just a different type of company.  I see that happen all the time, where someone’s dream and they can’t sleep at night if they’re not a Chief Financial Officer or they’re not a CEO, and they just won’t necessarily make it at their current company.  So if they go to a different company or a smaller company they reach the top and absolutely love it and enjoy being part of the top.
The other path is the founder path, where you’ve worked maybe at a smaller or larger company, you’ve had great experience and you have such a passion for starting your own company, and that’s where you take the path of founder.  And just really have an idea that you feel passionate about and you really want to make a difference with your own company.  That’s another path.
And then finally the path that’s probably least likely for you to be able to control it, but leapfrog succession is something that’s actually becoming more of a trend, which happened at Cisco, where leapfrog succession is where you were a couple of levels below the C-suite and you jumped over a level to get into the C-suite.  So for example Cisco’s CEO jumped over a level to become the CEO, and that’s becoming more and more common.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing.  And what are the circumstances that make that occur?

Cassandra Frangos
I think there are a few different ones.  One is the company is really ready to embrace a new leader, who is a bit more innovative or even has some new ideas to embrace new technology or take the business in a different direction.  It doesn’t necessarily mean a full turnaround, but it is someone who has some different ideas and is able to leapfrog the company, if you will, and to integrate success.
The other thing is they have established themselves internally as really being someone who has great followership across the company.  So when we announced Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins – standing ovation from across the company.  People just saw him as a natural fit and somebody who would really take Cisco into the future.  So if it’s a leapfrog it does have to be someone who has great followership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.  Well, so we have a few pathways there, in terms of segmentation and arriving at the C-suite.  And I’d like to maybe sort of go back in time a little bit for folks who are not a year or two or three away from that point just yet.  Can you also share, within the book you’ve got some kind of universal accelerators and derailers that can really make a world of difference, when it comes to the rate of progression?

Cassandra Frangos
Sure.  Accelerators can certainly be looking at something that you haven’t done before.  So if you are a few levels or even several levels below top executive roles, it’s taking on the white space or a new assignment, something that you’ve never done before, it sort of reinvents yourself, you get to know different executives across the company.
The other is just collecting experiences, and I love this.  One executive I worked with – he would always describe it as each experience he’s collecting little nuggets that help him become even more valuable to the company and his career.  So that can often be accelerating.
And then the other is really having the right sponsorship internally and externally in the company.  So if you are inside a company and you’re thinking about making the next step, do you have the right sponsorship of key people who would really say, “Absolutely promote this person.  I would bet my bonus on this person.  They will get results, they’re the right kind of fit, they’re absolutely the right person to accelerate the company or in that particular role.”  So you do need really good sponsors along the way, and people who will really take a risk on you as well, because chances are not everybody’s done these jobs several times over.  Many CEO will say, “I’m not really qualified to do this job”, but somebody is willing to take the risk on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.  And do you have any pro tips for how you go about identifying those sponsors and winning them over?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I think one of them is chemistry.  If you don’t have great chemistry with someone, they’re not going to sponsor you.  So it can start off as a mentoring relationship where you are just asking for advice and then over time you build a relationship, and then it really grows into more of us sponsorship where they are willing to say, “I’m going to take this person on and make sure they get promoted.”  So it’s being smart of who you’re connected with and who you might have chemistry with, because if you don’t, then you can’t really force it.  It’s not something that you could just say, “Pete, I want you to be my sponsor.”  It’s not going to happen if we don’t have a relationship, or there hasn’t been some way where we’ve been successful together.  So I think that’s important as you think about sponsorship.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.  Well, how about the flipside of this, the derailers?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, so this one is fun, where if you think about…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, is it?  Doesn’t found fun, Cassandra.

Cassandra Frangos
[laugh]  Yeah.  This is a question that I asked many senior executives, and I said, “What’s been something that you’ve seen derail other executives?”  And they said, “Too big of an ego.”  And you just hear the funniest stories – that’s the way this plays out.  Arrogance really doesn’t get you too far in the world, and a lot of senior executives will make it to a certain level and then you just see them derail because of too big of an ego.
And I think with also the way the world is going, in terms of more interconnectedness, and think about collaboration – no one wants to work with somebody who has too big of an ego or is just arrogant, where they only want to hear themselves talk and they don’t want to hear anyone else’s point of view.  So that can be something to really watch out for.  You need to have confidence of course, if you’re going to make it to the C-suite, but if you’re too arrogant it really won’t get you anywhere.  And you know all those people you’ve met; I mean you know them right away.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to hear the stories.

Cassandra Frangos
[laugh] Yeah, I’ll tell you one.  One was where an executive who constantly got feedback that he would not listen to anyone’s point of view.  So he’d be in meetings and he would interrupt you every two minutes.  Doesn’t matter who it was that would interrupt them – could be a brilliant engineer that really had a great point; just kept interrupting, wouldn’t listen to anyone’s point of view, everyone left the meeting deflated.  And then if they received feedback or, “We might need to move the product a different way” or, “We might need to think about this differently”, just said, “No, I’m right.  I know I’m right.  I’ve always been right, and thanks for the opinion.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, noted.  Don’t do that.  Thank you.  I want to also dig into your take on, you say a lot of times when there is a failure of leadership it is largely due to a cultural misfit.  And sometimes I wonder when I hear “fit”, if it’s just a euphemism for something else entirely, like, “I’m not going to tell you that this person is a jerk” or, “We hated him” or, “He completely failed to deliver all the things that we wanted.”  … to deliver upon.  But I think other times there’s something that’s really true, in terms of cultural fit, whereas this person is A, the culture is more so B, and it’s not a fit.  So could you just really lay that out in terms of several examples for what shows up as, “Hey, these things fit” or, “These things don’t fit”?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I think it’s looking at what kind of environment people can flourish in.  So, we’ve all met someone who would probably be great in a very structured, thinking culture, and they just would really flourish in the way of having procedures, policies, doing the same thing very reliably, and would just get really excited about doing that every single day.  On the flipside you can think about someone who would probably absolutely love to work for Apple – would love the innovation, love different ways of creating new products, and they’re probably willing to take some risk.  Maybe it’s a little bit more agile.
So you can think about two different spectrums and you can even think about yourself as to where you would fit most readily inside a culture.  And you can really feel it because you can get a sense of, “I’d really be excited to work here” or, “I think this would stifle me and I don’t think this would be the best culture for me.”  So I think it can go different ways, where certainly people can use culture as an excuse to, “Well, this person just didn’t work out”, or they really do breed the culture.
You can also think about… I live in Boston and around great universities, and there’s always this debate of what’s the difference between Harvard and MIT.  And I have actually a friend who’s a professor at each.  And the MIT professor is really entrepreneurial, loves to do things different ways, tries different things in the classroom.  And then Harvard Business School is really grounded in case study method.  So this professor that I’m friends with, he is very reliable in the way that he teaches because it’s through the case study method and that’s how he was taught and that’s how he knows how to teach.  So if you put him at MIT, he actually might not succeed because he can’t teach cases over and over again.  And if you put the MIT professor at Harvard, he may not actually be great at the case study method.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s a nice dimension there, in terms of stable repetition, follow the process, versus new, bold, innovation, different stuff.  So, that’s a cool one where we could see a misfit.  Could you give a few more examples?

Cassandra Frangos
Sure.  I think the other is a little bit more nuanced, in terms of, are you a fit with the top team or the team that you’re part of?  So there was one executive that I worked with, where just could not get to the right place in terms of finding his way in the culture; just couldn’t really find a way to establish himself in a way where he was respected.  And respect is everything in an organization, and your ideas are intangible.
So he couldn’t get his ideas through because he just wasn’t really catching some of the subtle cues in the culture.  And it was just a shame because he was brilliant, but without having that acceptance on the team or the team saying, “Hey, let me help you learn this culture.  It’s pretty complex and I want to help you succeed.”  So that can be just something really subtle, where someone can be not successful.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are some of those cues that one might miss?

Cassandra Frangos
I think it’s how people communicate.  So if you’re a person who tends to just love to communicate by email and actually not walk down the hall – that can be a cue that you’d miss where actually if you observed a little bit you’d see actually everybody is buzzing around the hallways and they love to say, “Hey, let me catch you for two minutes to run this idea by you.”  Instead you’re just kind of doing it all by email and you’re wondering why you’re not getting anywhere.  So that could be a cue.
The other is it’s a highly social environment, so the way you can get work done is actually by building strong relationships.  And not that you have to go to dinner with them every night, but it’s that you actually do show an interest in them personally and you want to really understand them and build a relationship so you can get work done.  If you’re missing that cue and actually just jump to, “Alright, here’s the agenda, here’s what we need to get through.  How are you going to help me get this done?” – probably they’re not going to help you because you didn’t build a relationship with them.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious now, do you see it in the reverse, in terms of, “We’re a very task-oriented kind of a culture and your attempt to build a relationship with me is unwelcome and a waste of time.”

Cassandra Frangos
[laugh] Yeah, absolutely.  Yes, I’ve seen that many times over, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood.  Well, I like these dimensions because it makes it all the more real and tangible for me.  So we’ve got innovation versus stable, is it more email versus walk there face-to-face, is it more task-oriented versus relationship-oriented?  What are a few more distinctions?

Cassandra Frangos
I think the other is how hierarchical is it.  Some organizations really rely on the work structure and you must go to this person and then that person, and follow somewhat of an order or a hierarchy.  Other organizations are really, “It doesn’t matter.  Go to the best person who has the answer, or just find your way through to the right set of people who will help you.”
So that can depend, where I have seen some stumble where you actually didn’t follow the hierarchy and now you’ve gone sort of several levels that it didn’t make sense and you’ve actually caused some conflict just because you didn’t observe how some of the hierarchy and order worked.  Or if you are actually just trying to go more to the source and people are seeing you as, “Why did you jump down to talk to all these different people that they don’t know who you are and it’s intimidating?”  So just finding those subtle cues is also important as another dimension.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to get your take on, in terms of cultural fit.  I guess at times there’s something that could be helpful about breaking from the norm.  And so, what’s your thought on when is it optimal to zag, as opposed to toe the line?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, sometimes you’ve been hired actually to zag outside of the line.  So sometimes I’ve seen people who’ve been hired where you are actually hired to be disruptive and I don’t want you to listen to, “Well, this is the way we’ve always done it”.  That’s often an annoying line for many people.  So, they might actually have an explicit charter and if they communicate that that’s their charter and they are looking for new and different ways to accomplish something or a new way of doing business, it can often be I think a great accelerator for a business.  It can be a lot more challenging if you have a culture where they love to say, “We’ve always done it this way for 50 years, so who are you coming in and telling me to do this different?”  But yeah, it can be really interesting when that happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing, yes.  So now could you give us a little bit of detail in terms of, if folks are looking to rise quickly, we talked about some universal accelerators and derailers.  Are there any other smart approaches – you used the word “brand” several times – in terms of really making that pop, in terms of you’re deploying your experience and everyone’s thinking, “This person’s great.”

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I think first of all life is short so it’s finding what you love.  I think if you’re passionate about what you do and you love what you do, that’s going to show through, and chances are you will accelerate on your own in the sense of people can really see you’re great at what you do and you love what you do.  If you have those two things, it can really take you far.  And that’s where also sponsorship can come in.  If people see that you’re really loving what you do and you’re good at it, they will more likely sponsor you.
The other thing is, I wouldn’t be afraid of failure.  There’s been lots of readings around this lately, where people are really willing to openly admit their failures and learning from them.  If you don’t learn from them, then certainly that can be just failure.  But thinking through, what are some risks you can take that could accelerate you?  Many, many times I’ve seen executives take a big risk and it paid off and they accelerated right to the top.  So that can also be something important.
The other is, you also have to think about, do people want to work for you?  So if you are going to accelerate to the top chances are you will have people who work for you, and what are you like as a manager or as a leader?  It can’t just be that you are great at managing up, or your boss thinks you’re fabulous.  It’s now more important to think through, what do your direct reports think, what do your peers think in terms of your effectiveness, and what do your leaders think about you in terms of your effectiveness?  So it’s having that 360-degree relationships, but also followership and having the impact you need on all of those different stakeholders.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good, thank you.  And I’d also love to make sure, while I’ve got you, to get a little bit of the insider perspective, if you’ve got some tactics or tips, tricks or stories from many of the executives that you’ve gotten to interact with personally?  What are some insider goodies that anyone who wants to be awesome at their job should know?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I think it’s certainly thinking about your career and your profession as a way where you’re almost putting the company interests first as well where it’s not about you.  I think that’s where the ego part came in where we were talking about before.  So if you’re out for yourself people will see right through it.  If you are out for creating impact for your company and the profession or whatever it might be that you’re part of, I think that is often something that differentiates many leaders.
Also, I can’t emphasize this enough – being willing to listen and really being a sponge for learning and really thinking through, “What did this person just say, so that I can really think through how I can act on it or make a difference based on what I’m learning and seeing?”  Many CEOs will say they’re lifelong learners, because they’re always listening, they’re always curious, they’re always thinking about some of the signals they’re seeing from customers, from the market, from employees.  So I think listening and being curious and learning all the time is something important.
The other I would say is reinvention.  Reinventing yourself always is something that will take you, I think, very far.  John Chambers, who I used to work for at Cisco, who was one of the greatest CEOs in the tech industry and also a wonderful person – he’ll say that he reinvented himself every three years.  And it was something that always accelerated his career, because he never wanted to be stuck in old business models or old ways of thinking.  He had to keep reinventing and being fresh and keep learning and always thinking about all the different senses and all the different pieces that would help him reinvent himself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  Now on that listening point – I’d love to get your take on, how would you paint a picture for what outstanding world class masterful listening looks, sounds, feels like, versus kind of run-of-the-mill or what passes for listening in day-to-day interactions?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah.  So I think wonderful listening is, you really are listening with all senses.  That’s why many people study body language, because what people actually do when they’re watching body language and they think about, “How did my words have impact on me and how did that make that person feel?” – I think that’s a really important way of listening, is really looking at someone’s body language.
Also just intently really hearing them, and pauses are okay – I think people are so afraid of pauses – where you really are just taking it in, what they just said, and you’re soaking it up.  And sometimes taking notes by hand.  We often all now take notes by a computer or iPhones, and actually taking notes pen and paper or your iPad pencil, you often can remember what somebody said a whole lot more by actually writing it down.
And then also just being aware of subtle cues and the tone.  If someone said, “Oh, I’m doing great today!” or, “I’m… I’m doing… I’m doing good today” – there are different ways that you can hear the fluctuation in someone’s voice.
And then on the flipside I think a terrible listener is somebody who’s just waiting to talk.  I often see that in some of the settings where I coach different teams of executives, and I can just tell the executive who is just really not listening to you at all or listening to the group, and they can’t wait to talk and get their point out.  And their point actually had nothing to do with the previous point, so the conversation actually feels like ping pong, versus it builds on each other and they truly listen to each other and build on each other’s points.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love your take – if you see that a lot in executives, how do you imagine they got to be executives?

Cassandra Frangos
[laugh] Yeah, I think some of it is, do they stay executives if they have that behavior still?  So I think there’s one thing to become an executive.  So some people can actually get there, but to stay there also requires another kind of finesse, where you and I read the newspaper every day and hear of an executive who didn’t make it or suddenly was abruptly leaving their company.  Chances are they probably had some of these derailing behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you end your book with a final question.  What is it?

Cassandra Frangos
Question is: Do you really want to be in the C-suite?  And I pose that because it’s not for everyone.  Not everybody really wants to be in the C-suite.  It takes a lot of work, it’s also a lot of responsibility, a lot of I think tenacity, and it takes a pretty big toll on your family and your personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, thank you.  Well, tell me – anything else you want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Cassandra Frangos
I think you touched on a lot of it.  I would just say that finding your own path you don’t necessarily have to follow a perfect formula, but finding your own path can be really fun.  And setting your own career vision is something really inspiring.  I actually read my paper that I wrote for my master’s program and the vision I wrote is actually what I’m doing right now.  So, if you can think longer-term and think about what’s motivating to you, you can have a really fun career.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful.  Thank you.  Well now, how about a favorite quote, something that inspires you?

Cassandra Frangos
Yes, I actually have it on my desk right now.  It’s, “Be yourself, because everybody else is already taken” by Oscar Wilde.

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

Cassandra Frangos
I love Boris Groysberg’s study on stars.  So what really makes stars in different companies.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you.  And a favorite book?

Cassandra Frangos
Love the book Resonant Leadership, because actually it’s two of my professors who are in different schools, and I didn’t know that it’d actually be in the school of these two different authors.  But Richard Boyatzis taught in my master’s program at Case Western, and Annie McKee who taught in my doctorate program at University of Pennsylvania.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Annie McKee on the show.  Very nice.

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, yeah.  She’s wonderful, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool?

Cassandra Frangos
I love the Hogan Assessment actually.  It’s a tool that actually helps a leader understand their leadership profile, but also their derailers.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And a favorite habit?

Cassandra Frangos
Thank-you notes.  Handwritten Thank-you notes.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a particular stationary, or how do you do it?

Cassandra Frangos
Yeah, I actually got a gift from someone that I coached of stationary with my name on it and my favorite color of purple.  And so, I love just writing – whether someone did something small or big for you – just writing something personal to them.  Because you can do an email – it’s too fast, it’s too quick, it’s actually not that special anymore.  So, handwriting it and getting something in the mail is pretty special.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.  And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear them quote it back to you?

Cassandra Frangos
I think actually relates to my favorite quote of really being yourself.  I think that often resonates with people, where I just often say, “This doesn’t sound like you.  Are you trying to do this because you think you should do it, or do you really believe you should do it?”  So, I do hear people thanking me for that often, where they’ll say, “You know what?  I was myself and it paid off, and I’m really happy that I wasn’t trying to do something that I wasn’t comfortable with.”

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

Cassandra Frangos
LinkedIn.  I’m on LinkedIn all the time, I’m posting different things.  But my personal email is on there, or you can just write to me directly from LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  And do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Cassandra Frangos
I would think about how to reinvent yourself.  Back to the John Chambers piece, where just what are some of the ways you’re going to reinvent yourself, either small or big, to make sure you can really, truly succeed?

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  Well, Cassandra, thank you for the book and for this conversation and demystifying this stuff.  It’s been a lot of fun and I wish you all the best!

Cassandra Frangos
Well, thank you.  Same to you!

Apr 13

286: How to Optimize Learning at Work with Whitney Johnson

By Podcasts 2 Comments

 

 

Whitney Johnson says: "Your odds of success are going to be six times higher when you pursue a disruptive course."

CEO advisor Whitney Johnson shares her insights into optimizing individual learning and team innovation via thoughtful disruption along a learning curve.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to optimize each stage of learning
  2. The three key stages of your learning curve
  3. The importance of ‘hiring’ the right boss

About Whitney

CEO advisor and frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Whitney Johnson, has over one million followers on Linkedin. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work (2015). She was an award-winning Wall Street analyst and co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen. She is a frequent keynote speaker on disruption, and has been recognized as one of the world’s most influential management thinkers by Thinkers50 and Fortune. She also hosts the weekly Disrupt Yourself podcast and is an original cohort member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

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

Whitney Johnson
Thank you, Pete. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. Well, I think we’re going to get into some really good stuff, but first I wanted to go back in time a little bit and hear in an earlier part of your career you were a winning, outperforming stock picker. How did you do it?

Whitney Johnson
That’s such a good question. I think the way I did it – I mean you have to build your financial models and you have to come up with your projections of what you think a company is going to be able to do in the future, but there’s an element of stock picking that’s actually very intuitive. The way I – I found that stocks, I mean, when I was analyzing them and studying them every single day of what they were doing, it’s almost like they had a personality.

One of the elements at least for me of being a good stock picker was sure I had to have the numbers, but also being able to analyze management, what I thought management would do, how they were thinking about the world, what was motivating them, and then also watching the stock and just getting a sense for when there might be momentum shifting either up or down.

I think a good stock picker has this element of being able to do the analytical work, but there’s also an intuitive – there’s a left brain, right brain aspect to stock picking.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s intriguing. One of these days my dreams is – because I’ve seen that there’s numbers and numbers of studies that show that certain kind of good people practices are linked to exceptional or beyond normal stock performance measures, if you look at maybe Good to Great or any number of those sort of studies that are out there.
Part of me thought on day I think it would be really cool to start a strategy in which I’m trying to snag undervalued stocks based upon having brilliant people and culture things in play because it’s like, those are not readily quantified, reported, sent to the SEC and digested by day traders the world over.

Whitney Johnson
Fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Some day.

Whitney Johnson
I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, yeah. It’s worth doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, maybe I’ll pick your brain when that day comes because you’ve made a leap here into more of the realm of people and learning and development. You talk a lot about disrupting and disruption, can you orient us a little bit? What do you mean by those words?

Whitney Johnson
I’m glad that you asked that question because I think so many of us hear those words and we all think different things depending on who we are and the experience that we’ve had. At its simplest, a disruptor, in terms of disruptive innovation, is a silly little thing that takes over the world.

Quick examples are the telephone that took over the telegraph; the light bulb, the gas lamp; more recently Toyota disrupted General Motors; Netflix, Blockbuster; and then Uber has disrupted yellow cabs.

It has a very specific framework. The disruptor gets a foothold at the low end of the market. And think about Toyota in the ‘60s. At the very outset, its position is weak and their product is inferior. At that point in time, General Motors could have literally crushed them like a cockroach, but they didn’t because market leaders rarely bother because for them it’s just a silly little thing, the margins are low, it’s inconsequential, why should we bother, let’s just go after bigger, faster, better. In the case of General Motors, it was Cadillac.

The bad news for General Motors, of course, and the good news depending on your point of view, if you were Toyota, is that once you’ve got that foothold, you’re motivated also by bigger, faster, better, Lexus. That’s what disruption looks like. At its simplest, it’s low end, eventually moves up market and upends its better resourced, at least early on, competitor.

Pete Mockaitis
When you talk about an individual being a disruptor or disruptive or causing disruption, what does that mean?

Whitney Johnson
Personal disruption is how you take these ideas and make them meaningful to you. This is the big aha that I had. When I was working as an investor I had co-founded an investment firm with Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School and we were applying this theory of disruption to investing and to products and services.
The big aha, the big insight that I had, was that this framework actually applied to people. What it looks like for a person is think of a ladder, so you start at the bottom of a ladder, then you climb to the top of the ladder and then you jump to the bottom of the next ladder, like the children’s game Chutes and Ladders.

To give you an example of what that can look like for a person, because I think we talked about Toyota, General Motors, but what does it look like for you personally. Well, Lady Gaga. We all know Lady Gaga.

Think about how in 2008 she starts at the bottom of a ladder. She goes straight to the top. Then for an encore what does she do? Well she jumps to the bottom of a new ladder. Think about that ladder. She collaborates with Tony Benet on a jazz album. Then she does this Sound of Music tribute. We’re talking about Lady Gaga singing The Hills are Alive. Then she produces a country album.

You’re like, “Wow, hm.” But the jump it obviously paid off because her performance at the Super Bowl last year had the largest music audience ever. That’s what personal disruption looks like.

The real snag for personal disruption though is that when you’re at the top of the ladder and you make a decision to jump to the bottom of a new one, people oftentimes look at you like, “What are you doing? You’re giving up all this stature, all this money, all this notoriety. Why would you do this?” You do it because you believe that when you’re willing to disrupt yourself, that what you will get in the future, that step back will turn out to be a slingshot forward for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting because I’m thinking sometimes it works out great and sometimes it doesn’t work out so great. I’m thinking about Opera right now. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not in the know and the Opera Winfrey Network is rocking and rolling, but for a while there it seemed like she was sort of struggling with the rankings or the ratings, Nielson stuff, and is just sort of hanging out, whereas before she was the Opera with rocking and rolling.

Whitney Johnson
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess time will tell what unfolds there or maybe Michael Jordan and baseball.

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, Pete. You make a really good point.

I think one of the important things to know about the theory of disruption is that the reason it’s so valuable is that the research says that your odds of success are going to be six times higher when you pursue a disruptive course and your revenue opportunity is going to be 20 times greater.  The thing that is important to understand is that when your odds go up by six times, that’s from 6% to 36%.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Whitney Johnson
There’s still a 64% chance that you’re on the wrong curve. It means that lots of things that we’re going to try are not going to work. That being said, your odds go up and most importantly, no S curve is ever wasted.

No matter what S curve or learning curve we’re on, we’re always learning something. Even if it turns out that this is not a learning curve that’s going to work fabulously well, like perhaps the OWN Network for Opera or even Michael Jordan and baseball, it doesn’t mean that he didn’t learn some really valuable lessons and she didn’t learn some really valuable lessons. Again, no S curve or learning curve is ever wasted.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. I’ve seen that in terms of just my own business adventures in terms of, “Oh, that didn’t work out. I’ve wasted some time and money on it, but oh wow, now I have these sort of extra resources, like great people to collaborate with, knowledge of platforms that I wouldn’t have had, skills that get put over to another place.” It’s hard to regret even most of those failures.

Whitney Johnson
Especially when it’s not about when you’re able to separate out the endeavor itself from you as a person, the worth that you have as a person. When you can separate those two out, you really can say, “Wow, I did this thing and it didn’t work, but look at everything I learned.” It starts to just be this accumulation of knowledge and understanding and experience that allows you to move up the next curve that much more quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s talk about some learning curve stuff in your latest upcoming work, Build an A Team. What’s this book all about and why is important right now?

Whitney Johnson
My prior book called Disrupt Yourself and we’ve kind of been alluding to it and talking about was this notion that we need to be willing to disrupt ourselves to jump from one learning curve to the next, so that your odds of success are higher.

One of the things that happened is that as I was talking to people, I would over and over and over again have people say to me, “Okay, I get it. I got it. I got it. I want to disrupt myself, but how do I get my boss to let me disrupt myself? Because I really like the company that I’m working at. And how do I get the team, the people who are working for me to disrupt themselves?” This book is a response to that.

Whereas Disrupt Yourself was for you, how do you decide when it’s time to try something new and then how do you move up your learning curve … to do that, this is about okay, how do you manage a team as a collection of S curves and how do you use this framework to onboard people, how do you manage people when they’re at the low end of their curve, in the sweet spot at the high end and what do you do when it’s time for them to jump to their next S curve.

With the idea that if your company is a collection of S curves, if you can manage the learning of each person on your team, you can actually optimize for innovation and avoid being disrupted.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. Well, you’re using a lot of words I like there: optimizing and innovation, learning, oh yeah. Let’s dig in a little bit then. What are some key practices that make that happen well in terms of some do’s and don’ts that you observe in the wild.

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, I would say the first thing to think about  is – let’s just talk about this S a little bit because I think for some of our listeners because we’ve been talking all about the S curve and  – I should say your listeners. They’re your listeners. They’re you tribe.

Pete Mockaitis
… share them now.

Whitney Johnson
Thank you for inviting me in.

If you think about this idea of an S, at the bottom of the S, you’re inexperienced, you don’t know what you’re doing, there’s going to be – six months to a year whenever you start anything new, a new role, a new project, where time is going to pass, time is going to pass, and it feels like nothing is happening.

But then you put in the effort and you start to move up the knee of that S. That comes the back of the S where it’s really, really steep and so you start to feel really competent and confident and you’re engaged.

Then you get to the top and now you become a master. Yay, you’re a master, but because you know how to do everything on your job, you start to get bored. Well, what you want to do as a manager is to
have about 70% of your people at any given time in the sweet spot, where they’re engaged, they know enough, but not too much.

You want to have 15% of your people at the low end, where they’re inexperienced, but they’re also, because of that inexperience, asking lots of questions like, “Why do you do it like this?” If you can get over the fact that it feels kind of pesky because they’re questioning the status quo, there are all sorts of nuggets of discovery that can come with that person who’s at the low end of the curve. You want 15% of your people there.

Then you also want 15% of your people at the high end of the curve who are on the top. Think of it, I’m talking about a curve, but also think of it as being on top of a mountain. There’s this vista, there’s this perspective that they have. They can also bring along the people who are the bottom and the middle of the curve before they then jump to a new one.

If you can optimize each of those respective stages of learning, it can allow you to be very innovative. In fact, if you, as an organization or a leader, are trying to figure out if you’re at risk of being disrupted, all you have to do is look at how many people are at the high end of the curve because if you’ve got too many people at the high end, that means they’re getting bored and bored people can either leave or worse they get complacent and bored and complacent people, they don’t innovate. They get disrupted.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. We’ve sort of laid out, “Hey, take a look at the mix right there.” Maybe I think it would be helpful – I guess in a way it really is a continuum as opposed to red, yellow, green, three firm, clear categories. Is that fair to say?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, it’s a continuum. But you want to dive into sort of how you manage people along the different parts?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes.

Whitney Johnson
Or what would be helpful?

Pete Mockaitis
I’d like to go there in a moment, but first I guess I’d like to say, I’m thinking about so folks are in there in their six months, like, “Yeah, I still kind of don’t know what I’m doing, but I kind of do.” I guess where would you place them in terms of the three segments or would you just say, they’re more like the new folk than they are the mid-folk and just leave it at that or is there any kind of key questions or indicators you look to and do your categorizing?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, love it. Great question.

One of the things that we have is we have what is called an S curve locator. It’s the too that you can – if you actually go to my website at WhitneyJohnson.com/diagnostic, you can download it and see where you are on your current learning curve. If you wanted to, you could have everybody on your team download it and see where you are.

What I would say is that it’s definitely continuum. But here’s a quick rule of thumb, typically someone’s going to be at the low end of the curve. If you’re mapping against the 10,000 hour rule, for example, and working 40 hours a week, you’re going to be there up until about the time that you’re at six months.

That’s going to be characterized by you’re coming home from work and saying, “I have no idea what I’m doing.

I feel very daunted by what’s happening.” That’s how it’s going to feel, so you then go, “Okay, I know it’s supposed to feel this way, so I’m not going to get discouraged.”

But at some point after – from six to nine months and it may be a year depending on how prepared you were going into this new work, you’re going to start moving into this sweet spot. You’ll be in this sweet spot for, again, on average two to three years, where at the low end of the sweet spot you feel like you still know enough, but not quite enough and at the high end of the sweet spot, you probably know a lot and perhaps almost too much.

Then once you get to the top of the curve, that’s going to be three to four years in a particular role. You don’t really want to be staying at that place for longer than six months to a year. Again, this is doing exactly the same thing. There’s lots of different ways for you to extend out the sweet spot of the curve, but that’s a basic rule of thumb.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really interesting because that seems to roughly correspond to what we’re seeing with the horizon in which people choose of their volition to stick with a current role … “You know what? I think I’m going to move on now.”

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, and you know it’s so fascinating, Pete, is that when people hear about this framework they go, “Oh, that’s why I move every three or four years because I was at the top of a learning curve,” and it helps them understand that they weren’t just being flakey like, “Oh, I’m done with this job.”

They understand, “Oh, it’s because my learning had peaked and I needed to do something new because I was getting bored and in order for me to be most productive and most be able to contribute better to the organization I needed to be able to leap to a new learning curve.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, all right. Let’s say, now we have three different segments, what are some best practices within each of them?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, okay. I would say for people at the low end of the learning curve, you want to have a plan. I think there’s this tendency to thing that whenever you hire someone that they’re going to be there forever and they’re just not. We subconsciously do that weird thing.

You want to have a really clear plan of what you want them to do for the first month on the job, for their first six months on the job, for their two to three years on the job, knowing that three to four years from now they’re going to jump, assuming that they’ve been a good employee, going to jump to do something new.

The second thing you want to do is to just let them do their job. I think sometimes when people are brand new, for example, I know some of your listeners are fairly new managers, there’s this tendency to want to micromanage. Let me just tell you a quick story around that.

There was this really talented, high performer at Boeing who was promoted to be a manager and a few months in one of his direct reports, an engineer, announced that he was quitting. The engineer is like, “Why are you quitting? You’re doing such a good job.” The engineer said, “Well, it’s because you’re micro managing me. You’ve made 14 changes to my work. Your job is not to do my job. Your job is to help me understand the bigger picture, to plug me into the network and to advocate for me.”

The employee still quit, but Alan Mulally, who went on to become the CEO of Ford, one of the best CEOs of our time, apparently learned his lesson, I should say.

The third thing I would say for people at the low end is to recognize that they’re going to be slow. Sometimes you’re going to say, “Hm, I wonder if I should have hired this person because they’re not really quite delivering the way I wanted them to.” Just recognize that they’re going to be slow because they’re at the low end of the curve.

Then remember that because they’re not blind through familiarity, there are lots of things that they’re going to see. Make sure you – before they start to get blind, make sure you ask them what their insights are and what suggestions that they have for you and how you might do things differently. That’s at the low end of the curve.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that, that notion that the new folks have – because they don’t know stuff, are a rich source of innovation.

I guess I’m thinking about it sometimes when we’ve had folks like just, “Hey, clean our home.” Sometimes it’s, “It’s gotten beyond us. We need a little help task rabbit or something on a number of occasions.” It’s sort of like I behold sort of what they’ve done and at times it’s like, “Well, that’s not where that goes. That goes over there.” It’s like, “But you know what? It makes more sense to have it over here.”

Whitney Johnson
Exactly. That’s a great example. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. At times it’s sort of like, “No, that’s not where that goes for a reason. I’m going to move it back here,” and other times it’s like, “You have sparked something really cool about how I should have been doing it all along.” That’s cool to have that flexibility, that humility to roll with it. What about folks who are in the midpoint or the sweet spot?

Whitney Johnson
People in the sweet spot, it’s a really interesting place because they are feeling really competent. One of the things that’s really interesting is when people are in the sweet spot, you start to them think of them as a high potential person. Fascinating research suggests that when people are high po’s, we actually don’t give them hard assignments because we’re afraid that they’ll fail.

The most important thing you can do for your people in the sweet spot is to give them constraints, to give them friction, to press them and challenge them. Give them real stretch assignments where there’s a real possibility of failure.

Then the second thing I would say is because they are performing so well, make sure you appreciate them. It’s easy sometimes when people are at the low end or the high end, you’re worried about them, etcetera, and you forget and ignore the people in the sweet spot. They’re not a problem child, so don’t make them one because you’ve ignored them. That would be my advice for the people in the middle of the curve.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very good. And those who are getting experienced?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, so the people at the top of the curve, there are a couple of different things you want to do.

First of all the way that you can best leverage their experience is to give them – first of all say to them, “Okay, you’re at the top of the curve. I know you’re getting bored. I need you to stay here from six months to a year in order to help set the pace for people at the low end of the curve, in order to convey the tribal memory, and also we just need to get your perspective overall.”

That’s how you want to manage people at the top of the curve is give them a specific role that they need to play for your organization. Then you need to come to their aid, so A-I-D.
Applaud what they’ve done. We tend to memorialize birthdays and anniversaries and promotions, but whenever someone gets to the top of the curve, applaud and say to them, “Look at what we’ve accomplished as a team because you were in this role.”

The second thing you want to do if you haven’t already is to identify what they’re going to do next.

Then the third, the D, A-I-D, is to deliver on the promise inherent in your contract that now that they’ve gotten to the top of the curve, they’ve delivered, they’ve performed well, they’ve now set the pace for the people at the low end, you identify some new role, some new opportunity, some new project for them to do inside of your organization so that they can continue to learn and as they learn, yes, they may leave your team and so there’s a short term loss for you, but you sub-optimize the present in order to optimize the future for them and for your organization.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting I think in practice – well, I don’t have any hard data on this, maybe you do. But my gut sense is that most organization don’t do this. It’s kind of like, “Well, this is the job,” and maybe there’s not clear-cut opportunities for advancement or other roles to be snagged, so then folks just kind of get tired of it and they leave of their own accord.

What’s your sense for how – what the proportion of folks who are doing things optimally viruses sub-optimally?

Whitney Johnson
I think the large percentage of people are doing it sub-optimally. It’s very difficult to do and yet we know – in fact, the data says it’s difficult to do. I’m trying to find – oh yeah, okay.

Professor at Harvard Business School, Boris Groysberg, he does this survey every year. I think he’s done it for about ten years of small, medium-sized companies and asks them about sort of how they build a great company and to rate how effective they are at a number of different HR practices.

For the 450 companies they surveyed in 2017, job rotations, which is basically what we’re talking about here, had the lowest, with high potential programs having the third lowest.

The key to maintaining this innovate workforce, they were the lowest and the third lowest. He said this is not unusual. It’s basically this way every single year.

If the organizations that are listening to this are struggling to do it, you’re not alone. But to the organizations that are able to do it, like for example, WD-40, who I talk about in my book, then you get things like engagement scores of 93%. You know that when you’ve got high engagement scores, you’ve got higher operating margins, your ROIs – you’re just a more profitable company.

So there’s a case to be made for it. But there are all sorts of psychological reasons why we don’t. Anyway, long-winded answer to your question, but I think the simple answer is very few do, more could and would benefit if done so.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Also, when you share those data, that also make some think of Korn Ferry had managers sort of self-assess where they fell on all the competencies and developing others and direct reports was dead last of all of them that they could choose in the stack order ranking, so it is challenging.

I’d like to zoom in then. If you were the individual who is wishing you had some enlightened leaders taking care of you in this way but aren’t quite getting it, what’s your advice for them?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, I would say you can’t necessarily change your boss. I think there are a couple things you can do. You can hire the right boss for you.

Because I think one of the things we overlook is sometimes it’s a good thing to help people leave and go to other organizations where they can become ambassadors, clients, etcetera for your company. I think that would be the first place I would start.

The second place I would go is to you, yourself. I think that if you can make it possible for the people who report to you to be able to learn and leap and repeat, you’re going to find that the people who are reporting to you are much more engaged. They’ll be all in and when they’re all in, when they’re learning, you’re going to ship more product and then you’re going to start to become a talent magnet and people are going to want to work for you and with you.

Then if it turns out that the boss that you happen to work for is not the talent magnet, then you’re going to have the ability to move to other organizations over time.

Pete Mockaitis
I also want to get your take on the – there are some employees who are not that interested, engaged or motivated by learning. They would kind of just rather sort of do their thing for a while with minimal interruption and maybe effort. How do you think about working with this sort of profile in the mix?

Whitney Johnson
With someone who just literally doesn’t want to learn, is that what you’re saying? They’re just not excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I think that you might call it less motivation or they would prefer just a bit more of routine. I’m thinking of Jerry Gergich from Parks and Recreation right now if you can bring that to mind. He just likes his government job because he can get home to his wife and family at a reasonable time and that’s that.

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, it’s such an interesting question.

I remember a few years ago, maybe two years ago, I was talking to a CEO of a company and he said, “90% of my people don’t have a learning curve. They just don’t care.” I could really feel how he felt. He was really frustrated.

My response was – I think it’s just not true. I think everybody is on a learning curve. It’s just … because everybody has the will for something. I think when we have someone inside of an organization who is not performing well, I think there can be a couple things going on.

I think sometimes they just don’t want to work that hard, but that means that this is not the right learning curve for them because I think everybody is willing to work hard at something, even if it’s playing video games ten hours a day or watching football for ten hours a day. There’s something that they’re willing to work hard at, but it might not be inside of your organization.

That’s sometimes where you’ve just got to have those difficult conversations and say, “This isn’t the right learning curve for you because you’re not excited about this particular curve.”

I do think sometimes that people are under performing not because they’re not willing to work hard, but because they are on the wrong curve. Part of the reason that that happens is because that we, as human beings, because we overvalue what we’re not good at, we sometimes get ourselves into the wrong roles because we worked hard at something so therefore, we should be in that role, when in fact what we’d be really good at is that thing that we don’t value because it’s easy for us.

A really great boss will be able to discern between the two and when they discover that there’s someone in the wrong role – and I talk about this in the book about a women named Jocelyn Wong, where she was at Proctor and Gamble. She was engineer. It turns out she was not performing well.

It’s not because she wasn’t good; it’s just that she was on the wrong curve, so they moved her into marketing and she’s now been the CMO of Lowe’s.

Again, I think everybody has the will for something. It may not be the will for the learning curve inside of your company, but sometimes when people aren’t performing it’s just that they’re not on the right curve.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Again, if there’s an individual who finds themselves bored and not sort of getting the proactive attention from leadership to kind of craft new things, do you have any tips for being proactive and how one might go about taking the initiative optimally to finding some new challenges within the current role?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, okay, so you’re saying, you’re a little bit bored. Okay, so a couple of things.

I would say number one is you want to talk to your boss and say to them, again, I understand that this might sometimes feel tantamount to getting pushed off the curve, which also gives you information. If you can’t go to your boss and say you’re bored, then you’re probably going to leave at some point anyway, so you may want to make the decision to be proactive.

But I do think that there are opportunities for you once you say that you can give yourself – you can create opportunities for yourself to stretch.

One of the things I recommend to my clients is to impose constraints because when you’re getting bored it’s because you don’t have enough challenge and challenge comes with friction and constraints represent friction.

They can include things like okay, we’ve got a target of X for this year, we want to see if we can reach our target in 0.75X, or sorry, we want to reach our target by September, not by December or what could we do if we had half the marketing budget or what would we have to do if we only had half the people. Start to really push yourself to be effective by constraining your resources and see what that can bring about.

But again, I think that that can at some level feel like busy work. You’re really best off by having that conversation with your boss and/or taking on interesting projects inside of the organization that engage and challenge you, which in a very, very large organization you certainly have the option of doing.

If you’re in a small organization, you can start a side hustle and see what happens there. But I think in that instance you’re basically saying, “Okay, this S curve I’m on isn’t fulfilling me. For whatever reason I’m not ready to jump to a new curve, it might be a financial concern, so I’m going to start a side hustle, start my own S curve over here and see what comes of that.”

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

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, I think the only other comment I would make is that I think whenever you’re thinking about disrupting and this idea of learning, and leaping and repeating, and allowing – disrupting yourself in terms of how you’re managing your workforce or your team is always remember that when – because you’re creating a new market, you’re creating a new way of doing things, it’s going to be scary and lonely. So if you’re feeling scared and if you’re feeling lonely as you’re pursuing this, you’re actually on the right path to disruption.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, so one of my favorite quotes is “Rings and jewels are but apologies for gifts,” I’m paraphrasing. It’s Ralph Waldo Emerson. “But the only true gift is a portion of thyself.” I really, really love that quote. It’s very meaningful for me.

Whenever we think about ourselves in the workplace or really any endeavor that we’re pursuing, I think it’s always important, at least for me, to find some way to bring myself into that, to really show up in some way, whether it’s professionally or personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or a bit of research?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, I read The Undoing Project not too long ago and I talk about it a little bit in this next book. I’m fascinated by this idea of behavioral economics and how sometimes when we want to encourage people to do something, we talk a lot about the carrot, but I think that when it comes to motivating ourselves, that the stick is not to be overlooked. I think that for me was really powerful.

Sometimes we need to just prod yourself by saying, “Okay, here are all the bad things that are going to happen to you if you don’t do this new thing,” because we want to be positive, but sometimes, we’re actually more motivated if we can tell ourselves that it won’t be good if we don’t do this.

Pete Mockaitis
Have you applied this in your own goal or pursuits?

Whitney Johnson
Yes, absolutely I have. Do you want an example?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please do.

Whitney Johnson
Okay, a few – probably a year or two ago I had gotten off of a webinar and I just wasn’t very good. You know you have times, you’re just not very good. Afterwards, I was like, “I wasn’t very good.” I was psyching myself up about how good I was going to be.

My husband, spouses and partners are often truth tellers, he’s like, “Don’t you get it? You need to tell yourself how bad it’s going to be. If you tell yourself how bad it’s going to be, then you’ll prepare.” I was like, “Really? He’s right. He’s right.”

So now when I’m trying to prepare to give a speech or prepare to do a podcast like with you, instead of saying to myself, “This is going to be great.” I’ll say, “Okay, if you don’t prepare, if you don’t take a look at – think about what you’re going to do beforehand, it’s going to be bad,” then it motivates me actually to act, so powerful research to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, good, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Whitney Johnson
Oh, I am reading Brandon Sanderson. Do you know him at all? He’s a fantasy writer. He writes fantasy and he wrote this book called The Way of Kings. He’s just the most fantastic storyteller. If you ever read Ender’s Game, he takes Ender’s Game to the exponential power. He’s just that good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. How about a favorite tool? Something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Whitney Johnson
Oh, Headspace app hands down. It’s so good. It’s really good. Did you have him as a guest on your show?

Pete Mockaitis
I haven’t, but we have a guest coming up who’s on the Simple Habit app. He’s coming on. Andy, yeah, he’s on the list, so maybe someday it can happen.

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, yeah. You could do the live meditation. Anyway, that app – I’m up to like 900 minutes. It’s really made a difference for me. I highly recommend it. In fact, I have recommended it to a number of people.

Pete Mockaitis
You said difference, what difference does it make for you?

Whitney Johnson
I think that when – I tend to get anxious or worried about all the 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 things that I need to do in the next hour or two hours, so I think the Headspace app has helped me say to myself, “Okay, that’s just a thought, just focus on what you have to do right now. Write it down. You can come back to it.” Just be much more aware of the chatter in my head and to kind of calm that chatter down. I found it very helpful for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very good. Thank you. How about a particular nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks? They nod, they Kindle book highlight, they quote you back to yourself. What is something you share that really seems to connect?

Whitney Johnson
One is if it’s scary and lonely, you’re on the right path.

Another one that people really resonate with is that shame limits disruption, not failure. I think sometimes people conflate the two and failure and shame are two different things, but we conflate them. When I say to people shame limits disruption, not failure, I think that that’s really resonant.

Then I would also say that this idea, which I mentioned earlier, is that if you want to know that if you as an organization are about to be disrupted, just take the pulse of your workforce. I think that’s really powerful for people, like, “Oh, right. I don’t need to just worry that I’m getting disrupted, I just need to figure out where my people are and if I’ve got too many people that are getting bored, I’m going to be at risk because they’re dialing it in.” That’s really helpful for people as well.

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

Whitney Johnson
As I mentioned earlier, you can go to my website to WhitneyJohnson.com/diagnostic if you want to take this S curve locator. The best way is to find me at WhitneyJohnson.com. You can email me at WJ@WhitneyJohnson.com or on Twitter at JohnsonWhitney.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Whitney Johnson
Yeah, I do. I suspect that as you were listening to Pete and I talk, you had an idea, one or two or three ideas, some insight. I would encourage you to write that insight down now, this very second. Pull over your car and write it down and then act on it in the next two hours. That would be my challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right, well, Whitney, thanks so much for taking this time. I wish you lots of luck with the book and all sorts of happy disruptions and A Team building in the future.

Whitney Johnson
Thank you very much, Pete. I appreciate it.