Presence Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, welcome.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. You are as senior a leader as they come. So, no pressure, we’re going to expect senior-sized insights from you, Anne?

Anne Chow
I don’t know. I used to be, perhaps, Pete, so I think it’s all relative. I’m currently employed by myself, which I think is something that lots of us can relate to, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so we’re talking about your book and more, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion. Could you kick us off with a really phenomenal, dramatic story that illustrates, indeed, just how transformative this inclusion power stuff is?

Anne Chow
So, this is actually how I opened the book. So, many of us can sort of reflect on what was the very first job we had where we realized that leadership was a thing. Many of us entered the workforce, whatever that may be, in a small business, medium-sized business, or a big company, and we’re going to work and we have a job. But leadership is sort of this abstract thing. It’s the people above us, people making the decisions, that are not like us doing the work in any way, shape, or form.

For me, I realized that leadership was actually a thing when I first had this job in customer service. And it was the first time that I had a large team that was sort of a seminal experience if you were in telecom, if you were an up-and-coming leader, that they wanted you to lead an actual big group of people that was geographically dispersed, demographically very different than yourself. Many of them were union workers as well. And so, that was the first time that, for me, I realized that leadership was a thing.

I kind of came in with a lot of, I would say, dare I say, Pete, cockiness, that I was coming in as a new, fresh leader, and I knew where I was going to take the group, and credibility wasn’t instant, let’s put it that way. Most of these people had so much more tenure than me, they were over twice my age, and much more seasoned and much more wise. And what I realized that there was a difference between leading and managing.

I had previously managed lots of things. I was responsible for projects and tasks. But in this case, I wasn’t just responsible for the job of the customer service function of my multi hundred-person organization. I was responsible for the people who were doing the work. And, ultimately, that’s what leading bigger is all about. It is really taking a very human-centric approach to your work, to your tasks, to everything that you do, not just about your workforce, but also as it relates to all of your stakeholders, whether it be your customers, your investors, your partners, your suppliers, or even internal partners and other organizations that you might work with.

And so, for me, that was a huge realization because I realized that I could not get the job done all by myself but I had to figure out how to lead bigger through widening my perspectives, by including more people in my purview. And that was all towards the objective of, one, being awesome at my job, but, importantly, having greater performance and a much greater impact on the business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you have the aha moment, leadership is for real. It’s a thing that you’re living and experiencing, and you can’t do the job by yourself. You needed to work through the folks and make it happen and take a human-focused approach. So, understood. So, then, did you see some transformative power with inclusion? Or what went down when you found yourself in this situation for the first time?

Anne Chow
So, first, I was hit and met with I wouldn’t call it quite a brick wall, but it almost felt that way in the sense that I didn’t have instant credibility with my team. I thought, naively so when I was, this is when I was in my 20s, that, “Hey, my title, my role would instantly gain me some respect and credibility,” and it didn’t. My people gave me kind of a wake-up call, they said, “Hey, what makes you think that you know what’s happening here? We’ve had leaders like you before. You’re just a young whippersnapper. You’re going to come in here and just kind of do your check mark and then move on.”

So, what I found myself having to do was truly listen, truly empathize, truly try to put myself in their shoes to understand, one, “Why were they so non-trusting in management?” Two, “What were the issues that they were facing in terms of not being able to do their job well?” There were many barriers. Most of them were outside of their control, which is where I would come in, whether it was relationships with other work groups like sales. And I think in many organizations, there’s friction between sales and service.

Sales are the people who get the commission for making the sale. They don’t have to make the service actually work or put it in. The service people are left holding the bag, trying to deliver what the salespeople committed on. Service people are there when something breaks. You don’t call a salesperson to fix something. You call a service person. And so, I had to get underneath those issues, actually represent them in front of other stakeholders, sort of transform how we were working with other teams, both internally and externally, because we had external suppliers and partners as well. And that completely changed the amount of agency we had.

It completely changed how they viewed me, quite frankly. They put a lot more trust into me. They realized that I was there to help them, to support them, not to micromanage them, but to empower them and remove barriers and enable them to be more successful, both as individuals but also collectively as a team. So those are just some of the examples of when you lead with inclusion, when you lead bigger from the front and with people in mind, it absolutely works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you had a change of heart in terms of, “They’ll respect me because of my title,” to, “No, they’ll respect me when they see that I’m for them, I’m serving them, I’m making their lives easier and understanding them.” I’m curious, was there a particular turning point or issue, and we can zoom way in, in which you really keyed in on a pain point or a frustration or a something, and then delivered something for them, and they said, “All right, here we go”?

Anne Chow
Yeah, there was. I’ll just riff on the example that I just gave between sales and service. So, sales was a constant pain point for us, and we would have chronic sales teams that would constantly bring in something that was overcommitted, we were not involved in any of the upfront planning process, and it was that kind of that old adage, Pete, that you’ve probably heard as many of your listeners have heard in terms of “Poor planning on your part does not a crisis on my part make.”

This was our life in customer service. We actually had, over time, we developed this wall of fame and wall of shame. The difference between the sales teams that were on the wall of fame, they had learned to work with us in a strategic way, in a proactive way. We actually felt like we had a partnership. The sales teams that were on part of the wall of shame were last minute, everything was always a crisis, we never had enough information, and we were always put in a bad position as it related to serving the customer and delivering what we need to do.

And so, in that front, what I did very specifically was target those sales leaders, my peers and my colleagues over there, to attempt to compel them to change their behaviors, to attempt to compel them to work inclusively together to realize that we are on the same team, this customer is our joint customer, and we will both be better off, and our teams will be better off if we actually work together.

So, I worked tirelessly to try to get as many of these sales teams, because this is where we would get our orders from, was from sales, from a delivery standpoint, and that was really a big part of the effort, very specifically, that I worked on as their leader, as their supporter to help my team get their role done.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say wall of fame and wall of shame, I’m literally imagining a wall with portraits of individuals. Was this physically present in the facility?

Anne Chow
Yeah, it was. It was the day before digital signage, so it was very much paper-driven and marker-driven, and could be easily removed, let’s say, if your leaders or customers might walk through the site. You wouldn’t want to see something like that. You’d want to see leaderboards and much more sort of cheerleading type of stuff. But no, it was in fact visible.

And what I think one of the most powerful things it did for my people, as it relates to how they perceived me, was that I was actually authentic and recognize what they were going through as opposed to giving them some corporate party line of, “Oh, well, yeah, we got to deal with it somehow. You know, it’s not their fault,” but to really be there for them as part of the team and really being part of a solution to help us all deliver better and lead bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking it’s fairly common to hear dismissive corporate talk, and it has so many flavors, but it all serves the same end, to be like, to convey, “I don’t really care what you’re whining about. Go ahead and make it all better.” And so, Anne, could you give me some choice phrases, like what a blow-off sounds like from that leadership?

Anne Chow
Well, Pete, I’ve strived my whole career to not lead this way, so I’m going to dig deep here. I’m going to dig deep here, although I will confess to you and our listeners and viewers that I have been accused from time to time of using corporate jargon. So, some corporate jargon that, these are some of the phrases that I, quite frankly, can’t stand, although I am guilty of saying them in a time or two. How about, “It is what it is”?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Anne Chow
That’s just not helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s basically saying “I will do…” Like, in response to they’re raising an issue, a complaint, a concern to you, and you’re saying, “It is what it is,” it’s basically like, “Nothing can be done. Next.”

Anne Chow
Right. And how actually ridiculous is that, right, which is nothing can be done. Something can always be done. And I think that when I think about that phrase or even catch myself wanting to say that phrase, I have to reframe myself and say, “You know what? There is stuff that we can control. We need to focus there. There are things that we can influence.”

“That is my job as the leader is to help drive influence where we may not have control. I know there’s also a ton of stuff we care about, but we can neither control nor influence it. Worry is a very unproductive emotion, and we all kind of go through this as humans. So, worrying about the stuff that we can neither control nor influence just hurts us all.”

So, part of I always felt, instead of saying “It is what it is,” is to get your team focused on “What can you control? What can we influence? And how can we influence it? And, yes, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff we care about, but it falls outside of our responsibility and our influence, and so we do no good expending calories and energy in lamenting about it.” So, I always found those situations as an opportunity to refocus my team, and also refocus myself, quite honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And I also like that there’s three categories and not just two. There’s control, there’s influence, and there’s out of control, as opposed to just control and no control.

Anne Chow
And, Pete, the engineer in me would say maybe there’s probably four categories. There’s control, there’s influence, there’s stuff you care about, and there’s stuff you just totally don’t care about, all of the other stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anne Chow
But our care-abouts are usually much, much greater than that which we can control, and sometimes we confuse the two. And in a workday or in any day in your life when you think about this, your time and energy are finite resources. So how are you going to spend that time and your energy? And do you align that time and energy against that which gives you the most powerful outcomes and impact? Or are you just busy?

I never really like this word “busy,” because activity is different than productivity. And so, that’s sort of another area is that, “Oh, you know, gosh, we’re so busy,” or, “I’m too busy for that,” that’s another one, or, “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We can’t look at that.” Busy doesn’t mean that this other thing that’s coming in might not need to take a greater priority.

Busy just implies, “All right, you’re just doing stuff. Is this stuff productive? Are you even open-minded enough to listen to other perspectives, to understand what this other opportunity or crisis or challenge might be, that it should, in fact, rise to the top of what you need to focus on, what you and your team need to focus on?”

So, I think that’s sort of another one, is to not fall in that trap of just “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We’re too busy to consider that new dataset. We’re too busy to go and read that additional research report. We’re too busy to go and take that field visit and join you in that customer meeting that might actually tell us something about whether or not our products and services are working in the minds of customers.”

So, I think that’s also another sort of corporate trap that we fall into, is that the craze of the day, the busyness takes us away from really thinking about having impact. And whether or not that busyness, what is it that we’re working on, the time and energy and effort that we’re placing, is it really aligned with the greatest performance and the greatest impact that you, as an individual, can have, but also you, as an organization, a team, or even a company, depending on what your role is?

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, busy doesn’t tell us much at all other than you have a lot of activity occurring currently.

Anne Chow
Right. And maybe you’re actually not that good at prioritizing. I am guilty of this. I think we are all guilty of this when we have days, weeks where we just feel like we’re, you know, what’s the analogy, the hamster or the gerbil in that wheel, that that’s like we’re going, we’re going, we’re going, but we’re actually going nowhere. And I think we’ve got to catch ourselves when we find that to be the case.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re talking about inclusion, can you share with us, what do we mean by the word inclusion in terms of how you define it, and how it’s often defined just generally in corporate speak? How are we thinking about this word?

Anne Chow
So, first, let me say that this book that I just recently wrote, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion is a leadership book. It is not a DEI book. One of the intents of me writing this book was to approach inclusion with a much more strategic perspective, aperture, than it is currently perceived by some. A quote actually from the book is, “Inclusion itself has been made too small, stuck at the end of the DEI acronym.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what inclusion is to me. Inclusion, and I use leading bigger pretty synonymously with inclusive leadership. All that is, is widening your perspectives to have greater performance and greater impact. And the ergo, the therefore from that is, one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to widen your perspectives is to widen your perspectives by including as many different kinds of people as you can in the work that you’re doing, whether it’s your employees, your team members, your partners, your customers, or otherwise.

Every business is a people business. And so, to take this very people-human-centric approach to your leadership and to your business. And who doesn’t? I mean, think about it. Who doesn’t want to widen your perspective so that your performance is better and that your impact is greater, however you might measure it in the scope of your job, or your career, or your life?

Why do I say inclusion has been made too small? There are different groups of people who view that DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, means certain things. And I think that it is often misconstrued by certain groups of people to mean issues of gender and race representation at the cost of everything else.

One, in actuality, this is Anne’s view. This is Anne’s view of DEI. One is the acronym does us a disservice because it oversimplifies three different important strategic leadership imperatives. While they may be interrelated, they’re not one thing. Diversity is just simply the reality of the modern world. Every generation that comes forward becomes more and more diverse. Our elements of diversity go far beyond our gender and race, our gender identity, and our racial and our ethnic identity.

Who would have ever thought that an element of diversity in the workforce would be, whether or not you wear a mask, or whether or not you have a vaccine, but these were new and emergent, during the pandemic, aspects of diversity in terms of how you had to think about your team, dynamics, how you would run your workforce, how you handle your workplaces. And this is just ever-changing, and my book explores many of the different dimensions that shape us as individuals.

But of course, Pete, no two of us are the same, and that’s the beauty of diversity. Diversity just is. You can choose to embrace it and lean into it because the diversity, the evolution of the diversity of the world will impact your workforce. It will impact your customer base and your evolving customer base. It will impact your investor base. It will impact everything about the work that you’re doing today, will be impacted by it.

The question is, “Do you lift your head up out of the sand and sort of run toward that to try to understand it so you can get ahead and grow? Or do you just kind of let it happen to you, and consciously or unconsciously ignore or exclude certain parts of the world because of your frame of thinking?

Equity is just simply fairness. So, for each of us as leaders, we have to decide what fairness we want. Do we want making it up? Do we want equitable access to health care for all of the members of our team? So, equity to me is just an outcome, and it means a fairness of some kind of outcome, and each leader has to decide what that is.

Inclusion, which is where the magic is, requires action. When you think about it, if you want to lead, act, behave in an inclusive way, it requires that you open your mind, that you open your perspective, that you open, in some cases, your heart, and that you do something differently, and it is about widening your perspective. Ultimately, what we want is more diverse, more innovative perspectives to help us come out with better outcomes, making better decisions. I mean, that’s what we want.

That’s how you become awesome at your job is that you make better and better decisions. You do that by surrounding yourself with the best people possible. You do that by delving into as many data sources, valid data sources as possible, and you collaborate. You collaborate. And if you’re responsible for an organization or a team, you build cultures that are agile, that are resilience, because the only thing that is constant is change.

So that is my view of inclusion, is quite simply widening your perspective, and inclusive leadership is about, and leading bigger is about widening those perspectives so you can have greater performance and greater impact. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, there’s a lot of really good stuff to think about there. So, can you bring that all the more real and practical in terms of our mindset and our way of thinking and interacting with the world? What are some habits or approaches that are working against us, maybe don’t even realize we’re doing, that fail to widen, but rather constrict our perspective to our detriment?

Anne Chow
Yes, very much so. So, I actually had an opportunity a couple years ago to co-author a book called The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias, and the way that we opened that book is with this sentence, and that is, “To be human is to have bias. If you were saying that you don’t have bias, you would be saying that your brain is not working.” So, bias basically sits in the functioning of our brains and neuroscience because we experience so much.

We’re taking in so much data in every moment but our brain can only process a very, very small fraction of it. And so, how we handle that is we form biases. Biases are predispositions for preferences. It may be even prejudices against certain things, groups, people. It could be associated with food. I mean, think about if you had a bad experience eating a certain kind of food, you will have a bias and not eat it ever again.

Why is it that if you happen to be exploring, let’s say, a different kind of cuisine than you’re used to, and you’re going with somebody who is very, very experienced in it, you want to ask them, “Well, what is that?” They’re not going to tell you, because if they tell you that it is, this is a true story that I experienced, if they tell you that it’s goat brain, you’re not going to eat it, because you have a bias as to what it is.

But if you try it, you may find that you actually like it. I mean, this is kind of how it works, right? On the flip side of that, in terms of the positive, think about the feelings that all of us have. If we meet a total stranger who’s from the same hometown we are, or how we might react when we bump into somebody or meet somebody who’s from the same alma mater, we have a natural affinity to those people because we always like to seek common ground.

Where we can fall into traps with this is imagine if you’re recruiting for a position that people have equal skillsets, maybe one of them even has better skillsets, but they didn’t go to the same school that you did in the same program. Might you inadvertently say to yourself, “I know exactly what program that was because I went through it, and it was super hard, and I’m going to pick that person over the other person who maybe has some of these other skills but I weigh those, the fact they went to my alma mater and went to the same program I did, higher because I have inside knowledge, and it’s something that relates to me,” right?

That would be almost a very natural reaction for many of us, but you may not actually be picking the best talent for the role if you let that bias rule. So, we have many situations like that, that we go through our regular workday, where we have to catch ourselves on, “Are we thinking with a narrow perspective? Are we leaning towards what’s comfortable? Or are we seeking wider perspectives? Are we making ourselves and the team sufficiently uncomfortable that we know we’re challenging each other enough, that we’re doing the due diligence around the debate of any particular issue so that we come out with the best decision and the best outcome?”

It doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to get consensus. In fact, one of the things I touch on in the book is the difference between collaboration and consensus. We always want collaboration. If, in fact, you have a truly diverse team and you’re really getting in the weeds of a difficult issue, you may never get consensus.

Some of you may be out there thinking, “Well, then what do you do?” You can get alignment. You can develop alignment if you’ve built an environment and you’ve cultivated an environment of constructive discourse, healthy debate, smart risk-taking. But consensus should actually never be the objective if you’re dealing with something really, really, really difficult and complex.

You’re going to have many different perspectives about it, but you want to vet all the different scenarios that you possibly can, the various risks, the intended consequences, think through the unintended consequences. And so, these are just a couple of examples of how we might, in our everyday lives, at work, or even out in our community, find ourselves falling into the trap of comfort.

Pete, this is a very interesting stat that may not surprise people, but over 70% of leaders pick protégés that are of the same race and gender. That’s pretty significant, that number. And when you consider it, think about yourself, who are you most comfortable with a lot of the times? Who might you not be comfortable with and why, even if you don’t know the people at all?

This is the power of really thinking more inclusively, acting more inclusively, behaving more inclusively, because if you don’t, you are, I absolutely believe that you’re going to ultimately lose to a leader who is leading that way. You will be out-competed, absolutely, in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, as you say this, I’m thinking about the podcast and like what I’m comfortable with, and it’s like, “I am not comfortable with TikTok,” for example. It’s, like, I don’t like being there. Like, it’s weird to me. It goes fast. I feel like my brain is getting dumber, and so I don’t want to deal with it. And, at the moment, there are no How to be Awesome at Your Job shorts on TikTok.

And yet I can see in my own data that my listeners, generally, are not big into social media. They kind of are, you know, they’re like me. And, as I do the surveys, it’s like, “Oh, the average age of my audience is growing faster than time is passing.” And TikTok does skew to younger folks and, I guess I’m 41 now and time is flying.

And so then, I see what you’re saying with regard to our comfort. It’s just like, “Eh, I don’t like TikTok.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, so that’s it? So, I guess I’m not going to mess with TikTok, we’re not going to get into TikTok, and we’re not going to draw in young folks who like using TikTok who have no idea that this show exists, and it is to our detriment just because of my preferences and comfort levels.”

Anne Chow
That’s right. And when you think about it, Pete, not to scare you, but I’m sure you’ve looked at all the demographic information because you’re now mulling it over. You as a Millennial, because you’re a Millennial, this is the first year in the workforce that Gen Z is either equal to or outnumbers Boomers. So, Gen Z-ers who are all over the TikTok, and if you talk about Alpha, who is coming behind them, coming after them, it’s all about the TikTok, do they not want to be awesome at their job? Of course they do.

But what are the vehicles and platforms that serve them to get what I think are timeless conversations that you have lifted up through your podcast, entirely relevant to them? But they will not ever know, nor will they ever move backwards in terms of using their mother or fathers, the elders. I have two Gen Z children, so one is already in the workforce, one is, knock on wood, going to enter after she graduates in December, and they actually call us the geriatrics. And I’m a Gen X-er.

So, I mean, I’m an old Gen X-er, mind you, but I’m a Gen X-er but my children actually call us the geriatrics. And I fancy myself to be pretty technology savvy but I’ll confess to you, since you confessed to me and everybody else, I don’t do the TikTok either. No, I don’t. And I’m specifically calling it “The TikTok” because it makes me sound even more geriatric but I’m kind of playing it to…

Pete Mockaitis
“All these youngsters and their TikToks!” So, that notion about being uncomfortable and widening the perspective, I think is very helpful because it’s possible for it to just blow right past us in terms, like, “Yeah, I don’t really like TikTok, so I’m just moving on.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we’ll timeout, like ideally, you’re having a wider perspective and including people who will challenge you a little bit along those lines, and say, “Okay. Well, TikTok may or may not be an optimal channel for you to invest in, but it’s worth a fair shake given just the vast quantity of hours that people are spending on TikTok, even though you’re not one of them.”

Anne Chow
Right. And, in your line of work, How to be Awesome at Your Job, more and more workers that are entering the workforce are on there, so you’re actually missing a big part of your target audience because of just this shift. And I think that really underscores a point I made earlier, which is you could do that, I could do that, but, ultimately, we will lose to somebody who is the next-gen Pete or next-gen Anne, and who is already on there, who’s going to disrupt us. Our audience will dissipate and we will become irrelevant, even if our content is better because, simply, we’re not there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Miss Excel is crushing it on TikTok, for example. So, they’re out there.

Anne Chow
Yeah, they are. They are. They are, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked a lot about TikTok, but I’d love to hear about other examples in which we can kind of, oopsies, forget to widen the perspective, and not get the inclusive goodness that leads to our peril.

Anne Chow
So, this is actually the last chapter in the book, and it’s about flexibility. So, some of us in today’s world will think, “Okay. Well, flexibility is important. Yeah, we want to work in a place that’s flexible and in a work environment that’s flexible.” Some people may say, “Well, you know what that means? That means that you get to work at home, I get to work in my car on the road. It means a flexible, hybrid work environment.”

I actually think that flexibility in a work environment. Flexibility and leading bigger means the following, and you’re going to be able to tell I’m an engineer because I’m going to give you three other concentric circles. The first circle is your job, the second circle around that is your career, the third circle around that is your life.

To me, flexibility means leading in a way that acknowledges and respects the fact that every member of your team has a job in the context of their career, in the context of their life. I’m going to sound like a geriatric now. Back in the day, when I first entered the workforce, you had your professional life and your personal life, and they were very much bifurcated. Workforce was a place that you went to. It wasn’t something that you did. We didn’t have this incredible technology that enabled you to be connected at all times, to be able to get stuff done, and check in, and do whatever it is you need to do. That world is gone. It’s over.

We now live in a world, and the pandemic really accelerated this, as we all know, where we all know that we have one life. It has some personal dimensions and professional dimensions. We can do work wherever it is that we live. We have to recognize, if you’re choosing to be a leader that your interactions with other people are specifically about their job and your job, but they have bigger aspirations. Their job sits in the context of their career, which sits in the context of their life.

And I think that the data says that we work, we spend about a third of our lives working, another third sleeping, so work plays a very significant role. So, unless you, as a leader, respect and seek to understand and have this broader perspective of, it’s not just about “Get the job done. Get the job done. Get the job done.” There has to be empathy involved, there has to be authenticity involved, there has to be grace involved.

These are words that, ten years ago, were never, ever thought of entering the workforce or in the context of leadership. These are now much more important skills in leaders today, and our next-gen workforce actually expects these traits in their leaders. So, to think much more broadly, to widen your perspective of what flexibility actually means, and that, ultimately, no two people are the same, you might not have a working agreement with somebody who is not a high-performer, is not going to be the same as you are with a high-performer who’s more experienced, who’s demonstrated, that they can have a much more fluid approach to work.

And so, I think this is a level of, if you will, sophistication in our thinking about what flexibility actually means. An example of that is safety. When we think about safety first, in my generation, that meant physical safety. That workplaces had to be safe, that if there was a spill, it had to be cleaned up, that there were rails on the stairs, handrails on the stairs, and you had to hold the handrail on the stairs, these kinds of things.

But today, equally as important is psychological safety, and psychological safety in the workforce. So, we all play a role, if you’re choosing to be a leader, to create environments where people feel safe to express themselves, to take smart risk, to have constructive debate. Because, how are you going to widen your perspectives if you don’t create an environment where people actually feel comfortable and safe to do so?

So, you cannot have an environment that is toxic or one that punishes “failures.” You have to have freedom within some kind of framework and some type of expectation, and this is just a very different way of leading. It’s a very different way of thinking about how you do your job and how your job relates to other people’s. I actually tend to think it’s really, really exciting and even more meaningful. But those are also some of the things I think for people to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, I’d love it if you could share any specific actions or tactics or do’s and don’ts associated with some of this goodness.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what I would say, I’ll address this from two different perspectives. If you happen to be a manager of a person today, so you have a responsibility for a team, people, whatnot, when you do your performance reviews with them and you give them performance feedback, you’re giving them feedback very specifically on their job. But part of your responsibility is to ensure that you have some line of sight to what their career aspiration is.

So, part of your role as their manager, as their coach, as their supervisor, if you will, to use some old-school language, is not just to focus on their performance development and performance management. You also have a responsibility to focus on their career management and their career development. I’m still shocked by the number of times that I worked with people, and they say, “Oh, I just got blindsided. That employee just up and left because he, she, or they thought that it was going to be better. They got a job that they thought they could have more upside. They just never brought it to me that they actually aspired to get promoted or they wanted to move from this function to that function.”

So, you as the manager, you as the supervisor, you as the leader have a responsibility to not just focus on the job but to help prompt and understand career aspirations, because I can tell you that individual, I mean think about yourself, you’re not just doing your job to do your job. You’re doing it because it’s going to lead to something.

And even if it’s you’re doing your job today to put food on the table, to get healthcare, for your family and yourself, you are doing that so that you can serve some other passion, whether it’s in the same line of work, whether it’s some, what is maybe today a side hustle compared to your day job, but you’re doing it for a purpose, and that purpose, your career is whatever that life’s purpose is, whatever your calling is, and that may or may not be directly related to your job.

And I think that we, as leaders, have to respect that, but we actually have to embrace it if we want to cultivate talent and have the best workforce out there. So, Pete, that’s one example of what you can do very differently. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to continue to give performance feedback and performance-develop your people, but it also says you also have to think about their career development and their career management as a separate but parallel thing, because they are, whether you like it or not, and they’re going to.

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

Anne Chow
So, one of my favorite quotes is, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” It’s a quote from Gandhi, and I think it’s a quote that, for me, embodies the fact that we are all adults, and we take ownership of the choices that we make. And if we see something that we believe needs to be changed, you’ve got to become part of that positive change. You’ve got to be part of the catalyst to make it happen. And so, that is one of my favorite quotes.

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

Anne Chow
One of the ones that I have used constantly since it came out, and they just celebrated the 10-year anniversary, the 10th one just came out, actually, I think just very, very recently, and that is the McKinsey Lean In, Women in the Workplace study that started a decade ago.

One of the reasons why I find this set of research so groundbreaking is that it very specifically goes into multiple facets of women in the workplace, slices and dices the different demographics, talks about the different stage of the evolution of women in the workforce at various different levels, and peels the issues and the opportunities back, not just by identifying the problems, but it also offers solutions for companies and organizations to consider, to continue to cultivate women in the workplace. So, I think it’s been one of the most groundbreaking, consistent set of research done over multiple, multiple years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Anne Chow
A favorite book of mine is How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I think this book is so revolutionary in the way of, you know, there’s been a lot of study shown that we, as people, are not truly happy unless we’re helping others. You know, this whole idea of happiness at work and joy at work, I mean, it tends to be sort of so simple. When you think about jobs and careers, it’s so quantitatively-focused, so ambition-focused, but ultimately what brings you joy in your life?

It really is extremely, extremely provocative in terms of helping you, maybe even catalyzing you to think through this question of “How will you measure your life?” We each have one life to live. We do not have a professional life. We do not have a personal life. We have one life. It has professional and personal dimensions, and we’ve been given a gift of this life. So, what is it that you want to accomplish in this very, very short time that we have in this world? And my hope, of course, is that you choose to lead bigger, not just at work but in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks?

Anne Chow
I’m going to reinforce something that I just said because I think it’s such an important one. We each have one life to live. We don’t have a professional life. We don’t have a personal life. We have one life that has personal and professional aspects. And so, the challenge, the opportunity, the gift we have each is to figure out what we want to do with that one life, and there is no time like the present.

Time is that most precious resource that we all tend to waste and squander. Once time has passed, we can never get it back. And so, if there’s something that you aspire to do, be, help with, become, the time is now. There’s no time like now.

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

Anne Chow
I would point them to my LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, or my website, which is TheAnneChow.com, The-A-N-N-E-C-H-O-W.com.

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

Anne Chow
Yeah, I would challenge every single person here to think about how you can lead bigger. What is the one area in your job that you would like to learn more about, where you know that widening your perspectives will help you, you just haven’t taken the time or made the effort or even thought about how to go about doing it? Is it with your team? Is it with a platform, a tool, a part of the market that you want to pursue, a set of investors that you know are out there, but you haven’t figured out how to connect with them yet? So, find one area first with respect to how you might widen your perspective and start there. So that’s the one challenge, a homework assignment that I give everybody out there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne, this is fun. I wish you much great big leading.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much. You too, Pete. Cheers to leading bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, welcome.

Mitch Warner
Thanks so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to be chatting with you today because Leadership and Self-Deception is one of my favorite books of all time, and I didn’t know who I could talk to on the show about it because the author is just The Arbinger Institute. And so, I was like, “Who? I don’t know, I guess.” And then you show up in my inbox, that it’s like, “This is the coolest thing ever.” So, thank you and welcome.

Mitch Warner
Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited for our conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. Well, maybe just to back it up a smidge, what is The Arbinger Institute? And how does a whole organization write a book?

Mitch Warner
Oh, great question. The Arbinger Institute is an organization that helps other organizations transform their culture. And the way we help people transform their culture is by helping people transform their people, specifically, at the level of mindset. A lot of people think about transforming a culture or transforming people in terms of behavior, “Okay, well, here’s what people are doing. Let’s fix that. Let’s get people doing something different than they’re doing today, and then we’ll get a better result.”

And our work illuminates the fact that every behavior that people are engaging in is driven by how they see. It’s driven by their mindset. And so, our work is to help organizations transform at the level of mindset. And then when that happens, people start behaving differently and they get better results. And so, the books that we write, including Leadership and Self-Deception, as well as the other books, are all deeply informed by the work that we’re doing with clients.

And that’s not one person. That’s a whole team of people that are going in to help organizations do the work of transforming their results. So those stories are coming through our team from our clients, and they inform everything that we do. And so, while we have teams of people that actually write those books to share those ideas more broadly in the world, we write them as an institute because we are an institute, and it’s really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And the book doesn’t read as though a piece of writing by committee. It is riveting and lovely, and transformation. That’s something we’re all about here. So, could you kick us off perhaps with a really phenomenal story of folks being transformed by some of these principles? Could you walk us through a person and what went down with regard to what they were thinking and doing and the new ideas that got in their head, and the new things they did, and what happened?

Mitch Warner
One that comes to mind is a leader named Louise Francesconi. She ran a 17,000-person division of a very large organization, and she decided that she was going to own the cultural transformation that she knew had to happen inside of the organization. And it was actually an organization that, when we started working with them, had been newly acquired, and she was put in charge of this division.

So, you got these two different groups of people, and these two groups of people are trying to come together, and they realize that they have to cut a significant amount of money. In fact, $100 million was the task of this newly combined leadership team. We’ve got to cut a $100 million dollars from the business, and we’ve got to grow the business at the same time.

Well, they’ve been involved in the work of cultural transformation that Louise wanted to own inside of this division, and so they just called and they said, “Hey, how would we leverage these ideas that we’ve been working with to tackle a really complex problem like that?” And we said, “Well, we’ll come and we’ll be on site as you do that.” And they came together in the typical way, “All right, let’s cut $100 million,” and Louise set it up in what she thought was the right way to set it up, “All right, everybody come, you’ll all present what you’re going to do to contribute to this big goal.”

And we all know how people show up like that. People are territorial, they don’t want anything to be cut from their area of the business, they kind of present something that’s perfunctory, but you just know you’re never going to get there in this way. Everybody is really just thinking about themselves. They’re coming to that with what we call an inward mindset, “I’m not malicious, but I’m definitely not focused on my impact on other people. I’m focused, really, on how this is going to impact me.”

And they got to a point about halfway through the day where they just realized, “You’re not going to make this happen.” And so, my colleague at Arbinger’s took Louise aside, and said, “Hey, would you mind if I just help shape this meeting?” And she said, “Sure, be my guest.” And he said, “Okay, we’re going to take two hours.”

Now, out of an eight-hour day, that’s a lot of time. But he said, “We’re going to take two hours. And I just want you to pair up with someone else in this room, and you’re going to spend the first hour just explaining to your counterpart all the things that you’re working on, all the things that you’re wrestling with, the things that you’re struggling with. And we’re going to do that for an hour, and then you’re going to spend the next hour just coming up with any way that you could help the other person that you’ve been learning about save their money, not cut their money, just save their money.”

And it was like magic. You had people who were now alive to the people around them for the very first time, really, and going, “Oh, my word. I didn’t realize that what you were trying to do in this organization was so important and how hard that is, but how critical it is, too. Here’s ways I think I could help you save that, that critical piece of the business.”

And it got everybody so far outside of themselves that they started to come up with, on their own, ways that they could help the other people in the business save their money. And as a result, they found redundancies and ways that they were costing themselves, the business, more than they needed to so that they got to cutting a $100 million dollars by the end of the day, and not one person had to lose their job in the process. It was stunning.

And I think about that experience often because it just illustrates what happens when people get outside of themselves, when they just start thinking about, “Hey, who are the people around me? What are they trying to accomplish? What could I do, given the resources that I have, in order to help people be more successful?” And you don’t have to be a leader to work that way. You can be anyone in an organization.

And I’d say that the people in organizations that are most valuable to the organization, doesn’t matter what role you sit in, whether you supervise people or not, are the people that think that way. They just figure out how to get outside of themselves and go, “How do I help other people accomplish their objectives given what I can do?” They’re the magic in an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds cool. And I’m not going to try to lean into my Bain strategy consulting background, but I’m so curious about these initiatives that saved a hundred million without losing any heads and people feel good about. So, could you give us just one example of an initiative that someone came up with, like, “Hey, this would help you save money,” and someone receives that and says, “Why, thank you,” as opposed to, “Back off, pal”?

Mitch Warner
Well, the first thing that happened in that room is one of the people stood up and said, “Based on what I’m learning from the person that I’ve just been meeting with,” in a serendipitous way. It wasn’t, you know, “Okay, you meet with you, you meet with you.” It wasn’t like that. “It was just the things that I’m learning about this person, I actually think that I should be reporting to that person.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Mitch Warner
That was the first move that happened in that room. And, look, that doesn’t happen in organizations. It doesn’t happen in meetings like this. No one raises their hand and says, “You know what? I think I should go down a rung in the ladder in our org chart.” That doesn’t happen, but it does when a person says, “You know what? We could succeed if all of the things that I’m doing, which in, a Venn diagram, really overlap with this other organization, if all those things were consolidated.”

And what they saw is that there were facilities, there was equipment, there were processes that had significant redundancy to this other department. And so, from the perspective of this person, they couldn’t say, “Well, I think you should report to me.” They just said, “You know what, for the good of this organization, I could report to you. And if we did that, if we consolidated into one unit instead of two different departments, we could get rid of all of those redundancies, work our teams in the same facilities, on the same equipment, with the same process.” That got them to their first seven million.

But, more importantly than that, it put in motion a domino effect in that room where people realized, “Hey, being part of this company means I don’t have to protect myself. In fact, I can figure out things that I could do that are so innovative because they’re no longer filtered through the lens of self-protection or self-advancement.” When it gets to that point, oh, my word, you can accomplish anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it really is beautiful. You said that doesn’t happen, it does sound almost like miraculous or spiritual, and they’re like wisdom traditions that are speaking of these matters associated with putting others, being in service of others, and kind of losing your ego and these kinds of things. So, I want to talk about the particulars of the individual mindset at length. But, first, I want to hear, in an organizational setting, how do we start to get the memo that, “It is, in fact, safe to do this, and I am not going to get my head chopped off if I lower the defenses”?

Mitch Warner
That’s a really good question, and that’s a question that is easier, I think, if you’re a leader to say, “How do I send that message?” If you’re not though, then it will feel risky. Let’s just be honest, it will feel risky to say, “You know what? I’m going to step out and I’m going to do the kinds of things that I feel would have the highest and best impact on the people around me. And it might mean that I forget some things about the past that I’ve used as justifications for why I haven’t done that to date. It might feel risky. because of where we’ve been.”

But the funny thing is, what I’ve experienced is, that people that take what feels risky, that step, discover that that’s the thing that actually propels their own success. You can’t do it. Here’s the irony about it. You can’t do it to improve your chances of succeeding as an individual. It’s just that I’ve seen that that is the natural outcome. It’s the byproduct.

When people step out and say, “You know what? Let me take a risk and just let me see this person as a person. What are they trying to accomplish? Let me adjust something.” Everybody is going, “That’s what we need in the organization. Those are the kind of leaders we need.” It’s just what I see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that is really beautiful. And I’m thinking about it even, I’ve witnessed this, even in, like, super transactional situations, like there’s a sales meeting that’s occurring, there’s a person that wants to sell something and a person that might want to buy that something. And I’ve seen this a few times when on, as the seller and the prospective buyer, when the seller says, “You know what? Given what you’re describing, or what I’m seeing here, what I have to offer isn’t right for you right now.

Like for a roof, “First, you’ve got to handle that masonry situation, or the roof I’m going to put on there isn’t actually going to keep the water from leaking. So, I don’t do masonry, so you’ve got to handle that first, and then maybe I could help you out afterwards.” Or, it was a digital marketing agency that said, “Hmm, you know, what we’re really good at is promoting this other kind of a result, and we don’t actually have the experience to get a bunch of email addresses associated with this consumer base, and so we’d really be just rolling the dice. And I don’t feel really comfortable putting your money at risk that way.”

And then that same person said, “Pete, I think you should absolutely hire this company.” And we did. Because that builds such tremendous trust that, putting your own self-interest aside, your short-term, immediate self-interest aside, built such trust and good recommendations and vibes, and I think they got more out of it as opposed to trying to grab the deal in front of them.

Mitch Warner
You see that all the time. I mean, is there any role in your life where you’re not more successful if you’re trusted as an advisor by the people that you’re trying to help or serve? I mean, whether you’re a leader, and the people that you need to be seen as a trusted advisor by are the people you lead, or you’re a salesperson and you’re trying to get people to buy, or you’re a parent and you’re trying to help younger people develop into better people. I mean, it doesn’t matter what your role is. And you see that all the time.

And sometimes it looks exactly like you’re saying, “You know, I don’t have the solution for you but I think I know who does. Let me help you get connected with that person.” I remember a dear friend of mine was a leader in a sales organization, but said, “You know, I was in the middle of this transaction. It was the end of the year.”

“I had my quota, and I knew that I had to get this deal over the line in order to meet my quota, and so I pressured this client that I had to get this deal over the line and it wasn’t in their best interest because I was trying to get them to buy in bulk something that they should really have amortized over multiple years when they actually would use this product.”

And the client actually called him on it, and said, “Hey, just so I’m clear, are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for me?” And it was so convicting that, all of a sudden, he realized, “Yeah.” And in that moment, he had this choice, and the choice was, “Am I going to be honest and be just human with this other human being, or am I not?” And he made the choice to just do what he felt was risky, and he said, “To be honest, I’m doing this for me, and I’m so sorry.”

And the interesting thing is that, while he adjusted the deal and he missed his quota, that client was a client for years, far longer than that contract would have been, whatever he was trying to sell. I mean, we got to be honest, sometimes we do take short-term hits by doing the right thing, but ultimately that’s where our success really lies. Those clients, they stay with you forever. There are so many examples of that.

And it can even be as small as, you know, a friend of mine, a colleague, was delivering an Arbinger workshop. And in the middle of this workshop with a client realized that they were bugged with some of the people in the room that were kind of resistant.

Mitch Warner
They were frustrated, they were annoyed with these people in the room, and they realized, “Oh, my word, I have got to make a decision. Do I keep going knowing that I’ve been irritated or do I own that fact, given that it’s a reality?” And they came into the room, they took a break, came back to the room, and they said, “I have to take ownership. I’ve gotten annoyed with some of you that are resistant, and it’s kept me from getting curious about what are you so resistant to. Can I just…?”

And, all of a sudden, the room changed and people said, “Well, this is what we’re resistant about.” And for the first time, that person could facilitate the workshop that they were there to facilitate because now they’re working with actual people. It felt risky, but the truth is it unlocked the very thing that they were there to do. And I think that’s the irony that you and I are talking about. Whatever feels risky, turns out will unlock the very thing that gets us the result that we’re there to accomplish in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, I love this stuff because it grabs the heart in terms of what is being a human about and, like, we got jobs, and we do them, but sometimes it could feel like they are just, like, “Follow the processes. I am a robot executing value-creation activities,” right? But when you speak about this stuff, and I read Leadership and Self-Deception, it comes alive in terms of we are human beings who have values and feelings about stuff.

And, sure enough, it does work out often, not always, that when you step up and are courageous, you take a risk and call a spade a spade, say what’s really going on, and compassionately listen to another person’s point of view, cool stuff happens. I remember, this is the weirdest example, but I was in high school and there was a girl, and we were kind of dating, kind of not, we need to DTR to find the relationship better, I guess.

Anyway, and so it was the weirdest situation, a fun bunch of friends, and we got in this weird little argument and it’s like we were litigating, like, who did who wrong in the course of this semi-romantic relationship. And so, we were sort of arguing in front of the jury. And we weren’t really getting anywhere, and then they left. It was just the two of us, I said, “Hey, yeah, I actually didn’t know you felt that way about this thing. I’m really sorry. And I wasn’t trying to do this. Tell me more about that.”

And it was amazing how it just totally shifted the view, it’s like, “Are we litigating or are we trying to understand, like, the other person and where we come from?” And it’s a totally different energy, and it might be, “soft” or “touchy feely,” but it is effective in terms of, “Okay, this relationship is restored, there’s trust, and we’re off to the races, moving and making things happen.”

Mitch Warner
Somebody once, who experienced this work, said, “Oh, this is soft like a brick.” It hits you and it’s at the core of our relationship. So, to the degree that we believe that relationships actually are what’s driving results, whether it’s in a personal relationship with a partner or it’s in an organization. If you believe that relationships drive results, then what unlocks those relationships is critically important.

And what you said, I think, is so interesting, this litigating who’s right and who’s wrong. In the book, in Leadership and Self-Deception, this whole idea of self-deception that gets in the way, we say sometimes there’s a risk of calling a spade a spade. Usually, the risk is calling myself a spade, when I am a spade, when I’m not seeing clearly. It usually never helps to call someone else a spade. Let them find out the truth about them. But, for me, in a situation where I feel a need to litigate, to justify, it means that something is off. It means that something is wrong and I know it.

I know it at such a deep and professional level that I’m really good at hiding it from myself. I mean, imagine that you and I work together, and I come across a piece of information and I think, “Oh, my word, this would be super helpful for Pete.” The straightforward thing to do would be to just share it with you. But if I betray my own sense of what would be helpful to you as a person, who has needs and challenges and objectives, who’s real to me, just a person that I’m working with, if I go against that sense, if I betray my own sense, then all of a sudden, I need to feel justified for that betrayal.

And how do I do that? I create a world where it’s okay for me to have treated you as less than a person. And so, I might see you as competition, I see you as a threat. Only one of us could get the promotion after all. Or I see you as lazy because, if you didn’t come across this information on your own, that means that you’re probably not doing your job. Or I see you as incompetent, or I see you as stupid, or whatever the case might be, and I see myself as all the opposite of those things.

And now, there’s this whole narrative in my head. You’re not even aware of this Pete, but I’ve got this narrative in my head of why it’s okay for me to be the way I am with you. And why do I need that? It’s because I’m actually not okay with the way I’ve chosen to see you. And I’ll invite you to be exactly what I say I don’t like. I’ll invite you to be all of those things, because if you are, then I’m justified in how I chose to see you. You’ve got this whole human dynamic that came about and I’m litigating that in my own head, but it all stemmed from me.

And I think the hopeful thing about that is, given the fact that I’ve deceived myself, I can also reclaim the truth, just like you did with that girl you were dating in high school. In the moment, at any time, we can go, “Wait a minute. That’s been my impact? I’m seeing you now again? I’m so sorry.” If I can let go of all of those falsehoods, then we can just be truthful together again. We can be human together again. That’s, I think, the hope of it. It’s both how scary it is, the way this snow-balls, but how easy it is to reclaim the relationship that we can have at any moment if we choose to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mitch, you’re saying so much good, wise stuff. And in the book, there’s an expression they use a lot, and I hear it in my own voice, in the voice of the Audible narrator, when I’m doing it, it’s like, “You’re in the box!” So, Mitch, tell us, what does it mean to be in the box versus out of the box, metaphorically?

Mitch Warner
The box is this metaphor for that distorted way that I’ve come to see the world that gives me justification for my own self-betrayals, the way I’ve chosen to see other people falsely. So now, I’ve got this distorted view of you and me. It’s two-sided. I can’t see you in a less-than way without seeing myself as superior, or vice versa if I get justification that way.

You can imagine a version like that, right, “Oh, my word, I don’t have any privileges here, and I’m new to the team, and Pete is so connected, and he’s so much smarter than I am, he’s so much more gifted than I am. He probably came across this information years ago. If I could go to him now and share this.” So, now I’m worse than, you’re better than. It doesn’t matter which form that takes, it’ll look different depending on how I get justification in any relationship.

But that distorted view, it’s like living in a box. I no longer see reality. I’ll only see the things about you or me that reinforce that false self-image and that false image of you that gets me justification. Because more than I want you to change, more than I want the relationship to be healed, more than I want to work productively to save our family, or our company, or our community, I want justification. And I won’t just carry that distorted, I won’t just live in that distortion of a box with you. I’ll carry that around in a new situation.

I’ll walk into a meeting, and you’re not even there now, but I’m so invested in this view of myself that, “I’m so smart and capable and noble, because the worst thing that you can do when you work with someone like Pete is spoon-feed them information. So, I’m doing the very best that I can, that I’m smart, I’m capable, I’m more capable.” I walk into a meeting and people are presenting ideas. I’m carrying this box, this distorted view of myself into that meeting.

If you were to ask me, walking in then, “Hey, Mitch, what kind of leader are you? What kind of contributor are you? What kind of team member are you? Are you the person that needs to have all the best ideas?” I say, “No way. I’m the kind of person that likes ideas no matter where they come from.” But if I’ve got a view of myself that I’m really smart and capable or whatever that case might be, and then I share an idea and it gets shut down, somebody says, “Oh, you know what, Mitch? I’ve tried that in some other organization. It didn’t work very well. I think we could do this though.”

If I didn’t have this box, if I wasn’t living in this distorted reality, I’d go, “Oh, awesome! I’m glad you’ve tried that. All right, how do we do what you’re suggesting we do? Let’s mobilize around that.” But if I’m living in this box, if I’m carrying this distorted view of myself and others around, all of a sudden, that idea that might save our team, that’s a threat. It’s a threat to my self-image. I experience this all the time at work, but also at home.

You know, I’ve got this image that I deserve to be listened to or whatever. All of a sudden, I walk into situations with my kids. I’m not seeing them. I’m not even seeing myself. I’m just in this distortion field because I need to feel justified for that distorted way that I’ve chosen to see them and me, and now I’m not interacting with what they say. I’m interacting with threats to this self-view that I’ve got that’s so important to me, because at least if that distorted view of myself and others is correct, I’m justified in not seeing the people around me. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely, it does. And this idea is so big and powerful and transformative when you get your arms around it. And so, I mean, I’ve read the book, and if folks haven’t, I just want to make sure they’re not like, “What are they smoking? This is some trippy stuff.” Could you give us some super common examples, like we see all the time in terms of how folks find themselves, deceiving themselves, and then getting into trouble, like the top one or two or three things that occur perhaps nearly universally to humans interacting with other humans?

Mitch Warner
Well, look, there’s a thousand examples of how self-deception shows up in my life, but I won’t see them because self-deception, by definition, is a lie I’m telling to myself. So, what’s odd about that is I can’t see the lie even though I’m the liar because I’m so invested in believing that it’s the truth. In fact, my own emotions will tell me that this is the truth.

So, one of the easiest ways to see it, where self-deception is showing up, and self-deception, let’s just be clear, it’s just the problem of people having problems and not knowing that they have that problem, which would be easy to fix if we’re like, “Hey, Mitch, by the way, the way you’re talking to your kids right there, that’s going to alienate your kids. Is that what you want?”

Or, “Hey, Mitch, the way that you’re showing up in this meeting is actually going to have people resisting your idea instead of embracing it.” Or, “Hey, Mitch, the way that you’re avoiding this conversation with this employee over there, you’re talking to everybody about them instead of talking to them, your team member, that actually will exacerbate the problem. It’s going to keep going rather than get better.”

I mean, it’s like the most basic things that we can see if we’re not the person in the middle of it. And this would be easy to fix if you could tell me, “Hey, Mitch, by the way, the way that you’re talking to your kid is probably going to alienate them.” It’s not just that in self-deception I can’t see it. It’s that I resist that possibility, “Well, do you see how they’re talking to me? How else am I going to get through?” or, “Do you see what this employee is doing? They never listen to other people.” Whatever the case might be, but we don’t see it.

And you can look anywhere in your life where people are creating problems for themselves and they don’t notice it. They can’t tell. So how do I discern it? How do I know where this is happening in my own life? I have to look for the red flags of this box. And the red flags are, “Are there people that I’m blaming for my situation, for my experience? Am I horrible-lizing any people in my life? Am I seeking allies? Am I talking to people about other people? What might that signal?”

You said I litigate. I do that in my own head, Pete. I lawyer up. I find myself driving home from work and I tell myself this story. It’s like I’m playing out this courtroom scene, and I’m creating this case for why I’m right. Even the feeling that I’m right might be an indication that I could be telling myself a story here and it may not be the full truth. I could be self-deceived.

Those telltale signs, it might be that I exaggerate values, “Well, you know what? This is fair.” I wasn’t thinking about fairness when I was just working with someone else. It’s when I betray my own sense of what other people need, and now I’m in this distorted box where I’m looking for justification. Actually, that word itself, wherever I feel justified or I’m looking for justification by talking to others and gathering allies for me, that’s a pretty big red flag that there’s a reason I’m trying to feel justified, and it’s because things aren’t right as they are.

So, I just say look for those instances. Look for those instances where I’m experiencing any of those red flags, and then ask myself, “Is it possible that this isn’t fully the truth?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Mitch, if I could put you on the spot, hardcore, could you share with us one recent instance in which you caught yourself caught up in this?

Mitch Warner
Oh, absolutely. I found myself with a team member here at Arbinger, one of the senior leaders, and I realized that I had had conversations with this person repeatedly, where I saw problems around what was happening inside of their team. And when they would ask me, “How are things going?” I would kind of dance around it, and I was talking to other people pretty straightforwardly about the problems that this person was creating for me and what I thought was for the company.

And then, finally, one person said to me, “Hey, what do you think it’s like for that person when you have conversations that aren’t really straightforward?” And in the moment, I realized I’m actually sabotaging this person’s success because I think I might want them to fail. Otherwise, why would I not tell them what I’m seeing if this could cost them their success?

And the reality is, I wanted to be justified. As long as they were behaving in these ways, then I was okay talking about them as a problem, seeing them as a problem. What you do with that, that’s where it can feel risky, but I always finish those conversations where I then step forward and say, “Hey, you know what, I haven’t been telling you the truth about what I’m seeing that’s problematic on your team or in you.” And it was an incredibly healing experience.

And what I saw in that conversation was all the ways that I had been creating problems for this person. So, yeah, it happens. I’ll be honest, Pete, those discoveries happen at least weekly, sometimes daily, where I realize I’m not real with other people, and I need to be in order to do my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mitch, I appreciate that vulnerability and sharing a lot, and I think that’s powerful context right there in terms of if you catch yourself doing this, that doesn’t mean you’re very bad and very wrong and “Shame! Shame!” It means, “Hooray, you’re engaging the stuff correctly.” And in so doing, you’ve illuminated a pathway to improving your relationships and your results, and even, I’d say, your very character and the rewarding-ness of life itself, if I may be so bold. And that’s awesome. And so, it’s encouraging to hear you, the almighty managing director of The Arbinger Institute.

Mitch Warner
Oh, no, no, no.

Pete Mockaitis
That you, you too, realize you have these discoveries frequently, and I think that’s just a good message for anyone who starts going down this road, and is like, “Geez, I am a real jerk.” It’s like, “Well, we all kind of are. And it’s nice that you’re identifying specific opportunities for improvement, and you’re going to be on a nice little upward character trajectory with better relationships and results to go with it.”

Mitch Warner
Look, the only thing that qualifies any of us at Arbinger to do the work that we’re engaging is that we see it all the time in our life. It’s just constant. I’ll just say one thing about this process. There’s two ways to go about trying to improve myself. One is a project that’s really about me improving, “I want to be free of the box. I want to be a person who’s not self-deceived.” That’s great, but I just find in my own life that that never actually gets me where I want to be in the relationships that matter to me.

The other way I get there is I just go, “Man, what’s life like for this other person having to live and work with me when I’m like this? What are they trying to accomplish? What are they trying to achieve? What are their needs and challenges and objectives? What’s life like for them?” And then when I focus on that, all of a sudden, I can see clearly, more clearly than I can when it’s just a self-improvement project, the ways that I’ve been getting in other people’s way, and then I just respond. When I do that, things get better, faster than when it’s a self-improvement kind of project. You know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that sense of conviction and what’s life like. And I think that’s a superpower question right there because, to even face that question soberly and honestly, it takes courage. Like, just the thoughts you’re willing to entertain in your own head, it takes some courage, like, “You might not want to do this when driving because the temptation is immediate.”

Like, “Well, they’re wrong!” It’s like, “They deserve it!” It’s almost like there’s a little monster that’s just, like, trying to run. Like, “No, no, no! Don’t look here, don’t look here!” when that is exactly the place that needs to be looked. It’s like, “What’s life like? Oh, it probably kind of sucks. It probably feels very unsettling to be on the receiving end of this day after day after day.”

And then to just internalize what you hath wrought, the pain and destruction that you have brought on to others hurts. But I think that’s a great sign that you’re growing in self-awareness and compassion, and it’s kind of like the immediate precursor to breakthrough.

Mitch Warner
Absolutely. And if you get there, if you find yourself able to begin to see, “Oh, my word, this is what I’ve wrought. This is what life, I think, is like, having to live or work with me.” Go share that with the person. Go tell them. We call this at Arbinger, “Meet to give.” So often we meet to get, “What would it look like if I just met to give?” And I say, not, “Hey, here’s some changes I think I can make.” You should share that. But, first, tell the person what you’re seeing that you weren’t seeing before when you started to think about what life has been like for.

And I’d just be that clear, I’d say, “Hey, you know what? I wonder if we could have a conversation, because I’ve been thinking about what life has probably been like for you having to live or work with me. And, look, I don’t know if this encapsulates all of it. I’m actually curious about what exactly it’s been like from your perspective. But just sitting there, trying to think about what it likely it’s like, I think it’s like this.”

“And as I think about your objectives, I think your objectives are this. I think this is what you’re trying to accomplish. And here’s how I think I’ve been making that harder, and I just got to own that. I am so sorry. But I’m actually curious. Is that right? Are those the challenges? Are those your objectives? Or what would you add?”

Going to someone, and saying, “Hey, tell me how I’ve been a problem for you,” don’t expect anything from that conversation. Don’t expect someone who you’ve had friction with to be like, “Oh, well, great. Actually, this…” They won’t tell you. You haven’t created a safe enough space. You haven’t demonstrated enough interest in figuring out that, and being willing to own it. But when you do that, even if you don’t have it completely right, all of a sudden, they say, “Oh, actually, yeah,” or, “Well, kind of, but it’s actually a little bit more like this.”

And all of a sudden, you start learning and you get curious, and you say, “Okay, tell me more about that.” That process of just owning it, showing that you’ve been doing some thinking, showing that you’re curious about what your impact has been, that does more to change a relationship than probably anything else you can do. I would say that nothing changes in an organization, nothing, until the relationships between the people that have to work together, transform.

And nothing moves the needle more in transforming those relationships than people doing the work to think about their impact, and then going and honestly sharing that and owning it, and then getting curious about how they might have been wrong around that, and finding ways to help. You offer, “Hey, so, well, given all that, I think I could do this. Would that be helpful?” And they’ll say, “Oh, actually, yeah,” or, “Well, it’s a little bit different.”

It’s no different than the conversation you should be having with family members, with siblings, or a partner, or your kids if you’ve got kids. It’s exactly the same. Just try it. Go meet to give with the people in your life and do the work in advance, and then own it honestly. You’ll be amazed at the transformation that that will begin to put in motion.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Being on the receiving end of that is, like, it could be like startling. It’s like the end of “A Christmas Carol,” like, “What happened to Scrooge? This is amazing! A Christmas miracle!” Beautiful stuff. Mitch, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mitch Warner
No, I just say don’t think that this is some theoretical thing. This isn’t. This is the way that we work when we’re at our very best selves. We’re just honest. We see each other as people. We’re outward. We take responsibility. And to the degree that you can uncover the places where you haven’t been telling the truth about how you’ve been creating challenges you haven’t seen, that move will do more to set you free to do the kinds of things that you want to see in your life that will propel your success in any relationship than, in my experience, any other work that you could do. So, just jump in, take the next step.

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

Mitch Warner
There’s many, but one of the ones that I personally love comes from Abraham Lincoln, when he said, “I don’t like that man. I should probably get to know him better.” I mean, it’s not terribly profound, except it is. If there’s people in my life that I’m resisting or struggling with, what would it mean if I just got to know them better? What would it mean if I just went and met to learn with that person?

I keep that in mind every time I think, “Man, I don’t like that person. I’m bugged,” or, sorry, irritated. “I’m experiencing friction. Maybe I really need to get to know this person better.” And the truth is every time, that’s unlocked something new for me.

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

Mitch Warner
Oh, great question. There was a study that was done by McKinsey a couple years ago. It was this longitudinal study over many organizations that found something that I have found in our work with organizations. What they found is that organizations that identify and address mindset at the outset are four times more likely to succeed at changing whatever they’re trying to change in the organization than are organizations that just bypass mindset change and go directly to behavior change.

When I saw that study, I thought, “Oh, my word, here is independent research that just validates the work that we’re doing every day.” You’ve got to begin with mindset. Going to behavior won’t work because every behavior is an outgrowth of mindset. So, if you can master that, you can change anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mitch Warner
Two that I keep coming back to, one is Insanely Simple. It’s a really powerful view into the work at Apple to get to simplicity, and what that can mean in your organization or in your own work as an individual. What would it look like to get to real simplicity? And the other one is called Creativity, Inc. It’s the Pixar story, and how that team of people was able to unleash creativity by really overcoming ego and seeing each other and their customers as people. We use the Adobe suite constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you or The Arbinger Institute shares that really seems to connect and resonate with folks that gets quoted back to you often?

Mitch Warner
When you think about a job, whatever your job is, with an outward mindset, there’s a particular pattern. Sometimes when we think about a job, we think, “Well, here’s all of my tasks, here’s my objectives,” the kind of things you could put on a job description. But when you’re really outward, you don’t start with what you do. You start with what other people need to do, who depend on you in the way you go about your work.

My manager, my customers, my co-workers, my direct reports if I’m a leader, if you start there and just see people, what are they trying to accomplish, then you will find the most innovative, powerful ways to adjust what you’re doing every day to be more helpful to them. And the truth is, there’s nothing that anyone does in an organization that’s not intended or designed to help someone else.

So, when you unlock that, that, “My job is to help other people accomplish their job better, so it’s in my power to figure out the innovative ways to change what I do moment-to-moment to be more helpful,” and then measure that impact. Go check in and say, “Hey, I changed this? Was that helpful? I’m thinking of adjusting this. Would that be helpful?”

You can remember that with the acronym SAM, see others, adjust efforts, measure impact. Employees that do that are the most valuable employees in the company. And so, I’d say that’s the thing people walk away, remembering day to day. The way to stay outward, the way to not get bogged down in self-deception or lies I’m telling myself, is to just orient my work every day, what I’m doing moment-to-moment in an outward way. See others first, then adjust my efforts and measure impact.

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

Mitch Warner
Just come to our website, Arbinger.com. We’d love to have a conversation with you, figure out what are your challenges, what are you trying to accomplish. There are tons of resources there that can help you get started on this journey to living and working with an outward mindset. Or, go online and buy our books. You can go to Amazon. You can go to any other retailer. Pick up Leadership and Self-Deception and see what that unlocks for you in your own work. Wherever you are, whatever you’re trying to accomplish, pick up the book, we’d love to hear from you about it.

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

Mitch Warner
I’d say, going back to what we were talking about, Pete, go and meet to give with the people that you have friction with. Just do that work. If there are people in your life that you’d actually just like to improve the relationship but there hasn’t been friction, I’d say go meet to learn. Just get curious. No other agenda. You could do this today.

Pick someone in your life. It could be someone in your family, it could be someone that you work with every day, and just say, “Hey, I’d love to just learn more about what your needs and your challenges and your objectives are. Would you be willing to just let me get curious about those for a minute? I’d love to learn more.” You’d be amazed at what that would unlock. Meet to give, if there’s been friction. If there are people in your life you just love to have a different relationship with, go and meet to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, this is powerful stuff. Thank you. I wish you many, many happy days and minimal self-deception.

Mitch Warner
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s been great to be with you.