KF #6. Collaborates Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Thom, welcome.

Thom Mayer
Well, it’s good to be here. I’m honored to be among your guests. I really enjoy the work you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, we’re honored to have you, the so-called master of disaster. Hopefully, this interview is not a disaster. And to that end, I’d love it if you could kick us off with a riveting tale. Firsthand, you’re in the midst of a crisis, high stakes, life and death situation. Take us into the scene. What went down and what was a key learning that you picked up that’s really influenced some of your work and writings?

Thom Mayer
Well, there could be many of them, but since we’re recording the day after 9/11, I can remember vividly what it was like to go to the Pentagon on 9/11 in 2001. I was summoned there to become the command physician. It was looking at the gates of hell. It looked like a movie scene. Everyone who was there that day felt as I did that, “This can’t be real. How could it be possible that a plane would crash into the Pentagon?” But everyone’s eyes turned to you, because as the command physician, and you wear a bright orange fluorescent vest that identifies you as such, it’s not like you can hide.

And they’ve got eyes on you to figure out, “Doc, is it safe for us to go in the building? Is it safe for us to go in and try to rescue people and to recover those who couldn’t be rescued?” So, it was an honor.

And the next three days were not a blur, as people often see it, but a series of not just snapshots with absolute clarity in terms of what the problems and issues were, but more like a movie on a continuous thread. Eventually, when it was safe, I went into the building with SCBA tanks on our backs and helmets on with the FBI evidence recovery team to survey both the devastation of what had occurred, but also to think about lessons for what that might teach us for the future.

So, most people are sane and run away from the sound of chaos and fire and flames and explosions, but we, I say not just me, but the entire team of 5,000 people were trained and anxious to go in and help. So, we kind of run towards the sounds of chaos.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s quite a turn of phrase, “Run towards the sounds of chaos.” And has that been sort of a recurring theme or lesson or a recommendation you give to leaders and professionals in the midst of them doing their daily work even if it’s lower drama, lower stakes?

Thom Mayer
Yeah, absolutely. And I get this question of, to me that’s an honor and one we should all embrace, and people ask me, “Well, yeah, but, Doc, I don’t get to lead on a national stage, an international stage of crisis, but that’s my point, is all of us lead all day, every day in whatever we do.

So, waiting, I think the word “Someday I’ll be a leader” is a wistful, unhelpful word and phrase. “Today, I am a leader” is a very embraceable phrase and one that everyone, no matter who they are, no matter what they do, certainly you lead when you put this podcast together. But you also lead when you take Joey boy for a walk or calm him down or whatever it is that he needs. As his father, you’re leading him. Just like a single mother leads her family.

So, it strikes me that leading is a truly universal concept and not an aspirational goal. It’s something that we need to listen to, embrace every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Thom, I like that and I resonate with that, and I’m curious if you’ve ever heard pushback. If someone were to say to you, “Oh, Thom, I am the tiniest cog in a grand machine. I have so little influence over…” how do you respond?

Thom Mayer
Well, certainly, I get pushback because, in the book, the title is Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless and that’s contrarian, counterintuitive at a minimum, and if it’s offensive, I don’t mean it to be, but it deserves an explanation. The explanation is leadership is worthless because it’s just what you say, and anybody can say anything. But leading is priceless, precisely, because it’s what you do, and we all do that. So, I do get pushback, “I’m the small cog in a very big wheel,” and my answer is, “But you’re your cog.”

When our boys were younger, Maureen, my beautiful and brilliant wife and I had three boys, now young men, but whenever I was in town, because my job requires a lot of travel, speaking and meetings, things like that, whenever I was in town, I drove them to work in my truck, and when I let them out, I said precisely the same thing, which is, “One more step in the journey of discovering where your deep joy intersects the world’s deep needs.” I swear I said this to them. They prefer to take the bus.

Pete Mockaitis
“Okay, Dad!”

Thom Mayer
Yeah, “Bye-bye. I’ll take the bus today. No, thank you.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Is my lunch here?”

Thom Mayer
Yeah, exactly. But the point is you have to start with your deep joy. Doing this podcast, setting it up, having the guests on that you have is not easy, but it’s your deep joy, and that comes through in every episode I’ve listened to, and I’ve listened to over 10 of them, that comes through. But if you were just showing up and putting the time in, that would show too, and that wouldn’t be your deep joy.

So, when I find people that are not able to embrace the job that they’re doing, it’s usually because they’ve signed up for the wrong job. It’s not where their deep joy intersects the world’s deep needs. And once people understand that and learn that, I think it becomes easier to not aspire to be a leader, but to embrace the fact that you are already a leader, and then to inspire others through what you do and what you say and how you do it.

So, I’m interested in helping people, when they wake up in the morning and their eyes open and they swing their legs around, to say, “Today, I am a leader. How will I lead? How will I exemplify what I believe in, my deep joy, mission, vision, values, true north?” whatever you want to call it, and different of your guests have called it different things, but that’s what needs to be done. And, therefore, the book is not intended as a leadership book. It’s also not an anti-leadership book. It’s simply a book for people who want to embrace the fact that they lead and will continue to lead.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’d love it if you could give us an, maybe, unconventional or striking example of someone who identified their deep joy connecting with the world’s deep need. Because I’m thinking about some folks who are like, “Well, geez, my deep joy is playing this game.” I’m just thinking about my kids.

Thom Mayer

Sure. Sure.

Pete Mockaitis

If I say that to them, “What’s cool?” it’s like, “Well, what I love doing most is playing the snake game on the Apple TV, Dad.” So, that doesn’t really solve a need. But I imagine there’s sort of a process of inquiry and discovery that leads you to discover such intersections. Could you tell us a tale of such a process?

Thom Mayer

I was a football player, and that was my deep joy when I was a kid. And when say kid, all the way through high school and college. I wanted to play in the National Football League. And most people play football in order to go to college so that they can get a scholarship and not have to pay for their education. I was exactly the opposite. I went to college to play football because I was finished with high school, and if I was going to continue playing this game that I loved, I couldn’t go straight to the pros then, you had to go to college.

So, I did. I started when I was a freshman, that was unusual. But about a third of the way through the season, the coach said to me, “Hey, I talked to your academic advisor and you haven’t declared a major.” And I said, “A major what? You didn’t say anything about a major when you recruited me.” “No, no, Thom, you got to have a major, a major field of study.”

So, I chose theology, and became a theology major because I was always interested in how people think and what they do and all that. And, honestly, Pete, it was because you didn’t have to take tests. You just wrote papers and had discussions under trees. So, I thought, “Hey, they’re already paying for my education, how about I don’t work all that hard on the education part?”

And at the end of my sophomore year, my theology advisor and a professor, biology professor, who I had taken a course from. “Have you ever thought about becoming a doctor because you might have more influence as a doctor than as a theology professor?” I didn’t know. A doctor was somebody who sawed up a laceration or stuck his finger some place I didn’t want it, and said, “Turn your head and cough.” But I said, Sure.” I trusted these guys.

So, as a junior, I started taking freshman-level pre-med courses. The first course was Chemistry 101. It went okay, if not great. I got to the first test. It was a hundred-question test, and I opened it up and the first question is “A mole is Avogadro’s number of particles or…” and then five answers, A, B, C, D, E. “Well, who’s Avogadro? I never heard of an Avogadro. He’s got a number. I don’t, a mole? I thought that was a critter that tore up your lawn or something.”

So, I thought, “You know, hey, this has been great, no problems. I wonder if I can…Are we still in drop ag? Can I drop this course? I’ll just go back to theology and football.” So, my answer is I didn’t even read the questions from there on because I figured if I didn’t even know what the first one was. So, I just did A, B, C, D, E, E, D, C, B, A. In football, we call a slant and go route, a sluggo route, and that’s what my answer page looked like.

So, I got to the end, a hundred question, marked it off, flipped the page, but in the back, there was a blue envelope, and typed on the envelope said, “Bonus question. If you get this question right, you’ll get an A in this course no matter what you did on the first 100 questions.” And I thought, “Let’s give it a shot.” So, I opened it up it says, “What’s the name of the man who cleans this room every night so you can have a great place in which to learn?”

So, I walked up to the professor, Keith White, the Chairman of the Department of Chemistry, I said, “Dr. White, this bonus question…” and he smiled, and I said, “You want his first name or his last name?” And he said, “Thom, if you can give me his first name and his last name, I’ll not only give you an A in this test, I’ll give you an A on this course, as long as you show up and as long as you do your work.”

And I said, “Well, Dr. White, what if I can give you his wife’s name and the names and ages of his six kids?” He stood up, took his glasses off, pointed at me, and said, “Thom, if you can do that, I’ll give you an A in every chemistry course you take, as long as you show up and as long as you do the work.” And he was as good as his word and I was too. And so, all my chemistry courses from him, I got an A in. And so, what’s my point?

Pete Mockaitis

If I may time out. How did you happen to know him so well, the person who’s…?

Thom Mayer

Well, that’s the point, that’s the deep-joy point because the reason I knew him so well was, I didn’t even get to the chemistry lab until I had finished all day of classes, all day three hours of practice in football, theology essays, so about midnight I end up showing up in the lab and that’s when this gentleman, who had another job during the day, came to the lab.

So, we got to know each other and got to know each other well in the darkness of the night because his deep joy was not just cleaning that room, but interacting with the very few students. I was probably only one of two in a whole semester. And so, I became a doctor not because I’m smart or intelligent or hardworking, but because of a janitor at the college I went to. His name was Roosevelt Richmond.

But, let me tell you, he came in smiling every day, whistling every day, and he always said to me, “Look at him, he’s got fire in his belly.” And I’d said, “No, Mr. Richmond, I just don’t plan my time all that well.” So, I found that, as a physician in environmental services, janitorial services, I hate that second term. In the hospital, so after a tough resuscitation and there’s trauma, there’s blood all over the place, sure, I thank the nurse, yes, I thank the resident, yes, I thank my colleagues, but I also go over to the environmental services person and say, “Thanks for cleaning this up. We can’t do this without you.”

So, I think as you go through your day, counterintuitively, you’re going to see people that may not have CEO after their name, they may not work and live in the C-suite, but they live in the C-suite of their life, of their family, of their job. And so, a long way to travel to answer your question, but they’re everywhere. The deep-joy folks are literally everywhere, in my opinion.

Pete Mockaitis

That is beautiful. Thank you. So cool. So cool. Well, so tell us then, your book, Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless, we’ve already shared a couple principles and some gems, are there any top things you think most of us are getting wrong about leadership and some key reframes or principles that you just wish the world would internalize?

Thom Mayer

So, I really want people to do three things. Number one, to think about leading, not leadership, but leading, a verb, active voice, the actions, in a radically different way.

Number two, I want them to act on that within a week, because if people listen to this or any of your podcasts, or anything that they hear or read or see, and aren’t moved to action within a week, they’re probably not going to do it. They may be, “Wow, that was interesting,” but if it doesn’t change what you do, so I want you to think, I want you to act.

And the third is to innovate. And the reason we have to innovate, I think, is because the way we’re working isn’t working, or it isn’t working well enough or as well as it could, so that innovation is an iterative process in everyone’s life. But it doesn’t occur at the speed of genius or intelligence or creativity. It occurs at the speed of trust because if we don’t trust each other, we won’t step outside the lines. We’ll be afraid of failure.

And when you begin to look at it that way, the answers are not above us, as most people think. The answers are within and among us. The answers aren’t in the C-suite. The answers are in the We-suite, the people who do the work, no matter what the work is. So, what I would say to your listeners is, the leader you’re looking for is you. It’s already there. It’s not something in the future.

I, personally, think if people call others future leaders, I think that’s absolutely a demeaning thing to say, as if, “I’m a leader but you’re not.” The boss is somebody who thinks that he’s the most important person in the room, but the leader knows that her job is to make sure that everyone else in the room feels that they’re the most important person in the room.

So, that somewhat epiphanous moment, and again, I’m okay with aspirational, developing, emerging, but the idea of calling someone a future leader, within those words, I guess as a theology major, I think all words have meaning but all actions and behaviors have meaning. You’re already there, folks. The leader you’re looking for is you. Just embrace it and, yes, improve it, but live up to what it is you believe in in the first place. Don’t think, “Well, someday in the future, it’ll happen to me.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah. Well, it’s funny when you say future leaders, I think I’ve heard that most often in the context of I was a high school student at leadership conferences, of which I was a big fan and attended many. But, yeah, when you say it like that to grown-ups, in the midst of their job, that does feel demeaning. And it reminds me of like, “Oh, I think of you as a child.” But even children, I would say are leading. I’m thinking about my six-year-old Johnny is leading his younger siblings and influencing them in positive, beautiful ways, which is heartwarming to see. So, yeah, aspiring, emerging, but also, yes, here and now.

Thom Mayer

Well, that’s a great example because, you know, we have three boys, and we now have five grandkids, and they lead. They lead their families. Those other kids, younger kids, look up to them and model their behavior after them. So, Johnny can feel like, “Well, I’m just a six-year-old,” or it can feel like, “Son, I saw what you did. That was incredible. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that.” Same world but two different worlds altogether, if you think about it in that way.

Pete Mockaitis

So, if we want to think about leading in a radically different way, is that right there, the radically different way, you know, the We-suite, not the C-suite, everyone is…?

Thom Mayer

Yeah, I think you have to talk about, you know, it’s not the C-suite that matters. It’s the We-suite. It’s the people who do the work. There’s a concept that Kirk Jensen, one of my research partners and I coined, called hardwiring flow, and that means hardwiring flow into systems and processes. What’s hardwiring flow? It means stop doing stupid stuff and start doing smart stuff.

Well, who’s going to identify the stupid stuff? I think the people who do the work know what the stupid stuff is. And they also know if we can innovate at the speed of trust, if we can make failure our fuel, they’ll devise the solutions that work best for the customer, for the patient, in my case, in terms of emergency medicine and sports medicine, as opposed to the C-suite.

Now it doesn’t mean that the C-suite doesn’t have an important role, but the role is not making decisions, not devising new solutions, not saying, “Well, leading consists of vision. I’m the Chief Vision Officer.” Well, the people who do the work are the ones who can best see what the vision is for how to improve the work, number one.

But the C-suite then begins to say, “Oh, my role is to create these enzymatic catalytic reactions which allow the We-suite to do their work,” which leads to corollaries, making failure your fuel, number one. Number two, it’s not the words on the walls that matter. It’s the happenings in the halls. As an emergency physician in tough situations, if I got to look up on the wall to figure out what I’m supposed to do, something is wrong.

Pete Mockaitis

“Hang in there,” with the cat.

Thom Mayer

“Yeah, let me figure this out here.” So, I think it’s not necessarily an inversion of the traditional ways of thinking about things. It’s a reframing of what I found the reality of leading in times of crisis to be.

Pete Mockaitis

You say, “Do more smart stuff and less dumb stuff. The people who are closest to the action see what’s the dumb stuff.” And I think that is, boy, in the game of leadership effectiveness, I don’t know if that’s maybe a third or a half of the battle is just creating the environment.

We’ve had Amy Edmondson, who talks about psychological safety and researches it, on the show a couple of times, in terms of, “Do you really have an environment, a culture, systems, processes, incentives, whereby folks are encouraged and freely, safely, are able to speak up and say, ‘Hey, I noticed we’re doing this dumb thing. Maybe we should do this other thing instead.’?”

And then will that be received and acted upon, or will it just be poo-pooed, or just like, “Huh!” Or just ignored, like, “Huh, that’s weird,” or more or less send the message explicitly or implicitly, “Shut up. This is the way we do things around here, and we’re really too busy to worry about this irrelevant little thing that you’ve brought to our attention, little peon.”

So, sometimes it really does feel like that’s the vibe in a lot of organizations and teams and cultures, and I think it is so toxic to our longtime flourishing. But you’re the expert, I’m just the rambler, how do you think about setting up a situation where folks can surface, “Hey, there’s some improvement opportunities, and let’s get after them”?

Thom Mayer

Well, I couldn’t agree more with the way you framed it. I think my friend, Mark Verstegen, who founded what’s originally called Athletes Performance, now Team Exos. He’s the performance director for the NFL Players Association, one of my partners in terms of keeping our players healthy and safe. But he says it well, “Simple things done savagely well.”

And we’ve made life more complex than it really is. In many ways, perhaps because I was a theology major, we’re almost reinventing and rethinking Aristotelian wisdom, and what I mean by that is this. Aristotle famously said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” The excellence then is not a virtue, but a habit.

Well, if that’s true, and I believe it deeply to be true, hence, the leader you’re looking for is you, the answers are not above us, they’re within and among us, then we begin to realize that. I hear about culture all the time, “We have a great culture,” and I go to organizations and 50% burnout, and when I talk about accountability, burnout, leaders and leading in times of crisis.

And my answer is, “If your culture is so great, why are 50% of your people burned out?” Because burnout, Christina Maslach is a close friend, and I talked to her many times.

Pete Mockaitis

A guest on the show.

Thom Mayer

Yeah, I listened to that one. It was great, as it always is. But, to me, burnout is simply the fact that you’re unable to feel your deep joy at work, then that becomes just a ratio of job stressors and adaptive capacity or resiliency, another term. We can talk about that if we have time. But when you begin to think of it in that way, and you realize that the culture is created every day by the people who impact the other people in the organization, whether that’s the customer, the outward-facing customer, or the inward-facing customers, the teams, that’s why there’s no leading except with teamwork.

So, the work begins within each of us, but it turns towards teamwork because we work in teams. So, how do you start that? Well, you hire right. I’m a lot less interested in hiring brilliant resumes than I am motivated people, motivated by their deep joy, their passion, their servant leadership, all these terms that we’re used to, easy to say but harder to do.

Because we can educate people. I can make them smarter in whatever, cardiac resuscitation, trauma, sports medicine, and all that. But if they don’t have the passion, if they don’t have the burning desire, if they don’t have the willingness to work across teams, Bill Belichick said famously, “Talent sets the floor of a team, but character sets the ceiling.”

And when we look at the character of people when we hire them, we say, “I don’t want you to just show up for work. I want you to show up for work with passion, with joy, with intensity, and with ideas on how this work could be better.” So, you have your job, but you also have that important job of helping that job be better and easier for the people who do it.

Because, as you know, and you’ve talked about this in the show before, intrinsic motivation is why people do things, not because the boss says so but because they realize this better serves their deep joy, it’s easier for them, and it’s better for the customer or patient or whoever it is that we’re at that job for. So, I think hiring right and creating that culture on day one before they ever come into the organization is critical and neglected in many organizations.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Thom, tell me any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Thom Mayer

What I learned at the Pentagon, I’m asked that question often, “Just tell me one thing you learned at the Pentagon.” And the answer is, “Stop sucking up. Start sucking down.” And what I mean by that is, on day one, September 11th, in the afternoon with the fire raging, there were 32 generals, two-star or above, standing behind me at the Pentagon. Great people, impassioned people, deep joy, saying, “Doc, tell us what you need and we’ll get it for you,” because that was their people inside that burning building.

Now, I could have spent three days, which I did on-site, sucking up to the generals. It wouldn’t have done me any good, and, more importantly, it wouldn’t have done the people I was serving, the paramedics, the firefighters, the structural engineers. So, suck down is what we need to do, and that was the structural engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, shoring up that building, fixing that gash where American Flight 77 blew through the southwest wall of the Pentagon, all the way into the A-ring, the inner ring of the Pentagon, the firefighters, the paramedics.

And I think that’s true in most organizations. People need to stop sucking up and start sucking down. If you have a bunch of suck-ups, most of us can’t stand that, but that comes when you talk about future leaders instead of “You are leading today. What can I do to make your job better and our customers’ lives, patients’ lives in my case, better?” So, one piece is just that. Stop sucking up, start sucking down.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, when you say, so sucking up, we understand to mean, when you say, “Oh, oh, is there anything I can do for you, sir or madam? I think you’re so wonderful and so smart and so brilliant, and, oh, let me get that for you right away.” And so, we sort of want to take that approach of, I don’t know, deferential-ness, or kindness, service, etc. to serve those who are on lower levels of the org chart so that we see “What do you need? What can I do for you? How can we make your life easier, better, resource you so that you can do what you need to do well?”

Thom Mayer

And you phrased it perfectly, particularly the voice inflection, but that voice inflection, that sucking up, is kryptonite to creativity. Absolute kryptonite to creativity. Because when most people, when most bosses say, “Think outside the box,” they don’t mean that. They mean, “Think inside my box. Think the way I think.”

Pete Mockaitis

“Outside of your box and inside my box.”

Thom Mayer

Exactly. And guess what the boss is thinking. It’s just no way to live. No way to live for the people doing the work. It’s really no way to live for a leader because it’s frustrating. You really want them to, “Hey, blow me away. Give me an idea. Let’s think about how this could be done differently.” Again, contrarian, but I think, in my life at least, it’s been one of the keys to success.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Any other top do’s and don’ts?

Thom Mayer

The leader you’re looking for is you. Everyone in every organization is a leader, number one. Number two, everyone in every organization is a performance athlete, no different than my athletes in the NFL, involved in a cycle of performance, rest, and recovery. Performance, rest, and recovery. And as you know, we’ve neglected rest and recovery, which is part of the reason we have so much burnout and moral injury in our society these days. So, invest in yourself, invest in your team of people.

And then third, the work begins with them. We always start within ourselves. People say, “Well, do you ask people in an interview ‘What keeps you up at night?’” And the answer is, “No, hell, no. I ask them ‘What gets you up in the morning?’ That’s what I care about.” And that’s why I say the work begins with them, but it turns towards teamwork. So, the skills of teamwork, perhaps a future podcast we can do together, but an absolute part of success, personally and within organizations.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

Well, one of my favorites is Churchill, and it’s not, maybe one you’ve never heard Churchill say before. But in the midst of his prime minister-ship, the Lord Mayor of London had a luncheon for him and his beloved, treasured wife, Clementine, was there with him.

And the Lord Mayor thought he was going to trick Churchill by saying, “Mr. Prime Minister, if you couldn’t be Sir Winston Churchill, who would you choose to be?” And his impish smile, and said, “Mr. Lord Mayor, if I couldn’t be Sir Winston Churchill, I would choose to be…” and he looks down at his wife, and said, “Mrs. Churchill’s second husband.” Isn’t that nice? That’s the way I feel too.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Thom Mayer

Oh, I think all the work done on this. We’re working now on lifespan, how long you live, health-span, how disease-free you are, but we’re doing a lot of work now on joy span, on how the generative joy, the generative nature of creativity, of doing things, not just at your stage and my stage in life, but Johnny’s stage and Joey’s stage so that we nurture that sense of awe, that sense of joy, that sense of we are all creating our own lives and helping shape the lives of others. So, some great research coming out on that that I think is going to help change the way we look at what does a successful life look like.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Thom Mayer

If you said choose one, I’m very impressed with Brene Brown, and I think her work is very, very important work. And if I chose one, I’d probably say Dare to Lead.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

Oh, I think a smile. When people think of me, I only want them to do one thing. I want them to smile. Now, I don’t have a great smile, but the tool is creating smiles in other people so that when they hear my name, hear my voice, see my face, they smile.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Thom Mayer

Gratitude. I try to get up every morning, and before I do anything else, sit calmly or stand calmly and think of three good things that I’m really grateful for. And I try, during the course of that day, to reach out to whoever or whatever team it was that I thought about and let them know that, because, as one great writer said, “There is silence enough beyond the grave.” I think expressing that gratitude is more important in some ways than feeling that gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with audiences or readers that seems to really connect and resonate, they highlight it, they retweet it, they quote it back to you often?

Thom Mayer

Over the course of 30 plus years, it’s deep joy. People say, they’ll come up to me and say, “I heard you speak 20 years ago or 10 years ago or last year, and of all the things you said, the thing that stuck with me is deep joy, deep needs.” So, yeah, people, and you’re probably about to ask me what my deep joy is, and my deep joy is helping other people find and embrace and live their deep joy.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

Well, the book is available on Amazon and all major websites, Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless: What I Learned from 9/11, the NFL, and Ukraine, because I had the honor of serving there. But my email is the best, it’s just thommayermd@gmail. If I can help you, it’d be an honor. Reach out anytime.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

The leader you’re looking for is you. The work begins within.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thom, this has been so much fun. I wish you much luck and joy and goodness in all you’re up to.

Thom Mayer

Thanks, Pete. It’s, as I said, an honor to be on. I appreciate it very much. Give a squeeze to your family.

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

Heidi Gardner
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to collaboration and doing it smarter and better. First, I want to hear, you’ve actually got to experience a little bit of an inside view of an interesting slice of history. You worked with the German Ministry of Education during the post-reunification time, helping reform their English curriculum. Any interesting stories from that era?

Heidi Gardner
So, this goes way back. It was the year 1995, I believe, and I was a Fulbright fellow living in a town, a city, called Dassel, Germany, which was basically smack in the center of what had been the DDR. And at that point, it was a pretty rough time to be living in the former East Germany in the sense that a lot of young people had cleared out, they had moved to West Germany in order to seek better economic opportunities, better job prospects.

And I was there working inside the education system, I was teaching in the Gymnasium, which are the high schools, and teaching in some of the technical programs and things, and I was also doing a lot of teacher-training and education curriculum reform. And it was a fascinating time to be there and experience this sort of change.

What I realized at the time is that, because of people’s relative isolation behind the Iron Curtain, there were so many things that they hadn’t been exposed to intellectually, culturally, that I had taken for granted, and I saw that as a real eye-opener for me. I had known that, of course, growing up in the States in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but to experience it firsthand and to be with people, explaining things that were very basic and very run-of-the-mill to me, which were fascinating to individuals who hadn’t experienced them previously.

For example, the idea that everyone in my family had their own car. It was an incredible eye-opener to them that that was actually pretty normal where I came from. And the idea that we would have bananas day in, day out, that was kind of the cheap food, things like that that I learned to appreciate more by living in that kind of environment.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Okay. Well, now, let’s hear a little bit about collaboration, and you’ve seen a whole lot of different environments, some in which people are grateful to be in, and some very much not so grateful. Could you share any particularly striking, surprising, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about collaboration from your work and research here for so many years?

Heidi Gardner
Absolutely. So, when we’re talking about collaboration, we’re not just talking about run-of-the-mill throw-a-team at every problem. We’re talking about the term we call smarter collaboration, which is starting with the end in mind and being hyper-intentional about how you bring people together, which particular kinds of experts do you need, when do you need to bring different people in so they contribute different perspectives that, collectively, allow the group to be something more innovative, more profitable, more productive, somehow better and tackle more complex issues than any of those people could’ve done on their own.

And what was surprising to me as we’ve been studying this over the last 10 plus years is how many mistakes people can make with something, which is a relatively straightforward process like that. One of the big mistakes that people have fallen into recently, sort of a trap, if you will, is the belief that if collaboration is good, more is better.

And so, what we see is a phenomenon of what we call overcommitment or over-collaboration, that people are joining many, many, many teams, or getting drafted onto different projects, or being asked to join the committee or the taskforce or the initiative, and people are stretched so thin that converse to the intentions, the intentions were, “Hey, let’s make the most of this great employee we have,” but the opposite happens.

That person gets stretched so thin that they end up doing fairly similar work project after project after project, and they don’t have the time to engage deeply, and they don’t have time to stretch their skills, and they don’t have time to really learn and think about how they could improve what they’re doing, and they also typically don’t get great coaching or mentorship along the way. And it’s been really surprising to me how common that problem is overcommitment inside lots of kinds of organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
The problem of overcommitment, I have seen, felt, heard that from my own firsthand experience as well as that of many others I’ve worked with. I’m curious, what is the fundamental root cause of overcommitment? It just seems like it’s almost ubiquitous in terms of professionals have too many emails, too many meetings, too many projects, and it’s just a cluster in a lot of organizations and a lot of professionals’ work lives. So, what’s behind this and how do we fix it?

Heidi Gardner
I see two kinds of root causes and both of them, I should say, stem from really good intentions, and that’s why it’s oftentimes hard to find a solution for it is because people are trying to do the right thing. So, in one scenario, you have the idea that “We’ve got these people who are really great at some specialized area and we want to make the most of them, both because they want to be challenged and because we, as a company, are paying a lot of money for these specialists, and so let’s really make sure we deploy them where they can make the most impact.” That’s the intention.

But, as the person’s reputation grows inside the organization, more and more people want a piece of that thing, so they’re like, “Oh, let me go grab Jane for this project. Let me go grab Joe, this expert,” and Jane and Joe keep getting tapped again and again and again for all of these different pieces of work, and that’s when we run into that problem of overcommitment. But, again, it stems from good intentions, “Let’s make the most of their skills.”

The other scenario is maybe even more pernicious. There is a very strong, credible research-backed reason to believe that when teams comprise people with very different kinds of backgrounds, and life experiences, and cultures, and a whole variety of different categories of diversity that that team has the potential to outperform. Very true.

Pete Mockaitis
Potential.

Heidi Gardner
But oftentimes what that means is that people who fall into particular categories, if you will, inside organizations that are underrepresented, the demand for them exceeds the supply for those individuals. Think about it in gender terms. This is happening in a lot of corporate boardrooms right now where they say…

Pete Mockaitis
“Hey, you’re a woman. Get on our board, too.”

Heidi Gardner
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Just like that. Okay.

Heidi Gardner
Absolutely. And they’re all looking for the same women, “Oh, well, we need a woman who was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company who has this kind of background and this number of years of experience.” And guess what? There aren’t just that many of that particular kind of person. And those individuals end up getting tapped again and again, in this case, for corporate boards or inside organizations. I worked with, for example, a lot of professional service firms. There just aren’t, empirically speaking, that many black women partners in professional service firms, and everyone wants their perspective and their wisdom and their experiences on their teams.

And so, those individuals are just pulled in so many directions, both, in the case of professional services, on client-facing teams but also on internal initiatives, like hiring, and recruiting, and employee engagement, and diversity and inclusion committees, and all of these places. And this is the second way that people get over-tapped and overcommitted.

And in both of those scenarios, managers and leaders with good intentions need to take a step back and look at the system. It’s not a set of individual choices. It’s a whole bunch of choices that systemically, collectively add up to trouble. And what we recommend, you asked for some solutions, first of all, and one probably I’ll keep coming back to in the course of our conversation, is get the data.

There is data that exists somewhere at some level in every company or organization that shows what people are working on and how many different ways and directions that they’re pulled. And there needs to be a person or a department, depending on how big the organization is, that keeps an eye out for this problem of overcommitment.

We studied it in a biotech company, for example. They asked us to come in because they had dropped a major ball, and figured out way too late that some of their best scientists were pulled in a thousand different directions, and when something really went wrong in one project, there was nobody to cover it.

So, this biotech asked us to come in. We took a look at the data and we started by asking them, “How many projects does every scientist like this one work on?” And they said, “Oh, probably two or three,” and they were right to some degree. Most people worked on two or three projects at once. But when we ran the numbers, we found that there were some people working on seven, eight, even eleven projects at once.

And those people who were most over-stretched also happen to be relatively new joiners, and so they didn’t know that that wasn’t normal, a normal workload, and even if they suspected it wasn’t, they were trying to make a good impression in their first months or year at the company, and they didn’t raise their hand and notify anyone that they were just way too overstretched. And so, one of the solutions is collect the data and figure it out, empirically, what’s happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you said took a look at the data and ran the numbers, when you say collect the data, that’s kind of what I’m curious about is how robust is the tracking and recording of this sort of thing in organizations? In my experience, the answer is not very, so you kind of have to go build that from the ground up, or I have seen some pretty cool enterprise-wide systems that capture that stuff, although sometimes they’re gamed and not being accurately reported.

So, when you talk about the data and the numbers, I just want to get your sense for what are the systems and platforms by which that is readily obtained versus how are you building it from the ground up?

Heidi Gardner
So, the best data, I think, is not reported for this purpose because, you’re right, it’s either garbage data and people don’t get around to doing it so at the end of the month, they kind of make a guess.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, my timesheet. Yeah, typical report.”

Heidi Gardner
Yeah, exactly. Or, they game the system for whatever purposes they think works best for them. So, don’t collect data specifically for this purpose, besides it’s just one more admin thing that nobody wants to do. But there is a wealth of data inside many organizations that’s collected for other purposes that can be mined for these sorts of insights.

So, the obvious one is in professional service firms or other kinds of sales or project-based organizations. There are actually ways to track, say, on distribution list, or who’s submitting to certain expense codes, or who’s billing their time to certain files. There are lots of ways that are lots of data sources that are hidden in other kinds of repositories that can be mined for this.

In the biotech company, for example, they have to file a lot of paperwork for grant applications and compliance reasons, and those were actually brilliant project rosters. And so, if you’re creative, you can take a look inside databases that are capturing data for other purposes, and figure out who’s working on how many different things. Again, expense codes are a great one.

Another way to do it though is through a whole variety of platforms now that capture, essentially, network clusters inside firms. And so, you can see you have to make some inferences but you can see that if there are the same eight people emailing each other with similar subject matter, etc., or the same people in certain Teams groups in Microsoft Teams. Or, you can mine calendars for the kinds of meetings that people co-attend. And you use de-identify data so that you’re not actually snooping in what Joe or Jane is specifically doing but you’re looking at patterns. And the patterns are more important than any single individual.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s clever. I like it. Whether it’s from the emails or from the calendars, or from the expense codes, even if no one is judiciously carefully tracking where each hour of their day has gone, you can see what’s that involvement looking like and where and zeroing on some stuff. So, such a fun project on the, I guess, enterprise-wide scale. I’m curious about individuals, if we’re zooming into individuals and teams, what are some of the top do’s and don’ts you recommend they can start right away in terms of getting better collaboration?

Heidi Gardner
So, team leaders are, ultimately, responsible for the health and wellbeing and outputs of the group. And so, it starts with the team leader, first of all, getting some clarity on the degree to which each team member is already committed to other pieces of work. And perhaps even before composing the team, seeking out individuals who are not the usual suspects. Because if I need to think about project X, my mind will jump to certain people who have a reputation for doing that kind of project well or a piece of it.

Well, what if I went to that person, and instead of asking them to join my team, ask them for a recommendation of somebody whose competence they could vouch for who isn’t quite as busy as they are. Now, this hinges on people knowing the skills and quality levels of their colleagues, but especially on their willingness to let somebody else kind of take their “spot.”

And this falls to top leadership to make it a priority that says, “Busier is not better. Doing quality work is better.” But if there’s that kind of culture where people are willing to make referrals, the team leader should be asking not always the usual suspect but perhaps approaching that person with the strong reputation and asking for a referral to somebody else, maybe an up-and-comer, maybe somebody who’s new in the organization, maybe somebody for whatever reason, doesn’t have as widespread of a reputation but is still fully capable of doing the job.

So, get the right people on the team, make sure once you get the team together that you understand not only how many other pieces are they working on, but on a pretty granular level, “Where are we going to have some friction in the calendar?” This sounds like Project Management 101 but it’s astonishing how often this piece gets skipped.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Heidi Gardner
And once the leaders of the team understand that particular team members are going to be under really severe pressure at certain points, then it’s a question of rerouting the work, of approaching other leaders of teams and asking for some flexibility. It’s not leaving it up to the individual, and I think that’s a big problem in many teams, is that individual members feel like they either just need to suck it up and deal with it, or they’ll be perceived as not capable or strong, or that it’s up to them to kind of work the politics and figure out whose project to prioritize.

And that shouldn’t be the job of those individual team members. That should be something that the leader takes on his or her shoulders. And so, there’s an awareness there, there is a willingness to intervene when necessary, and I think everyone in the organization has to create the context where people feel comfortable raising their hand, and saying, “I’m overstretched. I’m not unwilling to do hard work and lots of work but, right now, the degree to which I’m spread across, taking that hard work and spreading across too many different initiatives is unproductive.” And that’s what we need people to identify.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, bringing some of these bits together, could you share with us a fun story or two of a team or organization that was having some disappointing collaboration, and then what they did to change things up and the cool results they gained from doing so?

Heidi Gardner
So, there’s a great experience I had working with the executive team of a huge global electronics manufacturer. And we were asked to work with them because they were really struggling on innovation as a company, and leading innovation as this executive team. So, my team and I worked with 35 top executives. They were the senior president of a certain division, or of a geographic area, or of a product line, or chief-level officers of functions.

And with them, we conducted a psychometric profile. So, we’ve developed this tool, this online tool, which allows people in just 10 minutes or so to complete a bunch of questions, and it provides them with real insight about their natural tendencies. All else equal, what kinds of problems are they drawn to? All else equal, how do they prefer to operate, in a group, or individually? Are they risk-seekers or risk-spotters?

And you might think, “Oh, we all know this,” but actually, we tend to have some blind spots. And so, what we did with this group from the electronics company is we gave them all this profile, this Smart Collaboration Accelerator, and, first, we shared with each individual where they came out. Then what we did is we analyzed the group, all 35 of them, to see what their collective profiles were.

And it turned out that 33 of the 35 were extreme risk-seekers. In other words, they were motivated not to miss a single opportunity, but there were two people on their team who were risk-spotters. They were the kinds of people who weren’t motivated to take opportunities. They were motivated not to fail, not to make mistakes, not to have anything blow up.

And when we revealed with this data, these were mostly kind of engineers and very quantitative people, and we could put the numbers in front of them that said, “Just on that one dimension, here’s what you look like as a group.” There was a bit of kind of nervous laughter and then the, “Ha-ha, do you think that’s why the regulators are crawling all over us and so forth?”

And then one guy kind of raised his hand, we were in a virtual meeting, he raised his hands on Zoom, and he said, “You never effing listen to me.” He’s like, “I’m that risk-spotter, and I keep telling you that we have these problems that are coming up, and nobody ever pays attention.” And his colleagues said…they kind of laughed, and they said, “Yeah, we hate listening to you. You’re such a downer.”

But it revealed two things to them. First, it revealed to them that they were, in fact, incredibly biased on that dimension, and that they were steamrollering the outlier. Rather than making the most of the diversity in that team, these two individuals who could have helped highlight some real problems before they emerged and blew up, they were majority-ruling and, basically, going with what everyone else who were these risk-seekers decided was better for the company.

And through this kind of conversation, it was like, “Well, all right, we need to make the most of the diversity on the team. Even when you don’t like to hear it, they’re probably telling you something really important. And, oh, by the way, if you’re one of those risk-spotters, you probably need to learn to raise issues in ways that those people can understand what you’re talking about, you’re not just shooting down every idea.”

But what was powerful as well is that the group then realized that, because they were so similar on multiple dimensions, there was something really flawed in the organizational processes that meant you kind of had to be one of these cowboys in order to make it onto X Co. And they looked back at all of the succession planning and everyone coming through the ranks, and they figured out that they were more or less weeding out people who didn’t fit the mold at most rungs of the organization.

And it was a very powerful experience for them, again, once they had the data in front of them, they could visually see how skewed they were in certain behavioral terms that it wasn’t productive for them and actually signaled more root-cause problems throughout a lot of their systems and processes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful, and a pattern, I think, we see quite often. I’m thinking about administering the Myers-Briggs type indicator to many groups, and it’s almost like folks are closeted, it’s like, “Yeah, I’m secretly an introvert, but it doesn’t feel like that really works here, so I put on my extrovert hat around the sales and marketing deal-maker-y people and do that, or I prefer sensing in terms of like getting to the real facts of things as opposed to always imagining these cool possibilities and ideas, and I get called a wet blanket and such.”

Heidi Gardner
Exactly. And what we have worked with groups on, and this can be corporate boards that are a dozen people, it can be functions and departments and business units, what we can do when we help people understand their own natural tendencies is to figure out how to use those as a strength, “How do you bring your voice into the room, especially if you’re the outlier? But, in any case, how do you interact with other people? How do you raise concerns? How do you spot opportunities? How do you engage with people and keep them motivated in ways that are really authentic to you?”

Because I think that is a problem where oftentimes people feel that they have to fit in, they have to mirror somebody else who’s already successful there, and they, of course, are facing a huge burden then because, by not being able to be themselves, it’s really quite painful and draining, but the organization loses out.

There are huge amounts of research showing that when you have people who are genuinely different from one another and can play to their unique strengths, they’re more innovative, they’re more likely to spot both problems and opportunities, they’re better able to customize and tailor solutions to complex problems.

And so, that feeling of needing to fit in, whether it’s how you look and dress and sound, or what kinds of problems you’re attracted to, not being able to foster diversity and true inclusion in terms of bringing those people’s diverse efforts into the room and valuing them, that’s a real process loss for a lot of organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you, well-said. Well, tell me, any key things, Heidi, you want to make sure to mention in terms of top do’s and don’ts for collaboration before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Heidi Gardner
Well, one of the most important things I think when an organization is embarking on this journey of smarter collaboration, they say, “Okay, I get it. We need to really leverage all of the different perspectives we’ve got. We need to break down some of the barriers and the silos inside this organization. How do we get started?”

And we have done research with well over 10,000 senior people across organizations around the planet, and we know there’s five, six, maybe seven common barriers that come up from one place to the next. But what’s unique is…or not unique probably because there’s not an infinite combination. But what’s different for each organization is the prevalence and the importance of those barriers.

And so, for example, one of the barriers is competence trust. If I’m going to bring you into my special cherished project, I have to believe in your competence. I have to think you deliver high-quality, on-time on-budget, that you’re actually really good at what you do, but it’s not enough. Another kind of trust is essential, that’s interpersonal trust. Even if I think you’re a guru but if I think you’re a jerk, I’m still not going to work with you. And so, we know that interpersonal trust, or lack of it, or lack of competence trust, those spring up in most organizations.

But, depending which one really matters, which one is really standing in the way of people working across silos, that is the factor that needs to determine what course of action you take. Because if you’re trying to generate greater competence trust amongst employees, you’re going to go down a path of maybe learning and development, and helping people establish some curiosity in what other people do, and helping people hone their elevator pitch so when they’re talking to somebody, they can describe in compelling ways how they add value to problem-solving or whatever. But if you need to fix interpersonal trust, you need to go down a completely different route.

And so, the point of this is anyone looking to improve smarter collaboration in their organization, they have to start with a database diagnostic. They have to have some objective way of figuring out what stands in between them and really effective collaboration, and then make sure that the solutions they’re developing are tailored to those problems.

Because, all too often, we have worked with leaders who say, “I know exactly what’s wrong here,” and, actually, most leaders are pretty biased in their views of what goes on inside the organization. Nobody refuses to collaborate with the CEO, go figure. So, they don’t see that it’s a major problem, and they don’t understand how their position of authority and a whole lot of other things actually skews their perception of what stands in the way for an average person inside the organization. So, I would say find ways.

We have a toolkit coming out. We codified a methodology to do this after five or six years of doing it ourselves. We’ve now created a toolkit that will be published by Harvard Business Press as companion to our book, where people can use this methodology. We tell people in a very step-by-step kind of way how do you collect the data, how do you analyze it, how do you draw conclusions from it, how do you present it back to executives, and what do you do about it. And I’m hoping that that’s what people use in order to really create and craft a collaborative solution that will drive the kinds of outcomes that we know are advantages of smarter collaborations.

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

Heidi Gardner
My favorite quote is the one that we used as the dedication in our new book. We’ve dedicated the book to our two daughters Anya and Zoe, and all of the smarter collaborators of their generation. And the quote we used is, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” And that quote really resonates for us in this rush, rush world wherein sometimes we feel like taking shortcuts, and, “It’s just going to be better if I crack on and do it myself.” And that works some of the time, but if what you really need is a great solution, if you really want to go far, finding ways to engage in smarter collaboration is absolutely essential.

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

Heidi Gardner
One of my most recent favorite studies was done by Dr. Randall Peterson who’s a professor at London Business School, and he engaged in a very ambitious study of corporate boards.

And so, these individuals, board chairs and independent directors participated in his research and went through this rigorous methodology where they helped him understand in very objective ways what were the dynamics inside the board.

For example, he found that boards that are truly inclusive of women have much better and very different styles of problem-solving and conflict resolution. So, for example, boards that are very male-dominated tend to vote and to cut short discussion and majority rules, and it stamps out dissent and curtails the discussion of unpopular options or opinions. Whereas, boards that are more inclusive of women tend to talk things through in a more substantive and holistic way.

And fascinating discovery is that boards, therefore, with more women on them and where women’s opinions and contributions were more valued, actually were linked to significantly less shareholder dissent. Now, shareholder dissent is something that every corporate board cares about because if their shareholders are creating formal actions saying that they don’t have faith in the way that the board has operated, that’s hugely problematic for governance.

And Dr. Peterson’s research was able to link the way the boards interacted with the gender composition with that very important outcome. And it was a first, not only in the corporate board space but also in helping us understand why it is that gender inclusion is so powerful.

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

Heidi Gardner
I’m going to go way back to a book that was incredibly eye-opening for me. It was called The Russians by Hedrick Smith. And I read this book when I was 15 or 16 years old, so that was in the mid ‘80s, and it was the height of the Cold War. And I had only ever thought about the Russians as a block of people, sort of the Commies, the bad guys. They were featured in all of the movies as the one that Rocky wanted to pummel, or the idea that the US hockey team had to beat the Russians.

And I read this book as part of a summer program that I was about to attend, and it opened my eyes to the idea that the Russians weren’t a monolithic block. They were humans just like all of us Americans. And although it’s incredibly simplistic conclusion, for me, having grown up in Amish country in Pennsylvania, where it was not the most open society or community, and we looked at anybody who was foreigner with a fair degree of suspicion, humanizing the “enemy” was incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Okay. And can you share with us a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Heidi Gardner
Well, I have to go back to the Smart Collaboration Accelerator. It’s not just because we developed it. It’s the psychometric tool that’s science-backed, and it has helped so many organizations and teams and leaders fulfill their potential. It’s incredibly powerful. And we’ve now got 150 people around the world, accredited coaches and professional facilitators and consultants who are trained up in using it. And we are bringing the power of those improved dynamics and self-awareness to create smarter collaborators in a whole range of industries and generations.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Heidi Gardner
It’s hardly novel but exercise is my favorite habit, particularly walking. And I walk as much as I can, even conduct most of my internal meetings and some of my external ones from my treadmill. There’s a fair amount of good research that suggests that walking helps to stabilize some of the rhythms in the brain.

There’s a great deal of research that shows that walking is related to expansive thinking. And I didn’t know the research when I got so into walking, but started holding walking meetings with colleagues, and with family members, and with a whole variety of people where we would try to hash through different kinds of ideas. And now when I get to a new place, walking is the first thing that I try to do. And if I am stuck on a problem, I get on the treadmill.

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

Heidi Gardner
One nugget that came out of our research, we did a study of how smarter collaboration benefits individuals. And, initially, it looked as if people who had bigger networks were better off. And as we dug further, we realized that bigger isn’t better, better is better. And we can now quantify what it takes to make a better network in smarter collaboration terms, and it means accessing a variety of different kinds of not only experts but people who think really differently about problems and about solutions.

And it also means keeping ties open, at least to a small degree, so that you don’t need to be constantly in touch with people. They don’t need to be your best friends in order to contribute a brilliant idea, but they do need to be just warm enough that if you ring them up, or drop them an email, or however people communicate, that they’re going to respond and they’re going to help you solve that problem, or they’re going to give you their own nugget that will help you break through.

And that idea that people don’t need big networks, introverts make brilliant high-quality networks, and they don’t need to be the life of the party. So, the idea is better is better when it comes to forming a network, and the diversity is really key there.

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

Heidi Gardner
Our website is GardnerAndCo.co, and we have all of our studies and our books up there. And speaking of books, our new one Smarter Collaboration has just come out, and we encourage people to take a look at that 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?

Heidi Gardner
I want people to take a few minutes every week and just reflect on whether anything has surprised them. This is a question I ask my executive participants in programs at Harvard. I teach at the Business School and the Law School at Harvard, and, usually, by sort of day three or four of a program, I ask “What surprised you about being here on this program?” And often people are stumped but then the ideas start to flow.

And what we realized is asking about surprises forces people to confront what they have taken for granted or what they had expected. And I encourage people to stop every week at some point and just look around and say, “What has surprised me in the last few days?” because that will challenge us to think about what we do take for granted, what we had expected to happen, and it will raise our antenna up to being more curious about the world.

It will prompt us to ask better questions or engage in conversations that might take us to places that we weren’t open to hearing before, or we might tune in to a different kind of podcast, or a different news station, or new source that we would, otherwise. And if we seek out surprises, I think it really opens our mind. That will be the challenge I’d offer up to people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Heidi, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun collaborations.

Heidi Gardner
Thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.