Pete Mockaitis
Andrea, welcome to the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Hi, Pete. How are you today?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m well. I’m well. I’m excited to dig into your story and your wisdom. But, first, I want to hear, there’s an interesting backstory to your name of which we practiced the pronunciation several times beforehand. What’s the story?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, Wanerstrand is my husband’s name. I took on his clan name, if you will, and he is the only American citizen in his family. It is a Swedish name. It’s actually Lake Warner which is the largest lake, and strand is shore in Swedish. And, yes, I was dating him for about a year before I could even spell it properly or pronounce it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. Well, I don’t think that’ll be hard but I will, I’ll call you nice things and we’re going to hear some nice things, talking about coaching, and coaching cultures, and the benefits, and your Microsoft story, but maybe let’s zoom out to fundamentals. At the core, can you tell us how and why coaching boosts performance?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, at its core, the technique of coaching really is drawing on the wisdom within the individual that already exists. It holds them whole, capable, and resourceful and it allows curiosity to come forth. And it’s a technique that each of us can use to really help those around us get clear with their objectives, get clear with what they want to accomplish, and get clear in understanding how capable they really are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds like some great stuff. And I’ve experienced that on both sides of the coaching table, I guess, as a coacher, just the coach, the coach or the coachee. And so, can we put maybe some numbers on this? I know that there’s a human capital report with ICF that you’ve done some work with. Could you lay the case out in terms of benefits for individuals and organizations and figures? What are we seeing?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, ICF actually has come out with some even more recent studies but what we definitely see is that managers and leaders, and particular in organizations, that show up more coach-like outperform their colleagues and they’ll see it in the work health index in double digits, if you will. So, many companies and managers have employee polls as to how supportive their manager is or how effective their managers are.

So, the industry itself, at large, shows that when managers and leader, and us as individuals with our teams, show up more curious and show up more coach-like, i.e., we’re not asking folks in business necessarily all become professional coaches, but what the survey show, as well as the research data, is that you will see greater performance and greater autonomy across your teams when you enable them through the power of coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And for those who are not as familiar, what is the work health index?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Work health index, that’s a great question. So, in many corporations, there is an employee poll, asking questions of like, “Does your manager coach you? Do you feel supported? Do you see yourself advancing in this organization?” And so, it’s really about the health of the organization. And this is a global type of measurement, managers are often measured to the score that they get in that. And what we find is those that we have taught to be more coach-like score significantly higher and have more engagement with their employees.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I imagine the work health index and engagement figures are then, in turn, linked to all sorts of other great outcomes in terms of people have more creative ideas, they stick around longer instead of trying to jump ship as soon as they can, etc.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, absolutely. What you see is retention. You see actually greater business outcomes. So, it’s really when folks feel empowered, when folks feel confident, they’ll achieve greater results. And so, depending on what industry or business you’re in, the power of being more coach-like with your team, if you’re a project manager or if you’re a people person, people leader, if you will, the results are very similar in the fact that when you enable innovation and creativity through the power of coaching, you’re going to get extraordinary results compared to those that perhaps don’t embrace a growth mindset. And we look at curiosity as the underpinning of a growth mindset, and the lever for curiosity in organizations is coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Growth mindset, to curiosity, to coaching, I see that channel pathway. It makes some good sense to me. And so, I’d love to get your sense for maybe beyond the numbers and the conceptual. What do you see, hear, feel on the ground level in terms of individual contributors and manager’s experiences at Microsoft? Like, have any benefits sort of surprised you or things that you’ve heard folks say and make you go, “Oh, I guess that’s also great from coaching”?

Andrea Wanerstrand
What I’ve found is that many of our sales folks, their individual contributors in the organization, they’re using the curiosity with their customers. So, Microsoft, in particular, was a very licensed transactional company for many, many years, and then we moved into the solutions world as we moved to the cloud. And in that, you have to understand what your customer is going through, what their needs are, how you can help them.

And the power of coaching such as, “What’s on your mind?” or, “What’s the real challenge going on here?” and showing up with curiosity has allowed the connection with our customers to be accelerated, it takes less time to actually get to something that’s something actionable and has an outcome for our sellers when they deploy these types of techniques with our customers. So, there’s that.

Our managers, as they’re becoming more coach-like, they’ve upped their capability to be able to identify in the moment, you can coach in 10 minutes or less. It’s just being more coach-like. They’ve upped their capability for identifying coaching moments when, really, that individual just needs a confidence boost rather than being told what to do.

And so, we’re seeing results on both sides of the coin, if you will. Our individual contributors are utilizing the techniques of being more coach-like and utilizing the growth mindset with our customers. And then, also, even managers are using it with their teams. And there’s a cascading effect when the manager uses it and the employee uses it, and then the customer benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, benefits all around. Well, then, having established that, folks are buying, “Okay, that sounds cool. Let’s bring it on,” can you share with us the story in terms of how did this come to be in terms of start at the beginning? What happened with Microsoft that led us to embark on this coaching journey? How did the narrative kind of unfold there?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Sure. I don’t think it’s any surprise that Microsoft at one point in our history, and not so long ago, was considered kind of the old school. You would see the Apple commercials against the Microsoft commercials where the Apple was the new sleek device and Microsoft was looking a little dated, right? We also, as I mentioned, we’re more transaction. We sold licenses to software but we’ve had to evolve our model. And now we are a solutions company and our mission has changed from putting physical devices on every desktop in the world to empowering everyone across the globe to achieve more.

And so, in order to have something big and bold like that, you’ve really got to embrace a different mindset. And when Satya Nadella came into our leadership, he really set the tone of what is a growth mindset and how is that different than how we’ve thought about before. And this is moving that dial from a know-it-all culture where we were the only game in town for a very long time, to, “Now we have competition. And how do we differentiate ourselves? And how do we expand and think of what is needed next as you saw marketplaces expanding?”

Things like Uber didn’t exist back then. Airbnb. We had classical definitions of what is a large account, and then you had these magical unicorns that were coming out left and right and using technology and innovation. So, that growth mindset as our cultural north star became very important. And in order to really foster the north star, one of my favorite quotes is Marshall Goldsmith’s “What got you here won’t get you there,” and so we really had to look at, “How do we scale?” We were not adding on people so, “How do you scale through others? How do you add on and accelerate?”

And the power of coaching, really that activation of curiosity and empowering a growth mindset, was the trigger that we thought was necessary. So, for the last few years, we’ve really been dedicated to expanding our leaders as well as our frontline salespeople with our curiosity through coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you paint a picture for sort of what’s the current state in terms of coaching at Microsoft? I mean, it is expansive. Can you lay it out for us, like, where and how all is coaching being deployed?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Absolutely. So, we have some training efforts that we’ve done for our managers. In fact, all people managers at Microsoft are required over the next year to complete our core coaching habit training that we’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that the Michael Bungay Stanier coaching habit?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Yes, it is based on Michael Bungay Stanier’s work. We partnered with Michael and created a course within Microsoft that we have as an interactive course. It’s on what they call a MOOC platform, massively open online course. And it allows for folks to do micro-learnings, so bite-sized learning, as well as practice and cohorts, how to be more coach-like, and then actually go apply every week.

So, we created that with Michael a little over two years ago now. We launched it two years ago this January 2021. And from that as a baseline, we’ve now trained 93% of our global sales and marketing organization managers and 33% of all Microsoft managers as well as another 5,000 and growing individual contributors in our sales and marketing organization. So, it’s becoming a common language on the questions that we use, the Facebook question, “What’s on your mind?” that Michael kicks off with everybody. He calls it his kick-starter question.

But we also have melded that with our Microsoft values and our manager expectations of model, coach, and care. So, we’ve had that going, as I stated, about two years now. We also have ongoing kind of neuroscience reinforcement going on, I believe, in the power of social cognitive theory, which means at its simplest form, “I’m more up to do it if I see you doing it too.” And so, we have mechanisms in place to constantly be a drumbeat, if you will, to help people show up and be more coach-like.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. And then, so if…wow, 93% of sales and marketing, people managers, and then a third plus of all managers are there. To what extent do you engage with, I guess, hired guns or coaching pros as well?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Certainly. So, we look at coaching through three modalities, and this goes back to the Human Capital Institute’s research from 2016 with the International Coach Federation. We look at coaching as a service, which you’re talking about. We look at coaching as a capability that I just shared, so this, like manager and employee training on how to be more coach-like. And then a third one is coaching champions.

Let’s talk about what you called the hired gun but we call it coaching for service. Generally, this is done in a lot of organizations. Outside, external coaches are hired. They’re either hired to help a high-performer that is going to accelerate their work or sometimes it’s brought for a situation to do some course correction.

At Microsoft, we have certainly those traditional programs in place. We also look at democratizing coaching, i.e., letting it be available for different purposes throughout the organization. We’ve done some coaching on your coaching, bringing in external coaches for our managers. We’ve run a coach training program.

So, in particular, the coaching as a service is still a standard format for modality of coaching in our organization and we’ve gone deep in the last two years with coaching as a capability. And then we have a beautiful group of champions of coaching. And these are champions that are of being more coach-like in the capability section, as well as there’s over 200 and growing certified professional coaches across Microsoft that just happen to be coaches on top of their regular Microsoft day job and they all show up with a passion for curiosity and championing that throughout the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really cool. And so then, that sounds like a substantial investment and so, globally speaking, so there’s reports speaking to the benefit impact of coaching in terms of the worker health index and engagement. How does Microsoft go about measuring the ROI? And, to the extent that you’re at liberty to share, does it look good?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, the great news is that we are seeing that year-over-year trending increasing. When we launched in January of 2019, it was right before our first employee pulse poll and so we really had a great baseline, and we are seeing year-over-year so we hope to see the trend completing. It is a journey though. Even in professional coaching, you start off in the International Coach Federation where you go through 60 hours of training, and then you get a 100 hours’ worth of actual application, and then you can finally test to be a professional coach.

And then you’re an associate and you need to now gather more hours to actually become a professional level. And then you need to gather a thousand more hours to become the master coach. The same applies when you’re doing coaching as a culture within an organization, asking managers and employees to have a growth mindset and be more coach-like. It is a journey.

And so, the great news is we see year-over-year improvement, and our managers are able to identify coaching moments, they understand what’s the difference between telling and actually coaching, and they’re learning to integrate it.

And so, again, we’re working through, “How do you integrate that into your everyday conversations? How do you keep the habit consistently and be able to show up as curious as possible, especially under stress?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess when I’m thinking about ROI, I’m specifically thinking sort of dollars in and estimates of dollars value created. That’s hard to do, estimates, assumptions. But how is that shaking out?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Yeah. So, now you’re going to ask me for some Microsoft specifics that I can’t give you all the exact details on but we are seeing significant acceleration in key teams, if you will, and all teams. But, in particular, when you look at those from an ROI, our folks are able to be differentiated and be able to change from where they were before and now accelerate the business.

So, I’m not at liberty to share the Microsoft physical numbers for you, but when I look at perhaps a team that did not…maybe was challenged in meeting their numbers before, and through adapting to a growth mindset, taking on being more coach-like, we are seeing year-over-year change and in the positive direction for them achieving the business results and, in many cases, exceeding the business results. We see numbers of managers that were perhaps more micromanaging doing more empowerment of their teams.

So, while I can’t give you a dollar amount, I can tell you that it is significant and it is of a nature that we see immediate business results. And if we weren’t, our senior leadership would not have embraced it, nor would they have made it a requirement for every manager in the company over the next year or two, again, this is a journey, to get trained on how to understand the techniques that can enable autonomy and empower your teams.

Pete Mockaitis
And if memory serves, the last time I looked at Microsoft’s financials on the revenue side, where the sales and marketing folks are getting lots of coaching love, it looks really nice. So, of course, there’s many variables of work but I guess we’ll leave it at that.

All right. Well, so then let’s really zoom in here. So, we have, was it, you said maybe 6,000 plus, was it, individual contributors have directly benefited and experienced some of this coaching goodness. Is that right?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, 6,000 of the individual contributors have actually gone through the coaching programs themselves so they could become coaches.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s huge.

Andrea Wanerstrand
And all employees, hopefully, in Microsoft, as we get our 16,000 plus managers through this, will hopefully benefit from the actual coaching techniques that we’re teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, that’s the perfect segue. Let’s talk about these actual coaching techniques. So, we’ve had Michael Bungay Stanier on the show a couple of times, and I love his stuff, so, listeners, I recommend you check out those episodes. But you’ve seen it firsthand many times over. Can you share with us, what some of the top do’s and don’ts for being more coach-like? Are there some favorite tips, tricks, scripts, questions? If we want to go do that, what should we do?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Absolutely. So, first and foremost, if you want to understand the simple techniques of how to be coach-like, as far as coaching in the verb coaching, okay, versus being coach-like, Michael’s book The Coaching Habit and his The Advice Trap, his follow-up, where he talks about the three advice monsters so you can understand kind of the mental aspects and then the simple techniques, absolutely, absolutely highly recommend that.

Additionally, when we look at it in a business context, coaching is one of the techniques that we all have in our quiver. So, when we talk about showing up with a coach mindset, there’s an aspect of discernment that we ask each of us to have. And we all do it naturally as humans in conversations. You’re trying to understand, “Does the other person understand the concepts that I want to talk about?” so you’ll do a little bit of inquiry and you’ll move through that. You might do a form of evaluation. And you might actually realize that what you need to talk with the individual about is something that’s new to them or the challenge is really steep so you might have to do a little teaching.

But you might also need to give someone some feedback, and you can do that in a way where you’re looking at some missed opportunities or maybe positive reinforcement for a colleague on the team, and you can still be more coach-like in doing that. So, we talk about the techniques of “What was most helpful or useful here for you?” We ask the questions that Michael puts forth of “How can I help?” where you put the onus on the other individual to ask for what they want rather than you telling them what you can give, and you’re still a choice. We also have this aspect of mentoring where folks can learn from your scars that somebody can tread down the path and go past that.

So, for an individual with a coach mindset, we really look at not only the strong empowering technique of coaching, which is that folks can learn the most from self-discovery. We also encourage our colleagues to really embrace teaching, mentoring, and feedback, and learn how to do that in an integrated fashion to have the most efficient conversation that you can have that also is the most caring and empathetic conversation that you can have.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. The most efficient, also the most caring and empathetic. Can you say more about that?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Absolutely. So, in today’s world, more than ever in the current conditions, we are all stressed for time. We also are back-to-back to back-to-back, and I’ve heard over and over again, “I don’t have time to give them feedback,” or, “I don’t have time to coach.” But if we can show up curious with everyone we encounter, and, yes, I mean everyone, including your bank clerk or the grocery clerk that you’re giving your card to, to buy today’s groceries, the more you can show up curious in those micro moments, the more you’re showing up with empathy and connection to others versus overthinking or trying to solve the problems.

If you can really show up with curiosity, and let curiosity drive where you need to have your conversation go, and use the power of discernment, you will have a more efficient conversation, i.e., you can get more done in less time, and get to the heart of a challenge faster than when you jump in and try to give advice or try to solve it for someone else, that often becomes all about you rather than about them. And in empathy, it’s very similar. It’s all about them, it’s not about you. When we have sympathy, it’s about us. When it’s empathy, it’s about them. So, they really go hand in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if we could do just maybe a couple minutes of demo here in terms of let’s say there’s a situation, and you can make one up, or I’d make one up, like, I’m a salesperson and I haven’t been hitting my figures lately. Or, if there’s another scenario you’d like to run with, we can do that. And so, can we see it sort of both ways in terms of the coach-like approach that you’d endorse and the not-so-coach-like approach that you’d recommend we try to steer away from?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, Pete, let’s do this. I’m happy to step in and show you what coaching looks like and what coaching doesn’t look like. Let’s do this. Pete, what’s a real challenge that you have right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a real challenge I’m having is just our kids sleeping and me sleeping. They’re almost three and almost two, so we got two of them, right now. And, yeah, I guess I would love it if they did a better job of sleeping through the night or if I did a better job of falling back asleep when they holler for a minute and then fall back asleep themselves.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Oh, I could hear you. You know, having young ones, you don’t get sleep. I’ve got some great books that you could take a look at as far as like really some great ideas for sleep techniques. I don’t know if you’ve tried any sleep techniques. Have you tried some sleep techniques for the kids?

Pete Mockaitis
I have on my very desk Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems by Dr. Richard Ferber, so, yeah.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Oh, okay. Well, that’s a good one. I’ve tried a few of them but when my kid was younger but it really sometimes you just got to do that tough love and let them just get to sleep. Have you tried that one?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think we’ve made some headway in terms of the screaming is rarer and shorter, so that’s improvement. But, yeah, I guess, in the here and now, it just feels like a lot.

Andrea Wanerstrand
I hear you. I hear you. And it’s hard to hear those little ones. All right. So, everything I just did right there was not coaching. All right. So, first and foremost, I did maybe ask you, “What have you tried?” but I went right into what are some of the solutions I’ve used or I could’ve used, or like, “There’s experts out there.” So, let’s take two on that. Let’s see if we can have a different conversation on that.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. And I’ll just chime in that it didn’t feel great in terms of, I mean, it wasn’t like horrible but I didn’t walk away…and the experience of it wasn’t like, “Oh, boy, Andrea really cares about me. She gets me. She’s connecting.” It was just kind of surface level, I guess, maybe in terms of any stranger might engage me at that level.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Yeah. And even then, it’s not like a great feeling stranger either, is it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it’s not horrible, it’s just sort of like, “Yeah, okay. Well, hmm.” It’s like weather, it’s like, “All right, we could talk about the weather. It’s sort of what we’re doing here.”

Andrea Wanerstrand
Yup. And especially because I went in and I made it about myself, right? So, let’s try this a little bit differently. Hey, Pete, you shared with me that you’ve got some challenges going on with getting the little ones to sleep. What’s going on with that today?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, today, my sweet wife did the hard work last night and I was in a different location doing some better sleep. But it’s funny, it’s sort of like it’s followed me a little bit in terms of it’s like my body almost thinks it’s normal to wake up in the middle of the night, or maybe like at 5:00 instead of a 7:00 that I was going for, it’s like, “Aargh,” and I wanted to fall back asleep but I couldn’t quite so I said, “I guess I’ll clean the bathroom.”

Andrea Wanerstrand
I hear you. It really can play with your body clock as far as what’s night versus day. What are some of the things that you and your wife are doing to try to get some normalcy or some type of pattern going?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’ve gotten a lot more rigid in terms of, “This is the wakeup time and the nap time and the bedtime. And you may scream out for any number of comforts but those are no longer going to be provided to you, so learn to comfort yourself better.”

Andrea Wanerstrand
And how does that feel when you’re doing it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s hard. It’s harder for my wife than for me. I think it can be a little better being heartless but, yeah, man, hearing your beloved child yell for five plus minutes is tricky even with the earplugs in.

Andrea Wanerstrand
What’s the plan to, you know, we talked about today? What’s the plan for tomorrow and the rest of the week?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re going to kind of just sort of keep at it and I guess that’s sort of the hope is that we have seen improvements. And if we keep on trucking, the hope is that we’ll enter the Promised Land here of everyone is sleeping adequately most nights. So, it’s not really innovative of a plan. It’s just kind of like stay the course and I guess tiny refinements, like, “Oh, maybe a night light would be good in terms of providing some comfort that doesn’t require any intervention from us later on,” or, “Maybe the time-release melatonin will give me what I need to fall back asleep if I wake up at 4:00.” And it kind of has so that seems to be the thing. Going the course and minute adjustments.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, it’s an ever-changing time when you have children and, especially, at that age so staying the course, trying little new things. How can I be of further help for you today in this discussion?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you can be forgiving if I say, “Huh? What?” and need to repeat yourself.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, I’m here anytime you want to chat or talk about it and just hum, “Yeah. What?” So, I appreciate our time together. I look forward to our next sync. And then off you go. And then how did that feel versus our first?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, it’s more pleasant and I think I don’t see you but I think I heard a smile coming through, which is appreciated. Thank you. And it’s interesting, like it’s true, you didn’t…well, in either conversation did you give me sort of an quote-unquote answer, like, “This has nothing to do…” But in the second conversation, I walked away with more hope in terms of, “You know what, yeah, it’s unpleasant at the moment but we are on the path and we’re just going to keep on rocking. And it’s not a crisis that I have to solve so much as just sort of breathe and keep calm and carry on.”

Andrea Wanerstrand
Yeah. And let’s acknowledge that we’re doing this in front of 20,000 plus people that might be listening to this and so it’s a bit more filtered but it was the aspect of what you’re doing and reflecting on what you’re doing, and that you’re staying the course. And if you’re feeling good about staying the course and there wasn’t anything detrimental to you or the child or whatever, it was my job to encourage you.

And every coaching conversation looks different but the main thing between our conversation A versus this conversation B is I didn’t offer up any specific suggestions. I didn’t, in the second one, tell you what I’ve done. I might’ve empathized and said, “Yeah, it’s tough to have young kids.” And that’s where we, as colleagues, can really show up for each other.

And if I was doing a professional coaching session with you, I probably would’ve been going deeper with you, and we would’ve traversed maybe some other challenges, like, with curiosity, I was like, “Okay, so why is your wife having a harder time than you with this there?” But, again, staying in curiosity, helping the other individual for self-discovery for them, “What’s going on?” to empower them, to have hope, to not be closing down and feeling hopeless, those are the attributes of powerful coaching that can, even with two people who’ve never really chatted before, because you and I haven’t really had in-depth conversations prior to today, you can still instill some hope in somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, you’re good at coaching, and I’d love to get your take on what are some of the top resources you’d recommend for folks looking to improve their coaching skills? Any frameworks, books, tools? You’d mentioned Michael Bungay Stanier’s couple of books as being excellent. Anything else you’d point us to?

Andrea Wanerstrand
I think, from a coaching technique, if you’re looking to be more coach-like, Michael Bungay Stanier’s The Coaching Habit and The Advice Trap are excellent. If you want to learn more about the powers of a growth mindset and how curiosity does that, Carol Dweck’s Mindset. And, also, there’s a couple other favorite books I have out there. Everything is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo. It really talks about creativity, figuring things out. The Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani. I think I said that right. He’s the founder of Mindvalley, and he really challenges what he calls the brules. And I’ll let you guys go out and look out at what brules are, with a B.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s going to be on the show shortly so it’s going to be there.

Andrea Wanerstrand
And then I just finished reading Undaunted by Kara Goldin. She’s the founder and CEO of Hint. It’s a niche market beverage industry, and she really showed that grit and determination as an underdog for coming into a really established market and what you can do about it. So, coaching is a technique and it’s a powerful technique. And when you combine that with a growth mindset and coming in and being curious, you really open up the opportunities for yourself and those around you to really do some extraordinary things.

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

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, I think I mentioned it earlier. It’s, “What got you here won’t get you there,” by our friend Marshall Goldsmith. And the reason I’m a big fan about it is when we keep going back and trying the old ways, it doesn’t allow us to adapt to today’s environment or tomorrow’s environment. And while there are some stated true methods in the world, the world we live in is constantly changing. So, what got you here won’t get you there.

Pete Mockaitis
And we talked about some favorite books, so how about some favorite tools, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, I work for Microsoft, my friend, so I have to say my Microsoft tools.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Well, Teams, in particular. Teams has been lifesaving for my distributed teams, physical teams, that is, across the globe. And I have the privilege of working with people all across, about a hundred somewhat countries now, so my favorite tool these days is Microsoft Teams.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Andrea Wanerstrand
Oh, meditation. Every day. Queen’s University in Canada really did some interesting new research into the brain, and it’s something like we have more than 6,000 thoughts in a single day. And so, for me, I do transcendental meditation. And, for me, it’s a way to really kind of follow my thoughts and organize myself and kind of get to that deeper level of thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share with others that folks quote back to you frequently?

Andrea Wanerstrand
It’s “Lead before you manage.” It’s all about that extraordinary leaders whether you’re an individual contributor or a people manager. It’s not in the doing; it’s in the being that differentiates you. But if you’re going to do, do you.

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

Andrea Wanerstrand
LinkedIn for Andrea Wanerstrand or my website AndreaWanerstrand.com.

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

Andrea Wanerstrand
I would encourage folks to embrace the power of a growth mindset. And I, literally, challenge you to show up curious with everyone you encounter in the next 24 hours, and that includes anyone you run into, anyone you talk to on the phone, anyone you send an email to, that you just might learn something extraordinary about that other individual.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Andrea, this has been a treat. Thank you so much and we wish you all the best in your coaching adventures.

Andrea Wanerstrand
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate you having me.

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

Mike Robbins
Pete, thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. And, right now, you do speaking and consulting on high-performance teams, but in a previous career, you played baseball. What’s the story here?

Mike Robbins
I did. I did. Are you much of a baseball fan?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’ve enjoyed attending some games in my day, but I don’t follow much of anything sports.

Mike Robbins
Hey, it’s all good, man. Baseball is an acquired taste, so to speak. I grew up in here in the San Francisco Bay Area where I still live, and played baseball as a kid. I actually got drafted out of high school by the New York Yankees. Didn’t end up signing with the Yankees because I got a chance to play baseball in college at Stanford, and then got drafted out of Stanford by the Kansas City Royals and signed a contract.

And the way it works in baseball, you get drafted by a major league team like the Yankees or the Royals or the Cubs or any of the other teams in the major leagues, you have to go into the minor leagues, which I did. And I was working my way up, trying to get to the major leagues. Unfortunately, I was a pitcher and I went out to pitch one night, I threw one pitch, and tore ligaments in my elbow and blew my arm out when I was 23 after starting when I was seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man.

Mike Robbins
I know. And then three years, two surgeries, and a lot of time later, I finally was forced to retire from baseball. But, you know, learned a ton, it was definitely disappointing the way that it ended, but, ultimately, went into the dotcom world in the late ‘90s, had a couple different jobs working for some tech companies, and realized, which I didn’t know going in, that there were going to be a lot of similarities particularly from sort of a team and performance standpoint that were somewhat similar in baseball that were similar in business, and that’s actually what prompted me to start my consulting business almost 20 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. And, yeah, pitching, man, it looks violent what’s happening to the arm.

Mike Robbins
Yes, not a natural motion. Not what you’re supposed to do with your arm over and over and over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you’re feeling okay and you landed on your feet, and that’s good news. So, let’s talk about some high-performance team stuff. Just to kick it off, what would you say is maybe one of the most surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about high-performance teams?

Mike Robbins
Well, I think one of the things I realized early on, and again this goes back to my sports days, is it’s not always the most talented teams that are the most successful. Obviously, you need some talent, right? But anybody listening to us, whether you manage a team, or you work within a team, or have been on any team in your life, you may notice it’s not always when you have a team of rock stars that that ultimately makes the team the best.

I often ask when I’m speaking to groups and teams and leaders, Pete, I’ll say, “How many of you have ever been a part of a team where the talent of the team was good but the team didn’t perform very well?” and whether I’m speaking like I was six or eight months ago in front of an actual live group of people or we’re on Zoom or Skype, most people will raise their hands or nod affirmatively. And then I’ll say, “But on the flipside, have you ever been a part of a team where it wasn’t like every single person on the team, in and of themselves, was a superstar but something about the team just worked?” and, again, just about everybody can relate to that.

So, again, we all kind of know this but we think, and, again, a lot of managers and leaders that I worked with, or companies, were trying to hire the best and the brightest, which is important, but, ultimately, there’s something that happens when groups of people come together. And so, high-performing teams is about, yeah, we have to have a certain level of talent, but people need to understand their roles and it’s really about the relationships amongst the team members and the level of commitment or engagement the people have to the work that has a lot more to do than the actual talent of the individuals on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that totally resonates. And maybe could you maybe get us going here by sharing an inspiring story of a team that went from, okay, doing fine to really kicking it into high gear when they adopted some of your best practices?

Mike Robbins
Yeah. Well, a lot of examples. I think of there’s one team that I worked with a number of years ago and they, as a team, this was at Adobe, great technology company, great software company, and I’ve been doing a lot of work with Adobe, and the leader of this team actually changed, so the team members were all the same. But I’d worked with this leader, she was with another team, she took over the team. And what was interesting, so, again, none of the team members changed, and it took a little while at first, and part of what she really implemented was, “Hey, we need to communicate more authentically, be even more vulnerable with each other, be willing to fail.”

And a lot of times when a new leader starts with a team, everybody is a little bit on edge, everybody is a little bit walking on egg shells, wanting to impress the new boss. And one of the first sessions that she did with the team, and I wrote about this actually in my book Bring Your Whole Self to Work that came out a few years ago, but she did a series of sessions and had me help facilitate some of them where people really got real. She started, one of the things she said was, “I’m not sure I should’ve taken this job. Like, it’s a promotion for me but I really like the team that I was with before,” and sort of set a tone for, “We’re going not try to perform for each other, meaning impress each other, we’re going to perform with each other.”

And this team that was doing pretty well and had some pretty good talent went to a whole other level over the next year by really building a deeper sense of trust and communication. And, ultimately, what we call and what we now know as called psychological safety which basically means there’s trust at the group level, the team is safe enough for people to speak up, admit mistakes, ask for what they want, take risks, even fail not that we want to but we know we’re not going to get shamed or ridiculed or kicked out of the group for doing that.

And I’ve seen that over the years so many times with teams and with leaders, a willingness to really go there, a willingness to understand, as my most recent book is called We’re All in This Together, that we’re all in this thing together. Again, this idea of performing with each other as opposed to trying to impress each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think it’s great distinction right there, performing with instead of performing for. And so, you’ve got sort of four pillars of a culture of high performance, and the first one is psychological safety. So, that’s come up a few times on the show, and for those who don’t know, could you give us the quick definition? And then maybe just share with some of the best and worst practices. I think there are some subtle ways we erode psychological safety. I’d love it if you could flag some for us.

Mike Robbins
Oh, for sure. Well, again, psychological safety, basically, the way I think about it, I had a chance actually to interview Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School, she’s basically the world’s leading expert in psychological safety. And it’s group trust. Again, it means the group norms are setup in such a way that we know when we’re on a team with psychological safety, as I was saying before, we’re not going to get shamed or ridiculed or kicked out of the group for simply having a different opinion or making a mistake.

And trust is more of a one-to-one phenomenon, Pete. So, you and I can have trust with each other or not. That trust can get broken. It can get restored. Psychological safety is more, “How much, if we’re part of a team, how much trust do we feel that the team exhibits as a team, as an entity, so to speak?” And so, one of the things that’s really important in how you can build more psychological safety, if you happen to manage a team or be the leader of a team, is, like that example I mentioned, this leader from Adobe who since has left and she’s now at Intuit, but she really was able to show up in a way that she was vulnerable with her team. She was willing to share how she was really feeling, admit mistakes, admit whatever was going on, as I like to say, down below the water line, if you will, of the iceberg. That can help create more psychological safety.

Also, whether you’re in a management position or not, how we respond both as a leader and as team members when something doesn’t go well, when there’s a failure. So, that’s a moment, often I say, “Look, nobody likes to fail, teams don’t like to go through stress, but almost every team is these days especially, but how you respond to those moments can either make or break how much psychological safety there is.”

An example being somebody doesn’t deliver on a project or doesn’t perform at a certain level, how is that responded to? Is it dealt with directly but is it also dealt with in a way that is respectful of the human beings involved? Again, if we get called out, which isn’t always a bad thing, but if I know I’m going to make a mistake, let’s say, Pete, that you’re the boss, and I screw something up and you chew me out in front of the team, maybe even I deserved it to some degree, but that’s probably going to have me and everybody else go, “Uh-oh, don’t screw something up around Pete because he’s going to jump down your throat.”

On the flipside, not that we’re going to sugarcoat it, or people have to be grownups, but if I make a mistake and it gets handled in a way but you deal with it directly but respectfully, now that sends the tone to the rest of the team, “Hey, you know what, this didn’t work out the way we wanted to, but we’re really glad, Mike, that you brought that forward, you took that risk, even though you failed. Let’s do more of that.” It’s like, “Okay,” well, then that reinforces, “Hey, we can take risks and make some mistakes,” and now that sort of sets that tone amongst the team members.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that so much and, boy, I’m having a flashback, and it was in my early with my first project with Bain, I think, they thought, “Hey, this guy is an intern so he can handle a lot of hard work and challenging stuff.” And so, I was in charge of this giant Excel business and I was making some mistakes and it’s creating some embarrassment, and it was very uncomfortable, and sure learned a lot.

Mike Robbins
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But I remember I was having a chat with Brett, we’re having a little sort of a little mid-point feedback check-in, and I knew what I was doing wrong, and I’d started to make some improvements. But I just loved the way he set the tone, he said, “Well, you know, it’s just work.”

Mike Robbins
That’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Hey, we’re safe, we’re healthy, and the project is still going. But, yeah, we got some things we got to focus in on.”

Mike Robbins
That’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
And I really appreciated it. And even when you feel like you’ve screwed up about as bad as you can, you can bring some humanity and some comfort into those situations.

Mike Robbins
It’s true. And I think that’s an important distinction. Look, one of the things that happens, and I see this a lot in Silicon Valley and with a lot of tech companies, but just companies in general that want to be progressive, we want to have a really positive working environment, is that I think sometimes we err on the side of being nice versus kind. Nice is often sugarcoating, withholding, not really addressing it. Kind is where we have a sense of kindness, a sense of empathy, a sense of compassion, maybe even some levity and some humor. But, again, if somebody makes a mistake, it’s important that we address it.

I remember actually years ago at Stanford, I remember pitching really bad, and my pitching coach said to me, “You know what? Well, there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” And I said, “How about the good news?” He said, “The good news is there’s a billion people in China that don’t know that you just pitched like you know what, right?” He said, “The bad news is we got some things to work on.”

And, again, to your point, it sounds like your example from Bain, I think there’s a way in which we can address issues and challenges, and even failures. Amy Edmondson from Harvard said to me, she said, one of the things she wishes about psychological safety is that we had maybe named it something else because sometimes people hear this concept of like safe space, meaning like you can’t say anything negative. She said, “That’s not like it at all. Teams that have a lot of psychological safety really have a lot of give and take, and there’s a lot of open, honest dialogue and debate and conflict, and challenging each other. It’s just we know it’s safe enough to do that.”

When I work with a team, Pete, and people say, “Oh, well, no one ever…there’s never a conflict. We never have any issues,” I’m like, “Okay, somebody’s lying and/or it’s not safe enough to do that.” So, those are the things that we can see. Even at home, sometimes my wife and I, we have two girls who are 14 and 12, and the girls will really get into each other, say stuff to us, and I’ll say to my wife, “Look, we do need to teach them about ways to communicate respectfully, of course, but the fact that they feel safe enough to speak up to each other, to us, is actually a sign that there’s something healthy going on here, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t say anything.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, let’s talk about the second pillar then, focus on inclusion and belonging. What do you mean by this?

Mike Robbins
Yeah. Well, look, this is so important. I wrote We’re All in This Together last year and finished up writing the book in the fall, and didn’t know it was going to come out in the midst of a global pandemic on top of sort of a national and somewhat global reckoning around racial injustice in our country, specifically in America. But what I’d seen so, look, diversity has a lot to do with representation, right? And we may or may not be in a position where we’re hiring or we’re the people making the decisions on who gets hired. What we do know from all the research is that racially-diverse and gender-diverse teams perform better than teams that aren’t diverse.

But what I really focus on in this particular pillar in the book is on inclusion and belonging, which we have a lot to do with whether we’re making hiring decisions or not. And inclusion is about, really, doing anything and everything we can in our power to make sure we’re not overtly excluding people, particularly people who come from non-dominant groups. Myself being a straight white, cis-gender man, looking at, “Okay, how am I communicating? How am I operating? How am I thinking? What am I doing? What am I saying?” for anybody who’s a woman, a person of color or identifies as part of one or any minority group, it’s trying to, as best we can when we’re in positions of power or authority, do things and say things and be mindful and be open to feedback so we’re not excluding people consciously or unconsciously.

But even deeper than inclusion, as important as it is, what we’re ultimately trying to get to is a place of belonging. And what we know from Maslow’s Hierarchy, and so many other things, is that belonging is a fundamental human need. Everybody has a need to belong. And so, from a leadership position, but also from a team perspective, whatever we can do to create an environment where people feel as much as possible like they belong, the more engaged they’re going to be, the better they’re going to perform, and the more trust.

I mean, psychological safety comes first but we got to focus on inclusion and belonging because they’re so fundamental to so many aspects of success, especially in today’s world.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’d love to hear a bit about the how there. I’ve certainly been in environments where I felt very comfortable, it’s like, “Oh, yes, I belong here and it’s great.” It’s sort of like, I guess, in my experience it’s sort of like people sort of delighted in me and my quirks and what I brought to the table versus, and a lot of those are sort of non-verbal cues, and it’s sort of like, “You know, we kind of all like each other more than we like you, and we’re not overtly saying cruel things to you,” but I just got the vibe, like, “Yeah, I guess I don’t really belong here. I’ll kind of move along.”

So, can we make that explicit? What are the things, the practices, the do’s and don’ts?

Mike Robbins
Some of it starts with a sense of emotional intelligence and social intelligence and, ultimately, even cultural intelligence. Something as simple as just me even asking you the question “Are you a baseball fan?” And then you say, “Well, no, not really. I’m not into sports.” That’s actually a really important thing to know, not because it doesn’t really matter if I like baseball and you don’t, but sometimes we make a bunch of assumptions, “Oh, you’re from Chicago. You must be a Cubs fan, and blah, blah, blah,” and, all of sudden, you’re like, “What the hell is this guy talking about?” And, inadvertently, I’m trying to connect with you, but what I’m actually doing is creating more distance and separation if I don’t know that as an example, right?

And, again, there are a lot of things that we do, and this happens. Look, I travel. Well, I used to. I don’t as much these days. None of us are traveling. But I travel around the world, and I go places, and I think of myself as a pretty open minded culturally-sensitive person, but the moment I step outside of not only the United States but the Bay Area where I live, I realize, “Oh, my goodness, my worldview is so influenced by where I live, where I grew up.” That’s not a bad thing. It’s just something to be aware of, to be mindful of.

Oftentimes, I’ll be sitting in a room and I’ll make some comment about just the gender dynamics, and some of the men in the room, not because they’re sexist necessarily, just they’ll look around and go, “Oh, is it mostly men in this room?” Like, they’re not paying attention. Whereas, every single woman at that table or in that room knows exactly that there’s, “Oh, there’s four women in this room.” Do you know what I mean? So, things like that.

Again, a lot of times with some of these issues, some of us either aren’t paying attention to them because they don’t relate to us personally, or we may be are paying attention to them but we don’t know exactly what to say, or how to say it, or how to address it, so it actually leads into pillar number three, without jumping too far ahead of sweaty palm conversations, which is so fundamental that a lot of what we can do, right now especially, is ask questions and be curious about things even if we might be a little uncomfortable with respect to, “Are there things that are happening that are creating less inclusion, less belonging? And if so, let’s talk about that.”

And the challenge is that we often get defensive because immediately we feel like we’re being accused of something, when, in reality, if you’re committed to your team having a culture of belonging, then you want to know if there’s anything that’s being done or said by you or anyone else that’s getting in the way of that. And, in some cases, people who, what I know from my research, I don’t know from experience because, again, I’m male, I’m white, I’m straight, but when I talk to people from different groups, depending on how much psychological safety there is or how safe they feel, they may not always feel safe even bringing that stuff up. So, those of us who are in positions of power or authority, if we happen to be asking questions about that.

I think about this. I learn all the time from my wife and from my daughters of things that I don’t see just along the lines of gender. One of the stories I share in the book, my wife Michelle and I were at a workshop, and the woman leading the workshop said, “I’m going to ask the men a question, then I’m going to ask the women a question.” It was a workshop that was sort of for couples and about our relationships. And she said to all the men in the room, “When was the last time you felt physically unsafe?” And she said, “Just raise your hand one time and I’m going to name off some timeframes. Is it in the last 10 years, five years, a year, six months, three months, a month, a week, the last 24 hours?” I raised my hand for sometime in the last year. I could remember a specific moment I was in DC on a trip and got lost coming back to my hotel, and was walking around in the dark, didn’t know where I was and just felt.

She asked the women the same question, Pete, and she’s gone on 10 years, five years, none of the women were raising their hands, and I’m like, “What’s going on? Why are they not raising their hands?” She gets to one week. A couple of hands go up. She says, “Within the last 24 hours,” almost every woman in the room raised their hand, that they had felt physically unsafe at some moment in the last 24 hours, including my wife sitting right next to me. And I’m like looking at her, and I’m looking around the room, most of the guys in the room were all looking around, go like, “What? When? Where? What is going on?” And the women were looking at us like, “How do you not know this?” And the woman leading the workshop said, “This is one of the fundamental differences between men and women, and we almost never talk about it.”

And, again, that’s just an example that, “Oh.” Again, in the working world, in the environment that we’re in, like, “Oh, these things play a big role.” And if we can be more mindful, be more curious, be more open, be more humble about trying to see things from different people’s perspectives, and then being interested in creating the most inclusive environments where people really feel like they belong, now people are going to feel more like they have a seat at the table, and they’re not busy sort of defending themselves or holding themselves back as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, there’s a lot of great stuff there in terms of the mindset and the awareness and the assumptions, and I think that a lot of times the non-belonginess comes about when folks make assumptions. And sometimes I hear it explicitly in terms of they say, “Well, obviously this…” It’s like, “Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.” Or words like, “Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you certainly know about this.” It’s like, “Well, I didn’t know so I guess…” Or there seems like there’s sort of contempt for a viewpoint.

And, politically, what I find quite intriguing is, oh, boy, there are some data that shared that large swaths of us, regardless of Republican, Democrat, are just fearful, it’s like, “Don’t even bring it up because you might get fired, and some people are willing to fire and think you should be fired.”

Mike Robbins
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or then there’s so much contempt as a baseline assumption that, “Well, of course, all of us vote this way or that way.” And there are some surprising…if you really dig into some data, I’m a nerd for this, like it’s surprising. For example, I learned, so you’re in the Bay Area, for instance, you might…I was surprised to learn, I checked the sources every which way, but in the Bay Area, there are more Trump voters in San Francisco proper than there are LGBTQ folks in San Francisco proper, indeed.

Mike Robbins
Really? Interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you wouldn’t expect that.

Mike Robbins
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine the Trump voters aren’t speaking up. And then when there are…and so let’s go with either side politically or racially or anything. If you just have it as an assumption, “Well, of course, we all believe this and, thus, I have license to speak about the other…a set of views in a contemptuous way,” I think that shuts down the belonging in a hurry.

Mike Robbins
It does. I see this because, living where I live, which is sort of at the macro level to your point, one would assume, “Oh, it’s pretty liberal politically.” So, if you have conservative views, you’re going to be more in the minority, although, to your data, it may be more widespread than one thing. But, again, even growing up here, I know if you share conservative views out loud in this area, ooh, that’s very risky to do. On the flipside, when I travel to other parts of the country that are more conservative, and I meet people, or people have conversations with me, and say, “Oh, my views are a bit more liberal but I don’t really share that out loud because that…” you know

And so, I think if you think about this, this isn’t simply just about Left versus Right here in the US, although it’s a very relevant issue right now given that we’re in a Presidential election season, I think from a leadership standpoint, and from a team standpoint, I’m not one that believes we should never talk about anything controversial at work. I think that stifles authenticity. I think that’s unrealistic. However, I do think we need to be mindful of not making assumptions that everybody agrees and believes what we believe because that does create, “Oh, when I realize…” even if you take it out of the political realm.

I was talking to a group of people the other day on a Zoom session, and we were talking about what makes it difficult to speak up. And somebody said, “When I know that I have a minority opinion.” And they weren’t talking about politics. They were just talking about, like, “I’m the only one that thinks this about this decision. Everyone else is on board.” That actually is really hard to voice, because, “Do I really want to be the one dissenting voice in the room when everybody else seems to be on board?”

But, again, if you think about it, if that person doesn’t feel safe to bring that up, and the group isn’t interested in knowing where people stand, we still will go with the majority and we’re going to move on, but that person that makes a mental note, “Oh, if I have a dissenting opinion, I better just keep it to myself.” And that starts to become part of the culture of the team, and then we don’t even know what we don’t know, what we’re missing, and people are less engaged, and people aren’t really speaking up, or they’re not totally bought in, so all of these things go to both psychological safety and belonging.

And then that leads to pillar number three, which I alluded to, which I call embrace sweaty palm conversations, which is about, you know, I had a mentor years ago, Pete, say to me, “Mike, what stands between you and the kind of relationships you really want to have with people is usually a 10-minute sweaty palm conversation you’re too afraid to have.”

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds right.

Mike Robbins
Yeah. He said, “If you get good at those 10-minute sweaty palm conversations, you’ll build trust, you’ll resolve conflicts, you’ll talk about the elephant in the room, you’ll work stuff out, you’ll get to know people who are different than you.” He said, “But if you do, like most of us, and you avoid them because they can be awkward, or uncomfortable, or you say the wrong thing, or you unintentionally offend people, or put your foot in your mouth, or it gets weird, then you end up just sort of having mediocre lukewarm type of relationships.”

And it’s tricky. I don’t love having sweaty palm conversations. They are not my favorite. But if a team is really going to perform at the highest level, if we’re really going to build trust one-one-one, and psychological safety collectively, if we’re really going to be able to have that sense of belonging, we got to be able to have those sweaty palm conversations. If I really screw up, I need someone who can come to me with kindness but also with some directness and authenticity, and tell me, like, “Hey, man, you really screwed this up. We got to work on this,” but do it in a way that doesn’t have me walk away feeling like, “I’m an idiot, and I’m a loser, and everybody hates me,” because that’s not going to be helpful. But, at the same time, you know what I mean? And that’s predicated on the ability for us to engage.

And, look, right now, it’s harder to have sweaty palm conversations via Zoom or Skype or WebEx or the telephone, not that they’re necessarily easy when we’re in person, but we don’t have the same sort of body language and physical cues to go on, but we still need to have them so we got to continue to develop our ability both individually, but they become easier if the team has more of the norm of, “We’re going to have those conversations in the room even if it’s a Zoom room. We’re not going to have the conversation afterwards, or send little text messages or IMs to each other about what we really think. We’re going to actually talk about it directly.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hey, talking about vulnerability, I’ll put you on the spot. What happened, a couple of examples of the sweaty palm conversations, that were quite meaningful?

Mike Robbins
Well, gosh, I think of like I’ve had a whole bunch of sweaty palm conversations with my team over the last few months. When COVID first hit, we had…look, the way I make money, Pete, the way I’ve ran my business for all these years, the vast majority of revenue we generate is through speaking engagements that either myself or someone on my team goes and delivers in person. Every single one of those, it was on our calendar, got either cancelled or rescheduled or just went away within a matter of like two weeks.

So, I had to say to everybody, “Listen, I don’t know if we’re going to have a business anymore in the next six months. I hope so.” And then it was a bunch of individual conversations with everybody on the team about their roles, how they were doing, what they needed to do, and we had to let someone go, which was a really uncomfortable conversation, as often happens in business. And none of those were fun or easy for me, and, at times, I’m a pretty emotional guy, I was a little bit scared and stressed out as would make sense.

And, again, I think it’s just important for us, when we have those conversations with people, they don’t always go well. That’s the thing. Like, I had a situation recently where I had to have a conversation with someone, we had a little conflict going, and we had the conversation, and it blew up the relationship, like didn’t really work out well. That’s not usually what happens but that’s the fear that we often have, “Hey, I’m going to address this thing,” and this person is basically going to say, “Well, have a nice life. See you later.”

But, again, in hindsight, in that situation, for me, I realized, “You know why that happened? First of all, I addressed some of it by email before so it already didn’t start off in a good way. And, second of all, there were a bunch of sweaty palm conversations that I didn’t have leading up to that one that, ultimately, had that thing blow up.” So, again, it’s a constant work in progress. I mean, this stuff is messy. But great teams talk to each other and not about each other. It’s easier for me to go tell my wife that you’re getting on my nerves, let’s say if you and I are on a team together, than it is to go talk to you, “Hey, Pete, we got to talk about this thing, man. I got this issue. Let’s try to work it out because I don’t know how that’s going to go.” That’s vulnerable to have the conversation with you. It’s easy for me to go complain to my wife about it because she’s probably going to agree with me, or at least hear my version of the story, and go, “Yeah, Pete sounds like a jerk.” You know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Mike Robbins
But that’s not going to benefit you and me and our relationship is definitely not going to benefit the team if that’s the way we operate.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to these conversations, do you have some best practices associated with one’s summoning the emotional fortitude to go there, and, two, some do’s or don’ts for when you’re engaging them?

Mike Robbins
So, yeah, absolutely. The first thing is it’s important to acknowledge that they’re hard and they’re scary for all of us, so to have a little bit of compassion for ourselves and the other person or people involved. The second thing is we do need to get clear about what our intention is, “Why do I want to have this conversation?” Because if what I really want to do is come tell you why you’re wrong and I’m right, it’s probably not going go well. Even if I’m upset, even if I think something went wrong, I need to get to a place of, “My intention is really to clear the air, to connect more deeply with you to resolve a conflict,” some more positive intention.

The third thing is, whenever I have a sweaty palm conversation, and I encourage everyone to do this, is tell the truth. Lower the waterline on the iceberg, as I like to say. Meaning, express a little bit of how you’re actually feeling in the moment, which, for me, is usually some version of, “I don’t really want to have this conversation. I’ve been avoiding this, or I’m scared you’re going to get upset. This is not going to go well.” And I know it’s sort of counterintuitive to be vulnerable in the moment that maybe we have an issue, or a conflict with someone, or maybe we don’t feel super safe with them, but we’re relational creatures. So, the natural human response to vulnerability is empathy, so people tend to respond in kind if we start. Now, is it a guarantee? No. Could they jump on us and use it against us? Yeah, absolutely. But way, way, way more often than not, that’s not what happens. It ultimately gets the person into that place.

And then the final thing is it’s usually important to have some kind…not to be attached to a particular outcome necessarily but have some kind of action that can be taken from the conversation. Even if we agree to disagree, can we talk again about this, or revisit this, or how are we going to address this in the future? Or if we do come to some kind of solution, what are we going to do so it isn’t just this? As a friend of mine likes to always say, “Conversations disappear.” So, some kind of way of forwarding the action after we have that conversation, whether it’s a one-on-one conversation or as group, because there’s nothing worse than I get the courage up to finally come and talk to you about the thing we talked about the thing, “Pete, you’re open.” “Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.” And then nothing happens or nothing changes, especially like if you’re my boss and I’m like, “Well, geez, I’m glad he listened to me but he didn’t really take anything to heart, and now we still have the same issue running over and over again.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yes. Well, then let’s talk about the fourth area, the care about and challenge each other. You made a distinction earlier between kindness and niceness, which feels very applicable here.

Mike Robbins
Very much.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some of the pointers in terms of doing both?

Mike Robbins
Well, so this fourth and final pillar is about caring about and challenging each other simultaneously. And that same pitching coach I had at Stanford used to always say, his philosophy on coaching was, “You got to love them hard so you can push them hard.” And he was talking about it in the context of baseball, but I think that’s true for leaders, managers, that’s true for human beings, for teams. Meaning, “Can we really focus on constantly caring about each other?”

Now, when we’re caring for people, doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re all best friends, that we have the same values, that we like hanging out with each other. That’s a bonus at that. But you can care about people that you don’t even like, that you don’t agree with. You can care about people who bug you. Caring about is about finding value in people, wanting them to do well. And I often say, “Look, even if you’re super selfish and you don’t genuinely care, you’re just interested in your own success, it’s in your best interest to be around other successful people doing well because success is contagious. So, at the very least, can you at least care? I care about the other people on my team. Usually it’s not that hard to do, but then simultaneously, then challenging people, pushing people.

And, usually, when I talk to individuals about this or I talk to leaders or teams, most individuals, myself included, like I’m stronger on the care side than I am on the challenge side. Some people are stronger on the challenge side. I mean, it’s easier for them to push, push, push, but, like, oh, it’s harder for them to just naturally care about people. The tendency we have if we go, “Oh, I’m a pretty caring person but I have a hard time challenging people. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much.” No, no, keep caring as much as you do, just challenge yourself to push people a little harder, hold people accountable, have a healthy high standard.

And if you’re someone who really pushes people and challenges people, but you realize, “Oh, sometimes I’m a little harsh about it,” you don’t have to necessarily lower your standards unless your standard is perfection, by the way, which is people always fail. But what you want to do is then raise your ability to care about people. And some simple ways to do that are just looking for things that we find that we value and appreciate about people, and letting them know. Thinking if it were someone’s last day you are able going to get to work with them, what would you want to thank them for? What would you miss about them?

Again, looking at people as the full nature of being human. One of the things I do think is beautiful about this really challenging time in the pandemic, we are getting to know people. Even though we don’t get to see each other and spend time together, we’re Zooming into people’s lives and into people’s homes, and we’re seeing their dogs and their kids and their apartments and houses, and they’re sitting in their flipflops and shorts, and maybe they put on a nice shirt for the Zoom call or whatever. But it’s kind of equalizing in a way. Whether you’re the CEO of the company, or you’re an intern, or you’re anywhere in between, it’s like everybody’s got a life and a house and a family and friends and stuff they’re dealing with, so, in some ways, I think it’s both more challenging but in some ways also easier, if you will, to get in touch with other people’s humanity even in this weird virtual world we find ourselves in.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really like that prompt there for the caring in terms of, “If it were the last day, what would you miss about them? What do you really value about them?” And so then, it’s just that easy, huh? You just let them know, “Hey, I really appreciate that you did this. I really love the way you do that.”

Mike Robbins
Well, you know, it is and it isn’t. I mean, here’s what’s funny about it. Look, my very first book that came out like 13 years ago, it’s called Focus on the Good Stuff, it’s all about appreciation. And I’ve been studying appreciation and gratitude for years. And what I do know about appreciation of other humans, it’s super valuable. We all want it and crave it. When one human being expresses appreciation for another human being, it raises the serotonin level in both people’s brains. If we do it collectively in a group, it actually raises our serotonin level, which lowers our stress level and increases our happiness and fulfillment. But it also increases our oxytocin if we do it in a group, which physiologically binds us to each other.

However, all of that said, most of us are terrible at receiving appreciation from other human beings. We’re just awkward. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to say. We either give a compliment right back, or we somehow discount what they say or blow it off. As simple as this is, and I swear this is like so basic, but I’ve literally seen this enhance the culture of teams fundamentally, is that we learn how to receive appreciation from other people more graciously. We simply say thank you and shut our mouths. Because part of why we don’t express appreciation as much as we could, and should, is because it’s not psychologically safe to do. It’s almost socially awkward to do.

But when you create an environment on your team where we can express, now we’re not doing it manipulatively, we’re not doing it inauthentically just to be nice, we’re doing it genuinely, what happens is people start to really feel valued and cared about. And when you create that sense of caring, what becomes available is the challenge.

Again, I say this all the time to people, “Think of the people who you will allow to give you feedback, meaning you’ll take it. And you may not always like it or agree with it, you may not even want it, but you’ll consider it. Why do you take their feedback? Because they’re super smart? Maybe. Because they’re an expert? Maybe. Because they’re your boss or your spouse? Okay, maybe. But it’s not their role, or their intelligence, or their resume. It’s because you know they appreciate you. They value you.”

You could give me a piece of feedback, Pete, and some other person. Let’s say you and I know each other well, “And I know Pete’s got my back. He cares about me. He wants me to do well.” Even if your feedback is pretty harsh, I’ll listen to it. Some other person who I either don’t know, I’ll think, “Well, that person thinks I’m an idiot or whatever.” I’m not going to take their feedback even if I really need it because I don’t already feel valued by them. I don’t know that they care about me.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Yeah. That totally adds up. And love them hard so we can push them hard, yeah. Even if the accuracy is perfect, like, it is deeply insightful, the odds are high that it’ll kind of blow right past you if you don’t trust the other person cares about you.

Mike Robbins
It’s true because, look, relationships and, a lot of ways, teamwork, there is a scientific aspect to it. Data is important. There are lots of different assessments we can do but it’s more of an art than a science. Because, again, a computer could spit out a bunch of feedback for me that I need and all this data and I do all these assessments, I go, “Okay, but what I really need is a human being who cares about me to not only explain it but communicate it in a way that it’s really going to make a difference.”

Think about, again, your life, think about your career, I can think about mine, the pivotal moments along the way where people said things or did things, even if, again, it might’ve been a little bit tough love, and it’s like, “Wow, I really heard that.” It usually wasn’t, again, some piece of data or information as much as it was some communication that came through that touched us. Our mind, our heart, said, “Oh, I need to make a change, or I need to take a risk, or I need to stop doing something, or start doing something, or whatever,” and it’s like we look back in hindsight and we can see those pivotal moments, the challenges in the moment, “Can we be the kind of people that both give and receive that type of feedback and support in a way that’s going to benefit the people around us?”

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

Mike Robbins
Here’s one of the paradoxes of right now: We’re all in this together, yes, and people are having very different experiences. I like the metaphor, “We’re all in the same storm right now but we’re in different boats.” And so, I think both can be true. And what great teams and great leaders and just human beings who are interested in making a difference for other people have the ability to try to connect with an understanding, have empathy for different people’s experiences.

There is something oddly binding or bonding, if you will, about this experience we’re all going through, as challenging as it is, and there’s also a lot of uniqueness and diversity and how people are experiencing it. So, that’s a long way of me saying we need to have as much compassion for ourselves and each other because I know it’s corny and everyone is saying it, but we’re in unprecedented times and nobody was really prepared for this even though now we’ve been in it for five or six months or whatever. We just continue in and kind of make our way through it.

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

Mike Robbins
Well, I’m not just saying it because I used it as a title of one of my books, but I love Oscar Wilde’s quote “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

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

Mike Robbins
I love the positive psychology research on positives to negatives in terms of feedback, the five to one ratio, which the Gottmans did related to married couples, but I think it makes sense in leadership and teamwork and just all human relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Mike Robbins
The one that just popped into my mind was Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson that came out in the late ‘90s, and had a huge impact on my life and was one of the main things that got me on the path of doing this kind of work all those years ago.

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

Mike Robbins
A microphone for my podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, you sound great.

Mike Robbins
Well, I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Mike Robbins
Meditation.

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

Mike Robbins
I would say that when we’re going through something difficult, instead of asking ourselves, “Why is this happening to me?” change the word to, to the word for, and ask yourself, “Why is this happening for me?”

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

Mike Robbins
Best place is our website which is Mike-Robbins.com.

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

Mike Robbins
Be kind to yourself. I think we’re often our own worst enemy, and the kinder we are to ourselves, not nice, not pretending like everything is fine and perfect, but kind, genuine self-kindness, self-compassion, there’s almost no way we can overdo that. And when we’re kind to ourselves, we’re just naturally kind to others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, this has been a treat. Thank you. And good luck in your adventures.

Mike Robbins
Thanks, man. You too.