Tag

KF #20. Interpersonal Savvy Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

May 02
0

958: The Five Essential Behaviors of Great Collaboration with Tricia Cerrone and Edward van Luinen

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Edward van Luinen and Tricia Cerrone slice through the clutter to identify the fundamental keys to effective collaboration.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What most people get wrong about collaboration
  2. How to overcome the barriers to authentic collaboration 
  3. How to zero in on an inspiring  “noble purpose” that drives motivation and engagement 

About Tricia and Edward

Tricia Cerrone 

Courage and collaboration are hallmarks of Tricia’s global leadership experience, whether it is leading a project, innovating new designs, or overseeing a portfolio of work. With a keen eye for talent and more than 20 years on the business and production side of designing and delivering technically challenging projects at Disney and other Fortune 500 companies, Tricia is adept at inspiring and motivating teams toward successful outcomes while advancing careers and developing new leaders. 

Edward J. van Luinen, Ed.D 

For over twenty years, Edward has been a talent champion of teams worldwide. His experience includes Disney, Sony, and Heineken. He led teams through transformational global-regional-local restructuring, successfully implemented mergers and acquisitions, and introduced new software, learning systems, and leadership strategies. Edward’s collaboration motto is “advance a team member when you advance yourself.” He has worked in Africa, Europe, and North America. Edward collaborates in both French and English. 

Resources Mentioned

Tricia Cerrone and Edward van Luinen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Trish and Edward, welcome.

Tricia Cerrone

Hey, Pete, happy to be here.

Edward van Luinen

Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I’m happy to be chatting.

Edward van Luinen

Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis

So, your company’s called Authentic Collaboration. We’re going to talk about that a lot. Maybe, for starters, you could give us a definition. What do you mean by collaboration? And what makes a collaboration authentic versus inauthentic?

Edward van Luinen

Authentic collaboration is a group of people working toward a goal with all-hands on deck all the time. That’s a unique time because a lot of teams, the first thing they try to figure out is, “Okay, who’s the boss? Who’s the doer? Who gets the glory work? Who doesn’t get the glory work?” So, that makes it original and authentic right off the bat. It’s also a process with a lot of specific tasks that teams can begin to do on day one to set the tone of how they want to work, not just people staying in their swim lane and doing lists of tasks. How we work together is really the most important part of authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

And I think the part about why we picked authentic is we come out of the womb really good, and then but we get all these attachments and behaviors and things that aren’t useful to us anymore. And so, just imagine, like, we just want to kind of wipe off all the barnacles of life and be our true selves. And the behaviors really fight that and combat all of our weaknesses in a really easy way that’s natural.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, tell me, you’ve done a lot of research and teaching in the world of collaboration, any particularly striking, surprising discoveries that you’ve made about us humans and how we collaborate, best and worst?

Tricia Cerrone

That’s a good question. It’s interesting that people don’t actually know how to collaborate. I feel like the reason why it’s so important now, and we see in so many statistics people are trying to figure it out, and it’s the cause for so many work failures, but people are sort of just told to collaborate, and then they don’t really know what that means.

And sometimes they’re like, “Okay, we’ll make this beautiful cute room with fun things in it,” or, “We’ll kind of work together,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean collaborate. So, it’s like we learn how to walk but we forget it actually takes a few different movements to walk and sustain with collaboration. Only no one’s ever told you what those movements are.

And so, once we realized people just, they were doing things accidentally, but didn’t know why they worked, and so sometimes something would work. But, overall, no one really understood what it meant to collaborate. So, for us, we figured these five behaviors. If you do them all, you create this culture of collaboration that works consistently all the time. And so then, we went through, and we validated each of the behaviors of why they work for us as humans.

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. The five behaviors of a new way to work and lead, which is authentic collaboration, is generosity, co-creation, action, resourcefulness, and gratitude. And as Tricia exactly said, many of those behaviors are on their own, not original. But we did some original research with hiring a researcher and found that these cluster of behaviors are unique and have not appeared in any sort of model before.

So, exactly as Tricia says, too, it’s like we first have to understand what all the behaviors are, and then start to practice them day in and day out, and that makes a difference and that makes an authentic collaboration team.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you give us a picture for what’s the state of collaboration today in terms of how well are, say, American, for the sake of conversation, workers doing at collaboration and what’s at stake?

Tricia Cerrone

Well, there’s a few statistics, right? I’ll let Edward go in a second, but I was just reading a Gallup poll about our lack of engagement at work, which really speaks to collaboration. And the 2023 kind of state of the world was basically that we’re losing like $8 trillion in productivity because people aren’t engaged, and they just don’t want to work with each other. And in America, that’s like $550 billion of what’s being wasted. So, basically, like 21% of people right now are looking for another job, and that’s about the amount also that are engaged at the office. And, Edward, do you have a few other statistics?

Edward van Luinen

Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with Trish. I mean, the Gallup poll is really important. Salesforce did a survey, and 85% of workers said that the primary reason that projects are failing is because of a lack of collaboration. And I think they think, “Oh, I’m a team member. I’ve just got to do tasks. It’s consensus. 50 people have to be in the room, but I’m not sure what people are doing.”

So, going back to the behaviors, it’s really about how we work, not what we’re doing. And authentic collaboration focuses on making sure that we are working effectively together first before we start accomplishing our goals and tasks. Software, another industry, 50% of software budgets are created for collaboration tools. The big question is, “Do the software engineers creating the collaboration tools know how to collaborate?” Maybe some do, maybe some don’t. So, a challenge and an opportunity for those to learn more about authentic collaboration, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you perhaps zoom in to a particular group or workplace or a team, and paint a real clear picture of what does typical, yet unfortunately bad collaboration look like, and then perhaps something they did to turn things around and the cool results that came on the other side of that?

Tricia Cerrone

There’s certainly like many things you can do wrong. One particular team that I was working with and I was not the leader at the time, the leader, you know, people can be so nice at work, at home, and then they get to work, and some of the times their insecurities come out. So, if you have a leader who is insecure, which, in a way, is like how one of the ways that pride can show up at work, then it’s hard because they don’t trust your decisions necessarily, but they also don’t trust their own decisions.

And so, what we had to do was actually gently educate our leader so that he could trust working with us. And so, I think leadership, it can show up as like ego. So, when you have someone on the team who like wants all the attention, then they don’t want to collaborate. And I think the other thing that happens in teams is, to Edward’s earlier point, people stay in their lanes because HR, to a degree, has made an industry out of, “These are your roles and responsibilities. You do these.” And then, “If I do those, no matter what someone else does, I won’t catch the blame, I won’t lose my bonus.”

And so, it’s this fear that’s come onto teams, and so that’s what we see a lot of is sort of like fear that I won’t be able to do my jobs because someone else didn’t do their job. And so, that’s why we try to use this sense of generosity to remove fear, and so that people are trusting each other and actually being honest with each other, and helping to problem-solve quicker. Did that answer your question, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yes. Thank you. And when you talked about insecurity, what are some of the typical behaviors, I don’t know, words, phrases, actions, that you see insecure people taking?

Edward van Luinen

Great question, Pete. I feel that it shows up in hoarding information, hoarding team members, “This is my team. I’ve spent years hiring, coaching, growing them to be the high potentials or leaders. I want to keep them,” instead of the organization owning the talent. I think it shows up in not being all hands-on-deck all the time, “Because I’m a senior vice president, I don’t have to clean up the conference room after a meeting, when in fact I should, because I was participating in that meeting,” as an example. So, it can show up in a lot of ways.

I feel that another way that, on teams that I’ve been on, is that if we, as Tricia says, valiantly try to demonstrate the authentic collaboration behaviors in three, four, five meetings, and sometimes when you give, you kind of want to get, because you are role-modeling and demonstrating how you want to be treated. But in additional meetings or collaborations that I’ve tried, after three, four, five meetings, if I’m not getting any response from these authentic collaboration behaviors, it’s a good indicator that it may not work.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, okay. Well, that’s kind of quick results. We know pretty fast, apparently, if we need some traction here.

Edward van Luinen

Well, yeah, sometimes you have to. of course, depending if you’re in a company, you don’t often have the luxury of saying, “Okay, I don’t want to do this,” but as consultants or in a company even, you get an indication of how easy it’s going to be to demonstrate these behaviors and want to love your job. So, the question we want to ask is, “How can we get people to love their job even more?” And we feel we can do that with authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

I want to just add something to what Edward says. One thing we do tell people is if you do these behaviors, whether anyone else does or not, you are going to enjoy your work better because the way people respond to you is going to be different. And so, it does change the energy and the dynamic of everyone that you interact with. So, even if your whole team isn’t doing it, you’re still going to have greater success.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, I think we must hear these five behaviors. We got some hype here, let’s deliver. Tell us, what are they? How do we do them?

Tricia Cerrone

Well, the first one is easy, and I’ll just say, like, anyone can do these behaviors. It’s not about personality or style or how you were brought up, or anything like that. You can all do them. They’re all about the actions that you can do, behaviors, and getting better at them and being a little intentional about it. So, generosity is the first one, and generosity, you know, we all know that. It’s about serving and helping others.

So, it’s like, “How do you look at your team developing each other? How do you grow each other? Do you coach each other after a meeting? Do you,” as Edward said earlier, “help to clean up? Do you see what their needs are?” But the other great outcome of generosity is that it overcomes fear and scarcity, and that we talked about earlier, that insecurity and pride because it creates connection. So, that’s one of the great things about generosity. We could talk about generosity all day. I’ll hand it off.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure thing. And so, if I am trying to practice generosity regularly, are there any particular mottos, mantras, mindsets, attitudes that just I have in me and I’m working through as I see the world and make decisions, and choose what to do?

Tricia Cerrone

No, I probably wouldn’t say that we do have one. It’s more of like, “Look, be a little bit self-aware and look around you to see who needs help.” It’s how we walk through life, “Who needs help?”

Pete Mockaitis

And I love those simple examples in terms of cleaning up and coaching, etc. Can you give some additional easy little ways we can help out every day?

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. Thanks, Pete. And one of the ways is we worked with a lot of leaders on our project, three-year project, Authentic Collaboration, which came out of this project, and one is that feedback is very important on how you’re doing. And we made a commitment to provide very specific, timely, written feedback to leaders that helped us within 24 hours.

Many of them commented, “Gosh, I usually got this verbally, or it was very late, or it wasn’t specific,” but we wrote detailed thank-you notes, which seems a little bit old-school, but I think people still like to get written thank-you notes about how they made a difference on the project. Another generosity trait that we demonstrated was we had a lot of high potential junior, more junior talent, you could say, on our team.

Well, one of the ways that we thought we were generous and collaborative with them was “You’re going to kick off this meeting with a bunch of executives present.” “I don’t know if I could do that.” “Well, we’re going to coach you to make sure you feel comfortable doing it,” and then they did it, right Trish, numerous times.

And then we said, “Well, how did you feel doing that?” “Oh, my gosh, it was great. Someone came up to me and really was happy to meet me, and didn’t know I worked in that division or department, and we’re going to have a coffee because now they know who I am.” So, I feel that’s another specific behavior of generosity, is letting other people shine. That’s real important.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And I guess the counter, the opposite of generosity is not necessarily being evil and maliciously destructive, but rather maybe more of a scarcity mindset in terms of the hoarding, “This is mine. I’m not going to share. If I give a little then it’s going to come back to bite me because I will have less because I have given.”

Tricia Cerrone

Right. And also, like, the ego of like, “Well, I did this on my own, I’m the star,” and not sharing that it took a team.

Edward van Luinen

Exactly. No, you’re right, Pete. Great question. And our motto, actually, and our book title is Collaborate to Compete. We feel that’s counterintuitive, it’s original, it’s pretty disruptively innovative, because most times, as you know, Pete, and Trish and I experienced as well in companies, people are unnecessarily competing against each other. Why don’t we work together and compete to get more market share?

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly.

Edward van Luinen

That’s who we should be competing against. So, collaborate is, and the whole performance management system, as Trish was saying, the rewards were built on competing, not collaborating, so it’s a real head-turner.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so let’s hear about the next behavior.

Tricia Cerrone

One of the next is like resourcefulness. So, it’s better to be resourceful than to have resources, but it’s really about developing your ongoing growth and knowledge about everything in the world because you can often use everything, whether it’s tools or information. And so, it’s knowing how to use all of that in the moment, but having this also attitude of behavior of always learning.

So, even if we were going on a trip to Hong Kong to check out a different park, we would take a half day to like, “Okay, maybe I can get a tour of operations and learn how they do things differently here.” Or, if I’m in a restaurant and it’s, again, another country, like learning a few words, asking the history of the restaurant, because all those little things feed into your experiences and who you might be talking to.

And, as a designer, especially working with Disney so much, even looking at the world around you, like, “What’s the sense of humor of the country?” and you can see that in advertisements, or you might experience the culture in a store or anywhere you go. So, resourcefulness is really about asking questions and being curious, and curiosity really drives resourcefulness.

Edward van Luinen

I agree with Trish. Another behavior is co-creation, and a lot of people think, “Oh, I’m just going to go to a brainstorming meeting, and we’re going to come up with sort of a group decision.” I think that’s probably the 101 of co-creation. Co-creation can actually be democratized, for lack of a better word, throughout the organization in every interaction you’re in.

How can a conversation become co-created? You have ideas, I have ideas. We co-created our solutions all the time within the team. If they were co-created, that doesn’t mean, again, going back to the definition, all-hands-on deck all the time. It’s not my idea, it’s our idea in a conversation, in a meeting, in almost every interaction you’re having, you’re co-creating. And that’s, I think, another important behavior to authentic collaboration.

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, and a lot of part, a lot of the co-creation piece is it’s important with problem-solving, and often people are jumping in with like this solution, that solution, but this kind of gives you the discipline to pause and listen and ask questions and build on that idea first, and explore it first, and then move on to the next idea, and then prioritize.

And all of that’s important, one, because you might miss something that is a great solution, but it also makes sure that everyone on your team feels seen and heard and valued for the idea and contribution. And a lot of the behaviors do that. It’s sort of a thing that we all need as humans and it also makes our work feel like more valuable. So, connection and being seen, heard, and valued is kind of core to why all these things work together.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, do you have any top do’s and don’ts to achieve those ends?

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, keep your mouth shut to start, right? So, co-creation, like if you have a problem, state the problem. And if you’re a leader at the table and you’ve brought everyone together, don’t be the leader who’s like, “No, that won’t work.” Don’t be the leader who’s like, “Oh, I have a better idea.” Don’t be the person who says, “We’ve tried that before.” Pause, and even if you don’t think it’s a good idea, ask the question, “Well, tell me more about that,” or, “What made you think about that?” or, “Why do you think that might work in this situation?”

So, it’s that ability to explore an idea a little deeper despite your own filter that you have. So, again, a little bit of self-awareness and a little more listening. We were just interviewing another leader who was sharing that she brought together this entire team of leaders, and the solution came from the custodial person, not from all these other experts who are great designers and thinkers. And I think that’s what it is. Everyone needs to listen because you don’t know where that great idea is going to come from.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Edward van Luinen

Absolutely. I agree, Trish. And, gosh, I was a people manager for five or six years, always leading the team meeting. And I don’t know, finally I had the realization, Pete, that was like, “Edward, why don’t you ask your team members to take turns leading a meeting? Why are you doing it all the time?” And I think that speaks to what Trish is talking about.

Co-creation is other people have gifts and talents and creativity, and, gosh, they probably are maybe better at leading a meeting than you are, and you’re the one that has the manager title. So, I think that goes to also being generous and co-creating and being grateful for wonderful team members too.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Let’s hear about the fourth behavior.

Tricia Cerrone

Action or preference for action is what we call it, and so it’s obviously you have to move. The reason it’s important and we include it is because people have a lot of fear about making decisions, and you have to act even when you don’t have all the information, and that’s the point. And you actually don’t need that much information to move forward on something, and to try something, but if you do that then you will learn, “Okay, does that get me a little closer to the answer? Or is that something I’m going to cross off as it’s not going to work?”

And then, either way, whenever you do act, it builds that courage in you to continue to take more action. And when you do it as a team, it builds that confidence on a team so it’s a great feeling of that first time, especially when you do that together as a team, and you grow that kind of security and confidence and ability to take risks together.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And the fifth?

Edward van Luinen

Gratitude. Gratitude, we define as it’s really more than a feeling, it’s an action. So, it’s tied to action. I’ll give a specific example. I had to get ready for a very difficult meeting. I don’t know where I was working at the time, and I took the time to journal before that meeting, “What were all my thoughts about why I thought this was an excellent project? While I was even having a difficult time with the project at that moment, overall, what was great about what was I doing, what the team was doing, what the effort was, what were the early results?”

So, that when I went into that difficult project meeting, I was actually, that time spent on gratitude was almost sort of like an armor. Other people were negative, and they might have been critiquing but I was calm and I feel giving myself gratitude, and allowing to share gratitude with team members is also really important which is recognition and rewards, and it also gets to that collaborate to compete.

People are not expressing that much gratitude in the corporate world. We need more. It’s like water in the desert, and I feel that that’s really important for leaders who are authentic collaboration leaders and also team members to spend more time in gratitude. I may say, too, that sometimes people wonder and are suspicious at first, “Why are you buttering me up? Why are you complimenting me? We are in a competitive corporate environment. Are you trying to get something from me?”

And I feel that the authentic way of approaching compliments through gratitude and the consistent way shows that, “No, I care about the team. I care about the company. I care about the noble purpose of this project and this company, and that’s evident through my consistently doing it, not just haphazardly complimenting and being full of gratitude just to get something.” Or, as you said earlier, Pete, it’s really about, “How do I demonstrate that authentic gratitude?”

Tricia Cerrone

Yeah, there’s nothing worse when it’s insincere, right? But I think the value of it is to be specific of how that person contributed to this amazing outcome. I also think it’s important for the team to share celebrations together. And if you think of, like, when you tell a story, there’s the highs and lows, and even with our five behaviors, there’s points where I see it as telling a story, and gratitude is sort of that celebration moment that everyone needs like a breath from all of the action, and so it re-energizes everyone again.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, talking about stories, I’d love if you could share with us some of the most clear, illustrative, transformative examples of folks who have really made a 180 on some of these behaviors and the cool things that happened when they did so.

Tricia Cerrone

I had a colleague who honestly thought I was… he was a good friend and I had pitched this program for bringing innovation to Disney, and it was in a room with like all VPs and me, the only woman in there too. But, anyway, he totally put my idea down in front of everyone, and he was passionately against it. And so, I was like, “Okay, that was not co-creation right there.”

Pete Mockaitis

Could you share, what did he say when he put it down?

Tricia Cerrone

He said, “It’ll never work. No one can pitch an idea within five minutes,” and those were his main things. One, it’ll never work, and, two, it’s not actually possible. And so, after the meeting, I went with him and I said, “Can you talk more about why you’re so against this?” And he just said, “I just think it takes a lot more to pitch an idea, and you have to really understand the lay of the land, and blah, blah, blah.” He had all these legitimate reasons because when we pitch something at Disney, it could be 20 minutes to an hour where you have an executive. So, the idea that you could pitch something in three minutes and get potential feedback in two minutes was a little bit of an alien idea.

So, I took his notes and then I addressed them with everybody who wanted to pitch, and so I basically used generosity and taught everyone how to pitch, and I also brought him in to hear their pitches and critique them. And then when it came to the time for this event to happen, and all these different Imagineers were pitching various ideas in front of the leaders, he sat there in the audience, and he came to me afterwards, and he’s like, “That worked and that was really great.” He’s like, “I didn’t think it through.” I was surprised he admitted it but he said it was really great.

And so, through his not belief, and then him willing to sort of be generous and listening and giving me his opinion, actually, and then co-creating with me and the team to understand how to pitch, then he was able to, like, kind of overcome how he thought about something. And so, I think that’s kind of a co-creation experience of how that kind of came together.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Thank you.

Edward van Luinen

And just to add to that story, there’s going to be barriers to authentic collaboration, Pete. It’s not all just Pollyanna that everyone understands these five behaviors, and we’ve got a great product and process and team, and I love my job because now I practice these five behaviors and work with great leaders. And we have sort of a part of our book, which is “Negotiating Naysayers.” Like Trish said, what do you do in that instant when you’ve got someone who’s against you, publicly?

And Trish pushed through that barrier of whatever that was, insecurity or ego, by finding out sometimes, as Trish met later with that person, “What’s going on? Why? Tell us more.” Sometimes people saying no have a legitimate reason for saying no, and we can find out what that is and uncover more information to be more action-oriented and co-creation. So, sometimes barriers are a gift, not in the moment because they don’t feel so great, right, Tricia? But it’s like, “Wow, okay, this is the test of leadership, you know.” Yeah, this is the test of leadership. It’s not all Pollyanna all the time.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Tricia Cerrone

I think one of the other kind of important things that companies need to be aware of, and even like leaders on a team should be aware of is, and we call it noble purpose, but individuals and humans want to be working on something that’s important in their life. And how we express that to them on a team can make all the difference in their engagement and their desire to like push a little harder.

And so, if you think about a company vision and mission, a vision is sort of that emotional piece of it, and then the mission is the “This is what we actually do to make that happen.” And the noble purpose we always try to bring to a team, and it’s that combination of those two things, like, “What it is it for the company?” but then, “What does that mean for the team? How does the team’s vision and mission support the company? And then me, as a leader, how does that support the company? And then you, Pete, your unique contribution on the team that no one else can do, that is your more than more defined vision and mission, your noble purpose.”

So, we make sure everyone on the team understands how this doesn’t happen without them. Even the assistant who’s ordering food is incredibly important to make it all happen. So, we make sure that noble purpose is this concept that’s both emotional and practical and clear for each individual to, again, go back to like, “You are important and valued in this project and in this company, and we can’t do it without you.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Edward van Luinen

And if we can get our team members to say, “I love my job more,” then we’ve won with authentic collaboration. They can actually say they love their jobs more.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Edward van Luinen

I think that the Maya Angelou quote is so appropriate for authentic collaboration, “People forget what you say, people forget what you do, but people will never forget how you make them feel.” And I think that is really at the heart of authentic collaboration, is that people feel seen, heard, grown, developed, honored, and are rewarded being on an authentic collaboration team.

Tricia Cerrone

I think for me, one of my favorite sayings is the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Tricia Cerrone

I really like, as a business book, Essentialism by Greg McKeown, and also, anything by Michael Lewis, who wrote Moneyball and The Blind Side. I love all his stuff too.

Edward van Luinen

I like The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. I think that it speaks to how we can create in almost all circumstances.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Tricia Cerrone

They can find us at Authentic-Collaboration.com, which is our website, and we’re also on LinkedIn and post a couple times a week.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Edward van Luinen

Every day is day one. Sometimes when you’re in your routine as an HR director, or SVP of HR, or a general manager, or CEO, or hypo, sometimes we get into our routine. What we don’t want to do is repeat our same leadership style and wake up 20 years later, and say, “I’ve just been doing the same leadership style for 20 years over and over again.” So, every day is day one. Try something new. People don’t know you’re doing something new. They think you’re just being a great leader. But for you, it’s like, “Oh, this is the first time I’m doing it,” but no one knows that, so keep trying.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Tricia, Edward, thank you for this. And I wish you many lovely, authentic collaborations.

Tricia Cerrone

Thank you, Pete. It’s fun to be here.

Edward van Luinen

Thank you, Pete. It’s been really fun. Thank you very much.

Feb 19
0

937: Speaking the Hidden Language of Connection with Charles Duhigg

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Charles Duhigg shares the simple secret that helps you build powerful connections with anyone.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What supercommunicators know that others don’t 
  2. How to ask questions that deepen and enrich relationships 
  3. How one sentence can dramatically ease workplace conflict 

About Charles

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and the author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better. A graduate of Harvard Business School and Yale College, he is a winner of the National Academies of Sciences, National Journalism, and George Polk awards. He writes for The New Yorker and other publications, was previously a senior editor at The New York Times, and occasionally hosts the podcast How To!

Resources Mentioned

Charles Duhigg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Charles, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charles Duhigg

Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to be chatting. I read your prior book The Power of Habit many years ago, and you got a fresh one, Supercommunicators coming out here. I can’t wait to dig into your wisdom. But first, I got to hear, so in addition to being a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and graduating from impressive places, you’ve also served as bike messenger. Tell us this tale.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, so before I went to business school, I was living in San Francisco and didn’t have a real job. And so, I was like, “You know what I could do, I could become a bike messenger.” And this was back in the late ‘90s when bike messengers were super cool. And so, I signed up for it, and I lasted, literally, one day. I actually got pneumonia from being a bike messenger for one day because San Francisco, of course, was filled with hills, and I was not physically ready to be a bike messenger.

It was interesting though because I would say probably about half, I mean, I did spend time with the other bike messengers, and probably about half of them were more active drug users and had some real serious health issues going on. And I do remember there was this one guy, I took the bus over with him in the morning, and we were driving over the bridge on the way to San Francisco, past the IKEA, and someone was like, “I hate IKEA. IKEA is corporate awfulness.”

And he’s like, “No, bro, IKEA is the best. They got that play area for kids. Me and the wife sometimes will just bring our daughter there, and then we just take off for like six or seven hours, man. It’s amazing.” And I was like, “Okay, this is bike messenger life.”

Pete Mockaitis

Bike messenger life. Well, I’m thinking you have to be in great shape. If they’re using drugs, which drugs are we talking about?

Charles Duhigg

I don’t know. I did not really ask. There seemed to be a lot of conversation about the various drugs, which, of course, I knew nothing about. No, they’re in great shape. Like, if you ride your bike all day long all over San Francisco, you’re in pretty good shape. The other thing is I just didn’t know how to navigate San Francisco, and it’s a hard city. There are ways around the hills and I knew zero of them.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, you lived to tell the tale, and I would be most terrified of getting hit by cars.

Charles Duhigg

Yes, I was terrified of a lot of things. That was definitely one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
But if you’ve got the cool bag, the bike messenger bags are the coolest. Like, the seatbelt buckle and that material.

Charles Duhigg

And at the end of that one day that I spent as a bike messenger, when I was on the bike coming home, I felt like the coolest thing on earth, I was like, “Yeah, I’m a bike messenger. Just, like, messaging stuff,” and then I got pneumonia.

Pete Mockaitis
Mercy. Well, I’m glad you’ve recovered and I’m glad we’re here now chatting about Supercommunicators. It’s a great title and a great premise, and you were something of a supercommunicator in your world, although I think you’ll tell us times that maybe that was not as much the case. But before we get into all that, can you maybe kick us off with anything particularly startling or surprising that you discovered as you’re researching and putting this together?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. This has really changed how I communicate. And you mentioned that I’m a supercommunicator. Actually, the truth is all of us are supercommunicators at various times. We all sometimes walk into the meeting and we know exactly the right thing to say, or a friend calls and they’re upset, we know exactly how to make them feel better.

And the point is that, actually, we all have this talent. In fact, it’s actually hardwired into our brains, it’s how we evolved but sometimes we can forget it. And so, the goal of this book is actually to remind people or teach them how to think about communication so that it’s easier to remember what to do to be a supercommunicator.

And, for me, this really started when I was talking to these marriage therapists, and one of them described the situation that I’ve had a lot in my own life, which is sometimes I would come home from work after a long and hard day, and I would start complaining to my wife. I’d be like, “My boss is a jerk, and my coworkers don’t appreciate me, and blah, blah, blah.” And my wife, very, very wisely, would offer some practical advice. She’d say something like, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch, and you guys can get to know each other better?”

And instead of hearing what she was saying, I, of course, would like explode, and be like, “Why aren’t you supporting me? I want you to be outraged on my behalf.” And so, when I was talking to these therapists, I was like, “What is going on here? We’re both bringing sort of our best selves in this conversation, we’re both bringing good intentions.”

And they said, “Look,” and this is the big insight of the core of the book. They said, “Look, most of us think about discussions as just being one thing, it’s a discussion about one topic but that’s totally wrong. Every discussion is actually made up of multiple kinds of conversations.” And, in particular, there’s these three buckets that most conversations fall into.

There are practical conversations, “Why don’t you take your boss out to lunch? Here’s a problem, let’s solve it. We need to make a plan for how we’re going to get to my mom’s for vacation.” Then there are emotional conversations. And in an emotional conversation, I do not want you to solve my problem. I want you, literally, to just kind of give me encouragement and validate how I’m feeling.

And then, finally, there’s also social conversations. And social conversations are about how we relate to each other, how other people see us, how sort of we exist within society. And, oftentimes, when we’re having a conversation, we will move, or having a discussion, we’ll move from conversation to conversation. But if we’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same moment, we really won’t be able to connect. And that was what’s happening.

Pete Mockaitis

We, meaning, like, party A and party B, both on the same page, the same style and level of conversation.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. When I came home and I was upset, I was having an emotional conversation and my wife replied with a practical conversation, and so I could not hear what she was saying and she got frustrated by what I was saying because we weren’t, what’s known within psychology as the matching principle, we weren’t having the same kind of conversation at the same moment.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. And so, when you say, to complexify, often the conversation is not just one, it’s multiples.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Sort of simultaneously, or weaving back and forth, or all those things.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. You’re usually moving from emotional conversation, to practical conversation, to social conversation, and then back to emotional. And what’s important is just that everyone who’s in that conversation, whether it’s two people or many people, that we look for the clues about what kind of conversation is happening, and we match others, and we invite them to match us.

So, when someone says something really emotional and they’re sending us a signal about, like, “Look, we need to talk about how we feel. This is not about solving the problem. This is about airing out why the problem exists,” our ability to pick up on that and then match them, and then, after that, invite them to move to solutions, to move to a practical conversation, that’s really powerful. That’s how you connect with, really, anyone.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. Well, that sounds powerful. I suppose, if I may be so bold, can you prove it? Can you tell me, really, what’s at stake or what’s unlocked if we upgrade our super communication frequency from once in a while when I’m on fire to fairly regularly?

Charles Duhigg

It’s hugely powerful. Think about at work how many conversations you have that if the conversation goes well, things get so much better, and if the conversation does not go well, things don’t get better. Like, let me ask you. So, just think about the last week, what’s the most meaningful conversation you had in the last week?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m in the process of buying a company, so we had a meeting with the buyer-seller accountants, so I think that seemed important from just a dollars and cents perspective.

Charles Duhigg

That seems really meaningful. And I’m sure that that’s like taking up a bunch. Now, my guess is that a lot of those conversations are practical, but buying a company also brings up a lot of emotions. Like, it can be scary, it can be exciting, you can have partners who are saying, “I think we’re moving too fast,” or, “We’re not moving fast enough.”

A big transaction like that, have you found that some of the conversations you’ve had with your spouse, or with your partners, or anyone else that they’ve been emotional instead of just purely practical?

Pete Mockaitis

They have been emotional in that you see emotions are there but it hasn’t been super intensely emotional in either way.

Charles Duhigg

That’s fine.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, maybe between my partner and I, like, “Oh wow! This will be such a cool opportunity if we did this, or this, or this, or this. This will unlock this,” so there’s that. But never have we been super intensely emotional in terms of, like, angry, or, “You’re screwing me over,” which is great. None of us feel that.

Charles Duhigg

Which is great. And, by the way, most emotional conversations are not super emotional, they’re not super intense. We all have those conversations sometimes, and knowing how to navigate them is really important but most of the conversations we have every day are at a lower temperature, and that’s fantastic.

But if your business partner came, and he’s like, “I’m so excited. This is going to be amazing,” and you didn’t engage with that excitement at all, you didn’t sort of invite him to share that excitement, it’d be hard going forward. And then if you came in super practical-minded, and you’re like, “Look, I don’t care how excited you are, we got to figure out the dollars and cents on this,” and all he talked about was like the excitement and how he feels, it’d be super frustrating for you.

But just helping us recognize what kind of conversation is happening, that helps us figure out how to communicate.

Pete Mockaitis

It does. And what’s intriguing, though, is the interconnectedness. Like, let’s say, “I’m super excited about this specific possibility of integrating some staff here over there,” and they go, “Oh.” And so then, in some ways, the optimal response, for me at least in that moment, is not so much, “Yeah, that’s really cool,” although that’s not bad. I mean, I wouldn’t shun that, I’ll take it.

But I think, for me, I guess maybe next level stuff is hitting both, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, that is really exciting, and it will be so easy to just do this.” It’s like we hit the emotion and extended the practical at the same time.

Charles Duhigg

Exactly. So, the book is filled with stories of sort of supercommunicators who are just normal people who sort of figure something out about a particular conversation. And one of them is about the CIA officer in his early 30s, he’s just been hired, and his job is to go recruit spies overseas. So, they send them to Europe, and they’re like, “Come back with some spies.”

And this guy, his name is Jim Lawler, he’s a great guy, he spends, like, a year trying and just strikes out again and again and again, and he is terrible at this job. He can’t make a real connection with anyone he’s trying to recruit. And then he meets this woman Yasmin who, she’s in town, she works in foreign ministry in her home country in the Middle East, she’s like the perfect, perfect candidate.

And he goes, and he “bumps” into her at lunch, and then invites her to lunch next day, tells her he’s an oil speculator, and eventually they get to know each other, and they kind of start investing in each other a little bit. And then, at one point, he’s like, “Look, I lied to you. I’m not an oil speculator. I work for the Central Intelligence Agency. Will you help us by telling us what’s going on inside your ministry because we want the same things you do? We want to stop the repression of women. We want to bring down this theocracy that’s ruling your country.”

And she just looks at him and starts crying, and she’s like, “They kill people for that,” and she just bolts out. And so, this guy, Jim Lawler, he’s told his bosses already that he’s recruiting Yasmin, and when he goes and he tells them, like, “I tried to close the deal and she ran away,” his boss was like, “You’re going to get fired. You’ve been here a year, she’s your only possible recruitment, and you just screwed it up.”

So, Lawler knows that he has one more opportunity, one more meal that he can ask Yasmin to have with him. And so, he takes her to the meal, and she’s really depressed, and she’s depressed because she’s about to go back to her home country, and she’s kind of depressed in herself. She’s depressed that she hasn’t changed more on this vacation, and he tries to cheer her up. He tries to tell her stories about when they were sightseeing, and it just doesn’t work.

And then towards the end of the meal, he just decides, like, “You know what, this isn’t going to happen. I’ve screwed this up.” And so, he just gets honest with Yasmin, and he says, “Look, I know that you’re disappointed in yourself. I’m super disappointed in myself. Like, I thought I was going to be a great CIA officer, and it turns out I’m terrible at this. And I see other guys who got hired with me, and women who got hired with me, and they’re doing so much better. They all have this confidence I don’t have.”

And he just starts talking about how he’s going to have to go back to Texas, and work for his dad. And his brother is a better salesman than he is. And while he’s describing all this, he’s just being as honest as he can, matching Yasmin, unintentionally she was glum and wanted to talk about how she felt, and now, finally, he is also talking about how he feels, she starts crying. And Lawler reaches across the table, he said, “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” and she goes, “No, no, what you want is important. We can do this together.”

And she becomes one of the best assets in the Middle East over the next 30 years, and Lawler actually goes on to be one of the top recruiters in the CIA. But I think the point here is that, unless we know how to look for what’s happening in a conversation, unless we are a little bit conscious, and it’s not hard to get conscious of this, a little bit conscious about how to match someone, we can totally miss what they need, and they can miss what we’re asking them for.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, thank you, that’s a lovely tale. And so, let’s just go ahead and do more, please, Charles. So, that’s a demonstration of the emotional vibe, like, “What’s up?” And so, in that instance, there’s crying, there are some dramatics. So, give us more of the tale showing how that unfolds marvelously in the practical flavor and the social flavor?

Charles Duhigg

Well, okay, and I would actually say that conversation, there are emotional aspects but there’s also practical aspects because she’s agreeing to become a spy for him. So, one of the things that we know is that when researchers have looked at people who are consistently supercommunicators, they found that these kinds of people, on average, ask 10 to 20 times as many questions than other people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, no kidding?

Charles Duhigg

But we’re oftentimes not aware of it because the questions are like, “Hey, that’s interesting. What do you think about that?” or like, “Huh, what did you do next?” or just little things that make it easier for us to enter a conversation. And there’s actually an experiment I like to do. So, think for a second, if you were having, like a really bad day, like just a terrible day, who would you call that you know would make you feel better?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, we got a few options.

Charles Duhigg

Sure, but I don’t know, who comes to mind first?

Pete Mockaitis

I’d say my wife.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Now, let me ask you this, is your wife, like, the funniest person you know, like standup comedian funny, like just kills it every time?

Pete Mockaitis

She is among the funniest people I know.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Okay. But you described her as a wife, you don’t describe her as, like, my comedian wife.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Charles Duhigg

What about is she the most successful person you know, like earns the most money?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, depending on how we measure success, yes. From an income-generation perspective, she is not.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. And what’s interesting is the audience probably thought of someone that they telephone to make them feel better. And that person probably is not their funniest friend, or their smartest friend, or their most successful friend, so why telephone that person? What’s that person doing that makes us feel so good?

And the answer is what they’re doing is they are inviting us to share who we are, and then they’re proving to us that they are listening. So, you asked for an example of how this happens in the everyday world. There’s a guy named Nicholas Epley who’s a professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the things that he’s done a lot of work on is trying to figure out, “What kinds of questions can we ask that make people feel closer to each other, almost like without it being obvious?”

And what he found is that there’s this category of question known as a deep question. And what a deep question is that it’s something that asks you about your values, or your beliefs, or your past experiences in a way that invites you to open up and explain who you are. So, an example of this is to say to someone, like, “Where do you work?” and then they say, “I’m a lawyer.” You say, “Oh, have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Like, do you love practicing the law?” Those are deep questions.

Now, they don’t seem like overly intrusive or awkward but they’re deep questions because they invite the other person to expose something a little bit that’s vulnerable. And if when we hear that vulnerability, if we reciprocate that vulnerability, that other person will feel closer to us. So, my guess is that a lot of the conversations you have with your wife, and tell me if I’m getting this wrong, involved you asking her the deeper question rather than the surface question, her telling you something that’s real, and then you responding with something real yourself, and that you probably feel closer as a result. Is that fair?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, sure, that happens.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. But we don’t think about asking deep questions, and yet it’s something that we know helps us figure out what the other person wants to talk about, it helps us align.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s hear some more examples of these deep questions. So, “Have you always wanted to be a lawyer? Do you love practicing law?” What are some other examples here?

Charles Duhigg
Really, I mean, anything. Like, where did you grow up?

Pete Mockaitis

Danville, Illinois.

Charles Duhigg

Okay. Like, what was the best part of growing up there?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, what’s deep is that I have to think for a while. There’s a lot of good things.

Charles Duhigg

That’s a good sign though.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s so funny. When I hear questions, I really like to answer them masterfully or accurately. But, in some ways, I could say any great thing about growing up in Danville. So, I’ll say. I just had a lot of fun meeting so many different folks. And it’s almost like divisions of, in my experience, like divisions of race or class or whatever didn’t even matter. It was just like, “Oh, well, Ruhini’s parents have a huge house. That’s kind of cool,” and that’s that. And then onto the next. It doesn’t matter.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s what’s interesting about the answer you just gave me. First of all, you’re telling me a little bit about what it was like to grow up in this place. And so, you’re telling me about your experiences. You also told me about your values, like you value people who are kind, you value kindness. It sounds like you value kindness more than financial success or professional success.

It sounds like you’ve had some experiences where, like, you’ve had friends who are more wealthy than you and probably friends who are less wealthy than you but you found something really meaningful in creating friendships that aren’t defined by demographic lines. That’s a pretty easy question for me to ask, like, “What’s your favorite part of growing up there?” And yet, when you answered that question, I now know so much more about you, and you also told me something kind of intimate.

Now, in the language of psychology, you’ve exposed a vulnerability. Like, you put me in a place where I can judge you. You might not care what my judgment is, and you probably don’t, like if I was, “Oh, man, that sounds like a terrible place to grow up,” you wouldn’t care because I’m some idiot that you just met.

But the fact that you opened yourself up and exposed little bit of vulnerability means that you’re ready to feel closer to me, and if I reciprocate with vulnerability, if I tell you that I grew up in New Mexico, Albuquerque, which is true, I’m going there pretty soon, and one of the things that I loved most about it was that it was a place, like my high school was on 89% Hispanic or Native American. And that’s true of a lot of New Mexico and to grow up as a white guy, to get a chance to feel like a minority is really powerful and it creates empathy.

Like, A, I’ve told you something about myself by answering the question that I asked you, but, B, by reciprocating your vulnerability, we feel closer to each other. We can’t help but feel closer to each other. Literally, our brains are hardwired to feel closer to each other.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, and what’s interesting is, as we super-communicate with each other, is that it’s funny how the monkey mind just has all these associations, in like, where it just might naturally want to go. So, you say Albuquerque, I’m thinking, “I love the show Breaking Bad,” and so I have a desire to say something about “Breaking Bad.” But, really, from a connecting perspective, that doesn’t really do much for us here.

Charles Duhigg

So, here’s a good example here. I said I’m from Albuquerque, you definitely could’ve broken in and been like, “Oh, my God, I love Breaking Bad. That’s the best show ever.” But because you are a good communicator, you intuit it, like, that would actually disrupt the flow of this conversation. That’s a fun conversation, maybe a practical conversation, and I’m revealing something about who I am. It’s an emotional conversation or social conversation. And so, instead of interrupting me and stealing the spotlight in saying, “Man, I love Breaking Bad. Do you like Breaking Bad?” you knew to match the kind of conversation I was having.

Now, think of how many times we sometimes get this wrong. Like, I get this wrong with my kids all the time. Like, if my kids come to me with something they want to talk about, they’re upset about something, or they want to talk about the social scene at their school, and instead of listening, and asking questions, and matching them, and meeting them where they are, I start trying to solve their problems, like I have all these lessons in my head that I want to shove into their head.

And, of course, they’re like, “Whatever, dad.” It’s like you breaking and being like, “I love Breaking Bad.” It’s me being like, “Well, here’s a lesson that you can learn.” I do this all the time. I still make this mistake but the more we become conscious of it, the more that we’re aware of listening for what kind of conversation is happening, matching other people, inviting them to match us, the more we end up having those special moments.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, I think if we weren’t primed in the world of, I’m thinking about deep questions and matching, and practical versus emotional versus social, I might very well have just let her rip with “Breaking Bad is awesome.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Or, I might’ve like talked about growing up in Albuquerque. I mean, this is something that definitely happens, someone says. My dad passed away about five years ago, and I found that when I came back, I was living in New York at the time. When I came back to New York after the funeral, it’s the most interesting thing that had happened to me that year. It’s sad and it’s hard but it’s also just interesting and complicated.

And one of two things would happen. I would tell people that I was just back from my dad’s funeral, and they would say, “I’m sorry,” and then change the topic. And they’d usually change it to something that’s totally unrelated or totally different emotional attitude, or they would just not respond. That happened all the time. And what I really wanted was I wanted people to be, like, “What was it like? What was your dad like? Tell me about your dad.” That’s amazing when someone has passed away and someone else asks you what they’re like, you love describing them.

And I think that, to your point, oftentimes during the most meaningful conversations, we have this instinct to do that, “Hey, Breaking Bad, I love Breaking Bad” because we feel so uncertain, we feel so unsure of ourselves in the conversation. But the more that we can recognize how the conversation works, what this other person is asking for, the more certain and comfortable we become in giving it to them. And that can be incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. And I think there’s uncertainty or fear or trepidation, whatever the vibe is, in that moment. It’s like the risk is really, I think, lower than what we perceive it to be emotionally.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

Because if I were to say, “Oh, man, I’m sorry. That must’ve been really hard. Tell me what are some of your favorite memories of your dad that came to mind.” I’m thinking, like, at worst, you might say, “I’m really just not comfortable telling you about that.” You’re not going to scream at me or assault me. You might just shut that down if it’s like, “Dude, I barely know you. I don’t feel like crying in front of you at this moment. It’s been a day. I’m just going to terminate the conversation.”

Charles Duhigg

And, by the way, it’s been five years, and so when I bump into other people who have been to the funeral, I ask them, like, “Tell me a little bit about your dad or your mom.” Literally, not once has someone ever said, “I don’t feel like talking about it right now.” People love talking about it. It’s like literally this thing that just happened to them. It’d be like if you got married and none of your friends asked you about the wedding, like when you get married, you want to talk about the wedding, “It was overwhelming.”

And, honestly, like going to a funeral for a parent is just as overwhelming, and sad instead of happy, but you still want to talk about it. And I think that you’re right. I think that people perceive a risk that not only is overblown, oftentimes it actually isn’t even there.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, so then social, who are we, this category, it sounds like we’ve touched upon it in terms of it’s unveiling values and what we’re about.

Charles Duhigg

It’s a little bit different. So, when we’re having a social conversation, what we’re really talking about is, “How do I relate to other people? How do they relate to me? How do I see other people? How do I think other people see me?” So, think about, for instance, there’s a story in the book about Netflix. So, Netflix had an executive who, about five years ago, he used the N-word in a meeting, and he used it in a kind of benign way.

He was trying to describe something but many people in the meeting, for good reason, were offended. He ended up getting fired because of this, but it set off this whole controversy within Netflix. And they hired someone to come who was a supercommunicator, understood how communication works. Her name is Verna Myers, she’s amazing.

She kind of transformed how the conversation, across the entire company, thousands and thousands of people. She transformed how the conversation is happening to help people understand, “It is okay to say to someone, ‘I see something differently than you because of my background, and that doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right.’”

If I’m a black parent, I might very well see cops differently than a white parent. And that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong or I’m right. It also doesn’t mean we have to agree with each other. But understanding that difference, that’s a social conversation. It’s a conversation about identities, and how identities shape how we see things. That’s actually a huge part of understanding. And if we’re comfortable having that conversation, then it makes it a lot easier to come together.

Secondarily, as part of that conversation is this emphasis on belonging, that every single person has the right to participate in a social conversation and to have an identity. Everyone has had a racial experience, a gender experience, whether you’re black or white or man or female or nonbinary. We all have these experiences that shape who we are. And sharing that with other people, it feels really good. That’s a social conversation.

A social conversation is sharing how we see ourselves in an attempt to align how others see us with our self-image, and to hear how they see themselves and how that might differ from how see them.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some more examples here?

Charles Duhigg

Yeah. Well, so a lot of social conversations are like office gossip. There are actually these really interesting studies on gossip. And what they find is that gossip is really important within companies because gossip is how we not only learn information, it’s how we establish moral and social norms without having to be overbearing about it.

So, if someone is, like, “Oh, my God, Jim got so drunk at that party last night,” and they seem critical of it, then we know, actually, drunkenness is not a norm that’s accepted at this company. And it gets even down to smaller things. And once you start thinking about these kinds of conversations and the powerful role that they play, you can begin thinking about how to make them better.

So, there was a study that was done of an investment bank, and this investment bank was like a place for people who are at each other’s throats all day long. They were competing for deals, they were competing for bonuses, they would have these screaming fights on a regular basis during meetings.

So, these researchers come in, and they tell everyone, “Okay, look, before every meeting, for the next week, what we want you to do is we’re going to give you some notecards. Before every meeting, just write down, literally, one sentence on the notecard, and write down what you hope to accomplish in this meeting, your goal, and what kind of tone or mood you hope the meeting will have. And then when you start the meeting, if you want, you can read it, you can share it with other people, or you don’t have to.” Most people didn’t.

And what they found is that, when they looked at the cards people wrote, what people would write were things like, “I want to ask Maria if she wants to come on vacation with me but I want to make it easy for her to say no,” or, “I want us to figure out the budget for next year…” a pretty practical conversation, “…but I want everyone to get everything off their chest because there’s been some tension.”

Just by asking people to write that sentence before each meeting, the incidence of conflict went down 80% within the firm that week. Now that did not mean that people agreed with each other, it did not mean they stopped fighting, it did not mean that they were less competitive, but because everyone knew what they wanted out of that meeting, and because they knew what kind of mood they were looking for, they were able to signal that much more easily to other people, and we pick up on those signals.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Well, that’s my favorite kind of thing, Charles. We have a minor intervention with a huge result, that’s cool. So, we’re writing that down, and, in so doing, that gets to the “Who are we?” in terms of, I guess, “Who are we?” in that moment in terms of how we’re showing up right then and there.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, absolutely. We’re coming together and we’re working for this firm together. We are all here trying to remind ourselves that we are on the same team as opposed to on different teams. And if I’m talking to you in a meeting, and I’m saying, like, “I want to discuss the budget but I want to give everyone a chance to get things off their chest,” then what I’m saying to the other people is, “I understand you’re frustrated. I’m your boss. I could tell you we’re just going to do the budget. It’s my way or the highway. But I’m signaling to you, in a social context, I understand you are frustrated. I understand that you don’t feel like I am being the boss I ought to be right now.”

“And once we have that conversation out in the open, then we can start talking about how do we resolve it? Are there things about how we run the social organization that is this company, that we run it in ways that make it hard for people to speak up or to bring their best selves to work? If we’re having conversations with someone else, and we’re talking about ‘How does Jim see this?’ or, ‘I have a problem. Here’s my solution.’ That’s a practical conversation. “Now let’s think about how the rest of the firm is going to react when I bring up this solution.”

That’s a social conversation because the way that other people react will not be based entirely on pragmatics and practicality. It won’t be based entirely on emotions. It might be based on power differentials or on structural issues. But once we sit down, and we’re like, “Look, let’s talk about how this is going to play out at the company from a social perspective,” then suddenly we’re having a slightly different conversation than an emotional conversation or a practical conversation. We’re trying to anticipate how other people see themselves and how that shapes what they believe.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Thank you. Well, tell me, Charles, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Charles Duhigg

No, the thing I would say is the book is filled with stories, and the reason why it’s filled with stories, there are stories about there’s this awesome study called the 36 questions that lead to love. It’s known as the Fast Friends procedure, and it was this study that try and make strangers into friends, and it worked. It worked by getting them to ask each other deep questions.

There are stories about conflict, like, “What do we do when we’re in conflict with someone?” And the answer there, and that story takes place in part online in Facebook. It’s this group that was put together of gun rights advocates and gun control advocates. And what we found is that, in conflict, it’s even more important to prove that we’re listening.

And one of the ways we can prove that we’re listening is by this thing called looping for understanding, which is pretty instinctual. It’s, ask someone a question, repeat back to them what they just told you in your own words. And then the third step, and this is the step that most people forget but it’s the most important, ask them if you got it right.

If you do that and you continue looping until they agree that you’ve gotten it right, it’s almost impossible for people to be angry at each other no matter how big their difference is. And that doesn’t mean that you have to agree with each other but it means you can take anger out of the equation. And so, my goal with these stories is, and there’s a lot of practical tips.

There are sorts of the bullet points after each chapter, but my goal is to give people these skills that they can use to become better communicators because, as I mentioned, all of us are supercommunicators. Sometimes we just do it by instinct, sometimes we’re just lucky and it comes out, but if we learn the skills then we can do it whenever we want. And for the most meaningful conversations, we can really connect with someone else.

Pete Mockaitis

Just a follow-up on the looping point, I understand you’ve also got some research associated with the asking of a follow-up question is another super powerful thing that people did.

Charles Duhigg

Absolutely. And that’s actually a form of looping. Like, sometimes if I ask you a follow-up question, it’s proving to you that I was listening to what you were saying, and that’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. And so then, the good follow-up questions do just that. They prove that you were listening to what we’re saying as opposed to, “So, tell me more about that” which still is a decent question when you got nothing else. But, ideally, for a follow-up question, we want to have some content. I sort of think about it like when I’m getting emails, it’s like, “Was this a mass email sent to the whole world or was it sent specifically to me, Pete Mockaitis?”

And there are little indicators of that in the note. And so, too, with the question, one would have to have listened and shared some bits, like, “Oh, you said you think guns are a great way for teachers to prevent violence if they were all armed. Is that right?” “Yeah, that’s what I said.” It’s like, “Well, are you aware of some incidences in which folks armed up the teachers, and they saw the desired results?” So, there’s a follow-up question that shows I was listening.

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, that’s a question where you are presupposing the answer, so I would say one thing that’s important is…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I really wasn’t. I was like “Do we have that information?” “I’ll tell them and then no more problems.”

Charles Duhigg

Yeah, if you’re genuinely and curiously asking, that’s the key to ask curious questions. But you had said something like, the generic question is like “Tell me more about that.” But, again, getting back to deep questions, instead of saying, “Tell me more about that” like an easy way response, if you’re not certain what to say, is to say, “What did you make of that? You just told me about this thing. Why was it important to you?”

And that’s a deep question. It doesn’t appear deep. It doesn’t appear intrusive or it doesn’t appear overly intimate but, again, it’s asking me to explain about my values, or my beliefs, or my experiences. It’s giving me a chance to tell you about how I see the world. And I guarantee you that once you hear that, the follow-up questions are going to be almost automatic.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Charles Duhigg

I think the quote that I use most with my kids is, “It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn something from it.” And I realize this is kind of a cheesy quote. But honestly, I make mistakes all the time, we all make mistakes all the time, and it’s so easy to get down on yourself, that if you tell yourself, “It’s only a mistake if I don’t learn from it,” then it stops being a mistake. It starts being an experiment. And not all experiments are supposed to go right.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

Actually, I mentioned the 36 questions. This is an awesome, awesome study. So, what they did, it’s these two researchers at the University of Rhode Island, they took all these people in pairs, and they put them in a room, total strangers, and they would have them ask these 36 questions back and forth. And they designed the questions to be deep questions without appearing…many of them didn’t appear very deep, particularly at first.

And then they send everyone home, it only takes an hour, they send everyone home. This is pre-internet, by the way. And then seven weeks later, they tracked down everyone who’d been in that study, and they asked them one question, “Did you ever seek out the person that you had that conversation with?”

Now, they had not given them any information on how to find each other. There was no exchange of business cards or anything like that, so finding the person you had the conversation with was actually kind of hard. They found that 70% of people who had engaged in those conversations had sought out their conversational partner. They’d go out to beers and movies together. Three people ended up getting married to the person that they had the conversation with.

And it’s because of this emotional reciprocity, it’s because if we ask deep questions, and then we answer them, we feel close to the other person. And so, I just think it’s a wonderful study.

Pete Mockaitis

It is. I actually went through that list of questions on a date.

Charles Duhigg

Oh, yeah?

Pete Mockaitis

We didn’t end up getting married.

Charles Duhigg

It’s okay. It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis

But, in a way, it was a good outcome, and then I think we…I don’t know how much that exercise contributed to things but I think we parted on good terms not too long thereafter.

Charles Duhigg

Excellent.

Pete Mockaitis

And I guess we knew some new things. And a favorite book?

Charles Duhigg

I used to always say The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, which is just one of my favorite books. And for anyone who hasn’t read it, there’s a chapter on the religion of happy-mindedness. William James, of course, is like the father of American psychology. And the religion of happy-mindedness is about people who are just happy. Like, why are they happy? And what did they know that we don’t?

But the other book that I love, that I’ll make a plug for, it’s actually a novel. It’s by Jennifer Egan, and it’s called A Visit from the Goon Squad. And very similarly, I think it’s about how we create happiness in life, and how we recognize it and sometimes fail to recognize it even when it’s right in front of us. So, it’s a wonderful book.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

So, I just read an article about AI for The New Yorker, and part of it is about Microsoft’s Copilots that are coming out. And so, I’ve been using all the different AI products, and I will say, like, I don’t think that it’s making me more productive. It’s just super fun though. Like, I sent out an email this morning, and I made an image on Midjourney for it. So, I would say, right now, AI is the tool that I’m enjoying very much.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so lay it on us, ChatGPT, Midjourney, what else is cool and interesting?

Charles Duhigg

Oh, the Copilots. There’s going to be an explosion of Copilots over the next couple of years. And Microsoft is releasing them right now, but every company is going to be creating agents or copilots. So, in three or four years, this is totally feasible. We will wear a device that records every single conversation, and that conversation will be digitized. It will all be our data. No one else will have it.

And then 10 years from now, you’ll be like, “You know, I was once doing a podcast, and this guy talked about AI, and I can’t remember who he was, but he mentioned Midjourney. Go find that conversation.” And the AI will be able to find it. It’s what large language models index and search very, very efficiently with even vague guidance.

And so, if you think about it, our conversations are a huge corpus of knowledge, it’s a huge database, and it basically only exists between two people, or if you happen to be recording it, it exists between two people and whoever is listening to the conversation, but it’s hard to remember and you don’t know exactly who said what. And once we’re able to unlock the database of conversations, it’s going to be awesome.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And you are a habit master. Tell us your favorite habit?

Charles Duhigg

So, in The Power of Habit, there’s this whole thing about keystone habits, which are habits that set off chain reactions of other behavior changes. So, for me, I would say my keystone habit is definitely exercising in the morning. And I really dislike exercising, so what I do is I sign up for half marathons. And, by the way, I hate races. There’s nothing I enjoy about it.

But I sign up for half marathons because I’m so scared about how bad it will hurt to run that half marathon if I haven’t trained. And that gets me to go train every morning. And then after I train, I’m like, “Oh, man, I feel great. This is really good.” So, I would say my big keystone habit is trying to exercise at least once each day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

As I’ve been working on Supercommunicators, the story with my wife, I think, is something that really resonates with people, because I think we’ve all experienced that. Like, someone comes to us with a problem, and we try and solve it for them, and then they’re frustrated, and then we’re frustrated. And so, I find that explaining, “Oh, it’s actually two different kinds of conversations are happening here,” that that’s been really powerful for a lot of people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

If you Google me, I’m at CharlesDuhigg.com. If you just type Supercommunicators into your Google browser, I’ll probably come up, or Power of Habit. And then my email address is charles@duhigg.com, and I read every single email I get from listeners and from readers, and I respond to every single one, so feel free to drop me a note, and I will definitely respond to you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Charles Duhigg

I think that, here’s the thing that I would say, is think about your job right now, and think about where you’re not communicating as well as you can. Maybe it’s with a coworker, maybe it’s with your boss, maybe it’s with a client, maybe it’s when you’re doing pitches. There are some times in your life where you wish that you could be an effortless supercommunicator, and it’s not happening on a consistent basis for you.

And my guess is, as a result, you’re shying away from that opportunity because you’re worried that it’s not going to go as well as you want it to go. So, just break it down. Try and think about the last conversation you had where it didn’t go as well as you wanted it to go, and try and figure out, “Were we having the same kind of conversation? Was I asking enough questions? Was I asking the right kinds of questions? Was I proving to this person that I was listening to them? Were they responding to me and inviting me to match them?”

If you do that, you’ll find that there’s this part of your work life that you probably don’t like as much as you should, but it is an absolutely solvable problem. Nobody is born a great communicator. It’s just a set of skills that anyone can learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Charles. Thank you. I wish you much luck and super communications.

Charles Duhigg

Thank you so much.

Jun 15
0

874: The Five Questions that Build the Best Possible Relationships with Michael Bungay Stanier

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Michael Bungay Stanier reveals the simple secret to forging better relationships at work and in life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key factor that builds and ruins relationships
  2. The way to mend damaged relationships
  3. The simple question that helps maintain your relationships

About Michael

Michael Bungay Stanier helps people know they’re awesome and they’re doing great. He’s best known for The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, does what it says on the label. Michael was a Rhodes scholar and dabbles in the ukulele. He’s Australian, and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Resources Mentioned

Michael Bungay Stanier Interview Transcript

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
Hey, I’m grateful that you’ve got a short memory and you keep inviting me back. I am thrilled to be back. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Well, you don’t give yourself enough credit. You just keep generating more groundbreaking intellectual insights that the world must hear.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You know, I do better when the expectations are lowered at the start of the conversation rather than raised, but I’ll do what I can to kind of rise to the challenge. But, thanks for saying that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s try again. Well, you threw together some words, half of it is probably AI but let’s see if we can muddle through this.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thank you. That’s perfect. I can do that. I can crush that.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it. Well, so you’ve always got a lot of fun stories. I’m curious to hear the last year, two or three, any really cool coaching moments, or relationships transformed, or highlights for you?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Oh, man. Well, the biggest one for me, and that plays a role in this new book, was, and this is only going to go deep and maybe slightly really dark really quickly, but my dad died a couple of years ago. And I had flown back to Australia, I was living in the house with mom and dad, and dad had made it out of the hospital, and he had about two months living at home before he finally died.

And it was a miserable stressful time for everybody, mom and dad in particular, and they’d been a really good couple for 55 years, like they’re really tight, they loved each other, they supported each other, they were just like a role model in terms of how you wanted a married couple to be. And they were kind of a bit snippy with each other.

Dad’s stuck in a bed, he can’t do the stuff he normally does, he’s a little bit, “Hey, Rosie, get me this,” “Hey, Rosie, can I have that, please?” and mom was like, A, stressed that her life partner was dying, B, stressed a bit, going to being the servant, all of a sudden, in the household, in a household where chores had always been shared pretty equally.

And I kind of plucked up my courage and suggested that they have a conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in the remaining weeks or months of dad’s life together because I really didn’t want, mom in particular, to go, “I wasn’t the best version I could be in a stressful time in the last time I have with my husband.”

And so, we facilitated this conversation, mom was like, “This sounds like the worst thing on earth.” My dad was like, “This sounds bad but we should give it a go,” and we just had that conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in this final time. And they did so well, I was so proud of them and thrilled for them, and it just took a little bit of an edge off those last days together.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that really is beautiful. And did your mom talk to you about that conversation later?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, when I first suggested it, my mom was like, “Absolutely not. That sounds terrible.” And then the third time I suggested it, she’s like, “Well, maybe but do I have to be there?” And I’m like, “I think you do have to be there.” And we have talked about it since then in terms of just talking through those last days and talking about my memory of my dad, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that really is beautiful in terms of just positioning the richness, the value, all that is really wrapped up in our relationships and the conversations we have with those people. It’s big. And it does take some courage to have a conversation about your conversations, and yet really cool things are on the other side of them.

Michael Bungay Stanier
That’s right. As I’ve been kind of teaching some of the content from this book, I often ask a group, “Think of a really miserable working relationship you’ve had, or even just one that wasn’t terrible but just was kind of diminishing in a way, and think of what was said and done, and then think of the impact on you.” And then when you see what people put in the chat, it’s like, “I felt belittled. I felt shrunk. I lost my courage. I lost my sense of self. I did poor work.”

And then when you flip it, and you go, “Think of a really great working relationship you had, you might remember that, remember that back and forth, now what was the impact on you?” It’s like, “I feel braver. I feel more courageous. I did better work. I took bigger risks. I kind of expanded into the next version of who I am so I grew and I learned about myself.” And it’s like such a determinant of your work success and happiness in terms of the health of your working relationships.

But so often, we just cross our fingers and leave it to chance and hope for the best because it is an unusual and somewhat courageous conversation to say, “Hey, Pete, before we start working on the stuff, I think you and I have a conversation about how we do this best together so that we can not screw each other up and we can bring out the best in each other at the same time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m a huge believer in this, and this has come up, I think, with my conversation with Mary Abbajay about how to manage your manager. She had a book about managing up, which is excellent. And she said that she surveyed folks, her audiences, and she said less than 1% of folks really have such a conversation.

And so, when I spread the gospel at different trainings and events that I’ve been at, and folks are like, “Oh, no, that seems kind of weird.” It’s like that’s how their fear gets articulated or manifests, “Oh, that just seems sort of weird. I don’t know about that,” as opposed to, “Pete, I’m terrified of engaging in those words.” They don’t say that, they’re like, “Oh, it just seems weird.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it is a bit weird. At least, if not weird, it’s unusual. And your statistics point to it, less than 1%. It’s a rare thing somebody says, “Let’s talk about how we work together before we talk about what we work on.” But I love the point you’re making, I hope people heard that, which is, this isn’t just for the people you manage and lead.

It’s for the working relationships, so you can do that with your best customers, and you can do that actually with your prospects, and you can do that with your colleagues you have to collaborate with, and you can do it with your boss. So, there’s all sorts of ways that you can enrich and strengthen and make safe and vital and repairable these key working relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the book is called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships. As you were putting this together and researching it, did you have any surprising moments of discovery along the way?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Part of it was trying to figure out what the goal was in these conversations, and it felt helpful to realize that it wasn’t to create the best working relationship but the best possible working relationship. If you think of your working relationships you have, it’ll be a Bell curve. You have a few at one end where you’re like, “I love this person. I love how we work together, and it’s just thrilling.” And you have a few at the other end where you’re like, “This is sand in the gears. This is kind of a miserable experience kind of working through it.”

And it’s not always that because they’re nuts or a psycho or whatever. It’s just that sometimes you just can’t figure it out with the other person. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle where it’s good enough, and it’s solid, and it’s great sometimes, but less than great some other times. And each one of those different categories has the potential to be better than it is now, make the bad ones trending towards good or less bad, make the ones in the middle better than just average, and make the ones at the top end sustainable so that they stay sparkly and powerful as long as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, then that’s the notion of a best possible relationship, I suppose, is knowing that not every relationship is going to feel magical no matter what conversation you have but there is untapped potential that we can get after with some of these questions. So, shall we jump right into the questions, or how would you frame how we start getting into such a conversation where we engage these questions?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I want to get into that conversation and those questions but maybe a moment just to talk about the three attributes of a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I’ve mentioned them but let me say them again. It should be safe and it should be vital and should be repairable. I think one of the interesting things that I’ve learned is these aren’t A + B + C, they’re not additive. They’re actually in a dance with each other. They’re actually in tension with each other. The place to start is safe. And everybody who’s listening to this podcast will have talked about it and heard about psychological safety as a kind of key attribute for success.

Google Oxygen and Google Aristotle, all those projects alike, it’s safety that allows people to grow. Amy Edmondson, kind of the OG in this area, kind of championing and helping us understand what psychological safety means. And that is, a sense, to kind of move away from fear, and say, “I say what I need to say. I can show up as who I am without that fear.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s kind of ironic that Amy Edmondson is researching and teaching about safety and yet she’s a gangster.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I hadn’t thought of that.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I love the verbiage. I’m just joshing with you. We had her on the show, she’s great, and that’s fair. It’s a fair assessment. You could call her the grandfather/grandmother as well but OG hits me in my Danville, Illinois roots.

Michael Bungay Stanier
There we go. But she blurbed the book, and I said, “Amy, can I call you the OG of psychological safety?” And she’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” I’m like, “I’m not sure what that means. I think it means original gangster. I think that’s what it means.” Then she’s like, “Maybe you can call me Harvard Business professor.” And I’m like, “Sure. Okay, we’ll go with that. I totally get that.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
But in balance with safety is vitality. Every relationship needs to be vital. And I like the kind of play on the words there, Pete. Vital meaning essential, but vital also meaning alive. And there’s a way that you want a relationship to push, and provoke, and challenge, and take you to the edge of your competence and your confidence, and what you can, and who you are so that you can…you want it to be fun and exciting.

And I think safe and vital are often in this kind of play with each other. There’s a way that you can make a relationship so safe that, actually, it loses some of its sparkle. There’s a way that you can make it so dangerous that it becomes unsafe. So, with whoever it is you’re talking to, you’re trying to find the right balance between safe and vital for you and that other person.

And then the third element is repairable. And as part of writing the book and reading around the book, I was reading people like Esther Perel, and Terry Real, and Dan Siegel, and John Gottman, some of the really big names who’ve written about the dynamics of marriage and romantic relationships. And one of the recurring themes across all of their work is how bad we all are at repairing damaged relationships.

Mostly, “Ah, I’ll pretend it didn’t happen,” or, “I’ll be sad and sulk about it,” or hopefully the fabric will just repair itself. But actually, it’s rare that people more actively say, “How do we fix this thing that got dented or cracked or banged up in some way?” But you can bet that any working relationship is going to go off the rails at some stage. And the ability to say, “How do we get it back on the rails? How do we get back to where we were before?” is a really powerful one, and the key contribution to a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what are some common best and worst practices in the realms of safety, vitality, and repairability?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Good question. In some ways, that question takes me back to my roots, and it makes me think about questions, and it makes me think about not asking questions. I think that the act of remaining uncurious is one of the ways that damages safety and vitality. If you have a certainty about how right you are, how your point of view is all you need, how you should be the one who solves it, fixes it, comes up with the idea, explains a problem, sets the team going, there’s a way that that is a diminishing act for the people around you.

And I think part of one of the other things that’s diminishing or can detract from vitality is… it is an inability to see them for who they are and be curious about who they are. The question I suspect that could be most powerful for unlocking a sense of what vitality might mean is, “What do you want?” “What do you want?” is one way of coming at “Who are you? Who are you over there?”

Human beings are these messy, complicated, amazing, obscure, unpredictable people who we have to work with. And so, asking, “What’s your best? What makes you alive? Who are you? What do you want?” you’re using curiosity as a way of unlocking their humanity, the person in front of you. And when you unlock their humanity, when you see them more completely, you have a better chance of both creating safety and vitality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. So, when it comes to a relationship being repairable, I could think it’d probably be good to say, “I apologize” from time to time when you screw up, and to maybe just acknowledge and not ignore, or hope, or pretend that things are just going to get all better. Any other pro tips in that repairable world?

Michael Bungay Stanier
The fifth question of the keystone conversation, the fifth and final question, is “How will we fix it when it goes wrong?” because it will go wrong. And there’s something really powerful about having a conversation about “How will we get around to fix this even before anything bad has happened?” And what’s interesting is less, actually, the answers to the question. What’s powerful is a recognition that, at some stage, something is going to go wrong, something is going to be dented, somebody is going to be disappointed. How will we go about fixing that?

And if you and I were having a conversation, like, “Okay, Pete, you and I are working together. We’re going to do a joint podcast. It’s going to be amazing. You’re the lead guy because you’re smart and you’re handsome and you’ve got a voice for radio. I’m the tall guy because I’m taller than you. I’ll change the lightbulbs and make the lighting work but we’re going to work together.”

And if I go, “All right. Look, how will we screw this up?” And you’ll go, “I’ve worked with people like you, here’s where it goes wrong, and here’s what I do, and here’s what you do.” And I’m like, “I get that.” And I’ll go, “Pete, when I’ve worked with people like you, prima donnas behind the mic, let me tell you how it all goes wrong.” And you’re like, “Okay, I get that.”

I’m like, “Okay. So, how do we fix that?” And I might say, “Look, for me, if you just come up and say, ‘Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry,’ that’s it. That’s all I need. I don’t need an explanation. I don’t need to work it through. I don’t need to workshop it. I just need that.” With a former boss of mine, we agreed that we’d have what we call an off-your-chest session.

So, if I came up to Dave because he’d done something annoying, I’d say, “Dave, I’ve just got I need to have it off my chest with you,” and I just get a chance to rant a bit. And we both knew that his job was to sit there and listen. He didn’t even have to apologize particularly. He didn’t have to fix it or justify. He just had to listen to it. And it’s the negotiation to say, “How will we try and tackle this?” that makes repairability more likely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s really cool. All right. Well, so how do we kick off such a conversation in terms of I imagine we probably won’t just launch into some questions, like, “So, what’s your best”? Or, what do we do?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, I think it depends on who you’re talking to and what the setup is. I think you almost, in an early conversation with some people, you can kind of launch into it. And as an example, when I’m working with a vendor, somebody who’s supporting my small business in a way, in that first call, all I can say is, “Hey, I want to tell you about this project but before I tell you about the project and we get into too much detail about it, what is a good working relationship with somebody like me look like? Tell me what makes for a really good client. And then let me tell you what makes for a really good vendor.”

“And then, when we disappoint each other, and then how will you screw up this relationship? Now, let me tell you how I’ll screw up this relationship. So, how will we fix it?” So, there is a way that you can kind of plunge into it. I will you tell that when I do this with vendors, you can see their eyes widening a bit, they’re like, “What the…? What’s going on here?” But it allows me to have an interaction, a transaction, that has a chance of being the best version that it can be.

But if you’re working, say, with somebody on your team, you might choose to do this in a slightly different way. You might provide a little bit of setup. And I think it’s as simple as dropping them a note on Slack or email or something, and say, “Hey, I’d like a conversation about how we can best work together. Are you up for that?” It’s hard to say no to that invitation, because it’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to know how we can best work together as well.”

You can go deeper than that if you want. You could say, “Look, here are the five questions I think could be useful. I’m going to do some thinking about it in preparing my answer for that. If you have a chance to do that as well, so much the better.” Because it is true that everybody will have some first answers to the five questions. It’s also true that if you’ve thought about it, and you do some of the exercises that are in the book that will deepen and make more subtle and more nuance to your answers, that’s going to make for a better conversation as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let us discuss these five questions. Lay it on us.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the first one is the amplify question, and the way it’s written in the book is, “What’s your best?” I’ve been thinking about it since the book has been written and created, I’m like, “Not sure that’s exactly the best phrasing of it.” But I’ll tell you what’s behind it, Pete. I didn’t go want to go, “What do you do best?” I didn’t want to ask, “What are your strengths?” I wanted a more general holistic sense of, “Who are you at your best? Tell me what you look like when you’re in full flow, when you’re working to your strengths, when you’re loving the work, the way you contribute best? What does that look like?”

And one of the nuances within that is, for instance, teasing apart, “What are you good at?” versus “What are you fulfilled by?” Because there’s also a way that what happens in our organizational life is we collapse thinking that just because somebody is good at it, they must enjoy doing it. And as we all know, we’ve all got something in our kit bag where we’re like, “I’m pretty confident that, man, this task sucks the life out of me. I don’t want to do that.”

But that’s a really powerful start, “Let’s just talk about what’s our best. What’s your best, Pete? What’s my best, Michael?” Now, we know the best version of each other, the strengths that we should be living with.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And I’ve heard, I think we had Dan Cable, won some awards for a rock and scientific paper for a very simple intervention that involved just that, new employee sharing that, and then unlocked all kinds of things, like, “Wow, that’s a pretty good ROI for a little exchange of information.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. The second question after that is about your patterns and your preferences. It’s a steady question. Because, over the time, we’ve all built up the ways we work and the ways we like to work. And that is everything from the rhythm of our days, “I’m a morning person,” “I’m an afternoon person,” “I’m not a lunch person.” It’s the technology that we tend to default to, like, “I’m not a Slack person,” “I am a Slack person.” “Don’t ever leave me a voicemail.”

It’s right down to our kind of identity stuff around, “What’s my name? What’s not my name?” Like, “My name is Michael Bungay Stanier.” It’s a real mouthful. When I got married, I took my wife’s name, and it became Bungay Stanier. It doesn’t have a hyphen in it, which only complicates it. So, people are like, “Are you Michael Stanier? Are you MBS? Does that mean that you’re running Saudi Arabia?” I was like, “That’s a different MBS?” “Are you Mike?” I’m like, “I’m never Mike. There are only four people in the world that call me Mike, and it’s my brothers and their wives. That’s it.”

So, I’m best as Michael. And, in fact, before we hit record, you’re like, “What shall I call you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Even though we’ve interviewed before.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. And I really appreciated that because there was this little moment around, “What are your practices? And what are your preferences?” It’s like we’re having that conversation now to set this up. Because, just imagine, we’re halfway through this interview, you’ve been calling me Mike the whole time, I’m like, “Dude, this is a mic.”

Pete Mockaitis
M Sizzle.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What up?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, that I can go with. If you live with that, I’d be like, “This is the best interview I’ve ever had.” It’d be perfect. So, that’s the second one, which is like, let’s exchange information about how we best work so that we can just start spotting the stuff where we’re well-synced on that, and the stuff where, “Well, we’re kind of out of sync on this. How do we want to manage this between us?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s a steady question, “What are your practices and preferences, time of day, communication, technology?” All right, let’s hear the next.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the third and the fourth questions are kind of a matching pair – dark side and light side, and they’re called the good-day and the bad-day question. The good-day question is, “What can we learn from past successful relationships?” because here’s the thing to take away. Your past relationships are a predictor of your future relationships. Even though I know your past relationships are in a certain context with a certain person, with a certain thing going on, a lot of the patterns that play out will play out again, dollars to donuts.

So, the first thing to talk about is like, “What has been really great? What happened? What did you do? What did you say? What did you not do and not say? What did they do and say, and not do and not say? What were the things that made this flourish?” And then you answer it, and then they answer it, or vice versa, but what a gift to know that this is the context, this is the way to make this person really flourish. This is all the things that can contribute to something working really well.

And then the pairing question is the flipside of that, which is like, “What can we learn from past frustrating working relationships?” because we’ve all had those, and we’re like, “Man, that sucked.” And even though it would’ve felt personal and individual at that time, there are patterns there, there are stuff happening there that if you can explain it to the other person, they’re like, “We should avoid that. We should avoid doing as much of that as possible.”

And so, the more that you can communicate what’s happened in the past that is both amplifying the best of you and shutting you down and making your life miserable, the more you’re able to go, “Hey, why don’t we try and avoid what we don’t like, and amplify what we do like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the repair question?

Michael Bungay Stanier
And then the repair question, which we’ve touched on already, but it’s like, “How will we fix this when things go wrong because things will go wrong?” It’s just there’s no way of sustaining a perfectly undented amazing working relationship forever. Somebody will screw up, somebody will break a promise, something will be misunderstood, something will be missed, some damage will happen. So, when there’s a tear in the fabric, what are we going to do about that?

And the power of that, and we said it before but I want to say it again, it gives you permission to keep talking about the health of the relationship. That’s where the magic happens with all of this. It’s the answers themselves but it’s, really, we can now keep saying, “Hey, we’re trying to build the best possible relationship here. How are we doing? Is this good enough? Do we want to tweak anything? Do we want to adjust anything? Do we need to say something that hasn’t yet been said? Do we need to clear the tables, reset, get ourselves back on track? What needs to be done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I’d love now, could you share with us some of the more interesting answers to each of these questions that you’ve bumped into in your travels?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it’s everything, really. So, if the people who are listening to this think of their own answers, you can imagine people saying exactly the same as you, and exactly the opposite to you as well. So, when people say, “Michael, what’s your best? Who are you at your best?” I’m like, “You know what, I’m best when I’ve got something to create, I’ve got a way of trying to, what my friend Shannon says, to thingify stuff, to try and make     abstract ideas feel more real tangible and more real.

I’m at my best at designing experiences. I’m at my best at trying to understand what a reader or a participant is looking for, and trying to design to their real and actual needs. That’s some of the stuff that’s at my best. It’s like having ideas, I’m great at having ideas. That’s some of the best stuff for me.” But I’ll talk to my wife, who I work with for many years, and she’d say none of that.

She’d say I’m at my best when I get all my emails answered; I’m at my best where I get to have conversations with people and work with people one-to-one and kind of champion them and coach them on; I’m at my best where I get to kind of push back against authority and kind of point out that the emperor has no clothes. This is why we no longer work together because I’m the so-called emperor in this business, and I’m like, “You know what, I know you want your…you’re not necessarily for the man but I’m the man. You’ve got to be kind to me. We’re married.”

So, you get all sorts of different answers. That’s really the point, in some ways, which is it is very easy to assume you know what the answers are going to be. And when you assume you know what the answers are going to be, you’re kind of like, “I think I already know who you are,” and you actually stop that moment of engaging with them as a full human being, and you’re like, “Seeing you as I kind of I’ve boxed you in, giving you a Myers-Briggs label, and I’ve given you a this, and I’ve given you a that.”

And what this does is actually say, “Your answers are going to be different and unique. My answers are going to be different and unique. And then how we bring them together to build the best possible relationship is where things get really interesting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so now we’ve had the conversation, we’re doing this stuff, can you chat with us a little bit in terms of maintenance? How do we keep that rocking over the long haul?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, it’d be lovely if this was a one and done thing. You have the courage, you have the conversation, and you’re like, “We nailed it. Now we can just go about our business and, like, never need to bring this up again.” But, as with all living things, maintenance is required. So, there is a way to say, “How do I best stay present and active in this relationship? How do I stay open to doing what I can to keep it alive?”

And for us to name a single thing to do around this, Pete, it would be to ask the question, “Hey, how are we doing?” It’s to actually just move out of the hurly burly of all the everyday stuff that needs to get done, say, before we plunge into all of the tasks and all the to-do’s, because there’s always an endless amount of work to be done, let’s just have a conversation and check in on how we’re doing, “What’s working for you? Here’s what’s working for me. What’s not working for you? Here’s what’s not working for me. What’s one thing we can do differently to improve the way we’re working right now?”

And one of the questions, Pete, that I ask, and I think it’s particularly powerful if you happen to be the more senior person to hold more of the positional power of the conversation, the question is, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” I started a company 20 years ago, and about four years ago, stepped aside from that for Shannon to become the CEO of that company, but I still own it so she and I are in conversation all the time and kind of, I guess, calling me a board member would make it big hat, no cattle, but kind of that type of conversation.

And there’s a power dynamic between us because I’m the owner and she’s the CEO trying to run the company as best we can. And we ask each other that question all the time, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” because it’s that little nudge give us permission to talk about the needly stuff, or the stuff that might feel too small, or the stuff where it’s felt, “I just haven’t found the moment to mention this awkward thing.” It really clears the space, and says, “Now is a chance to mention anything that you’ve got just lingering there so that we can make sure that we clean it all up, if that’s what needs to be done.”

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’d say one of the unexpected benefits of doing this work and, perhaps, creating this book is that you deepen your own knowledge of yourself. It was very much about the relationship but, actually, there are exercises in the book. For each of the five questions, there’s three different exercises to help you deepen and enrich and make more subtle and more nuanced your answers to that.

And even if you’ve never had a best possible relationship, and you never had a keystone conversation, if you do the work and you come to understand in a more nuanced, more grounded way, “This is actually who I am. This is actually how I work. This is actually how I thrive. This is actually what shuts me down,” you’re better able to control and manage your work so that you can thrive and be awesome at your job.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, Pete, I might’ve mentioned this the last time we talked, and so forgive me for coming back, but it’s a favorite quote, so it’s still my favorite quote. There’s a poem by the poet Rilke, it’s called “The Man Watching,” that’s the English translation. And it tells a story of wrestling with an angel, so it’s an allusion or a nod to kind of the Bible, and Jacob wrestling with the angel.

And it talks about being ambitious for the bigger things, the bigger things that open us up and challenge us, and bring out the very best of us. And there’s a couple of lines in that poem which I think are extraordinary. I actually keep a little printout on my desk. And the quote is this, “Winning does not tempt him. His growth is to be the deeply defeated by ever-greater things.”

And this idea of hoping, I hope this for me, and I hope it for others, but I hope I still have the courage to seek ever-greater things and be deeply defeated by that. That’s what I’m hungry for.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
There’s a book I’m reading at the moment by Ed Young, and it is about how animals experience the world. And so, this is a little bit kind of a sideways angle into this, but we, as human beings, tend to assume that animals mostly experience the world kind of like we do. We tend to project the way we kind of embodied in this world onto all the animals around us. And nothing could be further from the truth.

As a very kind of slightly pedestrian way of talking about it, if you think of zebras, hey, however you want to pronounce that, in their black and white stripes, when you ask most people, “Why are zebras black and white striped?” they’ll go, “Well, it’s camouflage. It helps them blend in so they can hide from the predators.” But actually, lions have eyesight that is so shortsighted that they can’t see the stripes in a zebra. They just see it as a kind of a grey donkey. And, in fact, the stripes of a zebra are there to confuse a tsetse fly so that they don’t get bitten by these flies.

And as I’ve been reading this book in bed at night, every three pages I’ll say to my wife, “Oh, my God, did you know…?” “Oh, my God, did you know…?” as I keep hearing about how animals just experience so much more of the world than we do in a way that we can barely even imagine it. And why I bring it up is because, even on a human-to-human level, the person across the table from you experiences the world in a way that you don’t fully understand. And it’s so easy for us to just kind of think, “Ah, I know who they are, and I know how they’re feeling, and I know what they think because that’s who I am and how I feel and how I think.”

And this ability to stay curious about who is that other person, and how do they see and feel the world, opens up that ability for a more human-to-human connection and relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And a favorite book?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Nonfiction, my favorite book is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, as a writer about science, he has this ability to make the world feel miraculous because not only does he kind of make science less dusty, less boring, and kind of have the life gets sucked out of it in high school for us, but Bryson has this ability to say, “Look, this is amazing. And look what these people are discovering about our world.”

And then on a fiction level, there’s an Australian author called David Malouf. And one of his very first books is called An Imaginary Life. It tells a story of Ovid, the Roman poet, getting exiled to the shores of the Black Sea, as it is now. And it talks about him unlearning his urban ways and finding a new language and new way of being on the edge of civilization. And this integration between head, and heart, and the mind, and the senses is a really powerful journey.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I love the pens from Baron Fig. I’ve got one on my desk here made out of copper, I’ve got one other one on my other desk over there where I write, and I’ve got one in the little leather sheet. And I was home recently in Australia, and my mom has basically hundreds of cheap pens shoved in jars and cups all over the house. I have three pens and I only have three pens, and I love them. But writing is such an integral part of how I interact with the world, not just writing my books but kind of checking in my journal most mornings, that having a pen that brings me joy is an essential tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Making my wife coffee in the morning. And we both like coffee. I have espresso, she has an oak milk flat white but it’s the joy of the taste and the smell of really good coffee, but also the joy of being of service to my wife.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
In The Coaching Habit book, I said, “Look, you can sum up this whole book as a haiku.” And I’m going to misquote it slightly, which is ironic, but it says something like, “Stay curious longer. Your advice is not as good as you think it is.” And “Your advice is not as good as you think it is,” is what I hear often from people.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
You can find more about me, in general, at my website MBS.works. And if you’re interested in the book, BestPossibleRelationship.com.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it can feel a little overwhelming to listen to what I’ve been talking about with you, Pete, and go, “How do I do that with all these people?” But if you can be the person who reaches out, who says, “I’ll take responsibility for starting to build the best possible relationship,” that is a great gift you and to them, and to your organization. So, don’t try and do it all, but perhaps pick one person, one key relationship that matters, pick one question of the five, and start a conversation where it says, “How do we work better together?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and great conversation.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thanks, Pete. You are a gracious host.

Jul 25
0

786: How to (Really) Strengthen Your Relationships with Eric Barker

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Eric Barker shares science-based wisdom on how to make your relationships flourish.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The two critical elements of trust-building 
  2. The secret to dealing with difficult people
  3. How to navigate difficult conversation

About Eric

Eric Barker is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which has sold over half a million copies and been translated into 19 languages. It was even the subject of a question on “Jeopardy!” Over 500,000 people have subscribed to his weekly newsletter. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and others. Eric is also a sought-after speaker, having given talks at MIT, Yale, Google, the United States Military Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Olympic Training Center. His new book, Plays Well with Others, will be released by HarperCollins in May of 2022. 

Resources Mentioned

Eric Barker Interview Transcript

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

Eric Barker
It’s great to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. And I got a kick out of your dedication page, it is “To the relationships that you’ve screwed up.” Can you tell us a key story there about a screwup and some principles learned?

Eric Barker
It’s never been my specialty at all. One of the five factors that psychologists use to determine someone’s personality, one of them is agreeableness, and out of a possible score of a hundred, I scored a four. So, disagreeable, probably not helping there. One of the things that led me to write the book was that I’m not a specialist with relationships but then, actually, two weeks after I closed the deal to write the book, California lockdown for the pandemic, and I realized, “Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was going to be needing a little relationship-defibrillator after all this was over.”

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. So, low on agreeableness, and so can you tell us a tale of how that got you into some trouble once?

Eric Barker
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a specific time, but, it’s funny, the same trait that has harmed me in my relationships actually helps me in my writing because I tend to always challenge things, debate things, to not easily go with the flow, I want to test things, play myth-busters, and that’s basically how my book is structured. Like, taking the maxims that we all kind of assume are true about relationships, and wanting to say, “Wait a second. Is that really true? Shall I look up the evidence here?” So, there is a silver lining.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, as I’m thinking about my relationships, I’ve got a friend, I’m thinking of my buddy Avon, in particular. He seems to love to take the other view every time, and I don’t even know if he really believes what he’s saying or if he’s just trying to rass me or he finds it fun. And it’s interesting, it’s like some people love that and some people hate that, like, “Oh, what an interesting thing we’re exploring. Hmm, we’ll do a little bit of banter, a little back and forth, volley, exploring.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, like, just can it, Eric.” Is that your experience as well, some love it, some hate it?

Eric Barker
Oh, no, absolutely. That’s the kind of thing where, like I said, after a day of working hard writing the book, I kind of have to tell myself, “Okay, turn it off, turn it off. Don’t need to test and question everything anymore. It works out really well with the writing, not so much as well with other people.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about relationships while you’re researching and writing this book?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing that really blew me away was the research on loneliness. Like, Faye Alberti is a historian at the University of York, and she basically found that before the 19th century, loneliness pretty much didn’t exist. It sounds crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Eric Barker
But basically, we were all embedded in religions, nations, tribes, groups. We always felt like we were connected to other people. And what’s really interesting is that aligns with some of the scientific psychological research on loneliness, which is that lonely people don’t spend any less time with others than non-lonely people do.

Again, it sounds crazy but we’ve all had that feeling of being lonely in a crowd. Just because you’re on the subway or in the middle of Times Square, you can be surrounded by people and that doesn’t mean you feel connected to them. What John Cacioppo, the leading researcher on loneliness, found is that loneliness is how you feel about your relationships.

If you have good relationships, strong connections, and you go on a business trip, you don’t feel desperately lonely. You know that there are people who care about you, they’re just not near you or by you. But if you don’t feel strong connections to people, you can be surrounded by others. You could be at a sporting event and you’re not going to feel that great. Loneliness is, again, how you feel about your relationships.

So, in the past, we had these deep kinds of near-tribal connections to others. We were always part of a group. And these days, we saw, basically post-19th century, the rise of individualism, and so we don’t feel those strong connections. Loneliness is an issue of perception. When we aren’t near others but we feel we have strong connections, that solitude, that’s a positive, that’s me time. It’s like, that feels good. You know that people are there but you get a little time to yourself.

Well, when we don’t feel those strong connections, neuroscience actually shows that our brain scans for threats twice as fast, which, from our ancestral environment, makes sense. If you don’t think help is coming, you need to be on the lookout for danger, but that’s not terribly conducive to happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess we’re getting into it. Tell us, Eric, what is to be done if we are feeling not so great about our relationships and we got some loneliness cooking?

Eric Barker
It’s really an issue of deepening our relationships. The first thing I did when I…in the section of the book on friendships, the first thing I did was look at Dale Carnegie because that’s the book everybody knows, How to Win Friends & Influence People, and that book was written before the advent of social science research, it’s all anecdotal.

But the crazy thing is that the primary pillars of Carnegie’s book all proved true. They’ve all been verified, except for one, and that is he says to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. And research shows we’re actually pretty bad at that. But everything else, finding similarity, paying people compliments, listening, these are all positives. The thing is Carnegie’s book is written mostly for developing business contacts, so it’s kind of at the more shallow end of the pool.

But for deepening relationships, what I found is that the research seems to point towards two things, and that is time and vulnerability. Time is really critical. It is the thing that research shows friends fight about the most. And time is a powerful costly signal. You spend time with people, we only got 24 hours in a day. You keep spending time with somebody, it shows you care.

And vulnerability is opening up. That’s telling people what’s on your mind, your stresses, your challenges. We’re usually afraid to do this but this is what really creates trust. By talking about the things we’re afraid of, we tell the other person that we trust them, otherwise we wouldn’t say it, and that leads people to reciprocate, and that’s how you build trust.

So, it’s really critical for us to go past the small talk, and very often we can feel stuck in the small talk, and it’s time and vulnerability that will deepen relationships, make us feel closer to others, and help us beat loneliness.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I moved about a year ago from Chicago to the Nashville area, and I am more distant from many of my close friends than I used to be. And so, I’ve been thinking a bit about how one forms great friendships, particularly as it’s a little bit of a different ballgame being 38 with two kids and a wife than being 24 and “Woo,” just out and about for many nights in a given week. So, tell me, is there a…I guess it’d be hard to precisely quantify this with all the variability in humanity. But, like, what kind of time are we talking about here, Eric?

Eric Barker
What’s really interesting is Jeff Hall did some research on how much time it takes to go from just meeting someone to being like a good friend or a best friend, and it’s some pretty depressing research. It could take hundreds of hours to get to, like, closer best friend. But on the flipside, it is a matter of how we handle it and what we do.

Arthur Aron did research, and by giving people a series of questions to get them, like, opening up and talking, he managed to get people, in a laboratory setting, to feel like lifelong friends in only 45 minutes. In fact, two of his research assistants who were working on the project with him, actually fell in love and got married because of working on this.

So, it’s really that issue of vulnerability, of opening up. Usually, when we first meet somebody, we’re often tempted to try to impress them but the literature shows that signaling high status, while it might impress people and it might be good in maybe a sales or a business context, on a personal level, it tends to distance people. They don’t feel related to you. They feel like you’re above them or something.

Meanwhile, expressing yourself as a peer or actually showing human-relatable flaws, that’s the thing that makes us understand, relate, connect with people because we all have those insecurities. And when you express them, it’s like we get that, “Whew” feeling where we can relax, where we can relate. So, that’s the thing we really need to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when it comes to vulnerability, that sounds like sharing the stresses, the problems, the worries. To what extent is there also connected value in sharing the joys?

Eric Barker
Sharing joys is really positive, there’s no doubt about that. The literature points to this, something called capitalization, and that is when your friends or your spouse talk about something positive that happened to them, it’s really important to ask questions, it’s really important to be happy for them. In fact, it was Shelly Gable that did research at UCSB, and she found that actually celebrating those positive moments, how you handle the positive moments was actually more predictive of romantic relationship success than how you handle the difficult moments.

It sounds crazy because we’re always so focused on fixing things, on trying to resolve the problems in a romantic relationship but John Gottman found that 69% of the ongoing problems in a romantic relationship never get resolved. It’s like you’re not going to fix all of these things. You’re not going to fix most of these things. It’s about the regulation of conflict, not the resolution of conflict.

But on the flipside, you want to be a supporter, you want to be a cheerleader, you want to share your positives, you want them to feel good for you, to be curious about it, and you want to do the same for them. This is a positive relationship tip you can use anywhere, especially in a romantic relationship, is to really look for those positive things, be supportive, be the cheerleader. This is a huge thing that we often forget about because we’re usually trying to bring the bottom up rather than trying to raise the roof. And it’s really important to celebrate those positive moments.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Any pro tips on how that’s done in practice? I just watched the show Devs, and somebody kept mentioning if they wanted a champagne bath. So, I guess that’s one tactic, is to bring a bottle of champagne with you to splatter people when they’re excited, though they might not receive that so well in real life, like, “I’m all wet now and sticky.” So, any other more practical recommendations for celebrations? I guess what we don’t want to do is say, “Okay, that’s nice,” and just, boom, brush aside. But, yeah, like what that sounds like in practice?

Eric Barker
What some of the advices that they give romantic couples is pretty straightforward. At the end of every day, you say the best thing that happened to you that day, and your spouse says the best thing that happened to them that day. And again, like you said, you don’t want to be dismissive, you don’t want to just nod your head and acknowledge it. It’s, like, you want to be happy for them. You want to ask questions. You want to be just listening and be supportive and be excited. It’s about that emotional back and forth, so it’s just consistently.

It almost sounds weird but even with your friends, it’s like, “Hey, what good things have happened lately?” It’s not something we usually do but it’s not too crazy a question, and I think most people are pretty happy to talk about the positives that are going on. You’re basically letting them brag. That feels good and if they’re somebody you care about, it’s going to feel good for you, too, and it can have very positive effects for the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember a motivational speaker once mentioned that he had someone, I think it was at work, and that was just sort of like their go-to line when they started talking, and say, “Tell me something good,” and everyone liked that person. It’s like, “Oh, that’s what Marty says, and I like Marty,” because, go figure, people are telling him something good all the time, and he’s getting the goods and celebrating with them.

Eric Barker
Well, it’s a funny thing because, like I said, very often, especially in romantic relationships, we’re usually focused on fixing the negative, but it’s like if you feel step back for a second and think about that, if all you’re doing is fixing the negative then, really, ceteris paribus, that means you’re going to get to neutral. Even if everything worked, if the 69% of long-term issues could be resolved, you just get to neutral, and, “I have a not negative relationship with every stranger on this planet.” It’s, like, that’s not love. It’s, like, you don’t want to get to neutral. You want to be beyond that. You want to be supportive.

That’s why one of the other things I talk about, at least specific for romantic relationships, is doing exciting stuff together because the thing is that there’s a psychological principle called emotional contagion. And basically, what that means is we tend to associate the feeling that we’re having in any context, we associate it with the people we’re with.

So, if you’re doing fun stuff, you associate that with your partner, and that keeps the relationship alive. It keeps things exciting. And so, we need to do more of that. Too much Netflix and pizza on the couch, we actually need to get out more and do more exciting fun things so we can keep those positive feelings flowing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, we went deep on loneliness and friendship and forming bonds. Maybe we can zoom out a bit. And could you share with us what’s sort of like the main big idea or thesis behind the book Plays Well with Others?

Eric Barker
Well, one theme that I found throughout all the aspects that I was looking at is that relationships really do come down to stories, stories in your head. The first section of the book, I talk about the issue, like, they say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and I kind of tested that. I went and looked at the research on body language and communication and reading people.

And what happens is, as soon as we meet somebody for the first time, or even if we’re seeing somebody we’ve known for a while, our brains are immediately telling us a story about who this person is, and we kind of can’t help it. We start making assumptions in milliseconds. And it’s an issue of revising that story but that story is going to be there.

And in a romantic relationship, John Gottman, I mentioned earlier, he’s the leading researcher on love and marriage, and his claim to fame is that he can predict whether a couple would be divorced in five years just by talking to them for a few minutes. And he can do this with about 90 plus percent accuracy. And how he does that is simply asking the couple, each member of the couple, “Tell me your story.”

And when he listens to that story, if it’s this story of overcoming challenges and that’s really something, celebrating those difficulties and getting past it, that’s a really positive sign but it’s not about the facts and details because we forget most of the facts and details. We kind of congeal them into this story, and if that story is positive, things are really good.

And past that, the final section, I talk about, I test “No man is an island. Is that true?” And it’s this issue of communities, have a story, a story they tell about who the members are, “’What is important to us? What do we value?” And that story is what draws us together. So, it’s this really critical element of understanding the stories of how we perceive others, how we’re connected to others, the community that we’re a part of. This is kind of the subtext, the element that undergirds everything that goes on between human relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that is you could just change your story about a relationship you have with somebody without interacting with them in any subsequent way. So, you could just choose to reinterpret and reformulate your story about your relationship with them in your head, could you not?

Eric Barker
Oh, absolutely. And that can be a positive thing and that can be a negative thing. We can reflect on it and we can look at different aspects, and we can say, “You know what, I’ve been judging them too harshly. Like, I forgot there were those few times where that person really went out of their way to help me, and I kind of dismissed that.” Or, on the flipside, something that’s common with long-term relationships and marriages is that people sometimes they don’t want to fight, they don’t want to argue, so they don’t raise issues. And when you don’t raise issues, they can’t get resolved.

And so, instead of people having a conversation about their spouse about an issue, they start having conversations with themselves, and that doesn’t always go so well because you start making assumptions about what they believe, where they stand, why they did what they did, and this can be really problematic because now we’re not actually getting insight from them; we’re making it up ourselves and that can quickly turn negative because what a lot of people don’t realize is that, yes, you don’t want to fight but the truth is, yelling and screaming, only 40% of the time does that result in divorce.

What is more likely to result in divorce is when a couple stops talking. You yell and scream because you care. When you stop caring, you stop interacting. And that’s what more often precedes divorce is when couples start living parallel lives where they’re not communicating, they’re not connecting, they’re not arguing, they’re not resolving problems. They’re just going, “It’s not worth it,” and kind of living their own life. That’s what usually precedes divorce.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And if we sort of shift the focus into the workplace and professionals and those looking to be awesome at their job, what are some of the best takeaways for folks looking to have strong relationships with their boss, their peers, their clients, their suppliers, etc.?

Eric Barker
Well, like I said, in terms of friendship, those are some of the really key things, is trying to deepen those relationships. Like I said, time, vulnerability, but another thing we deal with in the workplace is that, with our friendships, the interesting thing about friendships in our personal lives is that you can leave whenever you want.

In the workplace, you’re going to deal with some people that maybe you don’t like so much. That’s the tricky part about it because of the role. And what the research has shown is that the people who cause us the most stress aren’t actually our enemies, because enemies, like we know where we stand, we don’t like them, they don’t like us. The people that drive us most crazy are those ambivalent relationships. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It’s that unpredictability. And Julianne Holt-Lunstad at BYU has found that that’s what drives our blood pressure up, it’s these people who we don’t know how they’re going to behave, whether they’re going to be nice or difficult this time.

So, in terms of dealing with difficult people, what we need to keep in mind is emphasizing three things: emphasizing similarity, emphasizing vulnerability, and emphasizing community, because these are the things that can sort of activate the empathy muscles in someone else. Maybe if they’re a little narcissistic, maybe if they’re difficult, when we express our similarity to them, when we talk about a vulnerability, weaknesses, when we express community, that we’re a part of something, that can trigger those empathy muscles that can help us deal with them a little bit better, help them understand us a little bit better. That’s truly key to dealing with those difficult people in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what does that sound like in practice to convey similarity, like, “Boy, Eric, you and I, we both love a good microphone, don’t we?”

Eric Barker
Again, we take those things for granted but that’s usually how many relationships start, is you’re both into a particular sport, a particular sports team, you’re both Star Wars fans, you’ve got something you relate to. And with those people that we haven’t taken the time to find something that we can both relate to and care about, that kind of acts like a medium for us to work through.

So, finding out a little bit more about somebody and finding that connection, research shows this is really powerful in terms of us feeling like we are connected, we’re part of the same group. In that way, community-wise, again, feeling like we’re a part of something, we’re both working toward similar goals. The research shows that a great way to get people who don’t like each other very much to cooperate and feel connected is to have them work on a project together, it’s when they have to rely on one another.

So, it’s really critical, it sounds a little silly in the abstract, but finding those similar things, asking them enough questions to realize, like, “Hey, we’re both into this,” it can make a surprising difference.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m also thinking about some research. I read about it in Bob Cialdini’s books about moving and/or singing or dancing or marching in unison has a powerful effect there.

Eric Barker
Anything like that, again, builds that kind of similarity, like that’s in the physical realm is that we’re doing the same things, we’re coordinated, we’re working together. That means you’re a part of something. You’re connected. What’s really powerful, I think, from Cialdini’s, he has Influence which is like he’s masterwork, but his other books are excellent as well, Pre-Suasion where he talks about how so much of what helps negotiations and conflict resolution isn’t the tactics that you huse in the middle of it. It’s those things that you set up beforehand.

And that’s where similarity falls in. Once you feel, like, “Hey, we’re connected in this way. We both care about this same thing,” you’re more disposed to want to help someone. It’s like if a stranger asks you for a favor, that’s very different than when a friend asks you for a favor. You have something that connects you beforehand.

One of the researchers at Harvard Business School talked about salary negotiations, and, again, it wasn’t necessarily the specific tactics used during the negotiation. The number one thing that he said was they have to like you, was beforehand making sure that they like you, they appreciate you, they feel connected to you, because, again, it’s one thing dealing with a stranger, to another thing dealing with a friend. You’re much more disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, to say, “Hey, sure, we don’t mind covering that expense. We don’t mind doing this.”

We think about these kinds of like really nuanced tactics in the middle, but if you can think about the beginning ahead of time, and say, “How can I really connect with this person emotionally so that they’re disposed to want to help me?” that’s much more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, with that connection now, those principles then of the similarity, vulnerability and community there?

Eric Barker
Yeah, first and foremost, like I said, that similarity, that’s something that we’ve all had that moment where we’re trying to connect with somebody, trying to go from acquaintance to friend, and similarity can really help. It gives you something to talk about. It gives you something that you connect on. And then that vulnerability aspect, where it’s like we all have our little jerk radar where we don’t want to be dealing with somebody who’s a pain.

And when somebody opens up and says, “Hey, you know what, I actually struggle with this. I’m not that great at it,” or, “Hey, this actually scares me,” that makes…humanizes somebody. They’re not trying to act like they’re above you or better than you. In community, it’s like we’re connected. It’s like, sometimes we don’t always love our in-laws but we still behave, we still do favors for them, we still do things because we recognize that we’re connected, we’re a part of something, and that shifts our perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure does. And I also want to talk a bit about the digital side of things. Social media, how do we use that well such that we don’t create more bitterness, division, self-esteem problems, jealousy? Any pro tips there?

Eric Barker
Absolutely. You see research back and forth that social media is the devil, social media is not the devil, and there are some stuff back and forth, but the key thing we want to be thinking about when it comes to social media is time. And that is that you only have 24 hours in a day. Some of that is going to be sleep, some of that is going to be work. You only have so much of a budget for social time. And if too much of that is being used for social media, then it’s not being used for deeper richer connections, like face to face.

We just want to make sure that social media is not cannibalizing it. You don’t want to be replacing kind of the rich sumptuous meal of face-to-face contact for the junk food of social media. If you’re using social media to reach out to somebody who’s far away, hey, that could be really positive. If you’re using it to communicate with somebody who’s nearby and you’re using it to plan a face-to-face get-together, hey, it’s an alley of positive.

But if we end up, consciously or unconsciously, using it to replace real relationships, that’s when it gets problematic. And when it’s eating up too much of the buddy budget, the social time, just on Instagram, that’s really where it’s quite clear that we’re not treating our relationships as well as we could.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And I’m also thinking about sort of the nature of what you choose to post on social media. And I found, for me, what makes me more favorably disposed to someone is they share something and it seems like it really is a means of spreading delight and goodness and positivity, as oppose to a post which says, “Look how awesome I am,” like, “Oh, just getting some sushi in Tokyo at the top sushi place ever.” It’s like, “Okay. Well, good for you, guy. That’s fun. I guess I’m supposed to think that your life is awesome.”

As opposed to, I’m thinking about my buddy Patrick, he once posted, “When my wife and I are cooking together and sharing instructions or collaborating, we respond to each other by saying, ‘Yes, chef,’ and it makes cooking so much more fun.” And I think of that because that is awesome and I do that now, too, and it really is fun and it spreads joy. And in both contexts, we’re talking about doing some food stuff and yet one post, I think, well, it makes me think more of Patrick, like, “This guy is awesome,” and not because he’s high status but that he’s just putting out joy into the world.

Eric Barker
Absolutely. I totally agree. This is something we’re kind of touching on earlier, where it’s like often when we first meet somebody, people often try to brag, they often try to signal high status, and it’s exactly what you said. When you see social media posts where clearly the person is bragging, and saying, “Look how awesome I am,” that doesn’t make us like them more, that doesn’t make us feel more warmly connected to them, so that’s probably not conducive to positive long-term relationships.

But when somebody posts a funny anecdote or if somebody is kind of like poking fun but it’s at themselves, then we do feel positively disposed to them. If somebody puts a warm positive moment, we react better to that. And these are the kind of things we definitely need to be thinking about because I think we’ve turned a lot of things. I think, by its very nature, social media often tends towards turning things into this kind of social competition because we’ve got quantification of likes.

You have a direct quantification of how much people like this post. That has this kind of almost competitive element to it. And I think, to your point, we need to resist the urge to kind of one-up people in that status competition, and another way is to rely on being a little bit more human.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eric, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts for us looking to improve our relationships?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing from the romantic relationship research, but I think it’s applicable in pretty much any relationship context, is John Gottman, that relationship researcher, he found that just by listening to the first three minutes of a conflict discussion between a couple, he could predict the ending 94% of the time.

And the takeaway from that is if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. If you have to bring up a difficult topic with your spouse, or frankly with anybody, if we go in there firing both barrels, the research is pretty clear, if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. So, if we present it in a more constructive way, we take a deep breath, we step back, we don’t launch into it in this very kind of antagonistic attacking mode, it can be a lot more productive.

Even though we feel like we deserve this, “I’ve been victimized. I need to…” that’s not going to get you the end result you want 94% percent of the time. That’s a very high number, so take a deep breath, think constructively, don’t point fingers, don’t personalize it. Anytime you have to have a conflict discussion, whether it’s at home or in the office, don’t discuss the other person’s character. Talk about the specific issue you had and stick to the facts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, Eric, I’d love to hear some of your favorite things. How about a favorite quote?

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. Well, this is a quote that meant a lot to me when I was writing both my books because I was thinking about, like, testing these maxims and all these issues we have around both success and relationships. It’s from William Gibson, he said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

And that really resonated with me because I looked at the research and there’s a lot of answers to the questions we already have. It’s just tied up in all this ivory tower academic research. And so, my focus was trying to take that and make it accessible to people because the answers are already here, to many of our problems. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s why I love doing interview podcasts, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t have to figure all this out. I’d just get Eric to share the goods.” Cool. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Barker
This isn’t necessarily practical. It might make people feel a little bit better but one of my favorite pieces of research is there was one study done on ethics professors and ethicists, and it found that they weren’t any more moral than the average person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Eric Barker
So, if you feel like, maybe you haven’t been behaving that well, even experts in the field, hey, they’re not necessarily all that better, so don’t beat yourself up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Eric Barker
Favorite book, oh, God, there’s so, so, so many. I have to say one of my favorite books recently is my David Epstein wrote a book called Range, which is not only really useful, really smart. It also made me feel much better because it talks about how generalists can thrive, and how generalists often do very well because I’ve always been a generalist. And anything that helps me rationalize my decisions is amazing and wonderful.

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

Eric Barker
I have got to say that I remember many years ago, my friend Drew got these Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They were pretty pricey, and I was like, “Why?” And I’m not a big music guy. I listen to podcasts, but I got to tell you, noise-cancelling headphones literally changed my life. It’s like when you’re on planes, when you’re trying to block out noise, you got loud neighbors, it’s something silly, I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal, but, man, I can’t live without them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love them and sometimes I will put in earplugs and then put on noise-cancelling headphones. I’m just really into that cone of silence.

Eric Barker
Okay, you’re playing on serious mode now.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. And it does send a message. It’s sort of like a ritual. It’s like, “All right. No messing around. We’re seriously dialing into this.”

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. You’re putting on the Batman costume. Like, “This is it. We’re going to war.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I need a montage I need to play during this.

Eric Barker
Yeah, with some John Williams music. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Eric Barker
Favorite habit is reading. There’s no doubt, my first instinct when I have extra time is to fire up the old Kindle app. And, typically, you think, “That person is going to call me back in five minutes,” or, “Oh, this is only going to take this long,” or, “The internet will fix itself and work,” “My Wi-Fi will be working again.” You know what, sometimes it takes longer than you think. Often, it takes longer than you think. So, I get myself reading and the time flies by.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they highlight it in the Kindle book version of your works, or they re-tweet it a lot?

Eric Barker
I think the key thing was, in the new book as well as with others, there’s the Grant study which has been going on for nearly a century at Harvard. They’ve been following a group of men, basically, their entire lives. I think most of the men are in their 80s or 90s, and so it’s interesting, rather than some two-week study or six-week study to see what happens across a person’s entire life.

And, as you can imagine, multiple people have led this study because it’s taken nearly a century. And when they asked George Vaillant, who was probably the guy who led the study for the longest time, they said, “Look, what have you learned?” and, as you can imagine, the amount of information they’ve collected could fill a warehouse, but he replied with only one sentence. And he said that your relationships to other people are the only thing that matters.

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

Eric Barker
They can go to my blog at EricBarker.org, E-R-I-C-B-A-R-K-E-R.O-R-G. And the best thing to follow the insights and tips that I’m finding from the research is to sign up for my weekly newsletter.

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

Eric Barker
Yeah, the key thing I would say is, and I talked about this in my first book, was sit down with your boss and ask them what you can do to make their life easier. Ask them what you could be doing, point blank, to be better at your job and to be a better contributor. There are two benefits here. Number one, you are basically getting the answers to the test. They are going to tell you what you need to be doing.

And, number two, just in terms of signaling and relationship, how would you feel if you were boss if an employee came to you, and said, “How can I make your life easier? What do I need to be doing to be a better contributor?” That is a very, very positive signal, and it is going to tell you what you need to be focusing on. It’s a simple little thing and it can be a gamechanger.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that absolutely can be. And we had Mary Abbajay on the podcast talking about how to manage your manager, and that was one of her very top tips. And she said that she frequently will ask audiences, like, “Who’s done this?” and it’s generally less than 1% of professionals have done that. But, yeah, it’s powerful on both sides.

Eric Barker
And then for advanced mode, every week, sum up what you’ve been up, what you’ve accomplished, and send a quick bullet point email to your boss, and make sure to be focused on that thing that they told you, that you are making progress towards what they said was most important. This is extremely valuable. Your boss is busy. They’re not watching everything you’re doing.

So, to be telling them, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been up to,” makes them relaxed, makes them like and appreciate you. You’re basically doing a highlight reel. And if things don’t work out at that job, you can go back to every Friday email you’ve sent through all the weeks, and you know how to update your resume because you basically have a long list of all the things you’ve accomplished while you were there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Eric, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. I wish you much luck with the book Plays Well with Others and all your adventures and relationships.

Eric Barker
Thank you so much. It was fantastic to be here.

Apr 21
0

761: How to Shape Great Work Relationships Through Honor and Ritual with Erica Keswin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Erica Keswin reveals how you can shape your workplace to be both good for people and great for business.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The do’s and don’ts of honoring relationships 
  2. Three components of rituals that bring teams together
  3. How you can make connections, even when working remotely  

About Erica

Erica Keswin is a bestselling author, internationally sought-after speaker, and workplace strategist. She helps top businesses, organizations, and individuals improve their performance by honoring relationships in every context, always with an eye toward high-tech for human touch. She was named one of Marshall Goldsmith’s Top 100 Coaches in 2020, as well as one of Business Insider’s most innovative coaches of 2020.

Her first book, Bring Your Human to Work: 10 Sure-Fire Ways to Design a Workplace That’s Good for People, Great for Business, and Just Might Change the World was published in 2018 by McGraw Hill. Her second book, Rituals Roadmap: The Human Way to Transform Everyday Routines Into Workplace Magic was published by McGraw Hill in January, 2021. Both books debuted as Wall Street Journal bestsellers. 

Resources Mentioned

Erica Keswin Interview Transcript

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

Erica Keswin
Thanks so much. Great to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too. Well, I’m excited to hear about Bring Your Human to Work but, first, I got to hear the story behind The Spaghetti Project. Can you tell us the tale?

Erica Keswin
I can. So, when I was doing research for Bring Your Human to Work and my second book, which is about rituals, I came across a study out of Cornell University that was done by a guy named Kevin Kniffin. And Kevin was looking at and studying team performance, what makes one team higher-performing than another. And his dad was a firefighter, and so he decided, “I’m going to study the firefighters in the firehouses.”

Long story short, what he found was that the firefighters who are the most dedicated to the ritual of the firehouse meal and sitting around the table, connecting as humans, it actually correlated with higher levels of performance, and those firefighters saved more lives. So, sort of a goosebump moment for me and my work.

To your question about The Spaghetti Project, when you think about firefighters, and I visited many firehouses and interviewed a lot of firefighters, their stereotypical go-to meal is spaghetti.

Pete Mockaitis
With meat sauce, I’m guessing.

Erica Keswin
The spaghetti meat sauce, spaghetti and plain tomato sauce. It’s just pretty much what’s easy to cook in that firehouse. So, therein came in the name The Spaghetti Project, which is a platform that shares the science and stories of connection at work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And so, now I’m intrigued. The firefighters who were most dedicated to the firehouse meal had the highest performance. And, wow, performance of saving lives, that’s huge. We’re not talking about selling stuff. So, part of me wonders, so causation, correlation, that’s always tricky to disentangle. Do we think that’s because they are the ones who are more committed, in general, to like “What we’re all about in each other,” and, thusly, those who choose to have that meal make that a priority, also care more in the line of duty? Or, do you think there’s another sort of chain of connection here?

Erica Keswin
Yeah, I do. So, when people are sitting around the table and bringing their whole selves, kind of shooting the breeze, more times than not, you start connecting with people on a personal level. So, let me give an example. I interviewed a firefighter that shared that he was at one of the meals with a colleague, and the guy shared that he was actually, when he grew up, afraid of heights.

Now, you wouldn’t really think that for a firefighter, that here’s this guy, Dominick, who’s afraid of heights. So, they’re just like shooting the breeze, like two people, no judgment, having their spaghetti. And four hours later, the fire alarm goes off and they go out to fight a fire. And the person overseeing the group and figuring out who goes where, now has this information in the back of his head, thinking, “Okay, you know what? Maybe I won’t put Dominick on the highest ladder as we go to fight this fire.”

So, the more that you know about people that you’re working with, the better that you can give them a sense of empathy around what’s going on with them. Take it to a present-day example. You may be really frustrated with a colleague who’s not returning your calls or not doing the level of work you think he or she should be doing. You, then, come to find out that a parent was dying, that somebody sick, someone had COVID, and you just have a different level of understanding and a way to work with them.

And so, the idea is it’s around bringing your human to work. And that meal, and you can even think about meals in terms of the role in our culture in bringing people together.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s excellent. Thank you. And so then, we talk about bringing your human to work, can you share with us – I think we’ve already got a taste – but sort of what would you say is the core thesis statement here of the work?

Erica Keswin
So, people ask me what it means to bring their human to work, and let’s say I boil it down to one line, which is honoring relationships. How do you honor relationships with your colleagues, with your boss, with your direct reports, with your clients, your customers, and even honoring that relationship with yourself?

And the premise of the book, I’ve been in the human capital space for 25 years, and so I’m sort of used to people either saying, “Direct leads to me,” or maybe, “Behind my back,” that some of this stuff is the soft stuff. And so, I would venture to say it’s actually the hard stuff and some of the really important stuff. And so, the premise of the book is why bringing your human to work and creating a more human workplace is not only good for people but it’s great for business and really does impact the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that seems sensible and, like, that sounds true to me in my gut, although I am a feeler, I’m a Myers-Briggs.

Erica Keswin
Yeah, me, too.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I like that kind of thing. For the skeptic, could you share some of the most hard-hitting bits of research or evidence that says, “No, no, this is for real and not just stuff that Pete and Erica like because they’re feelers”?

Erica Keswin
Yeah. Well, first, I’d send them back to think about the firefighters. You can’t get any more hard data than that, than actually saving lives. There are many studies in the book. A couple that jumps out, one that found that when you have that high level of trust with your boss, that you can be who you are at work, collaboration goes up by as much as 47%, productivity goes up by 50%. So, the numbers are real.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Boy, productivity going up 50%, again, I’m curious about the mechanisms underlying that. Part of me thinks it’s just like you’re not sort of worrying, and CYA, watching your back, like really politically massaging every sentence to make sure you’re not offending people because you just sort of have a good sort of trust and caring connection going. But what are some of the other ways that that 50% productivity bump get realized?

Erica Keswin
Right. Look, that’s a piece of it. I remember I started my career in management consulting, and those were the days, very junior, sitting in the conference room, having late-night pizza, and just really, really getting to know people to the point where you can finish their sentences, and you just work better together because you know how people work. And so, sometimes it’s as basic as that, setting the whole trust thing, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, in terms of knowing, like, “Oh, boy, you really hate that stuff, so I’m not going to ask you to do it. I’m going to ask somebody else. And, in so doing, we’ve got more energy and strength, focus, and all that kind of goodness.” Okay. I think when it comes to dishonoring relationships, relatively few of your colleagues are sociopaths, like, in terms of wanting to, like actively wanting to harm others. I guess there’s a thumb.

But I think, at the same time, it’s quite possible that we dishonor relationships, maybe without even being aware of it, just by not having as much attention brought to it. What are some key don’ts, I guess, when it comes to honoring relationships?

Erica Keswin
Look, nine out of ten people leave their boss, not the company per se. And so, that relationship really does make a difference. It is that direct manager that’s going to impact your day-to-day, “Should I stay or should I go?” And we talk about bottom line implications, and I’ll get to the do’s and don’ts in a second, but, again, we think about the data. Turnover is expensive, and we’re sitting here doing this interview today in the midst of this Great Resignation, that if you do lose people that you don’t want to lose, it is really hard right now to replace them. So, those are some pretty strong numbers in and of itself.

In terms of do’s and don’ts, I think a lot of it, when I think of honoring relationships, it’s pretty straightforward. You don’t want to be the kind of manager where it’s, “It’s my way or the highway.” And what I tell leaders, if you’re not sure and it’s different, the behaviors that you want to see other than the ones we learned in the kindergarten kind of like the basics that we probably don’t need to go into on a podcast like this.

But in terms of specifics of what to do, I often turn to the values of a company. And I have a litmus test called the fork in the road, “Should I take a left? Should I take a right? Should I hire this person? Should I fire this person because he or she is a sociopath?” to your point. “Should I launch a new product? Should I do this deal? Should I fire this client?” I look at that through the lens of a company’s values. And, quite frankly, if the values aren’t helping to drive those decisions, either there’s way too many values, 10, 12, 14 values.

A great example of a company that had too many values, back in the day, was Uber in the beginning when Travis was the CEO. They had 14 values, and the values motivated the wrong behaviors, like crush people like bugs, that kind of thing. And so, you might have too many or they might be the wrong ones. And it’s the strategy and the mission and the vision highlight what you need to do, and the values are really the behaviors and get to the how, and aligning that gets back to this idea of what it means to honor relationships in a specific organization because it’s going to be different everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
And can we zoom into some particular applications of this? So, in the firehouse, spaghetti meals, that’s awesome. Inside other workplaces where folks are often home before dinnertime, what are some excellent cool examples of places you’ve found where there are some great relationship-honoring and connection that’s going a long way?

Erica Keswin
So, the way that I mapped out my book about rituals, I mean, rituals are an amazing tool, amazing way to bring people together to have that connection. And some of the best examples that I’ve seen cut across all different aspects of the employee life cycle. So, there’s examples in onboarding. You only get one chance to make the first impression, so what better way to start that connection early and often than literally the first day or even when you get your offer letter.

Professional development, celebrating milestones in meetings is a great way. So, I looked at, and have examples that I’ll share with you in all of these different ways. One really fun one that I write about is from the company Allbirds, the cool felt sneaker company. And they have a ritual in their organization called 40 at 4.

And it came about very organically where there was a very early-on employee who was probably working too much at Allbirds as a startup at the time, and decided to go to the doctor and said, “You know, I’m really not feeling great from a health perspective. I’m going to set some goals for myself and do X amounts of pushups between now and the end of the year.”

He took that number and he divided it by how many days were left in the year, and he came up with the number 40. And so, he said, “All right, if I do 40 pushups a day for the rest of the year, I’ll meet my goal.” So, what does he do? He starts doing them in the office. A guy next to him joins, the woman across the hall joins. The next thing they know, everybody and their brother is either doing pushups at 4:00 o’clock, watching the pushups, talking about the pushups.

And I see it as like the healthy version of a smoke break. And even during the pandemic, I was able to reach back out with them because many people were really missing those company rituals. The way that they came together to connect with each other and honor relationships was gone, and they said, “Yeah, how do you know it’s a ritual?” Really, it’s sticky and people miss it.

And so, during the pandemic, they would rotate and somebody would volunteer to lead the pushups. Again, yes, it feels soft, it sounds soft, touchy-feely, but it’s these things that people come together and remind them, A, why they like the people they work with, B, why they do what they do every day. At least in 2022, we’re still human and not a bunch of robots running around, so these things do impact people.

Pete Mockaitis
For now, Erica.

Erica Keswin
For now. You never know, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is beautiful, that ritual, and that does…as I’m thinking about to back to some of my workplaces and rituals, they just feel so good in terms of, boy, it’s almost like there’s a primal human tribe thing going on, like, “This is us and who we are and what we belong to and what we do.” And it can be doing 40 pushups at 4:00 p.m., it could be changing the lyrics to songs and singing dorky versions about your workplace at the annual meeting.

Erica Keswin
Right, it could be anything. And let me share this, so I would talk to companies about what a ritual is and the ROI of rituals, and some people still wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate what the ritual is. So, I came up with this, I call it somewhat magic question now that every time I ask it, the person was like, “I got it. That’s my ritual.”

So, the question is, and I asked this at Chipotle, LinkedIn, Microsoft, all these different companies, and I said it to, for example, Marissa Andrada, who’s the head of HR at Chipotle, “Okay, Marissa, when do you think employees at Chipotle feel most Chipotle-ish?” Very high tech. Very high tech, right? But framing it that way, Marissa said, “I got it. Every day at Chipotle at 10:15,” by the way, I don’t know if you’re a Chipotle fan, but my kids eat it all the time, I like it, too, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
I ate it today.

Erica Keswin
Oh, there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
My napkins prove it.

Erica Keswin
Oh, my God. You’re right. You did eat it today. So, they open at…maybe you know this, I didn’t know this. Chipotle opens at 10:30 a.m. so I guess there are many people eating burritos at 10:30 in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve done it before.

Erica Keswin
Okay. So, you’re perfect for this example. So, every day at 10:15, before those doors answer, and before Pete comes through the door, they all sit down, all the people that have been working there since 6:30 in the morning, chopping up the lettuce, making the guacamole, they all sit down and have a meal together. And that is when they feel most Chipotle-ish.

Other people said to me at the company KIND bar, Daniel Lubetzky, founder, former CEO and now executive chairman. He said people feel most KIND-ish, or KINDly, when, during their orientation, their onboarding process, every new hire, once a quarter, meets with Daniel. Even now that he’s not even with the company, he still meets with them and talks about the history of the company and the genesis and why it’s called KIND, and how his father was in the Holocaust and was saved by someone, and how that person showed kindness to his dad, that drove the mission of the company.

And so, rituals, you kind of said it yourself, it gives this feeling of this sort of primal “This is us coming together,” and that’s when you know it’s a ritual. It’s that it sticks and you don’t force people to do it. Like, it just organically happens and makes people feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s intriguing because I could see how you could try to force that and it would just be weird, like if you don’t like that.

Erica Keswin
Yeah, like if you have to force it, you need to move on. I tell people not to get their ego wrapped up in some of these rituals. Like, somebody might be listening to this and say, “Okay, we’re going to start doing pushups just like Allbirds at 4:00 o’clock,” and people might think, “Are you out of your mind?” And it might stick but rituals can come from the top-down, the bottom-up, inside-out, really from anywhere, so if something doesn’t stick, I just urge people to think about feel like changing it, get feedback, ask your team for ideas.

And, oftentimes, the rituals that are the most sticky are the ones that are connected, again, to values or even things that you’ve done before. And that’s why, many times, it’s an individual contributor, just like the example in Allbirds, that came up with the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
When it comes to not forcing, it seems like, sometimes just the invitation will do, like, “Hey, I’m going to start doing these pushups and you’re welcome to join me if you like,” and then some will, some won’t.

I think what’s also interesting about the pushup is that it’s just a little bit, I don’t know, weird or I guess counter-cultural, or like you don’t tend to go into workplaces and see people doing pushups, like, “Whoa, what’s going on here? That’s a little different.” And in so doing, I think that might give you a little more juice.

I’m thinking about my work with HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership, seminar for high school folks doing leadership development stuff. And so, there’s a bunch of like cheering going on, which is a little bit like camp, and so it’s not that unique because camps have been doing it forever. But, in so doing, there are the HOBY cheers, and HOBY people know the HOBY cheers, and then HOBY people can just sort of vibe in that way. And in doing them together, you really do get this crazy bond formed in like three days amongst you.

And I think that if we were doing something very ordinary, like, “Oh, we’re brushing our teeth. Okay, well, that’s what everybody does every day, generally speaking, so it doesn’t have as much oomph.” Are there some, maybe, ingredients or components or principles that make a ritual a ritual?

Erica Keswin
Yes. So, first, let me share my…and it’s interesting. I’ll talk about how brushing your teeth could be a ritual, may not be a ritual, but could be a ritual. So, a ritual has three component parts. The first is a ritual is something to which we assign a certain amount of meaning and intention, sort of number one. Number two, a ritual typically has a regular cadence. So, for example, 40 at 4, 40 pushups every day could be once a week, it could be once a month, it could be once a year.

The third part though is really interesting. A ritual is something that goes beyond its practical purpose. And so, what do I mean by that? I’m sitting here in my home office and, let’s say, the lights go out. And if I decide to light a candle so I can see what on earth I’m doing, that’s not a ritual. But if I light a candle every day, or every Friday, let’s say, at 6:00 o’clock, to signify the end of the workday and the workweek and the beginning of the weekend, I’m lighting that candle because it means something to me and there’s a regular cadence, but I’m not doing it for any real practical purpose. And so, that’s the definition.

So, when you think about having a cup of coffee in the morning, maybe your purpose is the caffeine, but it’s almost something…I also think of it as sort of back-of-brain to front-of-brain. Like, you might have a habit, you just might have a cup of coffee every day, but if you make something like that a ritual where you sit down, take a few deep breaths, connect with yourself, there’s nothing practical about it but it’s something that’s meaningful to you.

And so, in the example of the pushups, yeah, the one guy was trying to meet his goal of doing those pushups but, half the time at Allbirds, people were kind of joking around, sitting there watching, and so there wasn’t this practical purpose but it felt good and something drew them into doing it. So, that’s sort of my working definition.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these examples are so fun, Erica. Just keep them coming. What else have we got?

Erica Keswin
Oh, my gosh. There are so many. There’s a whole book on them. Let’s see. One of my other favorite rituals in the book is a company called Udemy, the online learning company. And one of the things that I have been thinking about a lot, both from the standpoint of a manager but also as an individual contributor, that professional development, people want to learn on the job, up, down, and sideways.

And I’ve been in the human capital space for 25 years, and gone are the days of all the rungs in the ladder of used to be able to get promoted every year. Now, we need to get creative about how people grow on the job. So, actually, I just wrote an article, which I’ll send you, if you send out show notes for your podcasts. But Jeannie Weaver at AT&T has a book club, and that has become a ritual for her and her team, and also something that is easy to do when some people are in the office and some people are remote.

The company Udemy has a ritual around professional development called DEAL, drop everything and learn. So, once a month, on a Wednesday at 3:00 o’clock, everybody kind of drops what they’re doing and takes a class in something. And, again, what I love about it is it may have nothing to do with your day job. So, in that definition of no practical purpose, it’s not that I’m sitting there, “How to improve a podcast,” “How to do an Excel spreadsheet.” There are people that shared with me that in November, during the Wednesday in November, they took a class on how to make a turkey.

And what they do is the team manager will bring everybody together and they can take anything they want. The only thing you have to do is share what you learned that month. So, again, it’s another way to connect, another way to bring people together in a way that might seem touchy-feely for the Myers-Briggs feelers in the audience, however, you’re learning more about each other.

And from a leadership perspective, you have some great employee who’s on the subway and runs, meets somebody, and they’re like, “Hey, why don’t you come work at my company?” you might think twice because you actually have friends at work and people that you know at work who kind of know you and know that you know how to bake a turkey.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, that is fun in that not only are you learning but then you’re learning what other people learned, which is connecting, like, “Oh, you’re interested in cooking turkeys. Now, I know that about you.” And I guess with Udemy, it’s also a bonus in that if they’re learning the Udemy courses, then they gain some exposure to the platform and the product and may gain some insights, like, “Huh, this course isn’t that good, so maybe we need to update it,” or whatever. Okay. Cool. So, I love it. Let’s have another one.

Erica Keswin
I think there are, again, when you think about that employee life cycle, like let’s talk about meetings because a lot of meetings suck. So, you can think about rituals as a way to connect people. Now, here’s something. Beginnings and endings are what I call prime rituals real estate.

So, beginnings and ending of a meeting, the beginning and ending of a project, pretty much the beginning and ending of anything. So, Eileen Fisher, for example, the clothing company, they ring a chime before every meeting. And so, what that does is it just settles people. It gives them this feeling of, “You know what, we’re going to be at this meeting. I’m going to take everything that had been going on, all the chaos in the outside world, try to get rid of it, and come in and focus on what I need to focus on.”

During the pandemic, and even now we’re still in the pandemic, really, there is the importance of checking in, like that became a ritual. And what was interesting was, in 2020, probably for a whole year, sometimes there were meetings where 16 minutes of a 60-minute meeting were spent checking in. And then a year later, maybe 30 minutes of a 30-minute meeting. And at some point, like we needed to also do work in these meetings.

So, people will say to me, “So, what’s a way to have a ritual in a meeting that helps you connect but we can’t do this all day?” So, a couple of examples there, one CEO shared they have something, they have people say either red light, green light, yellow light, and they just kind of share how they are feeling that day. And what that does, the goal is not to solve it in that moment, but if you’re the team leader and Pete says red light, later that day, you can call him up and say, “All right, what’s going on? How can we support you as a company, as a leader?”

So, again, sometimes very little things. And one last one that I’ll share, a colleague from Microsoft has a cool ritual. She changed jobs in the pandemic and really didn’t know her team that well, so every week at her team meeting, a different person shares their origin story, which I sort of loved the way that’s phrased. You can go in any direction with that but learning somebody’s origin story, like stuff that you would never know about them, again, it kind of takes you back to where our conversation started with the firefighters and how to really get to know people in a human way.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like and I was going to ask about the remote work piece there. Any pro tips, do’s and don’ts when it comes to thinking about things remotely? I don’t know if there’s any tricks or software, tools, that you really think are nifty when it comes to some of this connection remotely?

Erica Keswin
Yeah, you’ve got to be even more intentional. It’s hard and you need to have protocols on how this should work. So, it could be something as…none of it is easy but something like, for example, every time somebody…let’s say you’re going to go around and people are going to share where they’re green, red, or yellow. One leader shared that everybody goes around and shares a one-word adjective that describes how they’re showing up that day. Rotate. “So, Pete is in the office, you go. Erica, she’s remote, let’s switch off, every person, so that we’re all engaging in the same way.”

Some people will say, “You know what, for all the remote people, we’re going to have one person that’s in the room be the point of contact that if there’s any issues with the technology or anything going on, that there is one person that kind of has their phone out and knows that they’re going to be contacted if there are any issues.”

And building in time for people to chit-chat a little bit over the proverbial watercooler. Having protocols around technology and really reminding people, “You know what, this meeting, we expect our cameras to be on,” which, by the way, I think that’s important but I don’t think they need to be or should be on in every meeting because Zoom fatigue is real.

And so, it’s just being as explicit as you can to manage expectations and to create an environment that’s as welcoming and as inclusive as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I guess I’m also thinking about how not to do this because I think sometimes if folks think connection, they think, “Okay, we’ve got team building retreats, we’ve got trust falls, we’ve got ropes courses,” and I’ve had some good experiences with ropes courses myself but some people, they’re not a fan. So, how would you think about, when we say, “Okay, hey, connections are cool, rituals are cool. We want to do more of that. We’re excited”, what should we avoid doing as we’re getting some of this flowing?

Erica Keswin
So, I love that question because when I was writing the book and I asked people, “So, when do you feel most Chipotle-ish?” or fill in the blank-ish. What I was going to say next did not happen at Chipotle, for the record, but did happen in some other places. And the person I was talking to, all of a sudden, would look, get a little pale, and be like, “Ooh, God, I don’t know if I want to answer that question.” I’d say, “Why? What’s going on?” And they would say, “Well, now that you asked it that way, I feel like every time we come together and bond or do our ropes courses or whatever it is we do, we always do it over happy hour. We always do it when people are drinking, and that’s not going to work for everybody.”

And I had somebody come up to me afterwards, I had a talk one time, and said, “I just got out of rehab and this makes me feel really uncomfortable.” I had another company, when I asked them that question, “When do people feel most connected?” they realized that everything they do is either at night or maybe on a weekend when they were doing this bonding, and what about people that are taking care of elderly parents or need to pick up a kid from daycare? So, I do urge people to think about all the different ways that you connect through the lens of inclusivity.

And, again, it goes back to getting feedback from people around what’s working and not working. I am not anti-happy hour but it shouldn’t be the only way you come together.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense. And, likewise, just in terms of including folks, it could mean a number of things, like, “Hey, ropes course don’t work for this person because they have an injury of sorts or disability of sorts,” and so that won’t work, or they got the rehab with the alcohol, or just sort of the timing schedule.

Erica Keswin
Anything, yeah. Right. There’s a lot of different ways that something is not going to be inclusive. I like it when companies will also think about creating like a culture committee and get people to…LinkedIn does a great job of this. It’s a real honor and professional development opportunity to even be in the room to think about all of these different ways for people to connect and they rotate it. And so, you do, you want to get different people weighing in on these issues.

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

Erica Keswin
No, I think we got a lot of rituals in there, so it’s great.

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

Erica Keswin
One of my favorite quotes is a Louis Pasteur quote, which is, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” And, for me, I don’t like to leave things for chance. I’m a planner and I feel like I just like to live that quote, that “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

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

Erica Keswin
Well, since we’ve been talking about rituals for most, so I’ll share one of those. So, there was a study done, I call it the “Don’t Stop Believin’” study. Just my own name. I’ve made it up. A study out of Harvard was looking at two groups of people. They both went into a room. The first group went into the room and was told that they were going to have to sing karaoke to a bunch of strangers, and were told to go sit down and wait.

The second group was told that they were going to have to sing karaoke to a group of strangers but, while they were waiting, they were told to…they were given a piece of paper, and they were told to write down how they were feeling about what they were going to have to do. They were told to crumple up the piece of paper, sprinkle some salts on it, and throw the paper over their shoulder. And, again, the other group is just sitting in the room waiting.

And what the study looked at is both groups got up and sang their karaoke, and the study was looking at which one had higher performance, and that was measured by people being able to read the words on the screen for karaoke, number one. And, number two, when you are told, out of the blue, that you’re going to have to do something like that, sing karaoke, everybody’s heart rates spiked, went through the roof, which mine would, for sure.

But there was one group that was able to bring their heart rates down much more quickly, and that correlated with who was better to actually sing more accurately. And out of the two groups, I’ll ask you, which group do you think was able to bring their heart rate down more quickly?

Pete Mockaitis
The ones who are good at singing already?

Erica Keswin
No, the group that was given a ritual. The group that was asked not to just sit there. The group that was asked to actually write down how they were feeling, crumple up the paper, putting the salt on it, throwing the paper over their shoulder. And so, being connected, again, there’s no practical purpose for any of that, but being connected to something outside of themselves, it actually lowered their heart rates and they were able to perform better. And the reason why I call it the “Don’t Stop Believin’” study is that the song that they had to sing to the audience was the most downloaded song in iTunes history, which is “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Erica Keswin
Let’s see. Lately, I’ve been trying to read more fiction because I feel like I never had time to read fiction. I just read a great book called American Dirt, which I highly recommend.

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

Erica Keswin
Is an Oura Ring a tool where I track my sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Uh-huh.

Erica Keswin
I knew you’d be very jealous to know that I get a lot of 94s, 96s.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Erica Keswin
I’m like Fitbit people are very jealous.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m such a nut. I’ve got the Fitbit and the Oura Ring at the same time. I’m excited that the Oura Ring is going to be updating their sleep algorithm shortly to have even superior accuracy. And I will admit to refreshing their webpage more than once to see if it’s out yet. It’s not yet as of April 5th, 2022, but, anyway. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be more awesome at your job?

Erica Keswin
It’s my coffee ritual where I get a cup of coffee in the morning. Back in the day, I would sit there and have my coffee and do my to-do list and crank through my work, until one day, I realized that the coffee was gone and I hadn’t even tasted it, which kind of bummed me out because I’m really one-cup-a-day kind of girl, and at Starbucks it’s not cheap.

And that then went from becoming a habit to what is now my morning ritual where I sit and, instead of just working away through my morning coffee, I sit there and put the coffee and feel the heat from the mug in my hands, take a few deep breaths. Rituals are very associated with our senses. And so, that is what I do and it helps me start the day.

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

Erica Keswin
Yes. I would say the soft stuff is really the hard stuff and the most important stuff.

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

Erica Keswin
To my website, EricaKeswin.com. It has my books and a lot of articles I’ve written, podcasts that I’ve been on, and you could check out my Instagram which is just my name. LinkedIn is always a great spot as well.

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

Erica Keswin
I would say everything that we’ve spoken today about rituals at work ring true for rituals in your personal lives. And these days, to be awesome at your job, you also need to take care of yourself and put the proverbial oxygen mask on yourself and really focus on wellness because there’s a tremendous amount of burnout right now.

And so, I guess I would challenge you, and a great place to start is to ask yourself, “What do you do in your life that makes you feel most like you?” And that’s a great place to start to incorporate some of your own rituals into your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Erica, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your connection and rituals and fun.

Erica Keswin
Thank you so much. Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too.