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Mar 27
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1044: Becoming the Boss that Everyone Wants to Work For with Sabina Nawaz

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Sabina Nawaz shows you how to cope with the pressures that come with leadership.

You’ll Learn

  1. The perils of getting promoted
  2. Why asking for feedback isn’t enough
  3. The power of shutting up

About Sabina

Sabina Nawaz is an elite executive coach who advises C-level executives and teams at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions around the world. During her fourteen-year tenure at Microsoft, she went from managing software development teams to leading the company’s executive development and succession planning efforts for over 11,000 managers and nearly a thousand executives.  She is the author of YOU’RE THE BOSS: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).

 

Resources Mentioned

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Sabina Nawaz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sabina, welcome!

Sabina Nawaz
Thanks so much, Pete. Looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited. You have studied managers up close and personal and in the trenches with them. Could you start us off by sharing one of the most particularly surprising and fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and managing from all your years at work here?

Sabina Nawaz
So, this book is not about how to become successful. It’s how to remain successful, and it’s about not all the things that people know, but what do they not know, as you said, counterintuitive stuff. Three of those.

One, being promoted is the riskiest time in your career. It is not power that corrupts, but pressure that corrupts. Pressure changes, not only stresses you out, but changes your actions. And power then blinds you to the impact of those actions. So, the higher you go, the less you know about the impact your actions are having on other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, those are big, and those are heavy. Well, I’m excited to dig into all of these promptly. But maybe, first, before we do, can you maybe just orient us to what’s the big idea or main message behind the book, You Are the Boss?

Sabina Nawaz
The main message is that pressure and power can be used for good or for harm. It’s your choice. And the choice comes from not needing to get a personality transplant, or to go on retreats for weeks on end, or to study emotional intelligence for the rest of your life, which I would still recommend you do, but by making a choice to use some simple tools and strategies to tackle the combined effect of the diabolical twins of power and pressure. The higher you go, the more important this becomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Diabolical twins. Okay. We’re sounding the alarm. We’re raising the flag. Okay. Well, so maybe could you share with us a story of the destructive potential that might be lurking for us that we’re not even aware of? So how about you give us a twin tale? Let’s hear a tale of surprised destruction, and a tale of disaster averted through prudent preparation.

Sabina Nawaz
Well, I’ll start with my own tale, because I tell a lot of tales in the book about a number of my clients, and I am not immune from this. I was a lousy manager at Microsoft, but that wasn’t always true. At first, I managed software teams and most of my people said I was the best boss they ever had, I cared for them, I coached them. Those were great years. And then everything changed.

I was running Microsoft’s management development when I was about eight months pregnant. My boss left the company so I took on her job responsibilities, and on my first day, as I’m getting ready to get back to work from parental leave, my assistant Lori calls me, frantic, “Where are you? Steve’s expecting you in 30 minutes.”

She reads the memo I’m supposed to discuss with Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, as I’m hitting warp speed on my way to the freeway. And that set the tone, Pete, for overflowing inbox, packed calendar, infant at home, no peace, no sleep, no patience. I’m sure this sounds familiar to you and to your listeners. And, in a moment, I went from being caring and compassionate to snippy and short. Still 5’3″, but now short-tempered.

In my rush to meet those deadlines, I had no time for detailed instructions or to repeat myself, and I thought I was being efficient. I also micromanaged because I was worried that my team or I would look incompetent to these high-level executives. So, I’m thinking, “I’m killing it. I’m being efficient. Look at how much we’re getting done for the senior-most people in the organization,” until my colleague, Joe, comes to me.

And I take one look at Joe and I know he’s about to give me bad news. My shoulders are tightening, and then Joe says, “Zach is crying in his office because of what you said.” And my gut falls to the floor. Joe has my full attention, not multitasking as usual, and I feel my whole body turned hot from shame, I cannot make eye contact with Joe, I feel so guilty, and I think, “How did I get here? How did I go from being caring and compassionate to this, somebody people apparently fear and really don’t like?”

So, I take a drink of water, I walked across the hallway, knocked on Zach’s door, “Will you go for a walk with me?” And a minute into the walk, I say, “Zach, I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse for how I reacted in that meeting.” And Zach’s eyes brim with tears. And it was in that moment of connection, Pete, I realized, “This is what I want, to treat people with humanity.”

But why had I started behaving badly all of a sudden? Why did I have no idea about it, the impact it was having? And why did more people not tell me? Because pressure corrupts. I wasn’t a bad person. I was a boss behaving badly. But the worst part is I had no idea because power then insulates us. So, that would be a story where things did not go well.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And, Sabina, I hate to bring you into, it sounds like, a genuinely traumatic experience for you. But for the question mark lingering of curiosity for our listeners, they got to know, what did you say to Zach?

Sabina Nawaz
It wasn’t just one thing. The problem was it was a whole stream of things, which sounded like a stream of being discounted and insulted to Zach. So, he was about to bring up a new idea, and I said, “Nope.” And not only did I say it, I had my hand out there, right almost at his face, going, “We don’t have time for that,” expletive. “We need to get going. Did you not hear me the first time? We are under a really tight timeline.”

So, my voice is elevated. I’m cursing. My hand is out there in front of his face. And then another, a little later in the meeting, Zach says, “It’s okay if you say no to this idea, but can I bring it up?” And I said, “Yes.” And he brought up another new idea, and I said, “No,” right away. No, “Thank you for thinking through ideas. What made you suggest this right now?” None of that.

So, it was this very abrupt, shutting-down action that I reacted to. I stopped thinking. I certainly wasn’t leading. I wasn’t even thinking, and I’m just reacting, reacting to my circumstances and the pressure in an inexcusable fashion. And, you know, of course, as I’m sure you’re aware, when managers treat employees badly, employees then go back to their office, not just crying, but they play video games or research shows that they even deliberately sabotage results.

Pete Mockaitis
Update their LinkedIn, take a look at the opportunities out there.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, start a secret group chat about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yeah, and thank you for sharing that. What’s really intriguing here is that, I think we hear stories associated with bosses behaving badly in these ways. And I’m thinking about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, where he talks about demon mode, or, you know, tales of Steve Jobs, or any number of famous hard-charging executives. And I think what people often tend to assume is like, “Oh, that’s just their personality. That’s just their management style.”

And so, you’re posing something quite fresh, and it’s like, “Oh, no, perhaps we have a whole lot of humanity buried under there, and it’s these diabolical twins that is going to work on some of these people, and that’s why we see these behaviors manifesting.”

Sabina Nawaz
Absolutely. Absolutely. With very rare exceptions, just like there are no purely good people or purely bad people, we all have good behaviors and bad behaviors in us, there are no purely good bosses or bad bosses. It’s our reaction to the circumstances. That doesn’t mean it should take us off the hook, but it’s not inherent in our personalities.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so then, by contrast, could you share with us a tale of someone who got the heads up and didn’t end up succumbing?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, I’ll share the tale of somebody who did succumb, then got the heads up, because that’s what usually happens. I come in; the feedback I’d gotten about this person was he was terrible to work with. He was a bully, people called him a thug, and much worse, words that I won’t use on your show. And we worked together.

Now, this guy, Adam, suffered from what many of my clients suffer from, where they think they’re successful because of some of these traits, not despite these. So, they become innocent saboteurs in their own fate and the fate of their organizations, and that was certainly the case for Adam. He made jokes because he thought that was encouraging people. He used sarcasm to motivate them. Of course, this was all coming across as bullying behavior.

Once he recognized that, so this is why I was saying the heads up comes after the fact often, because nobody wants to tell the person in a position of power what they think they don’t want to hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, especially when they’re behaving in a way that says, “I might get my head ripped off for this.”

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly. “Who in their right mind is going to do that? Not only get my head ripped off, I might lose my job.” So, you continue on thinking you’re doing just fine, because, of course, people would give you feedback. You’ve asked for the feedback, haven’t you? Asking for feedback is a waste of time when you have high authority. You’ve got to deploy some other techniques.

And so, in Adam’s case, when I interviewed a bunch of his co-workers and got this devastating feedback, he did work to turn that around. By the way, I never experienced Adam as a bully or a jerk. I experienced him as a wonderful human being, because, of course, we didn’t have that power gap in our relationship through which everything gets filtered as more dire, more directed personally at us either.

And a year later, I interviewed people again, and then people said, “Oh, I was dreading having to work for him again. He’s so much more respectful. I trust him so much more. He is a thousand percent better.” So, that was a beautiful ending to that story.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. Okay. So, well then, let’s dig into these particular truths that you shared. When we’re promoted, it’s the riskiest time in our career. Can you expand on that?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, of course, it’s also a time for celebration when you’re promoted, but once the bubbly settles, what you might realize is that the very strengths, the superpowers that have gotten you there, are now going to be seen in a very different light. So, for example, as a manager, you can say exactly the same things you said before, but now they’re going to take on a harsher light, a louder tone, a more personal note for the next that are craning up. Their views are less charitable.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Let’s say you are somebody who’s assiduous about details, how might you be seen as a manager?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, a micromanager.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, a micromanager. Let’s say you’re really calm under pressure, how might that come across?

Pete Mockaitis
You don’t care. You’re not invested.

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly. Ooh, we could keep going back and forth like this, but you get the idea. Strategic becomes manipulative. All of these things can be seen in a whole different light. You need to start to look at your strengths not from how you see them, but how they’re going to be seen from people below. The higher you go, the more that view gets distorted, like a funhouse mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what do you recommend we do when we find ourselves in such a spot?

Sabina Nawaz
One of the first things you can do is, actually, inventory your strengths and start writing down ways in which others might describe it, and put yourself in those shoes. So, one of my direct reports, what would they say? One of my skip levels, what would they say? Somebody who’s a junior employee who reports to one of my peers? Somebody from the outside who now sees my bigger title? So, imagine those soundbites coming at you, and once you see that, you can start to temper things.

Somebody I worked with was very, very strategic, and she would take her time speaking up in meetings because she wanted to see where the thread of the conversation was going, who was speaking, who wasn’t speaking, what was the tone, what was the vibe of the meeting, and, people started thinking that she was very political instead of strategic. They said, “Oh, she’s going to go where the wind is blowing. She wants to see what people above her are saying,” and so on.

Once she recognized that piece of feedback, she went back to her team to explain to them what she was doing, “This is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I have a rule. I don’t speak up right away. And then let me show you, let me demonstrate to you how that has benefited. For example, I was going to go to this meeting and I went in with this particular point of view, but it wasn’t until I heard the third person speaking that I realized this point of view is actually incorrect and it’s going to antagonize, unintentionally, three people in that meeting. Wasn’t it better not to speak up first in that particular case?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. Okay. Well, so it sounds like the master keys there are just let’s get a sense of what is the perception and then let’s provide some context, some explanation. It’s funny, that takes humility on both sides of that there.

First, to put yourself in a position where you’re willing to hear it, and then, secondly, to explain it. Because you might say, if you were less humble, “I’m the boss. I don’t have to explain myself to these folks.” And yet, it seems that, in order to be a great manager, maybe you very well do, in fact, need to.

Sabina Nawaz
Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you’re a manager who has a “yeah, but” raging at the moment, saying, “Yeah, but I don’t have time to do it,” think about how much time you spend undoing things and that it would take a fraction of the time to do it instead.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you said simply asking for feedback doesn’t work. What’s the means by which we get to the truth?

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, this is really tough because here you have a boss who has no idea how they’re coming across, and an employee who’s not willing to tell you because of the fear that they have across this power gap. So, simply saying, “Hey, would you give me feedback when you notice something?” employees are going to say, “Yes, boss,” and all they’re going to give you is very mild stuff, cushioned in praise.

So, when they tell you everything is fine, what they’re actually meaning is, “Oh, what an ass.” So, you have no idea. So, first of all, any feedback you get, you might want to add a couple of numbers to it to upgrade the severity of what they’re saying. But here’s the other thing, you can actually ask more specific questions, because the quality of feedback you receive is directly proportional to the quality of the question you ask.

If you simply say, “How did I do in that presentation or that meeting?” people are going to say, “You were fantastic. In fact, you should get on the TED stage next week,” because that is not asking for feedback. That is simply asking for reassurance. Instead, if you said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, where was I?” Let’s say they say 8, which you know is going to actually mean a 6 or a 5.

Then you can say, “What would it take, what’s one thing I could do to get to a 9, to get to a plus 1? What’s one thing I did that worked well? What’s one thing I can do to get to a plus 1?” Don’t ask for too much feedback. If you cut it down to one thing, people are more likely to be able to give you something, and you’re more likely to be able to act on it.

One other way to ask for feedback is to externalize the ask. So, instead of saying, “Pete, what’s one thing I could do better at on this podcast?” I might say, “Pete, if you were to channel your most skeptical, your crustiest listener, what would they say about the one thing I could do better?” Now, Pete is freed up, it doesn’t impact our relationship. In fact, it looks like Pete is working for me by channeling some of his listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot, especially when you’re the one asking for the feedback and you suggest the third-party voice. That seems like a real powerful combo. And I’m reminded of, well, some interviewers, I think John Stossel, in particular. He’s just always devil’s advocating, John Stossel. It’s like, “Well, some might say that this is just a means of bringing costs down, and that’s necessary.” He even has the voice, you know, which just cracks me up.

And so, it almost feels a little bit less than courageous when he says, “Hey, I’m not saying it, but it’s some third party,” which, at the same time, as an interviewer, can make your interviewee feel more comfortable, and so, you know, it works. But it’s even better to invite them to think about that third party.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, so then, in terms of, like, the asking, is this sort of in person, via survey, email, all of the above? What’s the mechanism of collection that you favor?

Sabina Nawaz
All of the above is great. I favor direct conversation, in-person or virtual, of course, these days, especially, but somewhere where we are making eye contact, looking at each other and having a live conversation because you can start to read the cues of the person who’s providing you with that feedback as well, and you can tone it down a little bit more.

You can make sure you’re conveying nonverbal feedback at all times, because they’re, of course, hyper-aware of any twitch that’s going on on your face, because they’re going to go, “Oh, my gosh, I’m fired.” So, it allows for more information to be exchanged as you’re doing this process. It also shows that you truly care. You’re willing to invest live time for it as opposed to a survey.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s dig into a little bit the second thing you dropped there with regard to it’s not the power but the pressure that corrupts. Can you expand on that?

Sabina Nawaz
It’s just like when I had all that pressure in that job and I started acting out. So, by corrupting, I mean your behaviors change. Your behaviors change in a way that impact other people adversely. You raise your voice. You have a tone to your voice. You provide harsher criticism than necessary. You cut people off. You interrupt them. All of those things show up when you’re under pressure.

Now, of course, there’s not a single person on the planet who’s not under pressure both at work and outside of work. And I’m sure, Pete, that you have moments where you’ve been under pressure and you’ve done something you’re not proud of, and, gosh, it would be mortifying if that was caught on video and put up on YouTube or TikTok.

And so, it’s no different for bosses. The problem is that the higher we go, the more pressure we have on us, and the more likely we are that one of those is going to subvert our actions and take over.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then when we are in that spot where we are feeling the pressure, what are the best practices to not being a jerk?

Sabina Nawaz
The first thing is to just shut up, and I have this term called your shut-up muscle. And as a manager, it becomes important to buff up your shut-up muscle. So, there’s a shut-up exercise which has many steps, but a couple of those. First of all, be, at least, the third person to speak. There’s no reason for you to jump in the minute somebody asks a question.

All you’re doing there is training everyone to become over-reliant on you and take the back seat, be lazy, or not grow, or feel disempowered on the other side. So, be the third or later to speak. That would be one way to exercise your shut-up muscle.

Another, when you’re on video calls, put yourself on mute by default. So, when you have that fast twitch desire to speak, you can speak, and people are going to go, “Oh, you’re on mute.” And by the time you unmute, you can go, “Oh, actually, that train has passed. I’m good.” It gives your brain a moment to get out of that reactive mode and get back to your senses to be more strategic, and say, “Do I really need to say this thing? Not really.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. The shut-up muscle, that’s really good, because sometimes, in my experience, I am quick to speak because I’m excited, it’s like, “Oh, oh, that thing that you said. Also, this!” And so, I can see what you’re saying when you compare it to a muscle, is it takes some discipline, some restraint, some strength to say, “Yes, I’m very excited. And I can share that in 90 seconds, if it still seems valuable then, and that’s okay.”

Sabina Nawaz
And that’s another key piece, if it still feels valuable then. Another tool for the shut-up muscle is to take margin notes. That is, you’ve got your notepad, and, then in the margin, write down all of your ideas that you’re so excited about, that are getting in the way of you being fully present and likely to cause you to interrupt other people.

If you wait for a while, let’s say you have five notes in your margin, three of those might be suggested by somebody else. That’s great. That means that they’re taking initiative. They’re going to start working harder than you for a change and reduce some of the pressure on you. And the two things that haven’t been said, maybe only one of them needs to be said.

Now you’re going to have a lot more impact because you’ve gotten rid of what I call a communication fault line, which is verbal overkill. If you have just one thing to share and that one thing is shared just by you, it’s not an idea other people thought about, that’s a way you can truly add value in a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And can we hear about the power blinding us?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, it’s the part about “Who wants to get their head bitten off?” And also, with power comes the, well, power to take away or give things to other people that matter to them: a raise, a promotion, their very jobs. As a result, people are not going to say things to you that they think will displease you and that don’t feel safe. So, as a result, you’re cushioned by people who are saying yes all the time, cushioned by a lot of praise.

A CEO I worked with, it was the day before their CEO ship was going to get announced, and they said, “You know what, tomorrow I’m going to become the funniest person in this company,” because your jokes suddenly are funny, your ideas suddenly are brilliant. So, you get blind to what else might be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
And what shall we do in that scenario?

Sabina Nawaz
The end of the book has an assessment of 40-plus questions called “360 Yourself,” and it looks at every power gap, every kind of power gap and every kind of pressure pitfall you can fall into, and ask you a few questions to say, “Which of these do you fall into the most?” If you don’t have time, 15 minutes or so, to look at those 40 questions, think about these few.

One, you never receive pushback or different ideas once you’ve shared your idea. That might mean you’re in one of those blind power traps. People think you’re funnier, smarter, faster than you know you are. You justify all of your actions with a “yeah, but.” All of these so you can self-diagnose, “Hmm, yep, that’s happened, that’s never happened, this always happens, therefore, it must mean I’m surrounded in my own echo chamber.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. Well, Sabina, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Sabina Nawaz
Because pressure corrupts, and it’s so important to allow pressure to help you shine, like we sometimes do, you know, when we have that deadline and we’re at our most creative, we want pressure to fuel us, not eviscerate us. Our tendency when we get into pressure-full situations is to work harder, to hunker down.

So, my favorite strategy here is to employ what I call blank space, which is actually do nothing. It’s two hours a week, back-to-back, that you schedule to unplug. No reading, no online presence, no conversations. You simply sit and think. And if that’s too much for you, do it in baby steps. Start with 15 minutes or even 5 minutes or 30 seconds. We are human beings, not human doings, but we’re very uncomfortable just being.

Those clients who have taken that time to do blank space have had transformational results. They’ve transformed their companies, they’ve averted disaster from the competition, they’ve even changed their careers completely. It’s a game changer. It takes the calendar management discipline to actually take that time. And then you can do a variety of different things to make use of that time.

You could simply do nothing. You could go for a walk. You could lie in a hammock. These are all things people have done that have worked with me. You could doodle, mind map, draw pictures, whatever, because research shows that our best insights come when we switch off this very busy working part of our brain, right? We’re in the shower. We’re running. We’re commuting. Those are the times where those answers come.

So, when you’re under pressure, thinking, “I’m such a loser. When am I going to get fired? I’ve got to double down,” stop and do nothing and trust that you already know the answer. All you have to do is let the noise die down so that the signal becomes amplified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, it sounds like there’s a variety of things that are acceptable during doing-nothing time, but what’s not okay is talking to other people or engaging with our digital devices.

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you can walk, you can lie, you can sit, you can have a notebook, and then just roll with it.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And then, in so doing, that’s when these brilliant, transformational, creative ideas just emerge. It’s during the do-nothing time, or is it after the do-nothing time? Or is it both?

Sabina Nawaz
Both. Sometimes you come back, I had somebody who had a near panic attack before his first blank-space time, like, “What do you mean? Tell me again. I’m supposed to do nothing? Nothing at all? How is that going to work?” I said, “Just trust me. Just go do it.” He came back, he’s like, “Nothing happened.” I said, “Well, you know, at least your brain was better rested.” Guess what? After three blank space states, magic started happening. So, it might take a while, or it might be instantaneous.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sabina Nawaz
My favorite quote is from the author who wrote The Little Prince, and I cannot pronounce his name. And it says something to the effect that perfection is not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away.

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

Sabina Nawaz
It would be the one I referenced earlier, which is when employees are treated badly, they deliberately sabotage results. Now think about that, Pete. That means they’re screwing themselves over just to diss the boss. And I read about this in a book by Bob Sutton called The No Asshole Rule.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, we had Bob on the show. And a favorite book?

Sabina Nawaz
I am not monogamous in favorite books, and so it shifts quite a bit. Currently, my favorite book is Martyr by Akbar Kaveh.

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

Sabina Nawaz
I use the Pomodoro technique often, which is setting a timer for 25 minutes and using that as focus time so I’m not monkeying around with every little distraction that comes along.

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

Sabina Nawaz
The one they quote back is actually the shut up, shut up more, and sense more as a result. Say less, sense more. Sense more what is going on because no one else is going to tell you.

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

Sabina Nawaz
Take one thing that you’re going to do to improve, and you already know what that is. Everybody does. In fact, you have probably a list of a dozen things. Break it down into the smallest, most ridiculously small unit and do it every day as a micro habit.

So, if you are going to be awesome at your job by being a better listener, once a day, your job would be to paraphrase somebody, or, for five minutes a day, to detach yourself from your phone, leave your phone in another room.

If you’re going to be awesome at your job through better health and well-being, instead of thinking you’re going to go to the gym for 30 minutes a day, do one push-up a day. That’s what a micro-habit is

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sabina, thank you.

Sabina Nawaz
Thank you, Pete.

Mar 06
0

1038: Getting What You Need from Your Boss through Managing Up with Melody Wilding

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Melody Wilding breaks down the crucial conversations to have with your boss to improve your work life.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to differentiate yourself with one conversation
  2. How to build your pushback power
  3. The easiest way to improve your visibility

About Melody

Melody Wilding is a professor of human behavior at Hunter College and author of Managing Up. She was recently named one of Insider’s “most innovative career coaches.” Her background as a therapist and emotions researcher informs her unique approach, weaving evidence-based neuroscience and psychology with professional development. Her previous book is Trust Yourself.

Resources Mentioned

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Melody Wilding Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Melody, welcome back.

Melody Wilding
Thanks for having me again. So great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it is great to be chatting with you from the fine state of New Jersey, which we discussed is lovely.

Melody Wilding
That’s right. Beautiful state, very misunderstood, but we love our Jersey.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, let’s talk about managing up. We haven’t discussed this issue in quite some time and I think it is so vitally important. Can you share with us maybe an extra surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made as you researched this managing up stuff?

Melody Wilding
Well, I think, just like New Jersey, managing up is very misunderstood, and even when I began writing the book, I was resistant to the idea of calling it managing up and even zeroing in on that concept. I wanted to talk more about influence and persuasion, how do you build respect and recognition. And my publisher had to keep nudging me that, “Yeah, what you’re talking about is the skill set of managing up.”

And I think my resistance came, and what I’ve heard from many other people, is from these misconceptions we have. These old images of managing up from the ‘80s, the ‘90s, the person being the suck-up and running around with their boss’s coffee order. And who wants to do that? No one wants to compromise who they are or feel like they’re ingratiating themselves to the people around them. So, it’s no wonder why we resist this concept.

But what I know now, having done this work and researched this subject is that managing up is not something you do for your boss’s benefit at all. It’s really something you do for yourself to make your own work life, your own career, much easier, less stressful and on your own terms.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I dig that a lot. And while we’re talking about misconceptions, let’s clear them up, I recall, I think I was reading a piece by, Paul Graham, the Y Combinator guy, made a statement along the lines of “Professional managers are amongst the finest liars there are.” And folks are like, “Whoa, that’s some strong language. What do you mean?”

He’s like, “Ah, perhaps I should say, they are adept at managing up,” which sort of imply, well, more than imply, that managing up involves telling the folks above you a little bit of what they want to hear, and massaging their perceptions and expectations, and it really made it sound quite like it’s the art of deception in the professional, acceptable way that we can courteously do so in proper modern times,” Melody. So, have you picked up on those perceptions and how do you address that?

Melody Wilding
I think, again, that’s the older school way of thinking about it. And what I would argue is it’s less about massaging and contorting yourself to someone else’s perceptions and more about tweaking, or in the book I call it flexing, your approach so that your message is actually getting through to the people who need to hear it the most.

That may mean you do need to tweak how you present something, or the type of language you use so that it’s more resonant with the other person, but I don’t think, wholesale, it means that you have to change who you are or what you’re trying to say, because this book is really all about, “How do you have the tough conversations with your manager? How do you push back on extra work or give them tough feedback up the chain of command?”

That’s what managing up really is. It’s having those difficult conversations, sometimes having the courage to say what needs to be said, but doing so in a tactful diplomatic manner that actually earns you trust instead of just turning into a professional people-pleaser.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a nice story that inspires or brings this together in terms of what’s really at stake if we master this skillset?

Melody Wilding
Yes, I think the book actually starts with one of my personal stories which was a time I failed to manage up, and I think it’s a lesson in multiple ways. So, before I went full-time into my current business, I was working at a health care company, and I loved that job. I loved my boss. What I didn’t realize at the time that I saw in hindsight was that I had been hired to work on really a pet project of my managers that was kind of outside of the rest of the company’s scope, and my manager had been given a bit of budget and, unbeknownst to me, some timeline to see if this was viable or not.

And so, that was my first fail, was really not getting on the same page with my manager about “What was the context that this project came up in? What are the expectations? Who else needs to be bought in and on board with this?” And long story short, let’s flash forward, I ended up being laid off. My role was eliminated, and it felt like a shock to me, and it shouldn’t have.

And that is what’s at stake. That’s a very extreme example of what happens when you don’t manage up well, but I was really sideswiped because I hadn’t aligned with my manager. I didn’t have other advocates in the organization who were willing to fight for me and keep me because managing up has to go beyond your boss.

Do not make your manager your single point of failure. You might not get along with them very well despite all of your efforts. Who is leading you may change on a moment’s notice, so you need to make sure you have those other allies as well. And all of that was a very cautionary tale, but I think that’s what’s at stake, whether, again, in my case, it was extreme. I lost my role.

But every day, people feel like they’re overlooked for promotions and opportunities, it may go to someone else who seems less experienced, or we get into these minor frustrations that we end up taking personally, “You know, why does my boss cut me off? They never even allow me to hear my idea out,” or, “Why are they micromanaging me and on top of me about everything?” And so much of this can be solved by learning some key skills.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, tell us, you lay out 10 key conversations for managing up well, which I love. And so, we’ve got alignment, styles, ownership, boundaries, feedback, networking, visibility, advancement, money, and quitting. So, I really dig this because I just love a framework and a set of distinctions and a delineation of categories that just helps make sense of the whole universe of managing up conversations. It feels like, “Yeah, that’s a pretty fine job of summing them up.”

So, I suppose I’m curious, do you have a gauge for what percent of folks ever actually proactively say, “Hey, I’d like to have a conversation about some of the fundamental ways we work and communicate with each other, and what would be best for both of us”? In a way, that almost seems like among the most foundational things one might do in the world of managing up. Is that fair? And how often is that happening?

Melody Wilding
It’s definitely fair. It’s very true, that it is so fundamental that, I think, we sometimes assume it. We assume that this has happened and we overlook it because of that. So, to your point, I would say maybe 10% of people are having those types of explicit conversations about how they work together with their manager, and that is a huge, huge opportunity.

Because if you are in that small minority of people who are doing this, you’re not only going to stand out as someone who is thoughtful, conscientious, you’re driven, you’re taking initiative, but you’re going to have intel and build rapport and trust much more quickly than anyone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. I agree, and I’ve experienced it on both sides of the table. Because it’s rare, it feels very special, like, “Oh, wow, this person, I like them. They’re on top of things.” And I think it’s hard for that to go poorly. Maybe if you ask at just like the worst possible time, like, “Hey, that’s like the definition of a non-urgent situation and we’re in the midst of something on fire right now.” So, maybe that that’s one way it could go poorly. But tell us your take on that in terms of to what extent do managers welcome these discussions because I think there’s a bit of reluctance on the part of some folks to initiate?

Melody Wilding
There definitely is, yeah. And when I have this conversation with people, in the book, we’re talking about really the styles conversation, and that’s when we talk about how, “How do we work together? How do we communicate? What are your preferences? What are mine?” And going back to what I said a moment ago, when you understand the context of who your boss is, and also what your defaults are, you stop taking things so personally because you understand, “Oh, this is their style. This is their way of approaching and processing information.”

“And so, if they send a period instead of an exclamation point, I don’t need to make that mean that I’m getting fired, or they hate me, or they’re against me and they favorite somebody else.” We can be much more diplomatic and make those tweaks to how we communicate.

Melody Wilding
And in my experience, people are reluctant, yes, to bring this up, but when they do, their manager is overjoyed. And, of course, you need to bring this up in a tactful way. So, what I suggest is that you present it to your boss and say something along the lines where you show why this is in their benefit, to say, “I’m really committed to us being able to reach our goals together this year.”

Or, “I want to make sure that you can get the best performance out of me possible, that our work flows more smoothly, whatever it is. And to get there, what I would love to do is understand a bit more about how you work and how I can communicate with you better to get you the information you need. Does that sound good?”

And you can start by asking certain questions of your manager, whether it’s, “If I have to get certain updates to you, what format is best? Do you want those in Teams, in email? Should I present a slide deck? Do you prefer bullet points or should I do narratives?”

Understanding some of those preferences, when you are asking your manager questions, gives you opportunities to then say, “Great. Thank you so much for sharing that. From my standpoint, here’s what would be helpful. If you have feedback for me, take me aside after a meeting, or if you notice that I’m not being as concise as I could be in a presentation, shoot me a quick message on Teams so I can adjust on the fly.”

All of us have different preferences around that, but it turns it into more of a two-way street where, yes, you’re understanding what your manager wants, but you’re also finding opportunities to assert, or at least put on the table, “Here’s what I would like. Is that something that we can find a middle ground on together?”

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds great, yes. And as you say it, and I’m imagining the scene, that seems pleasant and welcome to hear such things. And I want to dive deep on a couple of these. I don’t think we could do all 10 in our time together, but one with regard to boundaries. I remember when I was reading through this, I recall a conversation I had with my friend, Kelsey. We were catching up at a wedding. It had been a long time.

And she was telling me all of, like, the cool things she was doing with, like, go to an Ironman Triathlon, and this and that. I was like, “Wait a minute. I’m sorry. Don’t you work in consulting?” And she’s like, “Yeah.” I was like, “How on earth are you finding the time to have all of these adventures and do all of these things when I recall my days of consulting were so brutal with regard to the hours of the travel and the unexpectedness of things?”

And she was like, “Oh, well, you know, I just kind of talked to my boss and said, ‘Well, hey, here’s what’s going on, here’s the nights I’m not available, and here’s the thing…” She just sort of laid it out in terms of what’s up, in terms of, “I’m going to over-deliver on these key metrics and expectations, and these are the nights I will not be available to be doing things.”

And I was like, “And they went for that?” My mouth dropped, I was like, “You can do that? That’s possible? Even in client services? Wow.” And so, I was struck at just what a managing-up boundary conversation can do for transforming a life into being sustainable and enjoyable in what can be demanding fields.

So, lay it on us, Melody, if we want to establish boundaries but we’re a little scared and we think that we might misstep, or seem like we’re not a team player, or we’re lazy, or we’re not really committed, or any of these other negative associations we fear, how do we play the boundary-setting conversation game?

Melody Wilding
Well, that’s the tension with it, right? We need to protect our well-being, but we also don’t want to look like a slacker, so we have to find that balance there. And the thing with the boundaries-conversation is that “no” may be a complete sentence in many areas of life, but at work it doesn’t go over so well if you just say, “No, I’m not going to do that,” or “I don’t want to do that,” right? It’s going to hurt your reputation for you to say that so you need to be more thoughtful about how you approach it.

And what I think is so telling about what your friend did is it sounds like she was assessing, what I call in the book, your pushback power. And your pushback power is the invisible leverage you do or don’t have to push back, to say no. And we all fall somewhere on the spectrum, higher to lower. Your pushback power is higher if you have more positional authority.

If you’re more seasoned, tenured in your career, you have more credibility behind you, you are a high performer, or you offer a very specialized skillset that people may be more willing to make accommodations for because it could be hard to replace you. And even things like the strength of your relationship with your boss, how you build trust and rapport, your boss’s values, the state of the organization.

If the team is in free fall, in crisis, it’s going to be harder to say, “I can’t pitch in this weekend,” or, “I can’t take on more of this project for a colleague who just left,” versus if you’re in a time of stability, it might be a little more receptive to that. So, taking into account that pushback power allows you to gauge “How directly or assertively can I say no? And how frequently can I say no?”

And it sounds like your friend did that with her manager. Because she was higher in pushback power, she was able to say, “I have these commitments, and so can we find a solution to work my workload around these commitments that I have?”

Now, for those of us that may be medium to lower in pushback power, there’s a number of different things you can do. One of my favorite approaches that I talk about is called the trade-off approach, and this is great because it allows you to set up binary options. So, you may say, “Okay, thank you for sharing that, you know, Y has come down as an important priority from the leadership team. A few weeks ago, we had talked about that you wanted me to focus on X.”

“And so, if X is truly still a priority, how would you like me to reprioritize to make room for Y? Or what would you like me to slow down on? What would you like us to delegate or temporarily deprioritize in order to make that possible?” And the beauty of this is that you are setting the parameters. You are setting the decision options, subtly saying, “Both of these cannot happen at the same time. Which one would you like to choose?”

But ultimately, you’re approaching it more as a problem-solving conversation instead of just dumping a problem back in your boss’s lap to say, “I don’t know. I can’t do it, so figure out someone else to get it done.” You’re approaching it more as a collaboration, which that person will appreciate, and the ultimate authority is back in their hands.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s really handy because I think without the conversation, we can just assume, “Oh, I have to continue doing all the things we’ve ever discussed, as well as this new thing, and that’s just that,” and that is a dangerous, untenable place to live. So that’s handy with regard to the conversation. I’m curious, when it comes to increasing our pushback power over time, let’s discuss.

So, one of the levers is just the strength and quality of our relationship. Another is how special and wonderful and high-performing we are. Any others and what are the quickest, easiest ways to boost these so that we are growing in pushback power over time?

Melody Wilding
Well, let’s talk about the performance piece and building rapport and trust with your manager. There’s a conversation that comes before boundaries, and that’s called the ownership conversation. And that’s important here because the ownership conversation is all about looking for where can you take initiative of projects or problems you want to solve and run with, but by doing that really add value or solve an issue that’s a pain point for your manager, your team, the organization.

And when you do that, you build, you add to the pushback power you have because you’ve enhanced your value, you’ve shown you’re a problem solver, and that’s really valuable. So, the ownership conversation is all about “How do I not only spot those opportunities, but capitalize on them in a way that’s not going to step on the toes of other people around us?” Because that would backfire, of course.

And a lot of it comes down to choosing the right problem to start. And so, I talk about how there’s five worthwhile areas to look at. And a few of those may be bottlenecks. So, are there inefficiencies or broken processes, for example, that are slowing everyone down, including you, that if solved would make everybody’s lives much less stressful and easier?

Neglected needs is also a great place to look. What are the topics or agenda items that keep going to the bottom of the pile or keep rolling over month to month, quarter to quarter, that no one seems to have the time to get around to, but says, “Wouldn’t it be great? Wouldn’t it be great if we could do that? Or we really need to get to that”? Could you be the one to carry that torch forward?

And another one that I think can be easier to spot is feedback patterns. What are you hearing again and again from fellow team members, clients, your vendors, that if you took action on to make better, would add value to everyone else?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, could you give us a story of this ownership in action? Because I think you’re really keying in on something in terms of differentiating and growing a career, because it’s quite possible to go years at a time in reactive mode of doing whatever somebody asks for, or seems to be perilously on fire.

It’s hard to be distinctive in such a place, as opposed to, with ownership, it’s like, “Oh, you know, that’s a fantastic result. Yeah, that was, really, I’m the person behind that.” That’s hugely awesome. So, could you give us a story about ownership in action?

Melody Wilding
Sure, I have two that come to mind, if that’s okay. So, the first one is, I had a client about a year ago, who, his organization was acquiring a new one and he worked on the legal side of this. And so, because of that, when they acquired this new organization, all of his colleagues were running in the direction of all of the new opportunities that were created by this acquisition and trying to capitalize on that, chasing shiny objects, everyone was trying to meet with the three key leaders.

And what he saw was that that change actually created this vacuum where he could step in, and that no one was tackling, there was a neglected need, in other words, with due diligence matters of closing everything that had to do with that transaction, you know, wrapping up all of the contracts, dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s to make sure the merger was complete.

And so, he said, “You know what? I’m actually going to zig while everybody else is zagging.” And he carved out that niche for himself as being the person who was buttoning up the deal, so to speak, which gave him a lot of exposure to not only he became a close confidant to his manager, but also his skip level, his boss’s boss, and some other key C-suite leaders in the organization who really cared about this going correctly, and who knew, “We have to get these compliance matters correct.”

And for him, that allowed him to build those relationships. He was seen as more of a partner to those people. And flash forward about a year later, he was actually promoted to partner because of that work that played a huge instrumental role. So, that’s one example that comes to mind of looking for opportunities that other people may be missing.

And then the other quick story I’ll share has to do with another client who, after the pandemic, was really interested in getting mental health days going for the organization, making sure that the team had time for development and rest, and weren’t just go, go, go, go, go all the time. And why this was ownership is because she had to create buy-in for this idea. This wasn’t something that others had thought of. This was something she was innovating from the ground up and had to push through.

And so, a couple things that she did really excellently was she came with proposals in hand, and so when she would have meetings with some of the key stakeholders and decision makers, she would come with a one-pager with talking points that they could use, just ready-made. She made their job easy, took the cognitive load off of them, and she proposed small steps.

So, in the book, I talk about this as the foot-in-the-door technique in psychology, where you propose, whether it’s a pilot project or a test or rolling something out to just a small sample. The people around you want to mitigate risk and potential exposure or failure. So, if you could say, “Let’s start with a mental health day and then we can actually roll that out to have these once a quarter and have more events around this.”

She just started with, “Let’s have this one day,” and that was easier for people to get on board with. And, eventually, she was successful in making it something bigger but I thought that was a great example of planting seeds, taking it step by step, and getting small agreements that lead to bigger ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool thing to take ownership of because, well, one, that’s just great for everybody, and two, boy, I sure would like that person in my organization, it’s like, “Oh, this is the person who got us all the mental health days. I want to do them favors whenever possible.”

Melody Wilding
Yes, great point. And that speaks to this idea of looking for triple wins. Is something going to be a win for you in terms of you’ll enjoy the work, it will add to your own credibility? Is it a win for your manager? Will it make them look good or advance their priorities? And, third, is it a win for the team or your organization as a whole?

Like you said, your colleagues are certainly going to love you, but, you know, at the end of the day, for everyone’s productivity, sustainability in their roles and long term the results of the organization, it was huge from that respect, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, within these 10 key conversations, could we pick perhaps one or two that seem to be super transformative and yet pretty easy to do? Any of your favorite tips here?

Melody Wilding
Let’s talk about visibility, if that’s good with you. Yeah, I think this is one that people know they need to do, but don’t quite know how to approach because it feels daunting. It feels daunting to feel like, “Ugh, I spend so much time working. Now you’re telling me I have to advertise that work as well and I have to bring more attention to it?”

And in some ways, yes, because we can expect our work to speak for itself. It’s not going to do that. We need to be the advocate for it. But there are some pretty simple, easy ways to build visibility into just the day-to-day of how you work instead of making it extra effort, and I think that’s the win-win. One way you can do this is by restructuring your one-on-ones.

So, I highly recommend that you start all of your one-on-ones with your manager with wins. And you can call it wins, you can call it progress or milestones or achievements, whatever language feels best to you, but the point of that is to not just dive into status updates of, “Oh, here’s where this project is. Here’s where this is. This is what’s coming up.”

But to more so utilize that time to show your manager, “Yes, here’s what we’ve done, but here’s what it means. Here’s the outcome, the results. Here’s also visibility into how I thought about solving a problem, the considerations that I made, or the people I talked to.” And all of that shows them, yes, you are actually getting things done. It gives them more insight into you operating at a more strategic, perhaps even higher level. And it also gives them information that they need to run up their own chain of command.

And so, it’s not really self-promotion to just puff yourself up. We really need to think about it more as, “I’m giving my boss the data they need to advocate for me, to advocate for the rest of the team, to have resources, opportunities, decision-making power at higher levels.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s excellent. And often, when we take ourselves out of the equation, there’s less self-consciousness, and it’s like, “Oh, this is this is handy. Like, if I were leading this organization, I would probably want to know about the skills, this asset, this resource, this person has in the mix to be deployed when useful and necessary. Otherwise, everyone just misses out.” And how about advancement?

Melody Wilding
Advancement, yes. And thank you for that great segue because visibility and advancement go hand in hand, right? And you can start to see how these conversations build on each other, intersect, because once people know more about what you’re achieving and know more about you, well, then you’re in a position to do bigger things.

And why I say that term “do bigger things” is because advancement doesn’t always have to be a promotion. It can be that you want to grow your scope, or the budget that you oversee, you want to go from two to four people on your team, or you want to work on a stretch project, or something that’s completely different from your current skillset.

For example, right now I have a lot of clients who are asking for stretch projects in AI, because that’s really important to them to learn and they know it will be a value-add to the organization. So, think more broadly about what advancement could mean, but also think about starting much earlier than you think you might need to.

Because I see way too many people get caught in the performance review paradox where they keep their head down, they think they’re sending signals to their manager about what they want and where they want to go, only for their performance review to arrive and no promotion, no salary increases, no being named to that committee. It seems to pass them by.

And that’s often because we either haven’t been explicit enough about what we want or we’ve waited too long to bring that conversation up, and your manager has already had to allocate headcount or resources or make those decisions. They were made months ago. So, this may mean starting three to six months in advance to plant those seeds.

Let’s say you did hit a big milestone. You may say, “This was such a valuable experience. I really loved getting to interact with these clients or that stakeholder or use this skill. I would love to do more of that. Do you think there’s an opportunity in the coming months?”

And so, you start to get that out there. You may even have more of a formal conversation with your manager to say, “In the next year, I would love to double the size of my team,” or, “I would love to move from manager to director level. What would you need to see to be comfortable with that change?”

And that allows you to surface objections because your manager may say, “Well, you’re not ready for that,” or, “We need to have these other people on this committee bought into this, so I need to rope other people in.” And it allows you to contract so that you can understand, “All right, by June, you need to see this. By December, you need to see that.”

And you can work against that and have follow-ups to say, “All right, I did what we discussed. Are we still on track here? Has anything else come up? Would anything else prevent us from making that decision at that point?” And so, it has advancement top of mind for you and your manager, and it prevents some of moving that goalpost that can happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. Well, Melody, tell me, any other final tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Melody Wilding
Let’s talk about, briefly, the money conversation because if you have advanced and you’re taking on more, you probably want the salary that comes along with that. Money can also be very loaded and very sensitive, something many of us are not taught how to discuss in our personal lives, let alone in the workplace.

And one of the big mistakes or missteps I see people make here is that they focus way too much on what they’ve done already and not enough on what they can do in the future if they were given more money to do it, and that’s very important. You need to think about, “What’s the potential ROI if the organization gives me five, ten, fifty thousand more dollars, what else would I be able to do? Does it serve bigger clients, manage a bigger team?”

You need to paint that future so that your manager, again, see a theme here, can make a case to their own leadership about, “Why should we give this person more money?” It’s not enough that you want it or you feel you deserve it. That may be true and there needs to be a business case there. So that, combined with, instead of just saying, “I deserve this. I work really hard,” approach it from the standpoint of fairness.

We humans, we are wired for reciprocity. We want to make sure that people feel like they are being treated fairly or correctly. And so, if you can use language around that to say, “I want to make sure that my compensation matches the level that I’m performing at or is commensurate with the amount of value I’m bringing to the organization.” If you can use that sort of language, it makes it feel less like this request that you’re demanding, and again more like a trade.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Melody Wilding
In the book, I actually cite some of this research around micro-yeses. And so, if you can get a micro-yes, let’s say you have to give someone feedback, and instead of just diving into, “So, in that last meeting, I felt like you talked over me,” ask for permission first. Get a micro-yes, “Will now be a good time to talk?” “Yes, sure.” “Okay, I’d love to chat about that client meeting. Is that good with you?” “Yes, sure.” Get those micro yeses along the way so someone is a bit more bought in and not as surprised by what’s coming next.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Melody Wilding
Difficult Conversations by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. Fantastic book, as well as their other book, Thanks for the Feedback. Both amazing books that really break down the nuances, the anatomy of how to have these difficult conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Melody Wilding
I am a huge Oura user, so I have my Oura ring on here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Mine is on my charger.

Melody Wilding
Yes, I probably have to charge mine today, too. But I’ve had it for years, and I just, especially since they have added the heart rate monitoring throughout the day, it is so helpful for me to see what spikes my stress when I go into restorative time. It’s just helped me manage my own schedule and my own energy much better.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Melody Wilding
I am a go-to-the-gym-first-thing-in-the-morning person.

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

Melody Wilding
“You teach people how to treat you.”

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

Melody Wilding
ManagingUp.com is where you can find all the information about the book. You can connect with me as well there, too.

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

Melody Wilding
Start today with having the alignment conversation, and that is a really simple entry point to begin managing up, to ask your boss, “What would success look like for you in the next three months? What does great performance look like in this role? Or, what metrics does your boss discuss with you?” Start there, and I think that’s going to establish a basis of trust and give you a lot of insight that will be really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Melody, beautiful. Thank you.

Melody Wilding
Thank you.

Feb 24
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1035: How to Create Stronger Connections by Disagreeing Better with Bob Bordone

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Bob Bordone discusses the importance of building conflict resilience and how it can help you navigate the tough conversations.

You’ll Learn

  1. How conflict resilience brings people together  
  2. The key to raising your conflict tolerance 
  3. How to face any conflict head-on in three easy steps 

About Bob 

Robert Bordone is a Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School, founder and former director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program, former Thaddeus R. Beal Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and founder of The Cambridge Negotiation Institute. He is co-author of Designing Systems and Processes for Managing Disputes, and co-editor of The Handbook of Dispute Resolution. 

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Bob Bordone Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bob, welcome.

Bob Bordone
Pete, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to talk about conflict resilience, how to negotiate without giving up or giving in. Could you kick us off with a riveting tale, no pressure, but extremely exciting, high-stakes negotiation that you were in the midst of? And tell us what went down.

Bob Bordone
Oh, man. You know, there are many, and I think one thing I want to say also is that anyone who’s in a negotiation, for them, it is high stakes and riveting. But the one that immediately comes to my mind is actually one that I mediated, and it was a family of means that had lots and lots of property to be divided between them, and went on for many months.

I mean, there are so many fascinating aspects to this, but, for me, what was most interesting was folks were, and I think this actually comes up a lot in conflict, folks who are fighting over things, but the truth of the matter is that most of the actual fight was about feelings and emotions and stories that people told about each other.

And so, a lot of the work, this may or may not surprise your listeners, was getting folks to actually put aside the fight around the things, to talk about what was actually going on. And once we were able to do that, it didn’t make the fight about every single property easy, but it made it much easier and helped us to bring it to an end that not only resolved it, but also actually helped this family stay together.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, Bob, you’re giving me a flashback. Wow, this was a weird day. But, one time, I remember I did a Myers-Briggs workshop for a group, and then someone said, “That was awesome. You should come do that for me and my co-authors because we’re kind of working on a book together, and this would be really great for our team dynamic.” But as I got into it, what became clear was, “Oh, your conflicts are way deeper than just these personality difference stuff.”

Bob Bordone
Oh, wow.

Pete Mockaitis
“And, like, I don’t even know if I’m the man for this.” But, yeah, there was some family and some history and some emotions and about being appreciated or taken advantage of, or, like, historically, and it’s, like, wow. And just talking about who’s going to write what chapters and how their personality will help or hinder certain sections of who’s writing what isn’t going to cut it.

So, tell me, how do you make that that pivot, that transition, because in their mind, it’s like, “Okay, this the personality guy that’s going to help us write our book.” In their mind, “Okay, you’re the mediator guy helping us divide the property.” And then I say, “Well, no, actually, let’s talk about how you feel your sibling treated you as a teenager.” It’s like, “What?”

Bob Bordone
Yeah, Pete, this is a great question. It sounds like you’re not a therapist. I’m also not a therapist, and also this isn’t therapy. At the same time, I will say that one of the things that I have come to really appreciate, you know, my background is in law. People do not come to lawyers for therapy, but it is often the case that what’s most convenient to talk about is who’s right and who’s wrong, and who gets the thing and what the legal rules are.

But so much of, I think, the work of really being good at conflict to ourself and also being good as a mediator, a facilitator of conflict is getting people to do some of their own work first. And we imagine, my co-author and I in writing our book, that people will come to it, and in their mind, they’ll be thinking about, like, “How do I deal with this unhinged person at work?” or, “Like, my mother-in-law or someone on I’m in conflict with a, whatever, at the local church?”

But the first step, I think, is always doing like an internal audit, because I think, often, part of what makes conflict hard, like, across a proverbial table is that we also often have lots of internal conflicts and ambivalence in ourself. And when we’re triggered in a particular conflict, it’s kind of bringing up what’s happening in that moment. And then a big narrative and our history and our family background, and “Do we need to unpack all of that, like, to figure out who gets what?” No, I don’t think so.

It’s also the case that, I think, the more self-aware we are of those dynamics, the quicker we can move from that, what we call kind of period of limbic irritability, where we’re kind of being emotional or maybe irrational or running.

Pete Mockaitis
Limbic irritability, I can go into that.

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I love that. I would like to take credit for limbic irritability, but that is very much my co-author, who brings a brain science piece to this book. And it’s really just this moment, or actually more than a moment, when someone says or does something in a conflict and the frontal lobe, like the rational part of our brain that makes good decisions, is overridden, it’s irritable, if you will, by chemicals that are coming from the amygdala.

And we know that it’s like the adrenaline and the cortisol, and that’s kind of making it harder to make really good decisions at the negotiation table. And so, the quicker we can name what’s going on to ourselves, and there’s actually research about this, we’re looking at fMRIs, the quicker people are able to kind of name it to tame it, naming those emotions and feelings and those stories, the quicker the limbic irritability actually goes down, and allows us to be more constructive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now this is sparking some remembrance of a nonviolent communication. Is that Marshall Rosenberg?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
In which he nails it, like, to be able to say, “I’m feeling angry because my need for respect doesn’t seem to be being met in this situation.” It does worlds for like, “Oh, okay. It’s no mystery, that’s what’s going on here.”

Bob Bordone
“That’s what’s going on.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I felt like when he said that, that was disrespectful to me, and so I got angry about it. But, I guess, I don’t need to let that impact my thousands of dollars of whatever negotiation here. I can just kind of let go of that,” or maybe say, “No, actually, that’s pretty important, given brand, or reputation, or whatever. That’s got to get addressed here. Let’s do it.”

Bob Bordone
What you just did there, Pete, is, I mean, so critical because it’s, first of all, it’s being able to name yourself, the feeling and the need of what’s not being met, and that is important. I mean, I don’t know any relationship, whether it’s a boss, supervisor, colleagues, parent, friend, you name it, that works well in the long term where one person isn’t feeling respected.

So, the real difficult conversation is “What does respect look like? And how can we change the dynamic?” So, to be able to name that and say, “That is important. What might be less important is whether I’m getting paid $3,000,” or you’ve moved your fence six feet to the right, or whatever it may be. That might be one way of conveying respect, and there might be 22 other ways. But until we actually get at what’s really the real rub, which is, “I feel disrespected here,” it’s going to be actually hard to even have a conversation about the right thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s dead on. And I’ve heard that there is some research, and, Bob, maybe you have it top of mind. When it comes to medical malpractice type situations, one of the biggest drivers is the extent to which the physician is being caring and honest and helpful as they go and say, “Hey, so this is what happened, and we’re so sorry. Humans make mistakes, and we made a mistake, and here’s what we’re going to do to fix it,” as opposed to silence, lawyer up, be difficult. It’s, like, that actually is a worse approach for mitigating liabilities and losses.

Bob Bordone
Amen, yeah. And this research you’re talking about is really kind of fascinating because what it shows is that people are more likely to want to sue in a situation where they don’t feel that the doctor has been willing to kind of has actually met those interests in listening and sharing their contribution, where they’re just in a defensive stance, than if actually there is that listening and that kind of meeting the interests of feeling hurt, and even apology.

And I think where it’s really interesting from a conflict perspective, and someone who is also trained in law, is there’s this interesting sweet spot of, if people can just actually be honest, like doctors make mistakes, that causes damages for sure that need to be compensated. But the moment of acknowledging that goes a long way to me not wanting to destroy you.

I might need another surgery, and, yeah, I kind of expect the hospital to pay for that. But, like, I don’t need to destroy you. But that defensiveness, and what’s weird is law would come in and say, “Don’t say anything because if you say anything, that will be used against you and then we’re doomed.” And so, what ends up happening is we miss an opportunity there. We miss an opportunity that I think is unfortunate from a conflict perspective.

And, I mean, here we’re obviously talking about medical error, but on a day-to-day basis in, like, relationships, I think similar dynamics come up where the act of apology or the act of sharing some vulnerability doesn’t happen because we’re afraid that the other person is going to take advantage of us. Both sides fearing that do the kind of least good thing, the thing that’s like least in their actual character, and then they tell a story about how terrible the other person is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so coming back to your situation with the wealthy family, you noticed, “Hey, there’s some emotional history stuff going on here,” what happened next?

Bob Bordone
And so, just a piece of that, it is not to relitigate that, for sure, and one of the, I think, core things we talk about in our book, it’s not even to get people on the same page. But the process, I think, of just effectively listening to each other’s stories and experiences, having it validated as, “This is how you experienced,” just can go a long way in, I think, changing the narrative and, particularly, like changing the idea of what might be possible.

Like, another domain of work where I’ve done this is working across lines of difference with, like, Israeli and Palestinian young people. It’s not typically the case that ongoing dialogue across a line of difference changes people’s view on the substantive issue, but it powerfully changes their view on the way they tell the story about the other person, and that’s really valuable for what they might be able to do going forward.

And even if they can’t do all that much, being able to say that, “This is a three-dimensional complicated, interesting person that I can identify with,” is better than “They’re the enemy/subhuman/fill-in-the-blank,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so with your book, it’s called Conflict Resilience, what does that mean?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, so what we want to make really clear that it’s not a fancy word or a catchy word for conflict resolution, but it’s actually quite different. Conflict resilience is really the kind of capacity to sit with the discomfort of disagreement, meaning that it’s both this ability to listen very well and effectively and generously, and also assert your own viewpoint authentically, non-avoidantly, but in a way that increases the chances that the other side could hear you. And it’s independent of whether or not we might be able to actually problem-solve, agree, or find common ground.

So, in a sense, it’s a little bit like emotional intelligence. It’s a set of skills, but it’s like a capacity or a quality that, I think, in this case, is prerequisite to being able to do conflict resolution or negotiate or mediate. Because if you can’t stand the heat of the fire of the conflict, then you really can’t resolve it. You can run away from it but you can’t resolve it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, you’re sparking some memories for me. I remember I was dealing with an issue and I was chatting with a lawyer, and he said, very matter of fact, “Well, either they give that money back or you sue them.” I was like, “Oh, just like that, huh?”

And then someone else was talking about the same issues, like, “You know, unfortunately, it sounds like, I know it’s a huge pain, but if they don’t play ball, I think you’re going to have to actually, you know, contact a lawyer and do that whole thing, file a complaint with the county, all that stuff.” And it was so noticing how that juxtaposition there, two people talking about the same thing, one just like, “Hey, whatever, sue. No big deal.” And the other one is like, “Oh, yeah, it’s got to be a real big thing.”

And I think that that is reflective of personality or emotional capacity or something, because to one person, it’s no big deal, and to the other, it’s, “Oh, man,” a huge ordeal is about to unfold.

Bob Bordone
Absolutely. One of the things we talk about in our book is kind of these five Fs: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. I know I said that very fast. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or fester. But they’re kind of like our, as you were saying, Pete, like default tendencies that we have in that moment when we’re feeling conflict. And the brain, the way it’s kind of set up is, in the moment it feels this discomfort, it will go to the thing that relieves it most quickly.

And for some of us, it might be fighting. It feels like we’re doing something. And others, it might be fawning, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to. Oh, please forgive me,” or fester, I kind of just kind of sit there and stew quietly, or flee. And the truth of the matter is, though, I think that if we can become more aware of that default, and it does differ, as you say, for different people, it gives us this moment of opportunity to choose something that might be more purposeful, that might actually advance our goal. And it might be very different from you either sue them or avoid it.

I think the other thing, Pete, that you’re bringing up, and tell me if this seems right to you, is that just our individual experience of what might register as conflict just varies. So, just an example with my co-author, since you were asking about co-authors earlier, right? I’m somebody, I’m trained in law, I love to get into a policy discussion, right? We can, you know, whatever. You pick something, Pete, I’ll, like, get into it with you, and it’ll be super fun.

I’ll be like, “I had so much fun, it was great.” My co-author might be like, “Oh, my gosh, Bob’s really upset.” Like, sleepless nights. Like, “Is our friendship in danger?” And I’m thinking that was fun. And so, there’s just a way in which what each of us registers as conflict, so we call this conflict tolerance, in our book, varies.

But the problem is if we if we’re not able to even have the conversation about “How do we handle that difference?” I will come away thinking “This person just caves in all the time. They’re obviously not that smart. They clearly agree with me.” And the other person comes away thinking I’m aggressive, a bully, you know, fill in the blank.

And so, part of it is how do we identify these differences? How do we find ways to talk about how to handle even the difference in which we experience conflict?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, lay it on us. How do we do that?

Bob Bordone
Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think, so part of it is doing some work around your own, understanding your own defaults. So, with around the idea of conflict tolerance, we actually break it into two pieces, what we call conflict recognition and conflict holding. So, recognition is, “What is the moment at which I would describe our interaction as conflict?” Holding is, “Once I feel like I’m in a conflict, what is my ability to stay with it versus going into one of the defaults?”

So, doing some self-assessment, I think, is really important. I think the second piece is if I’m in kind of an ongoing interaction with, whatever, a sibling, where I continue to see, like, a shutdown around an issue. Instead of bringing the issue back up, there’s an interesting conversation to say, “Can we talk about what is happening for each of us when this issue pops up? Like, how do you experience a conversation? How do I experience a conversation?”

In other words, we’re going meta on the dynamic. And that may sound, I mean, to some listeners like, “Oh, my gosh, who’s going to do this? And are you going to do this every day, all the time?” No. But if it’s the kind of conflict issue that keeps you up at night, that’s tearing at a relationship that matters to you, that kind of you’re spending a lot of time around a proverbial water cooler or on a Slack channel, going on and on about how horrible they are, yeah, well that’s the time to actually engage this.

And that’s what people tend to avoid, and that’s what we hope our book can really be helpful with because that’s the productive thing we need to do better.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I’m thinking that, for any naysayers out there, I think that this is a tremendously valuable activity. Yes, not every day, and with not every issue. But because it really can be quite illuminating in terms of it registers for one person, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re enraged. You think I’m a terrible husband.” Like, whatever.

It’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, no, not at all. I just kind of preferred that we do it this way. I just kind of like it a little better. That’s all I was asking.” It was like, “Oh, really? Because it felt like judgy or whatever,” fill the blank. And so, I think those conversations are valuable. I think maybe some level of avoidance, resistance that we feel towards that is just straight up fear. Like, we’re worried the other person’s going to be like, “Oh, you softy. Come on. You always make me the bad guy.” Like, whatever.

It’s like there are, it feels as though that conversation could go very wrong. So, Bob, tell us what’s our risk prognosis and how do we do it well?

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I love that you’re bringing this up, right? So, I feel like there’s some good news and bad news in what I’m going to say here. The good news is that my own experience is, often the fear of what might go wrong in one of these conversations is like way more destabilizing, exhausting, and tiring than the actual conversation itself. I mean, it just is.

So frequently, I’ll work with somebody or coach somebody and they’ve practiced and they’re worried, and then after they do it, they’re like, “You know, I mean, it wasn’t perfect, but, like, I’m so glad I did it. Or it helped advance the ball. We didn’t get to Z. We got to F. But since we were at A, getting to F was like progress.”

But the other thing, here’s the bad news, because, I mean, I think there is bad news, and I think this does have people hold back. There is a chance, it’s like whenever you change the script and do something different, there is a chance you’ll get the worst possible answer. There is a chance that if you put yourself out there in a somewhat more vulnerable way to engage something that matters to you, in a way that’s really inviting to the other side, that they might be like, “Meh, I don’t really care.” “Meh, sounds like it’s your problem.” And, therefore, we avoid it.

We avoid it in service of the relationship, but the reality is that, if they really were to do that, in most cases, I’d rather know that now than engage in some kind of farce with you or wait for the slow kill on the relationship. And so, does that makes sense? Or what do you think about that?

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s resonating. And, I mean, you might give him a second chance.

Bob Bordone
You might give him a second chance, oh, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if they give you blowoff, it’s like, “Hey, you know, last week, I brought up this and you said that, but this is actually pretty important to me so I’d love to schedule time to dig into it.” And you might get a second blowoff, like, “No, I don’t think this is worth a second of our company time to dig into.” Well, you’re right, I think you know, it’s like, “Okay, this relationship will never be great. We may be able to endure to put our heads down and get something done, but we’re never going to have a trusting, excellent, world-class collaboration, so long as they are this way.”

And, it is, it’s good to know that earlier, rather than to be blindsided six years down the road, it’s like, “Oh, I thought we were really simpatico, but, no, we’re not at all.”

Bob Bordone
Yeah. Amen to that, right? And one of the things that I really do think, I mean, you touched on something when you said, “Give it a second chance,” right? For sure. And also, later in our book, we kind of offer some of our, hopefully, useful advice on kind of “How do you make this decision to have the conversation and when to not have the conversation, when it’s time to, like, exit in some way?”

And our overriding argument is that we tend to exit too quickly. We tend to go to that convenient, “Let’s just tell a negative story about them, we’re just the best it could be.” But there are some times when either it’s time to exit, or like, I mean, if it’s your boss and you like, you otherwise like the job, you’re going to have to figure out how to manage that relationship.

But, one, I think, important diagnostic part of that, it can’t be whether the other person in the conversation is going to be skillful, because people, as they don’t have some training in it, maybe they’re just not that skillful for whatever set of reasons. But I think you can say, “Can the person at least come to this with a degree of goodwill? Like, do I have to 100% trust them?” I don’t think so. But do you have to feel like they can enter into this with at least some good faith? That’s probably enough, at least to try. At least to try a few times.

And one of the things I always say is, I can’t ultimately change them, but before I make that decision of “This is not going to be the world-class collaboration that I hope for,” I want to have done all that’s in my power. I want to be as effectively assertive and as curious as I could have been. I want to make the conversation as inviting and as kind, but also as authentic as I could have been.

Then, you make your decision based on, after that. I mean, if it’s your sister, you’re probably going to have to have some relationship with your sister. If it’s your boss, well, for the time being, you might, but you might decide it’s time to look for a new work, right? If it’s like your golfing buddy and it’s so bad, you might be like, “Yeah, I’m going to find a new golfing buddy.” You make that decision depending on also what’s in your power to influence.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Now you’ve got a three-step framework: name, explore, commit. Can you walk us through this?

Bob Bordone
Sure. So, the name piece is, broadly speaking, what we would say is the internal work, meaning understanding what are the different internal kind of conflicts or stories that are perhaps making it hard for you to engage the conflict or making you tend to be very argumentative or fighting. So, name is, at both a kind of emotional level, a substantive level, and relational level, what are your interests? What are the kinds of default patterns you have? It’s a lot of self-work.

And we kind of break that into, we call mirror work, which is doing some of the self-examination of your own kind of history and story in this particular conflict. And then the next piece is the chair work, what we really call bringing into some integration, even internal stories or conflicts, and kind of naming them, giving them some voice.

So, just to give you an example, I think, that’d probably be most helpful. If there’s something you want to raise with, let’s just say, your boss, it’s kind of like, “Well, what are the reasons why it’s important to raise this? And what are the reasons why I’d rather not?” And, actually, like giving, naming all of those reasons.

And the reason why that’s worth doing is it’s often, and then practicing giving them voice, is because, often, once we get into the room, we tend to only have one or two of the sides actually get voiced. And the next piece, which is what we call the table work, is actually representing all of the sides in the conversation. So, that’s name.

Explore, I would say, is probably the most at-the-table pieces. So, what does it look like to actually open up and understand, like, “What are the interests of the other side? What is the story they’re telling?” So, a lot of listening, “How am I assertive about my views or needs?” And then the third piece, is commit. And with commit, there’s kind of two pieces in there.

One, we’ve kind of referenced this already, Pete, which is “How do I decide whether, if it’s a negotiation, like, is what’s being offered just something I want to say yes to?” If it’s an ongoing, let’s just say, conversation about, I don’t know, a political difference or a strategic difference, like, I don’t know, “How are we going to agree on an advertising budget for the next quarter?” do I want to kind of continue to engage on this, or do I just think it’s not worth it anymore?

And then, lastly, just from a relational interest, kind of as we were saying, is this a relationship that I might say, “I want to continue in this relationship, but it can only go so deep”? Or, “Gosh, we did something here, we did some work here that was pretty transformational, and we’re actually closer.” Or, like, “Now that I’ve learned what I’ve learned, it’s time to kind of move on.” So, there’s that piece.

But the other piece we really talk about in the commit is, “How can we try to build organizational structures in place?” Like, if we’re a leader, “How do I commit to building an environment that actually encourages people to be conflict resilient, meaning that encourages people to kind of come forward with their different viewpoints, that isn’t a cancel culture, that isn’t a, ‘If you disagree with us or me, you’re a troublemaker’?” So, we kind of offer some advice on how to build a greenhouse that helps people be more conflict resilient.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, I’d love to hear, let’s talk about the internal stuff, mirror work, in terms of, if we’re generally averse to conflict, it makes our necks feel uncomfortable, and there’s a lot of fear, trepidation, whatever, like, across the board, numerous relationships, numerous issues, any pro tips for how we can, generally, get better at this stuff?

Bob Bordone
Yes. So, part of in a situation where someone finds themselves more avoidant than engaging, my coaching on this would be like, “Okay, so let’s make a list of maybe what are the fears you have about engaging this?” and they’ll come up with whatever the reasons are, “It’ll go poorly, the person will get hurt, I’ll get hurt, it’s not worth it. Nothing will change. It’s not that important to me anyway,” blah blah blah. I always love that last one, “It’s not that important to me anyway.”

It’s like, “Okay, you’re paying me to spend time on this, but it’s not that important. I don’t even believe it, but, okay, let’s make that list.” But then, and this is the real coaching piece, “Why is it important? Why might you want to actually raise this?” And they’ll say, “Well, maybe something will change.” “Well, if we don’t, the relationship’s going to end up in the trash, anyway.” “Well, it’ll be hard to work with them,” “Well, it brings morale down,” “Well, how can they get better if I haven’t told them?” They make a list of all those things.

That work, just having them look at those two things, and then be persuaded, not that the first piece is not possible, but that the second piece is as legitimate and important as the first. And so, the kind of work there is embracing, this is the kind of mirror work, both of these are true. And if your tendency is that you tend to let all the fear side win the day, the side of you you’re letting down is all of the reasons why it’s really important to have a conversation, and you can’t do that consistently over time and actually be authentic and connected in relationship with anybody because they’re only seeing one piece of you.

They’re not seeing you. You’re letting something down here. So, if you’re worried about disappointing them, you’re actually disappointing a part of yourself. So, it’s interesting, some of this, I don’t know if any of your listeners, or you, Pete, have any interest in internal family systems, but some of this actually draws on internal family systems work, identifying, “What are the parts of us? Then how do we find ways to not evaluate or silence or overvalue certain parts and undervalue others? But each of these is useful and has served us.”

But when we consistently silence one because of fear, we are losing something, and I think the most important thing is we’re losing the possibility for connection. The possibility for actually a better working relationship. So, we think we’re doing something in service of preserving something, but we’re just setting up the slow kill.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, maybe I’m a dork who majored in finance, and I am. But that makes me think about risk and money. It’s like you could take zero risk and have your money hang out in a checking account. But then there’s the slow kill of its value from inflation. Or you can take some risk, put it in the stock market. Like, it could go down. It absolutely could. But over the long term, historically, things work out a lot better for you if you park it there as opposed to a checking account.

And I think about that, similarly with these conversations, it’s like, you could play it safe and never raise it, and it’s true, you won’t be rocking the boat. You will not cause the potential damage that conversation could cause, but you will also not unlock the greatness that could be possible within this relationship.

And I have been delighted by how, like, sometimes relationships can go into amazing places when you say exactly what’s up. I remember my friend, Anne, in college, and I was maybe a little bit less guarded and flippant, say whatever was on my mind at the time before being chastened by things that went wrong, conversationally.

But I remember she said she was dating this guy, and I said, “Oh, yeah, I know him. You know, he’s funny. He’s funny, but sometimes I wonder, does he ever kind of occasionally strike you as maybe a little bit of an asshole?” And she laughed, and said, “Yes, he does! We’ve been trying to work on that, and we’re probably breaking up soon.”

Bob Bordone
Oh, my gosh!

Pete Mockaitis
And so, like, I had just met her, like, “Oh, I haven’t seen you around,” but then that immediately catapulted to, like, “This guy, Pete, like, he’ll share what he thinks, and so I trust him.” And then I went to great places and, likewise, I’ve heard of therapists who challenge powerful executives in their sessions, it’s like, “Nobody else talks to me this way,” and because of that, there’s just tremendous trust.

Bob Bordone
Tremendous trust, yeah. You know, one of the things I like to do, Pete, I used to not do this. I’m somebody who kind of came to this work largely because I think I was really bad and conflict-averse and wanted to learn more. But one of the things I do now, I think people will find this surprising, it’s I’m supposed to be a mediator, right, but people will be in a room and someone’s saying X and someone’s saying Y and someone’s saying Z and then someone’s like, “Oh, I’m really glad we’re aligned,” or like, “I hear you saying this.”

And I’m listening, I’m thinking, like, “There’s literally no alignment here. What are these people talking about?” And the convenient thing to do would be like to nod my head and say, “Oh, I’m so delighted we’re all in agreement,” and, like, walk out. But I tend to do now, and I used to not do this, I used to be a head-nodder.

But I actually think it’s so much more valuable to be like, “You know, I don’t want to be troublesome, but I actually don’t think you’re all saying the same thing. I think you’re saying really different things. And I think should dig in on that because, otherwise, we’re missing something important here.” And they’d be like, “Oh, I guess you’re right.”

But it goes back to that, like, yeah, as soon as you do something like that with somebody, I just think there’s a level of realness, and it can be done in a way that’s not mean-spirited, that’s not cruel, and it should be done assertively, like, “From what I’m observing, you know, whatever, from what I’m observing, like, this guy sometimes seems like a little bit of an asshole to me. I’m surprised and interested what you like about him,” or whatever, you know. “I’m glad you like him. I don’t want to take that away. I just don’t see it.”

I mean, you know, am I going to do that? Does it make sense to do that with someone’s spouse of 50 years? No. But I think here’s the other thing, Pete, because, one of the things, like, sometimes I worry that our message is that “You should be doing this always and everywhere all the time,” and that’s just not what we’re saying. What we are saying is this skill, this conflict resilience skill, if you want to be a successful leader, if you want to grow professionally and earn people’s respect, it has to be in your toolkit to be deployed at the right times and in the right space.

But to somehow think, “I am going to make it by avoiding everything, or taking out my sword and lopping everyone’s heads off in my path,” I mean, you could get so far, but at some point, that only works for people who don’t care at all about relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and soon you run out of heads. It’s like, “I’ve lopped off all the heads.” Because like fill in the blank in terms of like if you’re looking within any community, right, you know, people talk. And so, it’s like if we’re talking about real estate agents in the Nashville area, it’s like, “Okay, lop off all the heads. None of them want to work for you anymore.” Or, top engineering talent in Silicon Valley. It’s like, “All right, I’ve lopped them all off.”

Bob Bordone
Yeah, that’s right, and, like, no one wants to work with you, you have no trust. And then, what ends up happening, now we’re kind of in just plain negotiation land. It’s like somebody who, let’s just say, there’s 10 points of value to be divided, they’re consistently getting seven, and they’re going around, saying “I won, I won. Look how good.” And, like, they are except for the fact that, with some more skill and an ability to actually handle conflict better, that 10-point pie could be 20 points or 100 points or 200 points.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Bob Bordone
And if it’s 20 and you’re getting 10 out of 20, you ain’t beating them. It’s just a 10 is greater than seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m right with you there, in terms of the creative, collaborative, win-wins. That’s just like my default. And it’s funny, like, you cannot even begin to play that game until the emotions, the limbic irritability, is soothed in terms of like, “All right, let’s see what we can figure out together.” It’s just impossible, in my opinion, to get there when they’re like, “Bob is a jerk. I hate him, and I’m going to make him pay. And also, we’re going to find a creative, collaborative solution together.”

Bob Bordone
Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
No. No.

Bob Bordone
It just won’t work, right? And the other interesting thing about just the brain science aspect of that is when you are in that emotional refractory period, that limbic irritability time, your ability to actually, at a cognitive level, identify the interests of the other party goes down. When people are made to feel anxious, they think, “Oh, let’s make them feel anxious and then we’ll get more concessions,” it leads to quicker exit, lower trust, lower joint gains, lower interest in working together again.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, and your reputation takes a hit too.

Bob Bordone
Yeah, and your reputation.

Pete Mockaitis
Your counterparties talking smack about you.

Bob Bordone
Yeah. So, it’s incredibly short-term thinking. But again, like thinking about that kind of existential brain of ours, that’s like going back to whatever thousands of years when you bang into me on a dark path and you’ve got to make a quick decision of whether I meant it or not. And if you decide I meant it and you’re wrong, you still take your club out and beat me and you’re alive and I’m dead. If you decide I didn’t mean it and you’re wrong, I take my club out and beat you and you’re dead, I’m alive right.

I mean, there’s a way in which the brain is, like, it’s not all washed up. It’s just that most of the things, like, this is we’re talking about conflict resilience. We’re not talking about existential. This is like your boss again, this your direct report, or your sister, or your brother, or like someone, or the real estate agent also goes to the Chamber of Commerce, and has to have a series of ongoing relationships.

So, you have to have a better command of yourself and a set of skills that are not going to put you into this, again, the 5Fs that are going to just make things worse for you, maybe in the short term, but certainly in the long term.

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

Bob Bordone
No, except this has been fun. I love it, I love it. So, thank you, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Me, too. Let’s hear about a favorite quote.

Bob Bordone
So, my favorite quote is a scriptural quote, actually, from Micah, and it is, “This and only this does the LORD require of you, to act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty good and that’ll do it.

Bob Bordone
I hope that some of the principles in the book honor that.

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

Bob Bordone
For me, I mean, I’m a big fan of all of, like, Daniel Kahneman’s stuff. I particularly love some of the research on self-serving biases, and also on fundamental attribution error. It’s like a fancy word, but fundamental attribution error, basically, the idea that, “If something goes well, it’s because I’m obviously brilliant. And if something goes poorly, it’s because they’re jerks in any way Mercury was in retrograde.”

And so, that tendency to not have a learning loop, I think, if more of us were aware of that, I think it would probably lead to a better conflict handling.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Bob Bordone
My favorite book is actually a fiction book. I mean, there’s lots of negotiations in it. It’s just really fun. I love “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Bob, this might blow your mind, it did me. Did you know that the story of “The Count of Monte Cristo” is based on a real human’s life?

Bob Bordone
I did not know that.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “That’s too crazy. That’s too crazy. No way, it’s a real human.” And, of course, there’s embellishments and literary, you know, whatever. But like, there was a dude who was in prison who escaped and exacted vengeance.

Bob Bordone
I did not know that. I like books that really make you feel like you’re transported to a different time. But another one that I really like is The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton because it’s another book that makes you feel like, in that case, that you’re like in high society, at this particular period in New York City. Anyway, so those are the books that really kind of draw me in.

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

Bob Bordone
Ah, favorite tool, which is actually in our book, it’s called The Ladder of Inference, developed by Chris Argyris and Don Schoen, who are of Harvard Business School. It’s a wonderful tool for all sorts of things, but particularly if you’re in a conflict situation, when somebody says something like, for example, “You really messed up here.”

That, we would say that the top of the ladder, it is a conclusion. It is drawn by, at the bottom of the ladder, an ocean of information or data that we don’t all have access to, we only have some access to some. And then each of us picks some piece of information from that ocean, that’s a piece of data in an ocean, and then we put a story on it, our reasoning and inferences, and that’s how we reach the conclusion.

What the ladder enables you to do is have a much more productive conversation where instead of me saying “You messed up,” and you saying “No, I didn’t,” we can walk down each other’s ladders, talk about data, talk about reasoning. Sometimes it shifts opinions. Even if it doesn’t, it’s just a much more edifying conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Bob Bordone
You know what? What I’m going to do when I get off this call, a daily 45-minute walk with my golden retriever, Rosie.

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

Bob Bordone
So, not to be redundant, but I will be, which is that just the power of the first no makes all of the other yeses actually meaningful. So, to the degree you are in a conflict and you’re avoiding and you’re trying to be nice-y-nice, etc., and you think you’re serving the relationship, finding a way to kind of say, “You know, I pretty much don’t agree with this part, or I have concerns about this,” that is deeply connecting because it, first of all, makes all the yeses seem sincere and it’s an opportunity for connection.

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

Bob Bordone
Yeah, so you could learn more about our book and, hopefully, buy it at our website, which is ConflictResilienceBook.com. That’s ConflictResilienceBook.com. You could also learn more about me and my website, which is BobBordone.com.

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

Bob Bordone
Yeah, I would just say, if you have any kind of difficult conversation or conflict that keeps you up at night, that’s worth engaging and not avoiding. And if do it well, no matter how it ultimately turns out, I think you’ll feel better about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bob, thank you.

Bob Bordone
Pete, thanks for having me. This was really fun.

Feb 20
0

1034: Simple Shifts that Form Exceptional Teams with Keith Ferrazzi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Keith Ferrazzi shares the simple but powerful shifts all teams can make to elevate performance.

You’ll Learn

  1. What’s holding most teams back
  2. How to improve collaboration with fewer meetings 
  3. The practices that turn team members into co-leaders 

About Keith 

Keith Ferrazzi is an entrepreneur and global thought leader in high-performing teams and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight and its Research Institute. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Who’s Got Your Back and bestsellers like Never Eat Alone, Leading Without Authority, and Competing in the New World of Work. He is a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc, Fortune, and other many other publications.

Resources Mentioned

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Keith Ferrazzi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Keith, welcome back!

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, I’m excited about the call. And I love the name, that’s my father’s name. So anytime I get a chance to talk to a Peter, a Pete, or a Pietro, it always brings a smile to my face.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, Pietro. A Pietro Ferrazzi.

Keith Ferrazzi
Si, è vero. È vero.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Oh, we already got some life, some energy in this. That’s good. Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, “Never Lead Alone,” and I am going to accidentally say Never Eat Alone, because I read your book back in the day.

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s okay. That’s what most people know me from 20 years ago. This is the anniversary, 20th year anniversary of Never Eat Alone, the book that redefined “How do you build relationships that open doors of opportunity for yourself?” And now, 20 years later, “How do you build the kind of relationships among the team that you work with that won’t let you fail?”

Pete Mockaitis
And just for funsies, we were talking before we pushed record, I want to know, Keith, are you still a conference commando?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, I just came back from Davos, which is probably the holy grail of conferences, and I had the blessing of facilitating a roundtable of the CEO of two of the largest high-tech companies, the CEO of one of the biggest banks, the head of AI for Salesforce. What an amazing place, and it was all utilizing the simple practices of “How do you deepen and build relationships in this crazy world we’re living in today?”

And that’s what we’ve done. I mean, the book Never Eat Alone was so successful because it was like eating popcorn. “Try this, do this, 15 tips to be a conference commando.” And this new book is the same way, 10 shifts from traditional mediocre leadership to having your team step up in high-performing teamships, and 10 shifts and a bunch of little practices and it’s not that difficult. You just got to pick up and start trying some of the practices.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I know your style, your practices are based on a boatload of underlying research. Can you tell us a little bit about that research and any startling discoveries that made you go, “Whoa!” when you saw it?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, 3,000 teams in our dataset. And what do you think the average team’s courage and candor is among a team on a scale of zero to five? What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
Two point one.

Keith Ferrazzi
You read the book. Actually, it ranges between 1.8 and 2.2, and that is just shocking. How we could be sitting in collaborative dialogues and people aren’t courageous enough or transparent enough or desirous enough to make each other successful to be telling the truth in the room? That’s just sh**. And the average team is mediocre at best. And what I just kept discovering time and time again was how mediocre the average team was.

Now, there are some teams that crush it. Amazon’s team does an extraordinary job on many of the most important shifts of a high-performing team, and so do a lot of the young unicorns that are coming out of Stanford, disrupting large corporations. These companies are doing incredibly well. But the average entrepreneur and the average big-company executives, pretty mediocre.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, courage and candor at a two-ish level, what does that look, sound, feel like in practice as compared to a dream state of a five?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, okay, we’re having a conversation about the lagging sales numbers this quarter, and we have a polite dialogue in the room, and then we leave the room, and the real talk happens, and that happens all the time. Or worse, people are DM-ing privately during the meeting, saying the sh** that they won’t say out in the meeting itself.

Keith Ferrazzi
So that’s in the average state. In the powerful state, and I’ll use a company that, really, is a lovely place to work, it’s called e.l.f. Beauty. At e.l.f. Beauty, everybody agrees when they’re hired that “We will have the fastest, most compelling growth as professionals while we’re working here. And a part of that is a commitment that we will always tell each other the truth. We’ll never let each other fail. It’s not throwing each other under the bus. It’s assuring that everybody is successful. We cross the finish line together,” all those kinds of words.

And as a result, in a meeting, somebody will say, “We’re lagging sales numbers,” and the head of sales will say, “You know it’s been very difficult to get the kind of leads we need for marketing because of our lagging competency in digital marketing.” And then the head of marketing will say, “You know, like I appreciate that. We’re down a gal that we used to have in that particular role, and it is an issue. But let’s talk about how we could reallocate resources.” And then the head of HR will pop in and say, “You know what? We’ve got an analytics person over there we could move.”

So, it’s that kind of a collaborative dialogue. Now, all of those one-off conversations would have happened in DMs or behind the scenes, and they wouldn’t have happened from a sense of what I call co-elevation, where people are collaborating in service of a mission, pushing each other higher. Instead, it would have been done in a more eviscerating-ly, kind of passive-aggressive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like whiny, defensive, “Can you believe so-and-so?”

Keith Ferrazzi
Pointing fingers, and that just happens. I am so shocked by the most prominent businesses in the world. So, I have another one. I’m not going to say the name of the company, but this is a company I’m coaching right now, Fortune 50 company. And this business has self-professed that their candor levels are at 1.3 on a scale of 0 to 5, 1.3. And in one meeting, we practiced some practices.

So, my practices are researched. That was the original question, 3,000 teams, I’ve observed practices of successful teams. I take them out, dust them off, package them, put them in other teams to a point where I can prove that “If you do this practice, you will move the needle on the diagnostic and likely move the needle on performance.”

And the 1.3 company did this practice called a stress test. So, we had three critical initiatives that were being, or that are absolutely important for this company to thrive. Three critical initiatives presented. The first one presented and said, “Okay,” and they all present in the same way, “Here’s what we’ve achieved. Here’s where we’re struggling. Here’s where we’re going.”

But everybody knew that they had to individually write in a Google Doc what the challenge was. Like, “I listened to you. Here’s what I disagree with. Here’s a risk you’re not seeing, something. Here’s where I might offer an idea. And here’s where I’d be willing to help.” The entire group is writing this in, and then they go into breakout sessions, and they corroborate as small groups in three. Then we come back in and have a conversation.

And then I asked the team, “What’s the degree of candor you just experienced?” They all put into chat fours and fives. So, literally, one practice moved them from a standard of polite, passive-aggressiveness, and political dialogue to full transparency where they got all the stuff on the table and we were at fours and fives levels of candor in less than an hour of the meeting starting. This is what high-return practice is, and what the book can do for any team.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m curious, what do we think is underlying the low levels of candor?

Keith Ferrazzi
First of all, there’s a wrongheadedness about feedback and candor that was born within our culture as children. So, when your parents gave you feedback, were they giving you input? They were telling you something. They were giving you a directive, “Sit up straight,” “Don’t eat that way,” whatever. Feedback has always come in the forms of a directive. And when you got it from your teachers, coaches, bosses, it’s always a directive.

Now I’m telling your peers to unleash feedback. But if everybody thinks that what they’re doing is giving each other directives, that is a cluster. But that’s why we don’t do it. Right now, we think that feedback and directive are intertwined. We don’t do it. We don’t like when we receive it because we assume that it’s coming with a directive.

I unbundle that when I’m working with teams. I say, “Listen, what we’re looking for is bold, inclusive, direct, challenging data from all of the points of view. In fact, let’s get more inclusive. Let’s go ask people who actually have a dog in the hunt down at the front lines. Let’s go ask innovators outside. Let’s get insights that just blow us away. And then let’s just treat it all like individual datapoints that we don’t have to do anything with, except use to analyze for better answers.”

So, one of the reasons why I think the feedback is so supercharged and the ability to get it more fluidly is to disaggregate what supercharges it. That’s the connection to directive.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. So, right there, it’s just like, “If you have a different perspective about what we’re doing, what we’re giving, what we’re receiving, that can be big right there,” because some folks might say, “Well, it’s not my place to direct this person because, I mean, I’m their peer, or I’m even at a lower level in the hierarchy of the organization.”

Keith Ferrazzi
That’s right. And instead, now it’s just like, “Oh, I want to give this person my data, my insight. They can do whatever they want to it,” but we start celebrating the desire to be bold and to throw out crazy ideas, and that’s the powerful element. Look, I think the other thing is, you know, in some places, there’s a sense of politicization, “So, hmm, if I make this person successful, do I look less successful?”

And the reality is that’s another reboot, which is the leader needs– and this is, by the way, everything I’m talking about, you can either learn it as a teammate and be the best teammate on the team, or you could read the book and learn it as a leader and get the whole team to behave that way. So, leaders lead differently when they’re asking teams to become high-performing teams.

So, if a good leader gives feedback, a great leader gets the team to give each other feedback. A good leader holds the team accountable; a great leader gets the team to hold each other accountable. A great leader will actually get the team to have each other’s back to the point where they won’t let each other fail.

Now, those are 10 shifts. I just gave you, three of them, you know, a shift from conflict avoidance to candor. The shift from accidental relationships, serendipitous relationships, walking down a hallway, to purposeful, engineered, more powerful relationships. So, there’s a whole series of these shifts. Everyone has simple practices that bring it to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us another, a couple shifts and practices that you’ve seen be tremendously transformational?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, one of the biggest lessons that I’ve learned, so I became a venture partner at a company called Lightspeed. It’s one of the largest VCs in the world, and I coach their portfolio companies. These extraordinary, thoughtful, fast-growth unicorn companies born out of Stanford University or IIT in India. And these companies, they very much collaborate differently than most other teams. They don’t use meetings as the way in which they collaborate.

So, one of the shifts is from collaborating in meetings to collaborating in technology. So, if I said to you, “We’re running slow on the sales this quarter. Let’s have a meeting on it,” we all get in the room and we start having a dialogue. There’s 12 of us, and four of us would think that we’d been hurt. It’s just, you don’t have time to hear everyone’s point of view. Some people aren’t bold and aggressive in meetings, others are more introverted, etc.

But if I said, “Let’s not have a meeting on it. Here’s a Google Sheet, and here’s all 12 people’s names. First column, what do you think the real problem is that has caused the sales to slow down? Second column is what is a bold solution that could get us back on track? Okay, now everybody writes that up and reads it before we show up in the meeting. Now we show up in the meeting, we probably already landed the plane and all we have to do is agree that one of those solutions or a combination of a couple is the way to go, and we’re off and running.”

The old way would have been the meeting, the meeting after the meeting, the meeting we walked down the hallway, the lobbying behind each other’s backs. I mean, meeting shifting is a major shift that these young, hot unicorn companies, they organically know how to collaborate in asynchronous formats, not meetings. That’s another shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot because, you mentioned Amazon being high performing, and I understand that Amazon very much has a writing culture in which folks do some writing about some things and they might start a meeting with “We’re just reading the writing.” And to some, that sounds very intimidating, like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to write essays and pages and pages.” But what you’ve described sounds super easy, “I got two cells. I might be generating nine sentences, and we’re off to the races.”

Keith Ferrazzi
I love the purposefulness of the Amazon culture, but I do, on this particular issue, I see the value of it, but I would rather not read in a room. Also, I think that by the time you’re writing up a five-page document, you’re putting a stake in the ground relative to what this thing is. I’m talking about, like, that’s fine if you’re down here on the funnel of collaboration, you’re ready to close something. That’s editing where somebody, where we think we are.

But if you’re up here, and you’re trying to break through a problem, I don’t want you, I don’t want five pages of your opinion. That boxes us all in to your opinion and your solution. I want, “I’m up here. I want to hear what you think the problems are.” Because I’ve seen this where, in a large manufacturer that was retooling a significant part of its product line, they were falling behind, and everyone’s pointing fingers. And I said, “Let’s just do a meeting shift. Let’s everybody go online and we’re going to write ‘We are falling behind. But what do you think the reason is we’re falling behind and what’s a bold solution?’”

And, all of a sudden, we had all of these opinions from different functions. Some people said, “I want to send it down to the plant level and see what they think,” and etc. And, gosh, it just revealed itself. Truth came out of this tapestry of insight. And the person who came up with the boldest idea that worked, that we ended up implementing, was L4 from the people who were actually in the meetings originally, level four underneath the levels one and levels two that were naturally there.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, one, we’re exiting the meeting, and we’re getting all the bold thinking, just straight right out there in a Google Sheet or some sort of easy collaboration platform. Lay some more on us, Keith.

Keith Ferrazzi
The word “agile” is a word that came up in the 2000s as a way to re-engineer how you develop software, and it, frankly, was a genius re-engineering of workflow that should be used by all of us in all the projects we do. And, ironically, even companies that develop software don’t practice agile on other project management solutions.

Look, agile can be pretty time-consuming and very in-depth. It can be a bunch of spreadsheets. But here’s what I would say if there’s a critical initiative that you have this year, a wish, a desire, a hope, have your goals for the year around it, but ask yourself very clearly, “What does success look like after month one?”

And after month one, pause and say, “Okay, what have we achieved in month one? Where did we struggle in month one? And what are we planning to do in month two in order to make sure we hit our year goals?” If you work in those short agile sprints, month by month, or if there’s a lot of volatility in what you’re doing, you could do week by week sprints, and at the end of those sprints, utilizing the practice that I’d mentioned earlier called stress testing, where the group of people who are involved in that project, beat it up at the end of every sprint.

They go into breakout rooms and they write, “What risks or challenges do I see that they’re missing? What innovation might I offer? Where would I offer help?” And now, all of a sudden, the whole team is on one page beating this thing up, all full transparency on the table. The person now says, “Thank you. I’ve got all this new information. Here’s how I’m adjusting my next month, and I’m now on track to hit my annual goals.”

Whereas, in the past, we’d wake up at the end of Q1 or Q2 realizing, “There’s no way in hell we’re going to make our one-year goals. We’re already so far off track and we haven’t been listening more and robustly to all of the input.” So, just using simple, agile sprints and adjusting through stress testing at the end of every one is an amazing operating system for the world we’re living in today, the volatility, the need for change, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, lovely. All right. So, we have a big goal, a big timeline, we split it up into segments, so we’re checking in regularly and seeing, “Are we on track and how do we fix it?” getting all the wisdom from the people. Nifty.

Keith Ferrazzi
So, I’m going to harken back to my first book a bit because one of the problems I saw in our coaching of teams is that most teams, do not effectively define what a team is. So, what I mean by that is, in most large companies, the big problem is we think our team is who reports to us, and we’re constantly banging our head against the wall because there are so many other interdependencies that are getting in our way of achieving the things we want to achieve. Well, that is the first shift that I talk about in the book, shifting from hub-and-spoke leadership, where control is what defines a team, to a team being the critical network of people you need to get the job done.

So, as a leader, your team is who you need to get the job done. I don’t work in a big company, I’m an entrepreneur, and my team includes other entrepreneurs, like Peter Diamandis, who’s a good buddy of mine, who’s a futurist in technology. He helped me design an entirely new business at Ferrazzi Greenlight that I hadn’t thought of, that was basically, it’s called Connected Success.

We take learners, you know, entrepreneurs, leaders. etc. who want to live the life of Keith Ferrazzi in terms of great relationships, transforming your life, transforming your career, etc., and we take them through an eight-week program. That is very different than the business model that I’ve always had, which is coaching executive teams. So, this is a very different business model.

And my teammate, Peter, incubated that with me, and he doesn’t work for me. I don’t pay him. I’m a partner of his and I do things for his and his teams, and he does things for me and my teams. All of a sudden, he’s a teammate, and if I didn’t define myself that way, I would have never tapped into his genius.

And in large corporations, you know, the software company that I was talking to you about earlier, the hardware and the software division are the same team in the growth of the business, and yet they think of themselves as other. And so, one team collaborates, and then they go try to get buy-in. Buy-in is BS. Buy-in is you’re trying to sell your ideas to people. You need to configure your team around the people you need to get the job done, independent of work charts.

And once that’s done, then you get that group to adopt what I call the social contract, “We’re going to be candid with each other. We’re going to push each other hard. We’re going to keep each other’s energy strong. We’re going to build strong, trusting relationships. We agree on this stuff, and then you do the practices.” So, just redefining team is such a critical component of high-performing teams and team-ship.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I’m curious, when you lay out this contract, do you encounter resistance? Or do people sign up readily, and then later on have trouble? Or is it smooth sailing through and through?

Keith Ferrazzi
You know, there’s usually, in every third team, there’s one a**hole that is just digging in out of self-preservation, fear, insecurity, selfishness, whatever, and they don’t want to really adjust to become a high-performing team. The reality is, in most teams, once they see, “Oh, wow, our score is 1.3? That’s pathetic. 

So, once you do the diagnostic, people are like, “Wow, that’s not who I want to be.” And now the question is, “It’s fine to be aware, but that doesn’t do anything. What are the practices? So, okay, I’m aware, now you’ve given me a stress test as a practice.” Or another practice is called a candor break, we’re in the middle of a meeting, everybody goes into groups of two, and they say, “Okay, what’s not being said in this meeting that should be said?” What a powerful question. They talk in groups of two, then they come back in the main room and they all share.

That’s turning the culture you wish you had into an assignment. It happens all the time in these practices. So, you become awake, you do the practice, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a better way to live my life. I’m not banging my head against the wall about my frustration about another peer. I’m able to have a conversation with them about it.”

So, I think that the adoption rate is very high. Very high. Every once in a while, you get one that’s not, but then it also becomes very evident that that guy is the jerk that probably doesn’t last very long in the team.

Pete Mockaitis
I do love that question in the candor break, “What’s something that’s not being said that should be said?” because it kind of reverses the emotional pressure dynamics, you know? Whereas, before, it’s like, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable to say this thing because maybe it’ll hurt someone’s feelings, maybe I’ll look dumb, etc.” Then when you shift it, it then feels like the pressure is reversed. So, now the wrong answer is, “Uh, nothing. We’ve said everything.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Right. That’s the ridiculous answer. All I’ve done in most of these shifts, in the high-return practices, I have seen and curated practices that allow you to turn the kind of culture you dreamed of into simple assignments, and people don’t mind simple assignments, and in fact they’re pent up. You know, most organizations that are so overly polite that they don’t share what they’re thinking are usually highly political and they share behind each other’s back.

If you tell them, “Hey, we’re going to step up to a new standard of courage and transparency. Here’s how you’re going to do it. You’re going to go in small groups of two. You’re going to talk about what’s not being said. I know psychological safety is 85% higher in those small groups. Then we’re going to come into the main room. We’re going to have that discussion because you were assigned to do it so everyone has to have something to say,” and, boom, it’s all of a sudden on the table.

So, it’s actually, there’s a Fortune magazine article I wrote recently that says, you know, I’m tired of hearing people say, “Culture change is tough.” It’s not. Culture change changes when you just adopt simple new practices that change the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about the importance of praise, so this stuff isn’t necessarily all like, “Oh, say the hard courageous thing that’s going to upset people.” But also, we’re sharing some happy stuff, too.

Keith Ferrazzi
Praise and relationships, both are very happy. So, praise, there’s, “How do you shift from paltry limited leader-led praise?” which most companies don’t have enough praise. So, limited praise from leaders to abundant praise from peers. How do you create, and what do you do? If you’re a leader, let’s do a practice. Once a month, we’re going to do a gratitude circle where everybody goes around and shares one person on the team that they’re grateful for and why. Really simple practice. And you can do them even more frequently than once a month.

So, there’s a whole set of practices that shift from the leader being responsible for all the praise to the team. You can still do leader-led praise. You want certain behaviors dialed up on your team, you do an award for that kind of behavior, and you call out who that is. Very simple. It’s Pavlovian in nature, actually, right? It’s like the dog rings the bell; they get a treat. So, if you change your behavior, you get a treat, you get praised. So, that’s on the praise side. Very simple practices breed that kind of energy.

And relationships, you know, most teams have mediocre level of connection. I will go into a team, I’m like, I’ll do diagnostic interviews, “How close is your team?” “Oh, we’re so close. We grew up together. This team’s been together forever. Deep relationship. Deep caring relationships.” “Okay.” And we get in the room, and I ask the question, “Does my team have my back? Do I care about my team and what’s going on in their lives? Does my team know what I’m struggling with? And are they there to help lift me up?” “Oh, well. that’s kind of a high standard. That’s low twos, you know?”

And then I do a practice where everybody goes around and says, “What is my energy these days and what’s bringing it down?” And, all of a sudden, people come over to me, like, “Holy sh**, I’ve known this person for 10 years. I had no idea that their mother was suffering Alzheimer’s,” “I had no idea that they had an autistic son,” “I had no idea that they were struggling so much with this business leader that they serve in the business.” It’s amazing. We just don’t curate purposeful relationships.

Now when you have that, then you have a team that has more empathy, has more care, has more commitment. Yeah. So, I think of all of the interviews I’ve done, I think we’ve gotten through, like, more shifts here. Usually, I get to like three shifts. We got through, moving from candor, moving from conflict avoidance to candor, redefining the team itself as not an org chart but a network.

We moved from serendipitous relationships to purposeful relationships. We sort of threw in there the idea of moving from individual, “I got my own back. I’ve got to take care of my own resilience,” to team resilience. We talked about agile. We talked about celebration. We talked a little bit about peer-to-peer growth.

That’s one that I love where teams actually give each other critical feedback on a quarterly basis using an open 360 where everybody goes around, and says, “Pete, what I most respect and admire about you in the last quarter is X. Thank you. And, Pete, because I care about your success going forward, I might suggest,” everybody goes around. And they go, “Keith, same thing.”

That kind of peer-to-peer coaching, I call it an open 360 practice, really starts to prime the pump for a team to become each other’s coaches. Anyway, you’ve been abundant in navigating around the book, so this has been a fun interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
”You don’t think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
I do a morning ritual, my fiancé and I, and I’ve just gotten engaged and we’re going to be married in June.

Pete Mockaitis
Congratulations.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you. The alarm goes off, we push snooze, and over the next 10 minutes, we both lie and meditate on what are three things we’re grateful for at that moment and three things we’re looking forward to in that day. And the three things that we’re grateful for, we’re never allowed to repeat the same one twice, ever in our lives. So, it’s a beautiful way to realize what kind of abundance we have around us.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Look, this is more of a gift. If you’re excited about using the book, you can go to KeithFerrazzi.com, and we provided a video course around the book that you can certainly buy but you don’t have to. If you’re buying the book for your team, you get the video course for free. So, I think the challenge is just try some of these practices on. They’re so easy.

Can’t afford the book? Just go online and type “Keith Ferrazzi TeamShip.” I’ve published a lot of things on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, etc., so just try some of the practices. You’ll learn how game-changing they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you, Keith. This is fun.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thanks, Pete. I appreciate your time.

Feb 03
0

1029: How to Tell Stories that Inspire and Influence with Anjali Sharma

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Anjali Sharma reveals why some stories fail to influence or inspire—and shares her top tips for creating stories that do.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why “amazing” storytelling isn’t the end goal 
  2. The critical question that generates more effective stories 
  3. Why to think like a journalist–not a novelist 

About Anjali 

Anjali Sharma is the Managing Director of Narrative: The Business of Stories. Anjali works with private and government organisations to determine what their individual and unique business challenges are, and by incorporating Story Skills, she crafts individualised solutions to help solve those challenges. 

Anjali has helped companies to increase Staff Engagement and Performance, increase Client Satisfaction and Sales, define Company Values and effectively Position Brands by embedding Story Skills into their organisations. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Anjali Sharma Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anjali, welcome!

Anjali Sharma
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat storytelling. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us humans and story over the course of the last 20 years.

Anjali Sharma
I think the most wonderful thing about storytelling is that, no matter where you go, there is room for storytelling everywhere, whether you go into someone’s life, whether you go into someone’s work, whether you go into relationships with your family, but the most effective storytelling is the one that actually really deep dives into a particular domain.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is that what I used to think, roughly about 12 years ago about storytelling is, storytelling is everything, it’s everywhere, and that was the beauty of it, but it was also the disadvantage of it, because you could start telling stories to people who work in corporations, which is where I largely kind of played the work that I do, and they would be like, “Yeah, it’s a great story, but how does it matter to me?”

So, I think the hyper-target-ness of the story is what makes it resonate, where people listen to it, and go, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly what happens to me.” That thing that people say can only come when you really target the story to the audience that you’re telling the story to. Stories are great, but the best storytellers know how to flex their narrative according to who they’re telling the story to. So, I think my biggest discovery was that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us a really quick example of what’s a generic story that’s not really going to “wow” someone versus what is that same story sound like in a micro-targeted way?

Anjali Sharma
Okay. So, I think I’d like to sort of make a little correction to that because, even though the story can go “wow,” we don’t tell just for them to be like, “Wow.” We want people to get up and take an action, and it is not necessary that whatever I will say “wow” to, I will actually act upon. I’ll demonstrate this to you.

So, say I want people to challenge the status quo for better innovation, and I say, “You know, we must challenge the status quo,” and I tell them the story of the founder of Body Shop, Anita Roddick, and Anita Roddick tells this story. She’s no more, but when she was around, she told this story to a magazine interview in which she says that, “When I was all of 12 years old, I remember the day when my father passed away, and my mother, in the house, was cleaning the floor, and there was this bucket of dirty water next to her.”

“And she looked quite sort of anxious and stressed, but a large part of her anxiety and stress was coming from the fact that my parents didn’t get along with the local priest, and she wasn’t sure that my father was going to get a Catholic funeral or not. And a few minutes later, the doorbell rang and my mother opened the door, and the priest was standing there. And the priest looked at my mom and said, ‘You’re very lucky. We’ve decided to give your husband a Catholic funeral.’”

“And my mother picked up the dirty water and splashed it onto the priest. Now when you’re brought up with a mother like that, you would challenge status quo.” Because for her, as a Catholic, it was right to get her father to get that funeral. It wasn’t a favor that the priest was doing.

Now, a lot of people get moved by that story, and they go, “Wow,” and “Amazing.” But as soon as you walk out of that place where I have told you the story, you’re walking out with a colleague of yours, you would say, “It’s a lovely story, but if I did that to my boss, I just, you know, I don’t think I’ll have my job. I’ll lose my job,” right?

So, a lot of the stories get, like, “Amazing,” but they don’t get an action in the right direction. Therefore, you have to choose the story very, very correctly because a job of a corporate professional is to remember that, more important than the re-marketability of the story, that this is an amazing story, is the resonance of the story. Resonance of the story will drive an action. Remarkability will give you claps.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That’s a really handy distinction, and I think it’s possible to go a whole lifetime without making that distinction because the claps feel good, you say, “I’m a master storyteller. People, they cry, they applaud, they tell me I’m amazing.” If you’re a speaker, they keep telling their friends, “And I keep getting booked.” But in terms of, if you’re being after a specific activity or action from your audience, that’s not adequate.

Anjali Sharma
Certainly. So, my success in a corporate world is not determined by the amount of claps and tears I get in a boardroom. It’s determined by how I moved people to take the action in the right direction and how much innovation we get, how we enhance the productivity, how we motivate people to come up with the best possible campaign next. So, I think that’s a very important distinction. You’re absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I guess, specifically that context, in terms of if you’re just looking to make phenomenal content that gets a lot of podcast downloads or even if it’s like a full-blown movie or something, then a wow can be fine. But if we’re after a particular action on the part of the people we’re telling it to, then, yes, that’s one key thing to look out for, is, “Can they receive that? Is it relatable?”

So, lay it on us, how do we go through a process by which we can craft stories that are effective at bringing about the action-taking we’d like from the people we’re telling the stories to?

Anjali Sharma
So, we’ve kind of, over the last 12 years or so, tried to make this approach extremely practical, simply because of the reason that, if I walked into a corporate boardroom and I asked people, or into any workspace and asked people, it’s like, “What is it that is your biggest challenge?” almost everyone will say time, right? 

The really traditional format of story and the creative format of story that actually relies on high character, high emotions, kind of built over time, you write, you go away, you let your creative juices flow. In corporations and workplaces, we don’t have time. So, the way I look at it is like this. Before even you tell a story, I say to people, the audience that you’re talking to, first determine, “Are you influencing them or you are inspiring them?” Those are two very different things. I mean, if I’m going to be speaking to the board or I’m going to be speaking to the senior leadership team. I need to influence them. But if I’m speaking in a town hall and getting 450 staff members to join an AI-upskilling program, then I need to inspire them.

So, the key way to differentiate whether I’m inspiring or influencing is, “Am I asking these people to take an action that affects many people? Or am I asking them to take an action that just affects them?” If it is affecting many people, like, “Let’s adopt that, buy that new technology,” it’s going to affect many people. That’s an influence decision.

But if I’m asking people to go and join this one-week upskilling AI hackathon that we’ve got, then that’s an individual’s decision that I’m going to go and join it, right? It’s a little bit like getting people to be fit, getting people to read more. These are individual decisions. I’m not disrupting an ecosystem. It’s my individual decision. Those are primarily inspirational messages.

So, very simply, “How do I target the story right?” You first think, “Am I influencing? Am I inspiring?” If I’m influencing, I’m asking people to take an action, make a decision around things that sort of influences, has an effect on many people. But if it’s an inspirational message, it’s likely to be an individual who’s going to have to take that action.

Okay, once I’ve determined that, very simply, I go, “If it is inspiration, then I have to give them a nudge to a new identity.” Because what we often do is we give people goals, but I learned this from James Clear in his book, the Atomic Habits, and then I’ve brought that learning into storytelling.

When we talk about goals, for example. Writing a book is a goal. But why do people write a book? Because they want to be called authors. That’s a new identity they want for themselves. Running a marathon is a goal, but being called a marathoner is an identity. People want to be known like that.

So, when you are developing an inspirational message, you have to give nudge to a new identity. If I bring it down to the corporate world, I’ll give you another example. When I bring it down to the corporate world, we worked on a program back in 2016 where we were asked to build a story around a factory that was going to become a smart factory with automation, robotics, etc.

And the whole proposition of that story was productivity, and I was like, “This is not going to work for people on the ground. This is not inspirational for them,” right? So, we built a new identity for them – supervisors of robots. Because somebody’s got to program them, somebody’s got to charge them, somebody’s got to roster them, and “Do you want to be the supervisors of robots?” And that was inspirational for them.

So, that’s how you kind of look at an inspirational message. And then when you come towards the influence style of messaging, I think your hyper-target-ness comes from, really, looking at three areas. Most messages that are influential have a story that anchors on time, which is efficiency. So, can you make a proposition for being more efficient? Or, they come to an image or a reputation, which is, “Can this story help build better image or a reputation?”

And then, lastly, if you’re working for a profit-making company, which most people are, “Am I able to, through this story, save money or make money?” So, I often joke around and say, “What is the TIM you’re angling?” T-I-M, you know, time, image, money. So, if you want influential stories, story that influences, then time, image, money are my anchors. But if I’m building an inspirational story, then a nudge to a new identity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is a fantastic distinction between inspiring or influencing. And I’m reminded of, I think in my early days, I was doing consulting for a strategy consulting firm, Bain, and we would make these slides that were so dense with numbers, numbers, data, charts, all this stuff, and effectively we were influencing corporate executives and boards in terms of, “Take this course of action and you will see tremendous profit.”

Like, that was always, we talked a lot about our story, “What’s our story?” And, basically, that was always the story, like, “Hey, do this thing we say and you’re going to make a lot of money, if you boil it down.” And so, those slides had a whole lot of data, a whole lot of charts to paint a compelling picture that was, “Hey, here’s the proof, here’s the evidence, here’s the argumentation like a debate, that this is, in fact, the optimal pathway relative to your alternatives.”

But then, at the same time, on my downtime, I’d be watching TED Talks, and I think, “Man, their slides look so much cooler and more beautiful and inspiring than what we do.” I felt like we were sort of we spent all the time with these slides, and I thought they don’t feel as awesome as the TED Talker slides, “What’s up?”

And I think this is a really handy way to think about it. It’s like, we are attempting to accomplish completely different objectives. If you trot out 20 fancy data charts to your TED audience, they’re like, “Yeah, okay. That wasn’t very much fun for us. Thanks.” And vice versa, if I just showed a picture of a seed in a hand to a board, it’s like, “All right, I hope you’ve got some data coming because this isn’t going to cut it for long.”

Anjali Sharma
Exactly. Oh, my God, you sort of distilled it beautifully. And I love the fact that I have taken you back to some time in your career because that is exactly what resonance is. I’m reminding you of an experience you have already had. And when that happens, you know that what I’m saying is resonating with you. So, you’re absolutely right, the objectives are very, very different, and that’s where the hyper-target-ness works really well.

I’ll add one little piece of information. There’s always this sort of war between the technicality of what we do and the emotions that are embedded in the way we communicate. And what I have learned is that time, image, and money, although seems like a sort of a very transactional way of influencing. In fact, rooted in it is an emotional thing.

Look at that boardroom and see all those people who are seated there. Their next career move depends on whether they are making that company efficient, whether they’re making that company profitable, which is money, and whether they are protecting the reputation of the organization or not, or they’re building the reputation of the organization or not.

So, I used to think, “Why is it so transactional and so dry and distilled in influence area?” But then when I started looking at the people sitting there, I was like, “No, this is also emotional because their next career step is dependent on those three things. So, their connection comes from that.

Leaning upon the definition of connection from Dr. Brene Brown, the exchange of energy that happens when people feel seen, heard, and valued.

When those people sit in that boardroom and you tell them a story that anchors itself on time, image, and money, they feel seen, heard, and valued, because that is what their job is all day in and out, to make more profit for the company, to enhance the reputation image of the company, and to make sure they’re efficient all the time. An inspiration, a nudge to the identity, new identity, is what’s the connection for the person who’s listening to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonant. And it’s funny, like if you apply the same sort of debater, data-driven argumentation approach to be very compelling about a thing they don’t care about, and I’m not making value judgments either way, but if a board doesn’t care a hoot about climate change or whatever, and you have just fantastic statistics about the carbon emissions of a thing and how this pathway will be so much better, you may have proven that point excellently in terms of that’s a rock-solid, logical approach, but you haven’t hit upon a thing that they’re emotionally invested in, you’re not going to be successful in your attempt to influence.

Anjali Sharma
Hundred, hundred, hundred percent. You know, Pete, you’ve taken me back to 2018, when I went to Hiroshima, Japan for 18 months to make another semiconductor factory have increased level of diversity. So, Japan, obviously had a huge amount of skill shortage, I mean, still does, but that was becoming a huge issue at that time. And this factory was originally owned by Japanese owners, but an American company took over.

And they soon realized that, “If we don’t get more foreigners working here, if we don’t get more women working here, and if we don’t get younger people working in here, so it’s diversity of three different lenses, we’re not going to have any people, and the factory will have to shut down.” So, there was this whole proposition, imagine, that homogeneous culture of Japan, this proposition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and everyone used to just kind of roll their eyes and they were like, “Yeah, whatever.”

And I had this vivid memory of one conversation between two senior leaders that I just happened to hear, who said, “Great, now we can make a compelling case of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we still don’t get what is its connection to the performance?” And I realized, “Oh, my God, like, what they really care about is the performance of the factory,” and then we have to find a way to connect the DEI proposition to the performance of the company.

And when we started to kind of figure how diversity, equity, and inclusion will help the performance of the company, every boardroom eye was curious, eager, willing, because it connected with them, and there was a direct correlation. We just needed to surface that and anchor the story in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I’ve learned that lesson a few times in terms of, “No, this is what you should care about. This is what is right and good and proper.” Like, that really falls flat, it’s like, “Okay, well, now I feel judged and I guess I don’t, so I am bad,” and I’m thinking about another manufacturing situation.

I was once doing a Myers-Briggs training for some executives. I was very excited because, like, we had these executives. There was their big meeting where they had flown in from multiple continents, and I was a part of it, like, “Oh, wow, I feel like I’m big-time now,” kind of early on when I was independent in my career.

And they had this situation, they manufactured like sausage casings. And, apparently, one of their major production facilities was having a real big problem at the moment, where there were sausages exploding left and right, which I thought was sort of a funny thing to imagine, “Oh, another exploding hotdog!” you know.

And so, they were all kind of consumed with this mentally, and I was like, “You know, isn’t that kind of a manufacturing issue. You should just kind of let them handle it. This is, like, your big executive meeting. This seems weird. And I feel inconvenienced because I’ve trucked it out here and I’m ready. I’m fired up and ready to go.”

And I thought it was so brilliant the way their VP of Human Resources reframed it for me, she says, “You know, this stuff here that we’re doing is important, and I really want to make sure that the whole team has all of their attention and focus on this, as opposed to this manufacturing issue. So, it’d be great if you could come back in two hours and then we’ll have it as sorted as it can be, and we’ll be able to give you all of our attention.”

I thought, “This woman is a master, because I’m annoyed, I’m frustrated, I don’t like rescheduling the thing. I’m fired up, energized, perfectly caffeinated, raring to go.” But then she turned it around to the thing that I cared about was having a productive, engaged, transformational session, and, “How, in fact, if you just do this thing that we want, then you’ll get that.”

And I heard a quote, which I love, which it said, “Diplomacy is the art of letting other people have it your way.” And I was like, “Okay, yeah, she just did that to me.” And we had a great session and the sausage factory, I guess, got sorted out, all is well. And so, you nailed it. Like, if you are making a super airtight logical case about a thing they don’t care about, you’re not going to get very far.

Anjali Sharma
And the tricky part is to really figure out “What do they care about?” Because, in your head you can think, “Oh, of course, everybody should care about DEI and climate change, and it affects our planet.” Yeah, sure, everybody should, but tomorrow morning when they get a call from their boss, nobody’s going to ask them about the diversity level. They’re going to ask about, “Where are we sitting in terms of performance?”

Like, even with the whole ESG bit, I have to be very honest. Every time I work on a narrative, and we come to the S part, which is the social impact part, the reason why the teams are really motivated is when they recognize that they’re not going to get investors if they don’t work on this. So, in some ways, it is an institutionalized forced change. So, how good it is that we have to think about diversity under social impact of ESG, the S part, because now, if we don’t have a good ESG report, we’re not going to get investors?

So, it’s like, there’s this term I heard many years ago, intrusion of inclusion, like you really make sure that it happens by systematically creating things that are institutionalized. You cannot escape those. So, I think more and more that I do this work, the more and more I realize that, yes, we all want to be good, but what we’re worried about is just getting through today. And if we want to get through today, in the way the ecosystem is built, then we have to really find the right framing and the right positioning and the right target of the story, or else it would fall on deaf ears.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so understood. And so, we have a huge distinction about “Are we trying to inspire or influence?” And we got to really get after a thing that they care about. So, can you walk us through sort of step-by-step or what are the key actions or processes we go through in order to do just that?

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, so I’ll pick it up from before. So, you sort of think influence, inspire, you think, “Okay, I need a story that I can anchor on time, image, money, or I need a story that can actually invite them to being, have a nudge to the new identity.” Now, here’s one thing I want people to remember is that, for a very long time, what we have understood for storytelling to be is either a marketer’s take, or a very big sort of stage sort of style of storytelling.

But when you are standing in the boardroom, the kind of storytelling that works in corporation has to have a little bit of a journalistic take into it. So, my invitation to all people who work within, who are actually trying to use stories in day-to-day work is to have a slightly journalistic take of storytelling. Now let me elaborate this for you, and then I will demonstrate for you.

So, what do journalists do? They go into the ground, they find the stories, and then they bring them out, and then they tell you, and then they make a point, or whatever is happening, they bring that out into the open, they bring it out to the surface. Now, a lot of people will try to find stories on the internet, from TED Talks, and try to tell all these really big types of stories which will never work.

Journalistic storytelling requires for you to actually get your hands dirty, go in, into the grounds, the coalface, and actually find stories that can actually help you make a point that you want to make, or sometimes they even change the point you want to make. You think that’s the point you want to make, and when you start having those conversations with people on the ground, you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was all along wrong.”

So, here’s an example of a journalistic story. So, once I’ve said that my audience are inspirational, so I will say, “You are the workers in this factory that are going to become a smart factory. I invite you to become the supervisors of robots.” Now at this stage, they’ll be like, “Hmm,” so it’s relevant for them, but it’s not yet resonant for them. It’s, “Okay, here’s something for me. You’ve opened with that positioning. I like it, but tell me more.” It’s not going to stop at that. A nudge to the new identity is the beginning of it.

Then, when you tell the story, here’s the story I found from the ground, and I built it for a CEO president, and he told: “Now, what do I mean by being supervisors of robots? Now, many of you in the audience today actually work within the factory, helping with taking things from one end of the factory to the other end of the factory.”

“Let’s take Maria, for example. Maria has been with our company for about eight years now, and Maria is in the audience. And when she joined us eight years ago, her job was to take a trolley, put in the semiconductor chips, and move them from one area to the other area.”

“Now, this may sound simple, but we all know this is a highly sensitive product, and it has to be done very, very carefully. So, it takes time and she moves the products carefully to the other side and downloads them for whatever other activity that needs to be done with them before they’re ready.”

“Now when she joined us eight years ago, she would on an average do eight rounds in an eight-hour shift. She’d go from here to there, here to there about eight rounds or so. Now, today, it’s the same Maria, it’s the same factory, but she’s having to do many more ups and downs, close to 24 ups and downs in a day. That’s three times more. Why is that? Because the demand for semiconductor chips has increased.”

“Semiconductor chips are everywhere. In our passports, there’s a semiconductor chip. When there is a finger scan somewhere, there’s a semiconductor chip everywhere. They’re everywhere. So, the demand increases, our workload increases.”

“Our workload increases, we are not allowed to have a bigger factory, we are not allowed to hire more people. Within the same factory size, within the same number of people, Maria is now being asked to do a lot more. And this trend of more and more and more and more will not stop. So, what are we going to do? What we are going to do is we are going to tell Maria to stop doing this work of picking up products from one end and moving them to the other end.”

“Instead, we’re going to get an AGV vehicle, which is like a robot, to do that, and Maria’s job is going to be the supervisor of that vehicle and make sure that it is rostered, it’s charged, it does the work that it does.” Now, this is a journalistic style of storytelling, because I’ve gone and found it on the ground, and when people are listening to the story, they’re going, “Yeah, exactly. That happens to me all the time. I have to move things so many more number of times. Like, I’m a human. How much more can I do?”

It reminds them of their own experience, so the resonance starts to happen here. The positioning and the anchoring of supervisor of robots brings relevance. It does not bring resonance. It’s when the combination of relevance and resonance happens, influence takes place. So, what is journalistic about it? Journalistic is that I didn’t get that story by just sitting in the boardroom and having a conversation. I got the story because I went on the ground, I chatted to people, “Talk to me about your day-to-day work.”

I can’t even tell these people, “Tell me a story,” because if you ask people, “Tell me a story,” then people think that I’m asking them to be Clint Eastwood. So, you have to have a very specific style of getting moments out of them and then be able to sense-make and put them into a structured way and give people who work in these organizations, who need to inspire or influence people, a language which will move people into the right direction.

Now, this is not a story which will make people go, “Wow, what a story!” What this would definitely do, it’ll remind many of those people who are sitting in the audience going, “That’s exactly what happens to me. That is so true.” That is so true doesn’t mean it’s factual. What it means is, “It resonates with me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I like that journalistic frame, because that helps a lot with regard to, we’re not trying to blow minds, necessarily, by making like a James Cameron epic film situation, so it’s not the Hollywood style, nor is it are we trying to be sort of the great American novel style but we’re being journalistic. And just the same way that we have a fascinating, riveting, impactful sort of news article or documentary, that’s kind of what we’re going for here with regard to our actions, our discovery, our presentation.

And we can feel great about the success if they are nudged toward that identity, as opposed to they are telling everybody they have to check out your YouTube channel.

So that’s a great lens, the journalistic lens. Tell us, do you have any top do’s or don’ts in terms of executing this in practice?

Anjali Sharma
I think the first thing is that, whenever you stand in front of your audience and you start speaking, you have to have earned the right to be there. This is not, “I’ll get GPT to come up with something for me.” I mean, of course, you can take GPT’s help to refine it, but the moment I start speaking about Maria’s story, straight away, the audience know that I have done the due diligence of going to them, at the coalface, chatting to people, and finding out what’s going on.

So, I always say to people that, “Don’t sit in the boardroom and just don’t chat there. Don’t think you know what it is. Get down, and talk to people and figure out.” I think that’s the first thing.

The second thing I would say to you is that please relieve yourself from the pressure of trying to come across as an amazing storyteller, because people are not interested. In fact, if you get told that you’re an amazing storyteller, then that’s the wrong outcome of your communication. What you have to be able to hear from people is, “You made a very relevant point. I’m going to do what you said. I think that makes a lot of sense.”

Moving people in the right direction to take an action is a better judge of how effective you were versus the claps that you get and versus how you get. If you get complimented on your being an amazing storyteller, that means the focus was you and your flamboyancy, not the point you made. So, if someone says to you, “What an amazing storyteller you were,” like, “Thank you. What did you get out of that? Like, do you think you’re going to take the action I was asking for?” Figure that out. So don’t feel that pressure.

And I think the third thing I would say to you is. When looking for a story, yes, you have to be journalistic, but also remember the kind of story that works in a corporate space is a story that happens all the time. In other words, a high-frequency story, not a low-frequency story. So, a pilot lands a plane in the Hudson River has happened. But if I told that story in a corporate boardroom, then people would be like, “That’s great. Never going to happen to me.”

But if I told a story about us not using a tool that we have to update our learning and development plan, and then not getting the promotion that we wanted because, on the dashboard, it didn’t seem like you were updating that so people didn’t know you’ve done all these things, all these courses and workshops etc., then a lot of people will go, “Oh, my God, that happens to me all the time.” So, high-frequency.

The founder of Google said this, “If you can find a problem that people face multiple times a day, you have a billion-dollar business.” Now when you take that saying and put it into the world of storytelling, if you can find a story, the problem that you talk about in that story, people experience many times, you  have a story that will resonate a lot.

So, resonance is more important than remarkability of a story. So, don’t pressurize yourself at trying to find a story that is amazing because, most likely, that will get you claps but will not get you the action. So, look for a story that happens all the time. So, I think those three are probably practical ones to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really doing the trick. And you’ve finally put to words why I get a little bit skeptical and I don’t tend to dig presentations or stories that lean a lot on legends of business, like, “Here’s what they do at Amazon and at Disney and Netflix. And Steve Jobs said and did this.” It’s like, “Yeah, okay. Sure, these people are genius, high performers, and they did a cool thing, and maybe there are some things we can learn from that. But it doesn’t resonate with me much,” and I think it’s for these exact reasons.

One, they haven’t journalistically done the work to see, “What are we actually struggling with here?” And secondly, they’re low frequency matters, like, “Yes, introducing the iPhone was really cool. That was a historic technological moment, and that happened, and now it doesn’t happen that often.”

Anjali Sharma
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think it’s just, you know, resonance only happens with things that happen all the time, because those are our daily experiences, things that kind of resonate with us. Yeah, I mean, like, we love Steve Jobs, and we love his ability to orate, but, you know, it’s available, but it’s not accessible. His style is available for us to view, but it’s not accessible for us, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally, “Just be like Steve Jobs, guys. That’s all it takes. Come on!”

Anjali Sharma
“What’s wrong with you?” Yeah, so that’s the hyper-target-ness. So, everything we’ve spoken about is about that really, that hyper-target-ness of a story, really looking at it from that lens of critically thinking it through and really trying to understand that it’s so easy to become a victim to this big style storytelling, “When I was born or when I started my career, oh, my gosh, you know, it’s like…” nobody really cares about that. Only your mom is really interested in listening to what happened to you, but we don’t really care about that.

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

Anjali Sharma
I can never say the full thing because it’s really long, but I’ll tell you which one it is, and you’ll be able to find it very easily. I think there’s this quote, where it sort of says, “When you lose the grip, you slip into a masterpiece,” which I really, really like. But the reason why I love that quote so much is because, after working in this space for more than a decade, my style in the beginning of working was very systematic, it was very structured, and it was very effort-filled. And then came a point somewhere, three, four years ago, where that system, that structure was like that intentional approach was so embedded in me that if I sort of knew the direction.

I could kind of maneuver within that, but that’s the only part. To become effortless, you have to put in the effort first. And telling someone who’s just, like, a couple of years into a certain domain, a specific domain, to just lose that grip is not the right thing.

But I think there comes a point where you start experiencing the magic of all that is in your subconscious, all that is embedded. So, I think that’s one of my favorite quotes, to put in so much effort into what you do, that it becomes so effortless. 

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

Anjali Sharma
So, if you are interested in storytelling, learning how to be better at it in a corporate space, the thing that helped me gain mastery in that, more than reading, writing was actually the fact that a system, a system for success that actually forced me to do the necessary work in this space.

If you want to gain mastery, then make a decision on what are you going to not just do, which is within you, but how are you going to put yourself out in the world in that domain. When you do that, you actually start becoming really, really good at it, whether it’s a video, whether it’s a blog every week, whether it’s a little thing you’ll come up with. If mastery in this domain is your aspiration, then a promise to the world that I will show up in this manner every week is what you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Anjali, this is wonderful. I wish you many beautiful stories.

Anjali Sharma
Thank you for having me and having this wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed how quickly you grasped everything I talked about, distilled it, and repeated it back to me, which was really nice.