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Nov 21
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1013: Harnessing the Six Motives that Shape Culture with Neel Doshi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Neel Doshi reveals how to build and sustain high performing cultures through total motivation.

You’ll Learn

  1. The six motives at the root of culture
  2. How to use metrics the wrong and right way
  3. The questions that kill motivation

About Neel 

Neel is the co-founder of Vega Factor and co-author of bestselling book, Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation. Previously, Neel was a Partner at McKinsey & Company, CTO and founding member of an award-winning tech startup, and employee of several mega-institutions. He studied engineering at MIT and received his MBA from Wharton. In his spare time, he’s an avid yet mediocre woodworker and photographer.

Resources Mentioned

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Neel Doshi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Neel, welcome.

Neel Doshi
Pete, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me too. I’m excited to talk culture. Could you kick us off with something strikingly surprising and counterintuitive that you know and have learned about culture that most don’t?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, absolutely. The core of our research has landed on this realization that, fundamentally, culture is about motivation. And to unpack motivation, you have to understand what motivates people. To unpack that question, what you realize is that actually fundamentally only six motives, reasons why people do things. Motives are the root of motivation.

The first is play, you do something because you enjoy doing it, it’s fun. The second is purpose, you do something because you believe your contribution matters, what you’re doing matters. The next is potential, you think it’s building up to something that’s important. The next is emotional pressure. Think about when maybe you guilted someone into doing something. Well, that’s an example of emotional pressure. You’re acting on someone’s identity to get them to take an action. Economic pressure, you’re trying to chase reward or avoid punishment. Or inertia, you’re just now going through motions.

What we’ve realized, and we can prove this all day long, is that when a culture maximizes play, purpose, and potential, you get outlier performance. When it does the opposite, maximizes emotional pressure, economic pressure, and inertia, you get fairly lousy performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wow, check it out, there’s so much there right off the bat. Thank you, Neel.

Neel Doshi
There’s a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, there’s so much to get into because it feels right. Because, naturally, when I get a set of categories, I want to try to find the counterexample, like, “Oh, what about this?” but it seems like that’s holding together pretty well. Anytime that I do something that’s kind of what’s behind it, and I’m having a hard time thinking of anything I do that doesn’t fit in there. So, very nice.

Neel Doshi
You know what’s funny, Pete, like you say that, it’s hard to find the counterexample, but at the same time you look at the average company and they don’t work this way, which I think is a very interesting paradox because when you hear this research, and you say this really resonates. It kind of has to be true. Like, it follows my intuition, it follows my life experience, but then why do we look at our teams, our companies, ourselves, and not manage this?

I’ll give you two examples which I think you’ll find interesting because I think your pursuit of the counterexample is fascinating. We spent many years helping to transform the performance model of one of the world’s biggest hedge funds. And I remember in the opening conversations, I was talking to the founder of this hedge fund who is wildly successful, he’s made more money than 99.99999% of humanity, and the rumor had it that was when he was on vacation, he’d bring an IT team with him to set up his nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal in the hotel room next to his.

And he says, “Neel, okay, I respect your work. I loved your book, but play, really? Like, do you really think that’s a driver of performance?” And so, I asked him, “Why do you bring an IT team on vacation and set up a nine-screen Bloomberg Terminal when you’ve already made more money than humanity?” And he said, “Well, it’s because it’s fun.”

And I said, “Okay, that is what made you the most successful person in your industry, and you don’t think that applies to any other human being?” And that really clicked for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I’ll tell you, trading can be crazy fun, too fun at times, so I’m resonating there. So, play, yes, it’s just fun. And when you say corporations aren’t doing this, you mean they’re just sort of ignoring it entirely, or they’re only thinking, “Hey, you know, it’s a job, there’s a compensation, you need money, therefore, we’re fine here,” and that’s about the extent of it?

Neel Doshi
Yeah, I think that’s more or less it. Like, a common question and answer I often see and have, so I talk to an executive or CEO, and usually it’s because they read our book, they asked me to come talk to their team or their company, and I’ll say at this point, “Do you doubt that motivation drives performance because that feels pretty intuitive, I would imagine for most people, that we kind of know that the more motivated we are, the better we perform?”

So, that’s an easy one, like, “Yes, of course, I know that motivation drives performance.” “All right, in your company, do you manage motivation?” “No, not really.” Okay, so that’s thing number one. Thing number two is exactly what you just said, Pete, like when you think about how you manage motivation what are you doing?

And, generally, what companies have put into place are systems that create emotional pressure and economic pressure and often inertia. So, they’re not just not managing it, they’re managing it in the opposite direction of how it should be managed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, could you perhaps bring this to life a little bit in terms of a tale with a culture transformed? What were things like? What did you go do? And then what happened?

Neel Doshi
One that played out in the news not long ago was the issues that was manifesting in the retail banking industry, specifically, with Wells Fargo’s fake account scandal. Like, if you remember, this is now circa, like, 2014 or something like that, Wells Fargo hit the news for ultimately creating on the order of three to four million fake accounts. Now, that’s amazing, by the way. Just think about the volume of that, like three and a half million fake accounts.

Pete Mockaitis
There must be some motivation behind that effort.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, exactly. You got to want that. Now, the thing about this is when that situation was unpacked, the fundamental reason why was because they were using pressure to drive performance, emotional and economic. And so, as a result, you get phenomenon like check-the-box behavior and cheating.

So, a different financial institution approached us, and I’ll never forget what the CEO said, literally, these are the words he said. He said, “We know in our industry how to create mercenaries. We have no idea how to create missionaries. So, what do we do?”

And so, I said, “It’ll be easier for me to show than tell.” And he said, “We’ve got lots and lots and lots of branches. Why don’t you take a dozen of them, do whatever you want? Our analysts will measure them champion-challenger style so that we can see, did what you do actually have performance.” So, here’s what we did. First, we eliminated the pressures.

When you looked at these institutions, these branches before, they used to have this weekly high-pressure call. Like, the goal of a call was to make you feel bad about your performance. I mean, if you really observed the call as an anthropologist might, you have to conclude that is the purpose of this, to create pressure. Their systems were about pressure. The way they thought about compensation, the degree to which your comp was commission-based, for example, the degree to which your promotion was based on metrics, all of this was essentially a system designed to drive performance through pressure.

The first thing we did is we got rid of all that. We got rid of pay-for-performance, we got rid of the high-pressure conversations, and what we replaced it with was a system that was really about creating play and purpose. Now, what does that look like? Think about the times where you felt real play in your work. Like, my guess is what it felt like was you were chewing on a new problem, it was really interesting, it was filling you with curiosity, maybe you had the opportunity to learn something or experiment in some way.

These are all precursors for growth. Fundamentally, if you think about the opposite of play, it’s boredom, and so it really tells you that play is highly attached to novelty. So, what we did was we put into place a set of practices, rhythms, measurement systems that were about play and purpose. So, for example, in our future state branches, every week, every branch would lay out the problems they want to solve. These aren’t goals. These aren’t financial metrics. These are just problems they want to solve.

And the ask of every person is to come up with ideas, and as a team decide which ideas we’re going to experiment with. They just ran that rhythm every week. It was fun. Like, when you start to understand the problems that we’re trying to solve, “Well, this is really interesting, and I can come up with my own ideas? That’s really interesting. And as a team, we’re going to help improve and choose ideas to experiment? Well, that’s interesting. And I’m going to actually run experiments? Well, that’s really interesting, too.”

That is one of about five different tactics we put into place, probably the most powerful one, and immediately, you saw a bunch of changes happen. You saw everyone start to care about performance without all the pressure, because they start to view it as a game. You start to see everyone create more ideas. As they created more ideas, their sense of ownership increased. As their sense of ownership increased, that casts a halo on all of their work. All of their performance increases.

We’re measuring motivation as we go, so their motivation is increasing. Then ultimately, they were measuring performance, and what they found was productivity, customer satisfaction, and sales all increased, and that was after eliminating the pressure systems.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Neel, that’s so cool and beautiful, that notion of play, like, “Yes, that stuff is fun.” And that’s what they say, I’m thinking about in Silicon Valley, in terms of, “Well, if you want to attract the top talent, the most brilliant software engineers, the top thing is not the foosball table or the compensation. It’s like, ‘Are you giving them interesting problems they get to solve?’”

It’s, like, they’re playing. They’re using their brain like, “Huh, how would we do that?” And then they get to try some things, experiment, see if they worked, vibe with other talented, sharp people who push them so they’re learning and growing and trying new things. And then in the course of doing it, they actually care about the metrics.

And I’m also thinking about a time, I coordinated a couple youth leadership conferences, and I was really big—because I used to work at Bain—so I was big on the Net Promoter Score, like, “What is the satisfaction of our students who are attending these?” And so, I had tracked it from the previous year, and everyone was a volunteer, so with my team, my staff. I didn’t have any economic anything over them.

But we were just thinking, “Hey, how can we make just a really amazing experience? Last year was great, but can we make an experience that’s even better?” And so, we had all these ideas, “Well, we could try this. We could try that. Well, maybe let’s watch out for how we do this. Get some more outside time, mix things up, make this interact.” So, we had all these ideas, and we were playing with them.

And then I thought nobody else really would care about this Net Promoter Score metric all that much, because, like, hey, I work in Bain, and I’m a numbers dork. And so, I remember I told my buddy, Graham, a fellow volunteer, he’s like, “Our Net Promoter Score is higher than last year by like 20 points!” And he said, “YES!”

He was so jazzed! Like, other people were in the room, like, startled. Like, he has just told we won the lottery or something, and he gave me a huge bear hug, and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect you to care about my dorky little number nearly this much, but you did because we were playing, and then as you’re as you’re playing, you’re invested and you care about the performance and the winning, even though I didn’t say, ‘Now, Graham, if we don’t boost our Net Promoter Score then this was a failure.’”

Neel Doshi
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, “I’m taking you out for drinks.” There was none of that.

Neel Doshi
Exactly. You know, Pete, what you’re raising is a really important misconception I often find in our research. Well, people ask me, “So, Neel, are you saying metrics are bad?” “The scoreboard can make a game more fun. You often need the scoreboard to make the game fun. The problem is not the metrics. The problem is you weaponized the metric. You made people feel bad about it. You used it to create pressure.”

If you set up a game like you just did, you set up a game, you had a scoreboard for the game, you didn’t put any pressure against the scoreboard, but you encouraged experimentation, you encouraged thinking, problem solving, well, now the whole thing is fun, and you feel a great deal of ownership for that.

And so, in a lot of these systems, what you find is companies are using their measurements the wrong way. The irony is, like, you see goal systems in companies, and you ask, “Well, what is the purpose of a goal system? Like, why are you doing this?” And, generally, if you’re really thinking about it, it’s two things, “I’m using it to create focus and alignment, and motivation.”

But it’s the second one that often gets completely forgotten, and so, you see companies with goal systems that are actually creating a great deal of pressure, negative motivation. And what you described is a perfect example of the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to back it up all the way to almost your first sentence, when you say, “Culture is about motivation.” That seems to really cut to the core of things, because so often with culture, we say, “Oh, is it more of a top-down or is it a bottom-up or distributed?” So, we think of all these sorts of domains by which we might categorize or put into types different sorts of culture, “Is it formal or is it informal? And then how does that show up with the dress code or the artifacts that are put…?”

So, usually, in these sorts of almost generic textbook conversations about culture, that’s sort of what we go to. But I like how you’re getting after culture is about motivation in terms of, fundamentally, “Do all of these things make folks more into doing their finest work, and making things happen? Or, are they more so stifling?” And I guess there’s a little bit to be said for different personalities and individual preferences there, but it seems like you’re really pointing out some universals that cut across whatever my personal proclivities are.

Neel Doshi
Yeah, a hundred percent. When I started this research, which is almost three decades ago now, if you ask somebody, “What’s the recipe for building a high-performing culture?” you’d have been given the answer, “Just copy GE.” And that didn’t work for them, as you see playing out these days. That “Copy this other company” is, essentially, we don’t understand the root cause, so we’re kind of guessing. We’re guessing at patterns that may or may not fit.

The root cause is, fundamentally, motivation. So, all of these attributes of an organization’s operating system, like centralized, decentralized, remote work, not remote work, like all these attributes are the symptoms at the edges. The key is we can make a lot of those attributes work. You can make an entirely remote-based company super highly motivating. You can make an in-person one super highly motivating. You can make one that leans more towards centralized, more towards decentralized.

You can get these dynamics right, but what you have to understand is that the fundamental thing you have to solve for is “Is everyone motivated the right way?” And then you realize there’s actually a lot of flexibility in how you build that machine.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve heard a bit about play. Can you unpack purpose and potential for us?

Neel Doshi
Purpose is probably, I’d argue, maybe one of the most misunderstood. So, play, the misunderstanding is ping pong tables, like, “I want to build a high-play culture, so I give ping pong tables.” No, that’s not it. It has to come from the work. Purpose has a similar problem, where a lot of people believe that purpose comes from our mission statement, like, “I have this big grandiose mission statement, we put it on the walls, we put it on the mouse pads, we put it on the screensavers, and that somehow imbues purpose.” Not really.

Like, the better way of thinking about purpose is its opposite. Like, if the opposite of play is boredom, the best opposite of purpose that I’ve found is fungibility. You feel fungible. You feel like a cog in the machine. Because even if the machine is incredibly purposeful, if you are a cog in that machine, you will not feel the purpose motive, and that’s a very important distinction that people don’t quite understand. I’ll give you an example of this.

I was working once in a performance transformation of a really cool, fast-growing tech company, And I was sitting down with the CTO, and I said to the CTO, “I’ve noticed that you’ve set up a model with the engineers where they are quite fungible.” And he says, “I did that intentionally.” He says, “You know, Silicon Valley, low retention rates, lots of attrition, I need to make sure I don’t have business continuity problems so I’ve made them all fungible.”

And I said, “By making them all fungible, you’ve increased your attrition rate because they don’t have that purpose motive. They don’t feel like they matter. They don’t feel like their work matters, their contribution matters. It’s about personal purpose.” And that’s the thing companies really miss on the purpose motive. It’s you feel like your contribution matters every day, day in, day out. If you don’t go to work that day, outcomes that you care about won’t happen.

Another example of that is think about the modern-day call center, where you’re sitting in that call center, you’re plugged into a phone system, and once your one call ends, you hear a beep in your earphone, customer immediately starts talking, and let’s say you have to take a break, you just kind of log out, no big deal. All the calls get routed to someone else.

You are a definitional cog in the machine at that point. You don’t really feel like your contribution matters. If you log out, no big deal, “No big deal. There’s no stakes to my work.” In that world, you don’t feel the purpose motive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m hearing you. It’s interesting because, on the one hand, that really resonates. And on the other hand, there is kind of always a vast population of people who could do what we are doing. So, it’s like an individual person has talents and skills and abilities and is fun and special and unique as a miraculous creation. But also, it’s like, just as the call center employee could be swapped in for another call center employee, so too could the software engineer. So, maybe let’s get a little bit clearer on the stakes. It’s like outcomes they care about will not be advanced if they don’t show up to work.

Neel Doshi
I totally hear you. Like, on some level, aren’t we all replaceable? Yeah, totally. It doesn’t mean that a company has to make you feel that way. Like, let me give you a simple example. Toyota. Toyota does this incredibly well on the automobile assembly line. So, if you think about an automobile assembly line, how could that not be cogs in the machine? Like, you’re standing there, this chassis kind of rolls up in front of you, you maybe bolt a door on, it rolls away. How do you not feel fungible? How do you not feel like a cog in the machine?

What Toyota does, Toyota has a very deep and interesting set of beliefs, which turn out to be highly accurate. Their beliefs stem from the realization that there’s really two types of performance. One type is called tactical, the other is called adaptive. Definitional opposites. Tactical is how well you stick to your plan. Adaptive is how well you don’t stick to your plan. You can think of a tactical as convergence, adaptive is about divergence. Definitional opposites.

So, the Toyota line worker who’s just standing there just mindlessly plugging the bolt in, that’s all the tactical performance side of the job. What Toyota realizes is that there are so many possibilities for improvement on an automobile assembly line, they can’t even really compute it. That every job could be done better, every part could show up broken, every supply chain could have an issue, and what they want is they want their line workers to be as adaptive as possible, and they’ve built that into their system.

So, imagine you’re that guy, you’re bolting the door on that car, and you have an idea. It could be any idea. It could be to improve your performance in any way. You reach up above your station, and there’s this yellow cord hanging from the top called the Andon cord. You pull that cord, your line manager comes up to you and says, “What’s your idea?” You say, “Well, if my tool was shaped a little bit differently, I could do this job better, cheaper, faster, safer.” Your line manager is kind of jotting it down on a clipboard.

In your team are machinists whose SLA, their agreement to you, is to take your idea and hack together something that you can try within 24 hours. They bring it back to you, you try it. If it works better, they scale it up. If it doesn’t work better, no big deal. There’s a bit more nuance to this process. I’m kind of simplifying it a bit. But the gist of it is they are saying to every line worker, “Your ideas matter.” And by doing so, they’ve emphasized the adaptive side of their job, where your unique thoughts are important, your unique ideas are important.

And so, they’ve essentially built a system that emphasizes the part of the job that requires you to think and, actually, de-emphasizes the part of the job that doesn’t. A lot of companies get this completely wrong. Like, the biggest thing I’ve seen as a mistake is they think that Toyota’s system is a suggestion box. So, like, Pete puts an idea in a suggestion box and some group of folks in corporate think about it.

This is not at all what Toyota has done, “It’s Pete’s idea. We’re arming Pete with the tools to experiment. Pete is going to see if his idea worked or not. Pete is going to be the one that learns from it.” That is a, fundamentally, different model than most organizations could even wrap their heads around. And so, not only is that building your sense of play, it’s building your sense of purpose also.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it just sounds sort of fun. I kind of want to hop on a Toyota line right now and see what ideas come to mind.

Neel Doshi
This is what’s remarkable about what they’ve done. They’ve taken a job that most managers would have said is motivationally irredeemable. You just cannot make this job motivating. They’ve taken that job and they’ve pulled those levers as hard as anyone could possibly pull them to great success in terms of both productivity in factories and quality.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you’ve got a turn of a phrase, “the total motivation factor.” Can you define that for us? And this is actually a number that could be calculated.

Neel Doshi
So, if you start with that foundational research that proves that if an organization creates more play, more purpose, more potential, and less emotional pressure, less economic pressure, and less inertia, you’ll get to maximum performance outcomes. Now, it turns out that performance is actually shockingly hard to measure. You can measure the tactical side of performance, like, “How many cars do we make?” It’s hard to measure the adaptive side.

Because how do I measure, “Did you come up with a good idea or a bad idea? Or did you experiment? Did you not experiment? Did you see a problem? Did you not see a problem?” Like, all of the adaptive side of work is actually very, very difficult to measure.

But what we found is motivation is actually not difficult to measure. And what we recommend to most organizations is measure motivation. If you know that it’s a root of performance, measure it, and that measurement essentially measures the degree to which you feel play, purpose, and potential. Those are positive to the number. The degree to which you feel emotional pressure, economic pressure, or inertia, those are negative to the number, and that number is the total motivation factor. Relatively easy to measure, relatively easy to calculate, highly predictive of performance.

And so, much like you found with Net Promoter Score and your example with your volunteers, the act of measuring something as long as you don’t put pressure against it actually signals you value it. Oftentimes, in more organizations, what you measure is the strongest signal of what you value. And so, measure it, you’re signaling you value it, you’re signaling you want people to think and experiment against it. It starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy of improvement at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with the measuring, is it just sort of surveys? Or how is that figure actually generated?

Neel Doshi
There’s a few implements. I’ll describe to you our most cutting-edge implement. Because the challenge is, what we found is the act of measuring something affects the thing that you’re measuring. There is certainly a quantum physics aspect to human measurement.

So, for example, a very simple example, let’s say I had a survey for an organization that had a question that was, “Pete, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you hate your CEO?” Like, obviously, no one’s going to put that, but let’s say I wrote that question. Well, all of a sudden, I’m priming you to think a certain way. The question itself is priming a thought process.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it didn’t even occur to me to hate my CEO. Well, now that you mentioned it, a little bit.”

Neel Doshi
You know what the funny thing is, I’m kind of giving you an absurd example, but I see more subtle versions of that exist in organizations’ measurement systems. In the spirit of trying to measure negativity, they often prime negativity, which I find to be really fascinating. Like, you’re trying to build an organization where people have agency. They’re trying to affect that… agency is fundamentally an attribute of play and purpose. You can’t really have a play and purpose without agency.

So, you’re trying to create these cultures of agency, these cultures of positivity, hope, optimism, and then you have instruments that actually are priming the opposite, like instruments that are saying, “Pete, you have no agency. The only way you can affect change is to anonymously complain to our executive team.” And so, what we find is that the instrument has a way stronger effect than people think on the mindset the questions themselves are creating, which is wild when you kind of think about that.

Now, so our cutting-edge instruments on this, they’re not just about measuring motivation. The instrument itself is about creating it. The act of filling out the instrument creates motivation. So, there’s a few tricks that we have. There’s probably like a hundred tricks that we’ve kind of built into our cutting edge of measurement, but I’ll give you one specific one.

When we measure motivation using our best implements, we won’t say, “Pete, how do you feel about your work?” What we say is, “Pete, think about your next quarter, the quarter ahead of you. And as you think ahead, do you see that work as it’s going to be fun and interesting, or do you see it as boring? Do you see that you will have a lot of personal impact, or do you see that you won’t?” So, play and purpose, and we kind of go through all the motives that way.

But by making this forward-looking, making this about the work you haven’t done yet, the measurement doesn’t become about complaining. It becomes a diagnostic to improve something that hasn’t happened yet. It becomes about anticipation. Very simple example of how our instruments are designed to avoid the problem of fomenting complainers. But that’s simply that. What we do is we say to an organization, “Every single team, every quarter, should do a health check. That health check is not a survey you do on your own. It’s a conversation you do as a team.”

And in that conversation, we suggest “The first 10 minutes, everyone does fill out this questionnaire, this diagnostic. You’re doing that first 10 minutes on your own. You immediately, as a team, get the results, and the results guide you through a conversation as a team to commit to something to change.” Because a lot of times, measurement, what’s the point if it doesn’t lead to action? And on these topics, a lot of teams are ill-equipped to take action. They just don’t know.

They don’t know what degrees of freedom they have. They don’t know what the tools are. And so, what we do is we, essentially, say, “Every quarter, every team, do this health check. First 10 minutes, we’ll do this positively priming diagnostic. The next hour and 20 minutes, we’re going to commit to changes we’re going to make in the next quarter based on it.” And that instrument not just measures, it puts you on the path to improvement more or less automatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, Neel, tell me, are there any other key do’s and don’ts when it comes to motivation and culture? And I’m thinking, specifically, even for individual contributors who are thinking, “Oh, I don’t know. This sounds like some really cool systems I wish were in place in my organization. But what can I do? Or maybe, how might I be able to hack my own work to experience more play and purpose in it?”

Neel Doshi
Start with yourself. That’s the easiest place to start. What we recommend to folks is, first, just start to understand the science of motivation. You can read Primed to Perform, we have a bunch of other articles. There are a lot of ways to kind of get your head around understanding the science of motivation. That alone is an important first step as an individual, because you want to start to ask yourself, “Am I feeling play in my work? Am I feeling purpose?” That’s kind of step number one.

Step number two is there are levers that you can pull on your own. So, for example, a lot of organizations, as we talked about earlier, their mechanism of alignment is usually just a number, like, your goal. It would be the equivalent of, imagine if I’m coaching a basketball team, and I say, “Okay, guys, here’s your goal. Get 100 points. I’ll see you guys after the game.” A lot of companies actually work that way, which makes very little sense when you think about it.

Like, the goal was the easy part. The strategy is the hard part. The problems to solve are the hard part, like, “Why am I, essentially, not coaching any of that?” So, the second step I’d say to an individual is take a step back from the systems of your company. Maybe the systems are creating pressure. Take a step back from them.

Ask yourself, what problems could you solve in the next month or two that you think will be valuable to your customer, to your team. Really start to understand those problems and start to come up with ideas against them. Just get yourself into a mindset of falling in love with the problem you have to solve, even if your company hasn’t made that easy.

The third thing I would say is get your team to learn the science of motivation, because teams have a lot more degrees of freedom than they think. Individuals, typically, have the least amounts of net degrees of freedom in an organization, but teams have way more than most teams exercise. Teams can do a lot to actually affect their rhythms, their habits, how they think about problem-solving, how they think about novelty and creativity. Lots of that is owned locally.

In fact, what a lot of companies don’t realize is, if you think about motivation as a construct for a moment, play is inherently local. Like, if you’re a large organization, like imagine you’re JP Morgan Chase, there’s very little that Jamie Dimon can do to create play in a working team because it’s inherently a local phenomenon. Purpose is also inherently a local phenomenon.

And so, as a result, when you measure motivation out, a majority of that motivation that’s controllable by the organization, about two-thirds of it, is actually controlled at the team level. Yet, most organizations don’t manage that. So, the third thing I’d suggest, even if you’re an individual kind of listening to this or reading our book, get your team to start to learn how to do this. Get your team to start to experiment in ways that they can improve themselves, and you’ll be surprised by how much a team can actually do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And as we start to imagine, “Okay, we want more play and we’re going to find interesting problems and we’re going to just go after them,” are there some particular pointers that make that effective or not so effective?

Neel Doshi
I’d say a couple of things. One, any team can start to get into the rhythm of a health check. You don’t need your company to do that for you. Like, any team could start to go down the path of measuring, having this conversation, coming up with ways to improve. We have loads of tools for this. Like, they’re super easy to start to experiment with. Like if you’re kind of in that path and you want easy first steps, what I’d recommend is go to Factor.ai and do a health check as a team. Simple as that.

The second thing I’d suggest, have a habit in your team where you take whatever goals that have been given to you and you turn it into problem statements. It’s very simple, but like, let’s say you said, “We want to increase Net Promoter Score of our volunteer group. Okay, what are the three problems that we might want to solve in the next quarter that could get us there?”

Just do that. Just keep doing that every single week. Turn your goals into problems to solve. Make that muscle memory. Make that habit. You start to do that, mindset changes really quickly. You start to realize, “These aren’t pressure systems. Like, I actually have a lot of agency and control.” That’s the second thing I’d do. Like, if I’m transforming any organization, those first two steps are usually our first two steps.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Neel Doshi
The thing that I often find organizations asking is, “Is this easy?” because everyone’s under pressure, executives are under pressure, CEOs are under pressure. A lot of their pressure is usually on short-term time horizons. And so, there’s often a temptation to say, “Well, I could just use pressure for the next quarter to get that bump that I need to get, and maybe like we deal with this in a few years.”

The funny thing is, at this point, it is just as easy to motivate a performance lift the right way as it is to motivate a performance lift the wrong way. It is just as easy to do it, and you just have to learn a new technique. And so, the one thing I want to make sure every person, every individual contributor, manager, leader, CEO realizes, you want the short-term lift? You can get it by motivating people the right way. You don’t have to motivate people the wrong way to get it.

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

Neel Doshi
I’ll give you one that we often use in our own work, because people come to us and they often say, “Neel, my engagement levels are low, like the engagement scores are low. How do I grow engagement? What’s the trick? What’s the perk? What’s the next ping pong table?” Simple answer. If you want your people to be engaged in their work, make their work engaging. That’s it, full stop. The other one I find I’m often using in change management with companies is “You can’t wake up somebody who’s pretending to be asleep.” One of the biggest problems I find in a transformation is, often, we’ll work with CEOs who’ll say, “I want the outcome that you’re describing. I want the more adaptive organization. I want the higher motivated organization. That’s great.” Their existing systems typically are the problem, and their existing systems usually create a great deal of pressure for their middle managers.

So, the middle managers are usually under the weight of a lot of pressure, and that problem is that pressure makes you less adaptive, less likely to learn, less likely to experiment, less likely to try new things. And so, the ironic challenge of change into a high-performing organization is your high-pressure organization is the thing that thwarts change. That’s the irony of this whole thing. A lot of organizations will implement systems that will incentivize people to resist change.

And so, when we often work with an organization, what we’ll find is that there’ll be people that will say, “We can’t do this. We shouldn’t do this. Like, this isn’t the time to do this,” like, all sorts of change barriers, sometimes overt, sometimes passive, like passive-aggressive. Now, when you talk to those people individually, they’re not bad people.

Like, I worked with one, for example, where we’re doing this big transformation, and I’m sitting down with this person who started off as being someone that was resistant. And, in this meeting, he sits down and he says, “Neel, first of all, the transformation is going really well. Can I talk about my kids?” I’m like, “Sure, let’s talk about his kids.”

He says, “You know, Neel, before I learned your research and read your book, I was a high-pressure dad. All I would do is exert pressure on my kids.” And he said, “I found that they started avoiding me. They didn’t want to spend time with me. I’d come home from work; I’d see that they would scatter. Their grades weren’t very good. And so, we’re going through this transformation, I’m reading your book, and I thought, ‘I am that. I am that high-pressure dad.’”

So, he says to me, “What I did with my eldest son was, I said to him one day, ‘Hey, if you don’t have to go to school, what would you want to do?’ And I really listened, and he said, my son surprised me, he said, ‘I want to go to school. And here’s why, and here’s what I want to learn, and here’s what I want to get.’”

So, his strategy as a father shifted entirely from pressure on grades, for example, to, “I’m going to help you do the thing you want to do. I’m going to coach you, I’m going to mentor you, I’m going to support you on the things you want to do.” He said, “I started to do that. My kids stopped avoiding me. Their grades in every way went up. And, all of a sudden, my relationship has completely changed. I just want to thank you for that in this conversation.”

Now, my point in the story is the people that I often run into in organizations that are resisting change are not bad people. They’re byproducts of the system that the company has built around them. And so, the challenge is the system is causing people to pretend to be asleep.

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

Neel Doshi
I’ll tell you one that I really adore. Researchers wanted to understand the impact of motivation in the wild, like a natural experiment. Like, is there something that happens in real life that they can actually see and measure?

So, what they found was an interesting case example with sugarcane farmers. So, sugarcane farmers, before their harvest, you can imagine that many of these folks are operating hand-to-mouth, and before their harvest, they have to put out a lot of cash because they’re not actually earning from it. So, before their harvest, most take out loans, most are hawking personal goods to fund their operation, feeling a great deal of pressure. Like, if the harvest goes bad, it’s a real problem for them, and after the harvest, loans are being paid back, their pressure is decreased.

So, the experiment they did was they took these sugarcane farmers, and pre-harvest and post-harvest, they put them through, essentially, a set of intelligence tests, like various forms of measuring cognitive aptitude, flexibility, etc. What they found was that the difference between intelligence for the same people, pre- and post-harvest, was about the difference between going from a 90th percentile on IQ to like a 30th percentile. Same person, just driven by pressure.

What you’re seeing there, by the way, is the vicious cycle of poverty. You’re under a great deal of pressure, economic pressure, like you’re having struggles to make ends meet, for example. Your economic pressure increases, your adaptability decreases. Therefore, your work performance decreases. Therefore, you perform worse, and it’s harder to get a job, and so you end up with a vicious cycle. This experiment clearly showed that, and not even in a laboratory setting, in like a real-life setting, which is one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And a favorite book?

Neel Doshi
Maybe rather than favorite, I’ll tell you what I’m reading that’s latest. I’m reading a book right now called Pattern Breakers. It’s by a set of seed-stage VCs in Silicon Valley, and they’re laying out the pattern of what they see in ideas that typically result in breakthrough growth. It’s a really good read, especially if you’re an organization that needs to build a culture of adaptive innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Neel Doshi
My favorite habit right now is bedtime with my kids. So, one of the things I’m doing these days, which I think is really fun, is I’ll have my kids come up with a bedtime story, and I’ll ask ChatGPT to make it like a rhyming epic. And so, the kids will write a little story, and it’ll be silly. My youngest is about four and a half, so her last story was about how she and her brother went to the beach, they got their foot stung.

They went to a doctor, they went back to the beach, and there were aliens there, and the aliens were messing up the beach, and they had to fix that problem. That was the story that she wanted to tell. So, I just plugged that into Chat GPT, got this long, rhyming epic of the story of “Sam and Cam in the Beach.” So, this has been my bedtime routine for the past few months. It’s just been a lot of fun.

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

Neel Doshi
Go to Factor.ai, you’ll see a lot of things there. You’ll see tools to measure your motivation to drive problem-solving your team, to actually just fully manage your teams. You’ll see our research. We publish new research, usually, every other week. So, you’ll see the latest thinking on things like remote work, or burnout, things that are affecting the workplace today, but go to Factor.ai and you’ll find all of that.

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

Pete Mockaitis
My final challenge is, at this stage of the game, you can find a job that motivates you the right way, or you can turn yours into motivates you the right way. Like, when I first entered the workforce, the reason why I studied this was I was so demotivated in my first job, I couldn’t even tell you why I was. I couldn’t even explain to you the reason that I was feeling demotivated, and I didn’t have the tools to fix that. I didn’t have the tools to understand that.

Thirty years later, we have the tools to understand it. We have the tools to fix it. So, my ask of everyone is if you’re feeling like you’re in a state of demotivation, don’t linger in that. Like, these are now solvable problems. Take a step. Learn more about it. You can fix this.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Neel, thank you. I wish you much peak performance.

Neel Doshi
Thanks, Pete. I really appreciate it.

Oct 17
0

1003: How to Be Both Empathetic and Effective as a Leader with Maria Ross

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Maria Ross reveals how leaders can drive growth and improve performance without sacrificing empathy.

You’ll Learn

  1. How everyone wins with more empathy 
  2. Why leaders struggle with accountability—and how to fix it 
  3. How to practice empathy without devolving into people-pleasing 

About Maria

Maria Ross is a keynote speaker, author, strategist, and empathy advocate who believes cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. She is the founder of Red Slice and advises organizations on how to leverage empathy to better engage and connect. Maria has authored multiple books, including her most recent, The Empathy Edge and hosts The Empathy Edge podcast. Maria’s forthcoming book, The Empathy Dilemma: How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries arrives on shelves in September 2024. A dynamic speaker, Maria has delighted audiences at leading conferences and organizations such as TEDx, The 3% Conference, The New York Times Small Business Summit, and Salesforce and her insights have appeared in many media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Newsweek, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global. 

Resources Mentioned

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Maria Ross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Maria, welcome.

Maria Ross
Thanks for having me, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too, to hear about some of your wisdom about empathy in professional contexts. So, I’d love to start by hearing, if there’s a particularly surprising or shocking discovery you’ve made about empathy in professional context since you’ve been researching this stuff for years and years and years.

Maria Ross
Yeah, so many. I mean, there’s so much data and research out there that shows that being an empathetic leader and colleague boosts engagement, performance, innovation, results in better customer loyalty, better customer lifetime value. I think what was most surprising to me in the early days was discovering that, for some companies, there’s a link between their empathetic culture and their stock price being favorable.

So, we all know, personally, that when we’re dealing with people that are empathetic or dealing with brands that are empathetic, we do feel seen, heard, and valued, and that actually translates to bottom line results. So, it’s been a fun mission to go on, to show people that empathy is a strategic advantage and by no means is it a weakness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s beautiful to hear you say that because, I don’t know, I’ve just been on this YouTube kick in which I’ve been hearing about the playbook of big tobacco and big pharma and big food and big chemicals, and it seems like, “Okay, someone says there’s a safety problem and you just deny, deny, deny and infiltrate research and all that.”

That kind of seems like the opposite of empathetic leadership, is that, like, we’re not trying to understand, “Oh, shoot, we might be causing harms,” but rather, it’s like, “No, no, no, no, you’re all wrong, and it’s not what’s up.” But I’m thinking even in these contexts, we think an empathetic culture would be a more lucrative one.

Maria Ross
Yeah, actually. And it’s funny because, yes, of course, we can all find examples of companies and leaders who are the opposite, the antithesis of empathy, and yet they are succeeding. But I think my message is all about you can be both empathetic and high-performing. You can be empathetic and achieve amazing results. You can be empathetic and hold people accountable, and that they’re not either/or. I think the examples you’re citing are the examples of companies gone awry, and organizations that are harming people rather than helping people.

But from a sustainability perspective in the long run, employees are looking for cultures. It’s sort of table stakes for them, “Will I be seen, heard, and valued in this culture?” But also, brands are now needing to appeal to generations of people that actually want to know what’s going on under the covers. They want to know what’s going on under the hood. And so, they actually do care about how you’re treating your employees, how you’re treating the planet, how you’re treating your community.

And we saw in the pandemic, through several studies that were done through an organization called DoSomething.org, that especially Generation Z buyers and younger Millennials were actually making purchase decisions based on how well companies were, I guess, responding to the needs of their employees and their communities.

I know when I was 17, I didn’t really care, but these generations do care and they vote with their wallets in terms of who they will support and who they won’t. And so, when we look at long-term viability and long-term sustainability, some of those outdated tactics may work for a while, but eventually those organizations are going to die out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s coming to mind here is I’m thinking about some friends who worked at a medical devices company, and there are some stories in which the leadership of such companies say, “Hey, take a look at someone. They’re going to come on stage for our annual meeting and we’re going to see how we saved their life and meet their spouse and their children.” You’re like, “Wow, look at what we do with our work.”

And then other leaders are just, like, all about EBITDA and cash flow projections and growth and da, da, da. And so, they’re doing the same thing, they’re making medical devices, and yet the presentation in the big meetings has a very different flavor, “Look how this enriches people” versus “Look how this enriches shareholders.” Well, the folks that I know left the company that is all about the shareholder enrichment view. So, I think that is very resonant in terms of engaging that stuff is powerful.

Maria Ross
Absolutely. And there’s a host of research, it’s sort of tangential to the work that I do around how purpose-driven organizations drive more innovation and drive higher retention and higher engagement from their employees for exactly the reason that you cited. It doesn’t get us excited to do our best work for a company that we know is just making a few people at the top much richer.

So, what is our actual purpose? What is our actual mission? Why are we here dealing with the slog of everyday work life if not for something that motivates us and inspires us to be our best selves? And that’s not just something fluffy. That’s about, “Do you want your team operating at maximum cognitive ability? Do you want them coming up with new ideas and being innovative? Or do you want the people that do that to go work for your competitor?”

That’s really the choice that a company is making if they choose to just focus solely on the money-making aspect, because that might be very inspirational for those that are benefiting from that at the top, but it’s not beneficial or enough of a motivation for the people that are within the organization. And as an example, recently a study came out that comes out every year. It’s in its ninth year. It’s called the State of Workplace Empathy Report. It’s done by an organization called Business Solver. And you can go check it out. It’s free.

But one of the things that they consistently find over and over again is that when employees are asked, “How does your company show empathy to you?” They actually cite some benefits as empathetic. And the top benefit that they cite is not higher work compensation. That’s like 13th on the list. The top ones are flexibility and also employee assistance programs. So, getting the support they need and also having workplace flexibility is more important to many of our best workers. Now that’s not to say we underpay everybody, but it is to say that that carrot of money only takes you so far.

Pete Mockaitis
And just to be clear, employee assistance, is that money or is that something else?

Maria Ross
Employee assistance programs are like mental health benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Maria Ross
“Do I have somewhere to go within the organization to get help that I need?” Assistance for new parents, assistance for bereavement, “What are those employee-assistance programs that you have in place to support me as a whole person and not just a body at a desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so empathy is great. Your book is called The Empathy Dilemma. It doesn’t sound like a dilemma, Maria. That just sounds like a great thing to go do a lot of. Where’s the dilemma?

Maria Ross
It does. So, the first book on the topic was called The Empathy Edge, and that was really the business case of the ROI of empathy for your organization, for your team, for your brand. And what I was hearing from people over the last five years, because that came out in 2019, right before the pandemic lockdown, I was hearing from people, “Great, we’re sold. We are converts, right? But here is where trying to be a people-centered leader gets really hard. Here’s where it gets challenging for me.”

And especially in the environment we’re in right now, we’ve got this group of managers and leaders in the middle who are being squeezed by the expectations of the business and the demands of their people, and they’re trying to be human-centered leaders, but they are burning out. They are experiencing a lot of poor performance. They’re seeing quality slip, and they’re wondering what they’re doing wrong.

And so, The Empathy Dilemma is really about helping people balance the needs of the business with the needs of their people by presenting five foundational pillars that will help them be both empathetic and effective at the same time without burning out, which is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell a story to illustrate that picture? What is me having so much empathy that I burn out and become ineffective look like in practice?

Maria Ross
One senior director I remember speaking to was talking about the fact that she had an underperformer on her team, and she had bent over backwards during the pandemic to provide flexibility and support to her team, and all of that resulted in good things that we don’t want to go back on.

We are talking about mental health more at work, we’re understanding that, again, people don’t park their humanity at the door when they come to work, and things going on in our culture, in our society, in the world, impact our ability to populate an accurate spreadsheet at work. We don’t forget those things. And so, all of those conversations were good, but what was happening for this particular senior director is that she had one employee who was constantly taking mental health days, and constantly citing, “This crosses my boundaries. This does this. This does that.”

And her response as a leader was, “What am I doing wrong? I need to support this person better.” And her idea of support was not having difficult conversations with her, not wanting to confront her, wanting to take on the work for her. And what she finally realized was that, in the name of empathy, she was actually not doing empathy. She was people-pleasing, she was caving in, and she wasn’t having confident and tough conversations head-on. And what that was doing was that that was not empathetic to the rest of the team who had to pick up the weight of this person constantly failing in their role.

So, when she finally was able to have a direct conversation with this person, and say, “Look, these are the expectations we’re holding you to, and you’re not meeting them. So, tell us what’s going on for you. Is this something where you need to be in a different role? Do we need to build different skills?” And in that situation, that employee was actually not responsive to her at all, to the point that they ended up parting ways because that person could not succeed at work. And nobody wants to come to work and fail every day.

So, what happened with this leader was she thought she was being empathetic the whole time, and what she was, was something else, and that’s what I talk about in the book, about the differences between empathy is not people-pleasing, it’s not caving into unreasonable demands, and it’s not even agreeing with someone. So, you can still make a difficult business decision, but it’s how you do it.

How do you communicate? How do you show up? How do you build a culture of trust so, when something like this happens, you’re able to have a really difficult conversation with someone, and say, “I’m not going to put it off. I’m not going to put it off because it might hurt their feelings. I’m going to have the conversation I need to have because I need to protect the rest of the team, and I’m here to do a job. I’m here to deliver something to my organization.” Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can do that and still make tough decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, do you have any guiding principles, or maxims, mantras, distinguishing guiding lights to help us as we’re making these distinctions or, I don’t know if it’s a tightrope, or if it’s a two-by-two matrix, or how you conceptualize this so that we’re playing the game just right and not falling into the zone of being a jerk versus a people-pleaser, but we’re being empathetic and effective at the same time?

Maria Ross
I think the biggest thing people need to understand is that empathy is anything but weak. Because for you to be able to take on another person’s perspective or point of view without defensiveness or fear, that actually requires a very strong person. And so, empathy for others actually begins with working on yourself. So, are you self-aware enough? That’s actually pillar one, self-awareness.

Are you self-aware enough to know how you show up in an interaction and in a conversation? Do you know what your strengths are? Do you know where your weaknesses are? Do you know what your emotional triggers are? That’s a hard one for people. I spoke to a CEO this past year who, very successful business, finally did some sort of personal development and some self-assessment, and realized that one of her biggest triggers was actually not being believed.

And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone accuses you of something, and you immediately start searching through your sent mail of like, “No, no, I know I didn’t say that,” or, “I know I said that,” or, “I know I have proof of this.” That was setting her off with people that really were just communicating that they didn’t understand something or that they had a misperception of something. She would sort of go off the deep end.

She realized this about herself and she realized that in those moments she wasn’t showing up as her best leader self. She was showing up very defensive and very much from a place of fear, to even hear what the other person was saying. So that’s what we mean by understanding our triggers. And so, when we work on ourselves first, we can show up in the conversation with more grace, with more patience.

It’s kind of like, you know, I have a 10-year-old, and I am the worst mother in the world when I’m hungry and tired, when I don’t have my own well full, when I don’t have my own battery charged. And so, in order to be empathetic with someone and stand strong, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that you are re-energizing yourself, helping yourself think in different ways. That’s why the second pillar is actually self-care.

So, self-awareness and self-care can help you create the foundation you need to have a more empathetic exchange with someone without blowing your top.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, yes. And we had, boy, one of the early episodes, we talked to Jim Tamm, and he kept coming back to managing your defensiveness is just transformational in terms of having effective conversations and working through this. And some of those parts boil down to self-awareness and self-care.

I would like to chat about the five pillars, and maybe, since we’ve already introduced self-awareness and self-care, could you give us perhaps a top do and don’t, associated with each pillar based on what you are seeing most frequently and what seems to be the most effective or disruptive?

Maria Ross
I love it because there’s a lot of strategies and then actionable tactics that people can try in the book. And I do want to just offer this, you don’t have to do all of them all at once. And they’re not meant to be linear, but if you do start with self-awareness, you can uncover “What are my weaker pillars of the five?” And you can mix and match and experiment with a few of the tactics within each of those pillars to see how you can shore up your empathy and show up as a more confident leader who can also make room for compassion at the same time.

So, self-awareness, the biggest tip is, take a self-assessment. There are a bazillion of them out there. There’s Enneagram. There’s Myers-Briggs. There’s DISC. Whatever could work for you, put your ego aside. Ego kills empathy. Put your ego aside and say, “I know that there’s got to be things that I could work on,” and help pinpoint what some of those things are. And that also can include seeking feedback from others and being okay enough with accepting some negative or constructive feedback.

With self-care, it’s making sure that you make time and hold it sacred for what charges you up, what lights you up. Self-care doesn’t have to be passive. It doesn’t have to be massages and manis and pedis. It could be, for some people, it’s rock climbing. For some people, it’s being in a play or doing improv. For some people, it’s knitting or running or whatever it is, training for a marathon. So, make sure that you’re making time for the things outside of work that light you up.

The things where you’re in flow, the things where you’re thinking about the present, because the more mindful you are, the more you can actually be present for someone in a conversation and read their cues, read their body language, hear their tone of voice, see what they’re doing in terms of, like, they’re fidgeting or their gestures. You can only do that if you are charged up. So that’s self-care.

The third one is clarity. We cannot hold people accountable to an expectation that we’ve never set. And too often, we, as leaders – I’m guilty of all of this too, by the way – we, as leaders, think we’re being clear about something, or we’re making assumptions that everyone in our organization or our team knows what professionalism means, or has the same definition of it, or understands what we mean by effective communication, or what we mean by hierarchy, or whatever the term may be.

Spelling out those things when you work with a team is really important to make sure that you’re coming back to shared goals. So, do we have like a document that goes beyond like the pretty bullet points of our values on the office wall? Do we have something that says, “This is how we communicate. This is how we run meetings. This is how we honor each other’s time. These are the expectations of our culture”? And make sure that that’s documented and it’s clear. Because if it’s not clear, you can’t hold people accountable to it.

The fourth one is decisiveness. And this is a good one, and you might be able to relate to this, and so will your listeners. But many of us, in the name of empathy, we understand that multiple points of view hold value. We understand that we make better business decisions. There’s a whole host of research around that, around diversity and inclusion, and belonging in terms of what makes a really good business decision. When we have diverse voices at the table, we can uncover opportunities we’ve never seen, we can avoid risks we might have missed.

The challenge is when you try to be an empathetic “leader,” you think that making a decision means making everyone happy, and that’s not what it means. There’s no such decision that will get unanimous consensus. I guess unless it’s, “Hey, you all get a million dollar bonus this quarter.” But what it’s about is being able to swiftly synthesize multiple points of view, make a decision, and then be able to communicate that decision back to your team in a transparent way, “Here’s why we made this decision. Here’s why, Pete, we weren’t able to implement your idea, but please keep those ideas coming because they’re useful.”

And being able to communicate in a way where people can say, “Okay, I disagree, but at least I commit.” Disagree but commit, “Can I at least get on board with the decision because I understand how it was made?” And the fact that you made it, that you didn’t just let it fester because it was uncomfortable or hard, or because you were waiting for the right sign from above to tell you it was the right decision, that leaves people in limbo. That stresses them out. That makes them anxious. They want to know what the plan is going forward. And so, being able to be a decisive leader is actually empathetic.

And then, finally, this one you might really enjoy, the fifth pillar is joy. The fifth pillar is creating levity, creating comfort, creating an environment where people can relax and be themselves is an important part of building an empathetic culture. Because when you do that, you build trust, you build psychological safety, and brain science shows us that when we are under stress or we’re being punished for something, our executive functions shut down. They’re not working because we’re in survival mode. So, no one’s going to learn, no one’s going to grow if they’re in an environment of fear and anxiety and heaviness all the time.

So even if the work is not always fun, we can create an environment where we can have levity, where we can laugh at ourselves, where we can have awards for the best failure of the week, where we can have fun Slack channels that say, like, “This is the curated lunch channel, and show us what you had for lunch for our remote team.”

There are so many ideas and so many leaders that I spoke to for the book that shared some really interesting ideas with me, but the possibilities are endless. And you can solicit those ideas from your team. You don’t have to just, as the leader, come up with all the ideas for how to make work more fun. There is research out there as well, again, tangential to my work, that shows that if you have a friend at work, you’re more engaged, the quality of your output is better. And in environments where it matters, safety goes up.

So, do you have a friend at work? Not all your workmates need to be your best friends, but do you have a friend or a best friend at work? That actually goes a long way to creating an environment where people actually want to show up and do the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I feel like I’ve got a good sense of some top do’s and don’ts for self-awareness and self-care. Could we hear a couple of your faves on the last three: the clarity, the decisiveness, the joy?

Maria Ross
Clarity, I actually offered up, which is to create a document for your team of, like, a memorandum of understanding, is what one company called it that I interviewed for the book, but sort of a code of, not a code of conduct, but sort of a rules of engagement for your team. Document that, “What will we put up with? What don’t we put up with? What are we asking of people?”

It could be something like, “We do not have to check our emails on the weekends, but if there’s an emergency, the leader is allowed to text someone.” It could be, “On Fridays, we don’t have meetings.” It could be, “In meetings, don’t get upset if we challenge your idea. That’s part of our culture is to be additive and to always try to up-level everyone’s ideas. It doesn’t mean you’re being attacked. It means we’re adding to it.” So, things like that, whatever is true of your culture, there’s really no one example, but being able to document that.

We often talk about like the unsaid rules of our team or our culture. Don’t make them unsaid. Write them down. Make sure everyone understands them. Decisiveness, one tactic I came across that I really liked, was putting a limit on your decisions. Meaning, if you know you have trouble making decisions, put a decision date on your calendar as a task, and say, “I will make this decision by next Friday,” and let everyone on your team know, “Hey, I’m making this decision by next Friday, so weigh in before that because I’m going to be making the call on Friday.”

That actually gives you a forcing mechanism that now people are expecting you to make a decision, and they know they better get their input to you before then or it’s not going to be factored into the decision. And then for joy, I gave you some examples of companies that are using some really creative Slack channels, or doing really great team-building exercises that are not forced team building, forced fun for people. But can they tie their team building back to either a skill they’re trying to build or to their mission?

Can they do a community event that supports their mission? Can they do something that also is inclusive of everyone in the organization? So, when you’re planning, the default is, “Let’s do a Friday happy hour.” That’s not really that kind or empathetic to those in your organization who might be recovering alcoholics. It might not be kind to someone who’s got to go pick up their kid at daycare at 4:00 o’clock. So, are you doing a mix of activities or modalities for injecting joy into the workday so that it accommodates people with different needs?

Pete Mockaitis
Could I hear about a particularly brilliant team-building thing that’s not happy hours or forced fun?

Maria Ross
So, I interviewed a woman named Teri Schmidt. She runs a company called Stronger to Serve, and I interviewed her for my podcast, The Empathy Edge, because she had such a unique take on team building. They have created seven experiences that you can choose from, or you can work with them to customize your own, where they’re tying the activity into a company’s purpose or mission.

And what they’re doing is, the first half of it is actually a skill building, a professional development exercise. So, let’s say, one of her packages, it is helping folks deliver difficult performance reviews or deliver difficult information. So, at the beginning, they worked on delivering how they could up-level their ability to deliver tough information in a nurturing and compassionate way and in a confident way so it didn’t leave people confused.

And then the second half, and it’s escaping me what it was, they did some sort of a service project around that that helped them use the skills they had just learned at the beginning in the project they were doing, and they were doing a service project as a team. And her research shows that when you engage in service, in acts of service together, it actually bonds you as a team.

So, I thought that was a really clever way of trying to, like, feed, I hate to say kill birds with one stone anymore, so I say feed birds with one scone. Not only does it check off professional development, it checks off team-building, and it checks off acts of service related to your mission or your purpose. So, it kind of ticks all the boxes for people and creates a memorable experience that they can bond around, but that actually has meaning to their day-to-day work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. I dig a lot of these, and what I’m thinking the most about now is with clarity, it’s astounding how one word can mean completely different things to different people. And I remember I was chatting with a buddy of mine, and he said that he was thinking about his culture of his company. He was disappointed that someone quit and they gave two weeks’ notice.

And he said, “I understand that this is a norm in organizations and employment, but in our organization, we’re all about setting each other up for success, and this really didn’t do that because it put some folks in a tight spot. You try to replace and backfill and reshuffle things.” And he felt like that was a bit of a failure in terms of communicating the culture, is that apparently this message didn’t apply because they didn’t even, like, apologize or acknowledge, like, “I know.” It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, hey, I’m moving on, so, okay.”

And so, he sort of took that on himself, like, “Well, we really got to be clear about what do we really mean about setting each other up for success.” And I think that’s, in many ways, what makes cultures fun and interesting and distinctive from organization to organization. It’s like, “Hey, this is a normal practice in many places, and here it’s not acceptable, and this is why, and what’s behind it, and what setting each other up for success means in our vernacular.”

Maria Ross
Right, “And what does it mean here?” That is such a great example, Pete, because that’s a thing about assumptions. And that’s also an assumption based on generational. That’s an assumption based on maybe what group you’re from. So that is such a great example of the fact that when we make these assumptions about these unsaid rules, we set ourselves up for failure.

And there’s a great book I’m going to recommend, not mine, that’s called Unlocking Generational CODES. It’s by a generational expert named Ana Liotta, who you should have on the show, and it’s one of the clearest breakdowns of the differences in the generations, not because one’s right and one’s wrong, that we’re all formed by generational operating systems.

We’re all informed by our generational operating systems that usually stem from, within the generation, something, some seminal event that happened around we’re 10 or 11 years old. It actually shapes the way that we view things. And so, it went all the way from what she called a traditionalist, which were like way older, like my parents’ generation, like ‘30s, ‘20s, ‘30s born, down to what she called Nexters, because she actually wrote the book before the term Gen X or Gen Z came out. And also, she gave, like, tips on how to get around those communication snafus that you have. But what I loved about it was it talked about for each generation, within their operating code, what were the differences around how they view information, for example, how they view communication, how they view professionalism.

So, one example is some of the older generations look at information as something to be hoarded. It’s an aspect of power. It’s “The more information I have, the more important I am.” It’s not right or wrong. It’s just what was part of their DNA, part of their generational DNA.

If you look at Millennials and Gen Z, they see information as a catalyst, “The more people that have information, the more innovative we can be, the more we can problem-solve, the more we can get creative.” So, you can imagine someone with that perspective trying to talk to someone with the other perspective about making decisions or transparency or, “Why didn’t you tell us that was happening?”

All of those things that cause all of these barriers to us being able to connect and, more importantly, perform, it comes down to clarifying what do we mean by these things, and understanding that people will have different definitions of their own based on where they come from, based on their own experiences, based on their ages, based on their sexual orientation, based on so many factors that it behooves us, within a culture of a team, to say, “These are our rules for operating together, and we don’t want to make any assumptions.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to get your take, Maria, for folks who are all in on empathy, and so much so that maybe they even struggle with non-empathy, people-pleasing behaviors, and that’s just in them, any pro tips on how to shake that off and be empathetic and more effective in those times in which it’s you got to call someone out, to hold folks accountable, to point out mistakes or development opportunities and difficult things?

Maria Ross
As you go through the self-awareness phase and understand your behaviors and your actions and your triggers and your strengths and your challenges, you can then determine, “What are the other pillars that I need to shore up in order to be in a position where I can have these conversations without giving away the farm, without taking on extra work because I feel sorry for someone?”

Once those foundations are shored up for yourself, you have a bigger likelihood of success of having an empathetic interaction with someone that still gets the job done, that still holds them accountable. I spoke to one leader for the book, who is a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and I had worked for her at one time. And her ability to get to know her people was by design.

She would keep, you know, this sounds kind of creepy, she would keep files on people, like family’s names, kids’ birthdays, interests, all that kind of stuff so she could have more meaningful interactions with her team, so she could get to know them outside of work, and understand, “For this person, this is how I need to motivate them. For this other person, this is how I need to motivate them.” And she was a master at actually managing up as well, being empathetic to her managers and her bosses, because empathy flows both ways.

And when I spoke to her about this dilemma that a lot of folks are experiencing, especially around leaders who say, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much work to do, and now you want me to be a therapist?” she was very candid and said, “I am very clear that my role is to generate revenue and drive growth. My role is not to be a therapist.”

“I can still get to know someone personally so that I can motivate them and inspire them and have fun with them, and be clear with them in a way that they can understand because I know them. But I’m very clear that my primary goal is this. And I’m not here, I was not hired to help you figure out your boundaries with your mother-in-law. That’s for someone getting paid $300 an hour who is an actual therapist.”

So, what I loved about that is that we conflate these things that actually make it harder for us to lead with empathy because we don’t have to be someone’s therapist. It’s not the same thing as getting to know someone on a personal level. And so, I think that that’s one of the biggest tips I could give is make sure that you understand the difference between where your role and your goal ends, and some other modality or some other intervention is required.

And for this particular leader, she was very good about understanding that “If the conversation gets to that point, then I need to direct that person to the resources or the employee assistance programs that the company provides. That there’s a line between what I’m able to do as I’ve gotten to know this person and motivate them and have fun at work, to what this person might really need.”

And I think if we’re more aware that there is a line, that we don’t sort of bleed into the people that we are managing, I think that’s a better way for us to more strongly set our boundaries. And I really like sharing that story because it’s about clarity of boundaries, but it’s also about clarity of role and clarity of goals, and why she is there in that company, what she’s there to do, and what she’s not there to do.

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

Maria Ross
No, I think we covered it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Maria Ross
A favorite quote of mine is from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, basically, I don’t remember the lead into this, but it’s how it’s so hard to please everybody because you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. So do what you think is right. That has actually been a really big driving force for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Maria Ross
Drive by Daniel Pink, and it’s about understanding the secret factors that motivate us. So, I just think that whole field of motivation is fascinating and his books a great read. It’s called Drive.

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

Maria Ross
I think it might be the closing tag to my podcast, which is something I came up with when I was writing The Empathy Edge. It’s that “Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive.”

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

Maria Ross
They can visit my main hub at Red-Slice.com. They can find all the socials there. I’m on Instagram @redslicemaria. And my podcast is at TheEmpathyEdge.com, or on your favorite podcast player.

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

Maria Ross
Yes. Do not fall into the false narrative that empathy is weak. Bring it into your career, bring it into your work, bring it into your life. And if you practice it at work, it may just spill over into your personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maria, this is fun. I wish you much good empathetic moments.

Maria Ross
Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.

Sep 30
0

998: A Crisis Management Expert’s Guide to Leading Well with Dr. Thom Mayer

By | Podcasts | No Comments

The “Master of Disaster” Dr. Thom Mayer shares his most valuable lessons learned from leading during times of major crises.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical first step to leading well
  2. The recipe for a great workplace culture 
  3. Why to suck down instead of up 

About Thom

Dr. Thom Mayer is the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, Executive Vice President of Leadership for LogixHealth, Founder of BestPractices, Inc., Speaker for Executive Speakers Bureau, and Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at George Washington University and Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke University.

He is one of the most widely sought speakers on leading in times of crisis, patient experience, hardwiring flow, trauma and emergency care, pediatric emergency care, EMS/disaster medicine, and sports medicine. In sports medicine, his work at the forefront of changing concussion diagnosis and management in the NFL has changed the way in which these athletes are diagnosed and treated. His work in each of these areas has resulted in changing the very fabric of patient care.

In 2022, Dr. Mayer helped lead a mobile team to Ukraine, caring for more than 350 internally displaced persons during the current war and training over 1,700 Ukrainian doctors, nurses, and paramedics. On September 11, 2001, Dr. Mayer served as the Command Physician at the Pentagon Rescue Operation and has served on three Defense Science Board Task Forces, advising the Secretary of Defense.

He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, over 200 book chapters, and has edited or written 25 textbooks. His newest book, Leadership Is Worthless…But Leading is Priceless will be released on May 7, 2024 through Berrett-Koehler.

He has won numerous awards, including the ACEP James D. Mills Outstanding Contribution to Emergency Medicine Award in 2018. He has also been named the ACEP Outstanding Speaker of The Year, ACEP’s “Over-the-Top” (three times), and ACHE James Hamilton Award (three books).

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Thom Mayer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Thom, welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
“Okay, Dad!”

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

Pete Mockaitis
“Is my lunch here?”

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

Sure. Sure.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

“Hang in there,” with the cat.

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

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

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

A guest on the show.

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

“Outside of your box and inside my box.”

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Any other top do’s and don’ts?

Thom Mayer

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Thom Mayer

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

Aug 26
0

990: How to Advocate for Yourself and Get Noticed at Work with Jessica Chen

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Jessica Chen discusses how to get noticed even if you’re not the loudest voice in the room.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top misconception about career advancement 
  2. How to ensure your message always lands 
  3. The five elements that make your voice resonate 

About Jessica

Jessica Chen is an Emmy-Award winner, top virtual keynote speaker, and CEO of Soulcast Media, a global business communication training agency. Her client list includes Google, LinkedIn, the CDC, Medtronic, Mattel, HP, DraftKings, and many more. Prior to starting Soulcast Media, Jessica was a broadcast television journalist. She is also an internationally recognized top LinkedIn Learning Instructor where her communication courses have been watched by over 2 million learners and featured in Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. She lives in Los Angeles.

Resources Mentioned

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Jessica Chen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jessica, welcome.

Jessica Chen
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom. And I would love to kick us off by hearing something super surprising and counterintuitive you’ve learned over your years of studying how we can get noticed at work for the right reasons.

Jessica Chen
Well, I have to reference back to when I first started working. My thinking was, “As long as you work hard and you’re smart, you’ll get recognized, right? Your opportunities will open up. You’ll get that promotion. People will know about you.” But, funny enough, that’s not how the world works. And it was counterintuitive to many of the things I was taught growing up in a very traditional and conservative household, where it really was just about studying and putting your head down.

And so, when I began my career, which, at the time, was as a broadcast journalist, I really figured out quickly that I had to learn some new skills because it wasn’t just about being smart or being hardworking. It’s being able to communicate, put yourself out there, and advocate for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious, we’ve got to talk about the Emmy in particular. Congratulations. Not very many Emmy Award winners on the show. So, tell us, that’s sort of a very concrete, discrete achievement, accomplishment, which seems to suggest, “Hey, you’ve been noticed for your work. It is outstanding as recognized by the powers that be.” Was that also something that you had to advocate for? Are we to understand that awards are not granted just for being outstanding? What’s behind the scenes here?

Jessica Chen
So, the Emmy Award, as many of you know, is considered the most prestigious award in television and it was something that didn’t happen absolutely overnight. It took me about 10 years to actually win that award, and this was when I was at the ABC station in San Diego, California. And it’s funny because, and I think, you know, if we’re talking about awards and things like that, I never feel like it’s something that you are aspiring or trying to get. You just do good work and hopefully people will begin to notice it. But there is an element to you have to be able to talk about the work so people know about it.

So, I remember for this Emmy award, this was actually a culmination of, it really was a team effort, and I have to say that, where the story that got us that award was, so this was, gosh, this was when San Diego was experiencing a lot of wildfires. I’m here in California, and many people know California is quite dry. And so, in San Diego, during that particular year that we won that award, there were a lot of wildfires happening.

And so, for us, in journalism, and for me particularly as a journalist, as a reporter, when you have, like, for example, a fire breaking out, your job isn’t to run away. Your job is to run towards the fire, which is also counterintuitive to everything. And so, I just remember our entire team did such a great job in covering the fire, safety, what was going on, where do residents have to go, where did they have to evacuate.

And just the seamlessness in the execution of how everybody operated, how everybody communicated, it actually ended up being one of the, well, the reason why I won was because it was actually a really well-produced news story and newscast. And so, again, it wasn’t just about working hard, which, of course, you got to do, but after we finished that, it was about, “How can we make sure that we get the visibility for this amazing coverage that we had?”

And, of course, we submitted it to get nominated, and it got picked as the award winner and whatnot. But I think that Emmy Award is a good symbolization of, “Yes, execution is important, but being able to put yourself out there and talk about it is also very key.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really dig that story because I think it’s possible that you’re doing a ton of stories, you’re cranking them out day after day, and it is sort of special for y’all to step back and realize, “Oh, wait. This one was really particularly excellent. Let’s make sure that we put our best foot forward,” and pick your moment and rock and roll there.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think one of the, you know, a lot of things that I talk about, one of them is being able to celebrate your wins, and at the same time it’s not about always talking about the work that you do but it’s being judicious about, “Okay, I know this one I did particularly well in. How can I make sure to maximize the opportunity and ensure other people know it?” Because, yes, you don’t need to do it for every single project, every single thing that you do, but for the ones that really stand out to you, it’s thinking about how you can take that and leverage it for perhaps more opportunities, more recognition.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, your book is called Smart, Not Loud. Can you hammer home the main idea or distinction we should be thinking about here with that?

Jessica Chen
So, the thesis of this book, and I really wrote this book for those who were raised in what I call a quiet culture. So, people who are raised in a quiet culture were taught principles like valuing humility, modesty, not seeking the spotlight, avoiding conflict, for example. And I teased this earlier where, growing up in a very traditional and conservative family, my parents taught me to embody these quiet culture traits.

But when you go out into the working world, especially in many Western and corporate workplaces, you start to see that it’s the people who are able to speak, be the first one to speak, put themselves out there, talk about their wins. These are the things that people notice, which is what I call loud-culture traits. So, the question is, “For somebody who was raised to embody and value these traits, how can you still get noticed at work without necessarily changing who you are as a person?”

Because my whole thing is, if you naturally tend to be on the quieter side, or if being assertive, dominant, loud, and extroverted, if that’s not your style, I don’t think that’s necessarily what you should do because that feels quite inauthentic. But how can you still show up in a way for you to get noticed and still unlock those bigger opportunities?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds handy. Maybe before we get into the particulars of how that’s done, could you share with us a cool success story of someone who made a transformation doing this kind of stuff?

Jessica Chen
I’ll share my own story, because this is a personal journey for me too, and like I mentioned, that was how I was raised, and I experienced a lot of friction. I call it communications friction in the workplace. And, in many ways, when I started working, it was this culture shock.

So, I was trying to find this balance that I was talking about earlier of like, “Well, if it seems like the people who are loud get recognized, but that’s not necessarily my style, how can I do that?” And at the end of the day, a lot of it actually came down to one thing. It was communications.

It was learning how to be an effective communicator. And we know communications is a very broad topic, and there’s actually a lot to learn.

It’s about, for example, public speaking, getting comfortable standing up and presenting an idea. I think, for many of us, this is not something that we are naturally born with. It certainly wasn’t something that I naturally was comfortable with, or even finding that moment to communicate your idea in a meeting. I used to remember sitting in a meeting and being like, “Oh, gosh, I have an idea. I want to say it.” But instead, I’m in my own head creating this narrative of like, “Is it a good idea? Is it not a good idea?” And then before you know it, the conversation has moved on, right?

And so, it’s funny because I always joke, even though communications was something I struggled with, because I started out as a broadcast television journalist, there was no better industry for me to learn how to become an effective communicator. And so, this is to say, when you asked about the journey, like a person who had that transformation, I think, in many ways, it was for me being introspective, identifying these points of friction, and then really doubling down on leveling up my communication skills, because once I did that, I felt like opportunities, visibility, all that completely changed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to talk about some of the particulars of communicating well and sort of getting past these friction points. But could you first share with us what is it that we want to communicate? How might we go about identifying key things worth highlighting before we figure out the how, specifically, to execute that communication?

Jessica Chen
The number one most important thing anybody has to think about if they’re thinking, “How do I make sure my message comes across the way I want it to come across?” is to always ask yourself this question, “Who am I speaking with and what do they care about?” I think, for many of us, it’s not instinctive for us to think about that first question because many times we’re thinking about, “I have this idea. I’m excited about this idea. I’ve been working on this project and I know I want to talk about it in this meeting.” And a lot of it is coming from your own perspective.

And I always say you can be presenting or talking about one topic to this group. You’re at a next meeting, same topic, but different group of people. Even though your topic is the same, how you communicate and how you tailor that needs to be different because maybe the people in group A, the things that they care about might be a little bit different than the people in group B.

And here’s an example. Let’s say in group A, you’re talking to your immediate team, and your immediate team are people who just need to know what’s going on, the execution, the nitty-gritty details. But let’s say in Group B, you’re talking to senior-level executives. They probably don’t want all the nitty-gritty details. They just want to know the high-level key points and perhaps your recommendation.

Because if you boggle them down with all the details, they might go, “Okay, so what’s the point you’re trying to say, Jessica?” And I think, as an effective communicator, we’ve got to be really in tuned with our audience, what they care about, and tailoring our message to them. That can be our guiding light and our North Star.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about any number of times I’ve received an intriguing enough cold email that got me to hop on a call for a demo of something. And I’ve been amazed at how fairly often folks will walk me through a slide deck, this is just like a one-on-one kind of sales conversation, but walk me through a slide deck.

And I’m thinking, “I don’t care about any of that. I don’t care about your founder, or the history of the company, or your story, where the idea came from, like the inspiration.” It’s like, “I just want to know, can you really do the thing that you’re saying you can do? Is that going to make big results happen for me? And could you show me a cool case study or how this unfolded in practice with some charts or graphs or numbers?”

But help us out with that. So, we tend to get stuck in a world where we just think, “Okay, this is my presentation, so I’m supposed to give it,” or “I’m fired up about this, so I’m going to go for it.” What’s sort of the habit or practice or ritual we should use to stop and check in and get that audience info we need first?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because the story that you just mentioned, that experience you have, a lot of it is because this person is presenting you a canned presentation that they’ve created. It’s like, “Okay, getting on a call with Pete. Let me just pull up the presentation that I always give.” And here’s the thing, and let’s be real, nobody has time to recreate a presentation every single time they’re meeting somebody new.

But I do think the first few minutes of, and let’s just use the example of presentations, the first few minutes of you giving a presentation, that is the most critical time because, like you said, Pete, you’re ready to listen, you’re like, “Okay, you got me on this call. I am intrigued enough to talk to you, so I’m paying attention.”

And so, for folks who are thinking about, for example, leveling up their presentation skills, yes, we’re not talking about changing your entire presentation because nobody has time for that. But thinking about how you can tailor just even the first few minutes, “Okay, I’m getting on this call with Pete. What do I know about him? What is it that I feel, like, he cares about? And I can make sure that I start off with that because I want to capture his attention and get him really interested.”

And like you said, for you, you’re like, “I don’t really care to know about, like, the founders or, like, whatever, that kind of stuff,” but maybe to somebody else that is important to them. So, for the person who is engaging with you, for them to think about “How can I be strategic?” it’s being able to identify, “Okay, what are the things you care about? And how can I start it off to capture your attention?”

Pete Mockaitis
And it seems like it would be totally fair in a small environment where you can, like if it’s one or two or three people you’re speaking to, as opposed to hundreds, to just ask, “Hey, so where do you want to start first? What do you find most interesting? What made you intrigued to have this conversation?” And I suppose you can simply ask.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I think a good way is to ask open-ended questions at the beginning, and this is kind of where like the art of small talk happens. Before you even dive into the presentation itself, before you even pull it up and start sharing your screen with somebody, it’s just kind of getting a temperature check of, like, this person. Maybe asking a few questions, and then that can give you some pretty key insight of like, “Oh, I know this,” or “Pete said this, so maybe I can kind of, like…”

And this can even be not just content. It can just be even tone and the vibe of how you present it. If you notice somebody is, like, pretty formal and pretty, let’s say, they just want to get straight to it, then you’re like, “Okay, I got to get straight into it.” Or, if you’re like, “Oh, in this small talk, I found that this person likes to chit-chat. They’re a little bit more casual,” then maybe in your presentation style, you now tailor it to that. It’s always basically meeting people where they’re at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you could intuit based on your observations of how things seem to be. That’s super. Are there any explicit questions you recommend just straight-up putting out there?

Jessica Chen
Well, I mean, I’m trying to think about very specific, but I mean, even just when we think about small talk, it’s just thinking about, like, “What have you been working on?” or, like, “Kind of what’s exciting?” And I think that can give you insight of who the person is, what they’re interested in, and then using that information, whether it’s in the beginning of your meeting or later on in the meeting, but using that bit of insight to make it feel like, “Oh, I heard what this person said.”

And so, in the middle of the conversation, you can even bring it back up. You can say, “Oh, yeah, and, Pete, when you mentioned that earlier, when we first jumped on that call, this point that I’m about to make actually relates to that.” So, it’s really making sure that you’re asking questions that provide insight into this person, but then also maybe even leveraging it during your conversation to show the other person that, hey, you’re listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am listening, Jessica, and it sounds, like, you’re kind of touching on some of the stuff associated with your 4A Sequence for speaking up at meetings. Can you lay this on us?

Jessica Chen
I have found that for some of us, being the first one to speak up in a meeting is not the most natural thing. Some of us tend to want to get a temperature check of the meeting first, or not the first one to speak, or they tend to just want to think about their ideas before they say something, versus some people are very much about they’re processing their ideas in real time as they’re communicating.

However, there is this 4A Sequence, and this is a communication strategy specifically for people who tend to have a hard time finding that moment to speak because, what we don’t want is for somebody to have a brilliant idea and they’re just keeping it in their mind, and they’re trying to figure out when’s the right time to speak, and before they know it, the conversation has moved on.

So, the 4A Sequence is a way of basically seamlessly inserting yourself into the conversation, and I’ll walk you through the 4A. It’s four As basically. The first A is active listening. The opposite of active listening is passive listening which is think about when you’re sitting on your couch watching Netflix. You’re passively listening and watching what’s but you have no intention to chime in. And I think this is a very important mindset shift, because when you go into a meeting with the intention of saying at least one or two things, it completely changes how you even sit in a meeting, whether you’re leaning in, and how you’re paying attention. So, going in with A, active listening.

Once you found that opportune time to chime in, whether it’s because of a pause or because somebody said something that is relevant to what you want to say, the next is you want to acknowledge. Acknowledging is you simply saying, “Hey, Pete, that was actually a really interesting point you just made,” or “What you just said made me think of…” You’re acknowledging the person by saying, “I hear you.” And you can even say those words, “I hear what you’re saying.”

But what is great about this is you’re allowing the person who just spoke to not feel like you’re cutting them off necessarily. Because when people feel like they’re getting cut off, or this is even more important to do if you have an opposing idea, is you want them to feel acknowledged so that they can go, “Okay, at least I was heard.” You acknowledge. And, by the way, acknowledging is not agreeing, it’s just letting the person know that you heard them.

Then the third A is anchor. Anchoring is repeating one or two words the person said right before you as a way to connect your point to their point, “Hey, Pete, that was a really interesting point you just made. And when you said the word data, it made me think of A, B, and C.” You said data, I repeated your word, data, and that creates a connection.

And then, finally, the fourth is answer. Now you make your answer, your pointed statement, or whatever it is you want to say. And I have found that when you can, like, present this acronym of the 4A Sequence, it’s especially helpful for people who tend to figure out, like chiming in and how to do it. So, it’s active listening, it’s acknowledging, anchoring, and answering.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like those little examples there. Could you give us a full demonstration in terms of we’re chatting, and, well, I guess I need to say something first that you can actively listen to. So, we’ll say, we’re chatting, “I’m really excited about the opportunity to put forward this content. I think it’ll be like testimonials on steroids when we interview our clients in this context.”

Jessica Chen
“So, you mentioned the word content and I know, Pete, you’ve been producing a lot of different content on this, and so it made me think of the next few episodes you’re going to be creating.” So, this is just kind of me using and repeating the word that you said. I was anchoring it to the word you said, which was content. I mean, I don’t really have a follow-up question to what you have to say, but if I did, I’d be like, “Okay, Pete, okay, content, oh, I did have a question about content.” So, this is how I would essentially seamlessly insert myself back into the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I think I’ve found is that when you’re anchoring and repeating a word or phrase someone said, if that word or phrase is somewhat unique, distinctive, original, fresh in some way, the person who said those words that you anchor to feels a little dose of, like, a pat on the back, or a high five, or a good job for saying that clever thing. So, I just get the impression that it increases your likability or maybe that’s just me and I’m super susceptible to this kind of flattery.

Jessica Chen
No, you’re totally right, and I think some of it can be very subtle. It could be also very unconscious. Like, if I had repeated something that you said, it kind of makes you feel, “Oh, wow, Jessica actually heard me.” And it’s not like I’m explicitly saying it, like, “Oh, amazing idea,” but it’s just like, yeah, it’s just kind of like a little like, “Hey, wink, wink, like I heard you.”

And when we think about being an effective communicator, I think we have to think about making sure we are capturing people when they’re most receptive to listen. And when they’re most receptive to listen, it’s generally when they are feeling validated, feeling acknowledged, feeling like they’re being heard. So, I think, yes, these subtle communication tactics, which we’re talking about right now, is the anchoring, repeating one or two words that person said, it can actually achieve that for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Chris Voss on the show, the FBI negotiation dude, and he talked about that very concept of repeating the last few words they said is almost magical, even if you’re doing it sort of as though you’re thinking it in, like, a soft thinking processing kind of a voice. It’s like, “Okay, you’re really considering what I’m putting forward, and I appreciate that. Thank you.”

Jessica Chen
Exactly. So, I think when we think about being an effective communicator, it’s leveraging things that are also, yes, explicit but also very implicit too, but it’s still getting the other person to feel, like, “Oh, yeah, okay. Well, me hear what Jessica has to say next.”

Pete Mockaitis
And you highlight five different elements of voice which I think is so cool. Can you walk us through these five things? But, first, tell us why do we want to pay attention to our voice and what it sounds like? Is it just sort of like our voice is our voice, and that’s fine? Or just how much of an impact does it make tinkering with these variables?

Jessica Chen
It’s funny because I think, whenever I talk about tone of voice specifically, a lot of times people go, “Well, it’s just the sound of my voice, right?” Yes, but there’s actually way more we can do with our voice than we think. And the five elements, which I will go through, are, I mean, this is not something that I produced. It’s actually based off research and study and research.

And I remember, just for me, when I was a broadcast journalist, I remember we would have consultants come in and they would critique us on television, and they would say, “Do this, do that, change this, change that,” just like as consultants, that’s what they do. And I remember one time I had the consultant come in, and we’re watching me talk on camera, doing whatever story, and she kept commenting, at least for me specifically, like, the rate, the pace of my speaking.

Now, when I get excited, when I’m happy, I tend to talk very fast. I think that’s just kind of like who I am, like I’m just excited, so I talk fast, especially if I’m maybe doing a story that’s more upbeat. And I remember her saying, “Jessica, you got to slow down.” And, in my mind, I was like, “I actually thought I was talking much slower than I would normally do,” because I know being and talking fast is my one weakness. And she was like, “No, no, no, Jessica, if you really want to be impactful, you got to speak way slower.”

And that’s when I realized, your tone of voice has many different elements, and, yes, how fast you speak is the first one. So, I’m going to walk through the five right now. So, number one, your tone of voice, the first element is really what we call your rate, how fast you’re speaking. And that’s kind of like the one that we think of the most because when people are nervous or excited, which is in my case, we talk fast. So, the key is you can actually control and change it. In fact, you do want to have a variety.

The second one is what we call your pitch, and that is basically how high or how low your voice is. Now, we know men tend to have lower pitches, women tend to have higher pitches, but here’s the thing, we all have a range. If we’re maybe talking about something serious, something that we want people to understand the urgency, then we might want to modulate our pitch so it’s a little lower. But it’s not doing it in this unnatural way. It’s, again, knowing that we all have a range.

The second one or the third one is thinking about your intensity. So, intensity, essentially, is how loud or how soft your voice is. Now, typically, when we are mad or angry, we will raise our voice but sometimes when people are shy and timid, they might speak in a lower tone of voice. And the idea is you want to have variety.

And I think this is like very strategic if you’re thinking about, let’s say, you’re giving a presentation and you’re speaking, you’re speaking maybe in a louder voice, and then suddenly you want to get people to know that this point is the most important. So maybe you’ll slow down your rate, lower your voice because that gets people to lean into what you have to say.

The next one is what we call inflection, and that is essentially what words you want emphasized. So, as you’re speaking, you have a choice of, “This is the word that I want people to know.” Like, even I’m just kind of doing it right now, “This is the word I want people to know is the most important.” And that is part of your tone of voice. It’s that inflection on that word.

And then, finally, it’s what we call the quality, and that is inherently, “What does your voice sound like?” When somebody calls you, they’re like, “Oh, that’s Pete,” “Oh, that’s Jessica.” And we say, of the five, the first four, you can control. In fact, you should change and have variety, but you can’t really change what’s inherent, which for some people, it might be that squeaky voice, that hoarse voice, that raspy voice. That’s just inherently who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
In a way, I’m thinking about sort of like recipes. If I want someone to receive a message more, like, thoughtfully, “Let’s reflect on this thing here, and really kind of mellow out and be calm,” we’re going to have a slower rate and a softer volume intensity. And that sort of produces that, which is very different than, “Rally the troops! Onward!” It’s like we’ve got more volume and rate in that zone.

Jessica Chen
Exactly. And I don’t know if you’ve ever even, like, thought so intently about tone. Maybe this is the first time you’re really thinking about it because we’re talking about it, but you’re right, and I feel like because you’re, like, “I have a specific intention, then I need to talk and modulate my tone in this way.” And even when you were just doing those two different modulations, my feeling right now, as a person listening, like I felt a certain way. And that’s the thing, you controlled it, you kind of did that with your tone of voice.

Pete Mockaitis
And not to get on a rant, but people are amazed at AI speech-to-text these days, and it’s very impressive technology, I’ll give you that. Like, that’s pretty cool and that wasn’t around nearly as robustly and beautifully six years ago because I’ve tried over the years. But at the same time, boy, when I watch a YouTube video and it has an AI narrator, I can tell, I get irritated.

Because it’s, yes, you are saying the words, bravo. Bravo, robot. But it’s not giving me all the emotional things with words that are part of what make a video lovely. So, I don’t know, that’s my take for what that’s worth. What’s your take on how AI plays into all this, Jessica?

Jessica Chen
Honestly, it’s just going to get better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, over time.

Jessica Chen
It’s just going to get better. It’s going to get better over time. It’s going to sound so realistic and it’s going to be scary, in my opinion. But where it is right now, I think many of us can tell it’s very artificial. It doesn’t sound very natural. And, as humans, like, I think that’s actually a good thing right now. It does kind of scare me a little bit once you cannot differentiate between, “Is this AI talking or is this a human talking?” But right now, for us, as humans to humans, that is how we connect. It’s the emotion behind the words, the language that we’re using. That’s how it builds connection, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And then you got me thinking about news broadcasters, in particular, and connection. What do I call that, the down pitch, in terms of like at the end of things? And some folks, let’s see, for an example, I might say, “And Starbucks revenue has increased by 18%.” It’s like the “Do-do,” at the end. And so, sometimes I get the vibes, it’s like, “Okay, you’re done. That’s what you’re communicating with that, is that we’re done, we’re over with this.” But kind of my thought is, from like a connection building perspective, that makes me feel like the broadcaster is more robotic and artificial and less connectable. So, what’s your take? You’ve been in it.

Jessica Chen
Oh, yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about this. And I have a lot of thoughts because I had to also get out of that broadcast mentality myself. Having worked in broadcast, you start to develop a “broadcasting voice.” And, in some ways, it’s good for maybe more of, like, the nightly news, where, really, it’s just telling you exactly, like, what’s going on.

But if you watch morning shows, for example, on television, it’s way more casual, way more conversational, and that’s the intent. Because in a morning show, the vibe is really to like connect with the audience versus, I think, in my opinion, when you’re watching the nightly news, it’s really about, “This is serious stuff we’re talking about. Like, this is what’s going on. This is breaking news, or whatever politics and crime, whatever’s happening.”

And I think, for most of us listening right now, we’re not trying to talk in that broadcast voice. Actually, a lot of people say, like, “I want to speak like the people who talk on television.” And I’m like, “Actually, you don’t. Yes, maybe in the sense where they’re talking very clearly, they’re enunciating the words, yeah, those are all really good things. But when you’re talking about just everyday speak, you really want to not talk as if you’re talking to a person. You want to talk as if you’re just having a conversation.”

And, honestly, Pete, I think you do a good job with this too. Even though we’re doing this recording together, and in some ways it’s “broadcasting,” but it’s really like we’re having a conversation, and I think that’s really the approach and mentality for everybody.

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

Jessica Chen
I would say the number one most important thing that I want people to know is whether you grew up in a quiet culture, or a loud culture, or you find yourself a mix of both, where sometimes it’s easy to speak up, or sometimes it feels a bit harder, I think what we can do for ourselves is know that we actually can control our career brand.

And our career brand is the perception people have of us in the office. So, the real kind of takeaway point is when you go into work every day and you’re thinking about communications, for example, or you’re thinking about tone of voice, or any of those things that we’re just talking about today, ultimately though, what can really accelerate any of our careers in the corporate environment or whatever industry that you’re in is knowing how you can take the work that you have to do, things that people assign you to do, and how can you use it to really leverage it for more opportunities.

Of course, communications plays a huge role in that, but if there’s any kind of, like, one golden nugget, I want people to feel empowered when it comes to their work, and knowing that they have control. Otherwise, if you don’t control the narrative of your own career brand, other people are going to start controlling it for you, and then you start to be boxed into, like, this person who just does this one thing. And I think all of us are way more dynamic than that.

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

Jessica Chen
It’s the one where it’s about when you think about communicating, it’s not always about focusing on the words that you say. It’s really about how you’re making other people feel with that.

And I think that’s kind of the essence of why I do what I do. And when people ask me, like, “Oh, can you help me become a more strategic communicator?” a lot of times, I’m like, “Yes, the words that you say matter, of course, are really important, but let’s talk about delivery and how you’re saying it because that’s really what matters at the end.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jessica Chen
I recently read a good one by Tessa West, it’s called Job Therapy.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes.

Jessica Chen
And I actually really enjoyed that book. I mean, granted, I will be biased, we share the same editor, but I really liked her book because it’s similar to kind of, like, how I think about career. It’s a very proactive way of finding a career that makes you happy instead of the other way around, essentially.

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

Jessica Chen
On my desk, I have a cup heater and love it because it just keeps my coffee hot all day. 

But, honestly, in all seriousness, I will say, and this is, they don’t pay me to say this but I do use this one app quite a bit to schedule meetings. It’s called Motion, and that has been huge for me. I’ve been using that a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people seem to really connect and resonate with and quote back to you often, and say, “Jessica, that was brilliant. Thank you”?

Jessica Chen
I would say you got to be your own best cheerleader. I think, for a lot of us who are smart, hardworking, we do good work, sometimes we can just do the thing and then move on. And I think it’s important to remind ourselves that, from time to time, we got to celebrate ourselves, be our own best cheerleader, and it could be even like small little things.

And one quick tip that I love to share with people is if you get an email from somebody, and they’re saying, “Congratulations. Good job. Awesome work,” create what I call a “Yay” folder. Drag that email into your “Yay” folder, and that will effectively become the one place where you can find all the good work that you’re doing, which is very helpful for performance review season.

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

Jessica Chen
I’m most active on LinkedIn, so do connect with me on LinkedIn, Jessica Chen. But I’m also on Instagram, so same thing, Jessica Chen, Jessica Chen page. Otherwise, our website, SoulCastMedia.com. That’s, like, another way to get in contact me and find out about the communications work that we do.

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

Jessica Chen
Yeah, find something to celebrate this week because you are going to be your own best cheerleader. So, think back to the last week, put something small that you did that you’re pretty proud of, and how can you highlight it so other people know about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Jessica, this is fun. Thank you and best of luck.

Jessica Chen
Thank you, Pete.

Aug 19
0

988: How to Elevate Your Status and Command Respect at Work with Alison Fragale

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Alison Fragale reveals the keys to improving others’ perceptions of you.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical missing piece for your advancement
  2. Why your response to “How are you?” matters more than you think
  3. The quickest way to get others to promote you

About Alison

Alison Fragale is the author of LIKEABLE BADASS: How Women Get the Success They Deserve and the Mary Farley Ames Lee Distinguished Scholar of Organizational Behavior at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Kenan-Flagler Business School. As a research psychologist, award-winning professor, international keynote speaker, and author, she is on a mission to help others — especially women — use behavioral science to work and live better. Her scholarship has been published in the most prestigious academic journals in her field and featured in prominent media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Inc. She lives in Chicago with her husband and three children, who are all named after professional athletes.

Resources Mentioned

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Alison Fragale Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alison, welcome.

Alison Fragale
Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting with you because you’re going to teach us how to become likable badasses. That sounds like something I think that we want. What’s the scoop here?

Alison Fragale
I think we should. You know, I will say when I put Likable Badass on the cover of my book, I get the same reaction from everybody. It’s, “Yes, that’s what I’m going for.” And people want it, and there’s a good reason that they want it, because there’s a lot of science behind how it actually helps us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, lay it on us. So, what is the benefit associated with, well, first of all, just define a picture of what that means, and then share with us the research on how that’s beneficial for us.

Alison Fragale
I’m going to take one step backward, and I’m going to introduce something that I care a lot about and I think everyone should care a lot about, and that is the idea of status. And status is how much we’re respected and regarded by other people. So, if we have high status, that would mean our audiences have high respect and regard for us.

And I know from my work and others, it’s what we call a fundamental human need. It’s something all human beings seek, and life is so much better with it, without it. Work is better. Life is better. Our physical and mental health, our ability to gain power at our job, to use the power we have, all these things. So, status is really important for us to understand and understand how we can influence ours.

Where does Likable Badass come in? Because when people look at another person and decide, “Do I respect that person?” when you do that to other people, those decisions that you make, that we all make, those aren’t random. They follow a pattern. There’s two things we look for when we’re evaluating another person to decide how much do we value them. And one thing we look for is how capable they are.

I often talk about that as our assertiveness. Not just, “Can we assert ourselves?” but a whole of skills that if I give you a task, can you get it done? Can you do it well? Are you competent? Are you organized? Are you efficient? Are you persistent? And so, if you have those qualities, I know if I put something in your hands, it’s going to get executed well and I value that. So, I’m going to respect you because of that. So, capability, assertiveness, that’s important.

And then the other one, is our warmth, or do we care about people other than ourselves? And that’s really important too, because I’m going to value people who aren’t just out for themselves, who are going to use their talents to benefit me. And so, if we see somebody who’s very caring and other-oriented, we value that too. We respect it.

So, those two dimensions in psychology are really critical. In fact, we call them when we create a little XY axis out of them, we call them the interpersonal circle of person perception. And “Likable Badass” is my catchy term for the space in the circle we all want to be, which is we all want people to see us as very capable and very caring.

Because when we do that, that’s how we gain status, that we respect people who are good at getting stuff done and who care about other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And I suppose that, so is it fair to say these are the two dominant things that make us perceive a person as being respect-worthy, these are the two?

Alison Fragale
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I suppose there might be some third elements that are idiosyncratic to individuals. I was watching this comedy movie, where this guy was shocked and appalled that his best friend was a Republican, for example. So, I’m thinking, like, there might be certain dimensions of division or stereotyping that can cut across this for people. It’s like, “Okay, you’re very capable and you are very warm, but I still don’t like you for…” insert fill-in-the-blank personal bugaboo. Is that fair to say?

Alison Fragale
Yes, although I think you can actually probably shoehorn most of these judgments into capability and warmth somehow. So, I kind of question how good of a human you are. Or maybe I question your intelligence, because, “How could you possibly believe this is true or that is true?”

So, under capability, for example, is also competence and intelligence. So, it’s a circumflex, and there’s characteristics all the way around it. But a lot of times, we can take most of the judgments we have and say, “They do reflect on either how good I think you are at what you do, how smart you are, or how nice and caring you are.”

Again, I’m sure if we played the game long enough, you could find something, but even a political affiliation that people could say, “I don’t really respect that person,” you think, “Well, why don’t I respect that?” And it could come to something about, “Well, you can’t be that smart if you believe that’s true,” or, “You can’t care about other people if you’re willing to let A, B, and C happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. So, our deeply held beliefs about a political affiliation, or any sort of an issue, then colors the extent to which we think that they are likable and capable. And so, I guess the opposite of a likable badass would be a jerk-idiot. We’ll hyphenate it. Yeah, I sure don’t want to be one of those, or either of those.

Okay, so there we have it. Status is a fundamental human need, and if we are in the likable badass zone, then good things come to us. I guess we feel we have status, and that feels good, that human need is being met. We feel respected, which is cool and enjoyable. And so, what does it do for us in terms of our career, our progression, our being awesome at our jobs?

Alison Fragale
One thing it does is it opens up all of the things that we tend to want at work. It makes all those things easier to achieve. So if you want to climb a career ladder, if you wanted to have more responsibility, if you wanted to be paid more, all of those things are forms of power, which is related to status, and I spend a lot of time helping people understand the distinction.

Power is controlling resources that people value. So, if I get to spend my budget without having to ask for permission, if I get to make a decision about a work product without having to ask for permission, if I get to review your performance, if I get to hire and fire, all these kinds of things are resources that we value and we control. If I get to come and go as I wish at work, have autonomy, work from wherever, that’s a resource.

So power is also another fundamental human need. People want to be in control. The lack of control of your environment also damages our life satisfaction and our physical and mental health. But status, being respected, is a gateway to getting all of these other good things. Not only is it good to possess in and of itself and it feels good, it also is how we get the power and the resource control that we want. And not everybody wants power in the same way, but everybody wants control over their environment. Again, even if it’s just power over self, “I want the autonomy to be able to work when and where I want or how I want.”

So, we focus a lot on power when we try to help people navigate their careers. A lot of on “How do you advance?” But the piece of the conversation that I don’t think we’re having as explicitly as we should is, “Well, how do you get those things?”

And the way I started was teaching people negotiation skills, which are important. You think, “If I can negotiate really well, I can negotiate myself into the career that I want.,” and that’s helpful. But also, it helps if your audience really values what you’re bringing to the table, that if you’re trying to get something from somebody and that person who’s looking at you, rightly or wrongly says, “I don’t really value you, and I don’t really respect you very much.”

You’re kind of sunk at that point, there’s very little you could say or do from a strategy standpoint that’s going to get you a good outcome, because we don’t give rewards to people that we don’t respect. So, it opens doors for us to being able to control our environment at work in whatever way we want to do it, and that is also really valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Alison, conceptually, that seems to add up and check out like, “Yep, sure, that follows.” Could you point to any particular studies or data that show perhaps just how eye-popping-ly powerful this status stuff is?

Alison Fragale
One of my favorites, looked at interruptions in a work group. and looking at gender and interruptions in the work group. So, this is a group, they had three men, six women, intact group, worked together for years, and the researchers studied the group, and they looked at who got interrupted and who spoke. And they found that everybody spoke at a proportional rate, and so everyone had about equal airtime.

But not surprisingly, the women were getting interrupted disproportionately, much more so. And an interruption is a marker of low status. So, when someone interrupts you, they literally silence you. And so, when you are cut off from even speaking, you can’t have influence. And so, who gets to talk and who gets cut off is a subtle way that we communicate whose ideas are worth hearing and whose aren’t, whose do we respect. So, an interruption is a status, a marker of status.

So, they find the women are cut off, and that is not necessarily surprising, given what you know that gender affects status. But what might be surprising is when I tell you the group, and the group in question is the United States Supreme Court. So, they found, this was the court at the time when Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were three justices. Those were the three out of the nine. They were interrupted disproportionately more than their male colleagues.

And so, this idea of, “Do they all have power and equal power?” Yes. “Do some of them might have more status than others, in this case, coming from gender as a determinant of status?” Yes. And so, what we see is that even when people have a lot of power, if they do not have the status, that power doesn’t necessarily raise their status, and it doesn’t necessarily protect them from being treated in these lower-status ways.

And so, I always say, if the power of being a Supreme Court justice is not enough to guarantee that everybody would respect you and listen to what you have to say, then we can’t expect that any of us are going to have it. So, we’d like to think that power, being in charge of stuff, is going to make everyone respect us, but what you see in that study is it doesn’t, that direction doesn’t work. The other direction of, “I respect you and, therefore, I give you power,” we see a lot more evidence of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. But I guess a follow-up is, is it the fellow justices interrupting the female Supreme Court justices, or is it attorneys?

Alison Fragale
Both. Both.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, I would be, “Whew!”

Alison Fragale
Yeah, it’s transcripts of these cases that appear before the Supreme Court. So, it’s both the justices and the people who appear before them. Yes, both.

Pete Mockaitis
I would not dream of interrupting a Supreme Court justice, male or female, which is maybe a whole other dynamic about personality in the mix there. So, yeah, I could chew on that one for a while. So then, point made, that there’s quite the distinction between power and status. And it’s interesting how much I really, really don’t like being interrupted.

And so I like that you’re pointing out that, okay, well, yeah, that’s really kind of like a fundamental human dimension is going on, as opposed to I’m just a cranky jerk. So, thank you for that. So then now unpack for us how having status results in great things unfolding for us from a data-driven perspective?

Alison Fragale
We see the status power link, which is, if I have status, so if we look at the groups, there’s been studies done in all kinds of work groups, groups in the military, civilian groups, and they measure at time one who are the really respected people in the group, and that’s a status measure.

And then at time two, they’re measuring who ends up, ultimately, getting the power at some point, like who gets to be the leader, who gets to be in charge. And in all those studies, what you see is that strong status power link, that the people who are the most respected at time one and time two end up being the people who get to be in charge. And I think, I really want to point this out, because not everybody necessarily wants a promotion, not everybody necessarily wants more money or more work. But, one, people do like autonomy over their lives and control, and that power and status are both resources.

Those resources do not just need to be used to benefit you. Those resources can be used to do all kinds of good things for the world. So, if I have power, I could use my power to hire the people who I think deserve to be hired but often get overlooked. I could use my power to elevate somebody in the organization who does great work but may not necessarily get the recognition. And so, power is a resource that we can do a lot of things with. So, that science goes that way.

And then the other piece is that if somehow you had managed to be one of the, you’d think, lucky few who didn’t navigate status very well, but managed to kind of get ahead in your career to the point where you were a person who had a lot of power, you were kind of a Supreme Court justice of your domain, you might think, “Oh, okay, well, I’ve made it, right? I’ve arrived,” but actually, and this is what I’ve spent a lot of my own research doing, we find things get worse for people.

And what we find is that when a person is in that situation, it’s a miserable existence.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like it.

Alison Fragale
Yeah. Well, you look at research on incivility, so that’s going to be the mistreatment that kind of goes below the radar. You’re not officially harassing somebody, but you’re doing something that makes them feel terrible. You roll your eyes, you cut them out of the information flow, you make some kind of snide comments about them, that kind of stuff. That stuff is disproportionately directed toward people who have power but don’t have status. And we see at work data that people, when they’re treated that way, they exit if they can.

So, I’m really struck by a lot that’s been reported lately about the exodus of senior women from organizations at greater rates than junior women. Because gender affects status, the idea of being a senior woman raises the idea that some of those people are in these low-status power holder positions. They control a lot of stuff and people don’t respect them.

And then we see they’re treated uncivilly and no one likes that, and so if they have an option, they eject, and we see people, senior women leaving at greater rates than they’re actually being promoted. So, it’s both the good things that can happen to you with it, and the bad things that could befall you without it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. So, lay it on us, Allison, status, how do we get it at work?

Alison Fragale
Some of the things that affect our status are things that are outside of our control and some things that we just might inherit, if you will.

So, it could be gender, race, an accent, an ethnicity, a religion, all these kinds of things, and they don’t have any bearing on our competence or our caring, but people think they do. We give them meaning and, therefore, some people get more automatic respect than others just because of how they look or show they up. So that’s part of it, and that’s why, so some people getting status is actually a little more work, and I want to acknowledge that because status comes from these two places.

But the part that’s very positive is that a huge amount of our status is very controllable. It comes from how we show up when we interact with human beings. And the part that we can control has been shown to have a bigger impact on how respected we are than the parts we can’t control.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good news.

Alison Fragale
Yes, it’s very good news, but what it means is that if we have some of these things that we can’t control that aren’t working for us, we want to be really sophisticated about controlling the controllables. So, here’s the deal. Status exists only in somebody else’s head. It’s their belief about you. So, what do we need to do to influence our status? We need to influence what they believe about us. Feels daunting, but psychology, this is what we study. We say, “Look, you can have a lot of effect on your audience.” It’s controlling the messaging that your audience gets.

So, everything that everyone in the world knows about you at this point in time has come from one of two communication channels. One is information you have put out in the world. Someone sat next to you on an airplane, they listen to your podcast, they know you from being your neighbor, whatever it is, they read about you online, social media, whatever. Those are things that you have originated, put them in the world and people see them.

So, one is we have to control that channel. And what I mean by that is making sure that we are putting information out there that says to individuals and the world at large, “I’m very capable and I’m very caring.” Sometimes that is being willing to self-promote to talk about positive things in a way that feels authentic and comfortable, and we can explore that piece of it. Sometimes it means not doing dumb stuff. So, there’s some stuff that we do that there’s a logic to it. We think, “This is going to be really good for my brand,” and it’s not.

So, one example would be hiding our successes. This is why self-promotion is effective. Hiding our success. Something good has happened to you. You’ve gotten an award, or you’ve hit a milestone on your podcast, or something like this, and you think, “I’m proud of that. That’s good. But I’m not going to go and tell people about that because I don’t want to be seen as a bragger. I want to be humble. And if I’m humble, you’ll like me more.” That’s how I convey the whole likable piece.

But if we’re chatting, and you have some good news and you don’t share it and then you leave, and I hear later, because the grapevine is efficient, that you didn’t tell me, is my first thought, “Oh, my God, Pete is so humble”? No. People think, “Why didn’t Pete tell me? Are we not that close? Or does Pete think I’m so petty I couldn’t be happy for him?”

And so, what happens is when we hide our successes, we actually do it because we think it’s going to get us at least the likable part, not the badass part, but it’s going to get us the likable part. But the research shows it isn’t actually true. It’s not what people infer when they hear that you had something good and you didn’t tell them. You actually end up being seen as capable when the news is released, but it damages the relationship.

So, a better strategy is, why is sharing our success actually a good thing for all that we’ve been told about telling our stories and self-promoting? It’s because you are seen as warmer when you are forthcoming with people and you’re seen as more capable because you’ve told them about the good things. So, that would be an example of starting to control your channel, to not do something that you think is helping your reputation or your brand, but the science shows that it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
If being forthcoming is a desirable attribute, we probably also want to share sort of major happenings in general, otherwise we’re not forthcoming, whether maybe something sad has occurred in your life, and then they find out about that through the grapevine and they say, “Oh, I was just talking to him. How come he didn’t bring that up?” I guess that same phenomenon could occur there.

Alison Fragale
That’s right. So, again, self-disclosure, you want to be authentic about it and decide where you want to draw the line. Some forms of self-disclosure help build our status. Other forms might not. You might share something personal to build the rapport and the warmth. But then you might say, “I’m going to tell you some things I’m not really good at,” and that’s self-deprecation.

But that is a behavior that is not status-building. Because when we cut ourselves down, we’re basically saying, “I’m not as capable as you think I am,” and we are the experts on ourselves. So, when people cut themselves down, they are seen as less capable as a result, on whatever dimension they just deprecated. But we often do it because it’s socially cohesive.

Cutting yourself down is a form of humor, and many comedians, that’s they’re bread and butter, right? They make fun of themselves, and we laugh, and it is a form of humor. So, being funny is actually cohesive, it builds warmth, but humor at your own expense doesn’t. And so, I think it raises the idea of when I talk about controlling a channel of communication, the balance between being authentic and being strategic.

Because you might say, “I had a really bad day today and I really messed something up. And I didn’t do a good job and I got really bad feedback at work.” And the question is, like, “Do I share it? Do I cut it? Or do I keep it to myself?” And I think everybody gets to make their own decision about what they want to put out there and what they don’t.

But what I’ve had to coach myself on is a lot of the self-deprecating I was doing was done solely for the purpose of trying to be funny. I mean, I believed it to be true, but I was like, “Oh, this is my way of being funny.” Not fully appreciating that that form of humor wasn’t having the effect that I was hoping it would have, which is people would respect me more because of it. And so, now I’m more thoughtful that, if I’m seeking advice or support from somebody, and I say something has gone really wrong, I will tell them because I want their advice or their support in the moment.

But there might be other moments where my goal in the interaction is to show up in a way that’s going to get people to respect me, and I might say, “I’m going to tell a different truth, maybe something that is also equally true, but showcases my capabilities and my concern for others a little bit more.” So, controlling our channel is going to be a big one. And then thinking about easy ways that we can show up to other people and showcase how capable and caring we are.

And what I always tell people is, “Look for opportunities to solve other people’s problems using your unique skills and talents, things you are naturally good at, you really enjoy, and doesn’t take you very long to solve their problems. If you do that in life, and that’s all you do, you will build your status because as soon as you solve their problem, you’re capable, and you’ve spent your effort to solve something that matters to them, so you’re caring.”

But those things can sometimes be done in seconds. So, introducing two people, for example, is a form of solving somebody’s problem, “Hey, let me connect you with somebody who can do the thing that you’re looking for.” And I’m showing that my network is really valuable and it’s really robust, and I’m using my network for your benefit.

Taking something you like. I was very struck recently by a woman that I saw in an event, and she was the unofficial-official Instagram documentarian of this event, and she was taking videos and everything, but she said, “You know, I love being on Instagram, but I think a lot of my older senior colleagues don’t value this. They think it’s, like, personal and silly and it doesn’t really matter. And so, so how do I balance, like, that I really care about that with the fact that that they don’t?”

And I said, “You know, I would love someone who knew better than I did, to say, ‘Hey Allison, I know you’re on social. I have some ideas about how I could make your social more fun for you or more effective or better and, like, increase the impact of your messaging. Could I help?’” Well, all of a sudden, “Oh, sure.” Now it’s not just this silly thing you do. It’s you using your natural talent to help me.

And a lot of those things are fun for people and they’re easy.I always joke, you can buy someone’s coffee if you meet for coffee, but it’s a pretty forgettable act. It doesn’t showcase your capability. But if you make an intro or you give someone feedback on their Instagram, it’s not that much more effort than buying the coffee, but it’s allowing you to showcase yourself in a way that is more unique while still helping them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so these fundamental principles make good sense. We can control the channel, make sure the good stuff gets out there and we don’t hold it back, as well as being helpful. We’re helping people, thus being warm, and we’re helping them using our unique skills, thus being capable at the same time. So, I think those are great things to get our radar up and being on the lookout for such opportunities. You mentioned introductions are great. Do you have any other super favorite things that anyone can do that are great?

Alison Fragale
A hundred percent. So, first, always have good answers to what I call throwaway questions. When people say to you, “What’s new? How is it going? How’s work?” A lot of times we just throw those questions away, “It’s fine. I’m busy. It’s good. How are you?” And at that moment, someone’s giving you a chance to tell your story. Now, do they want a 30-minute answer to that question? They do not.

But something that is better than “fine” or “busy” but gets them interested, like, “I had a great win at work today.” Something that sparks a little curiosity and gets them to actually pause and ask you a little bit about your story. That can be a really good one is, don’t throw those questions away.

The second one is to use the updating that you’re naturally doing as a course of your job to build your status. So, we often have to give people status updates. Use those kinds of things as storytelling opportunities. And one effective way to do that is, in psychology it’s called dual promotion, I call it brag and thank. Anytime you have an update, you’re going to talk about a success or a win that you’ve had, and you’re also going to talk about the great work of other people who helped that win be possible. I’m telling you something great about me and I’m also telling you something great about other people.

That turns out to be a really winning strategy because when we promote ourselves, we’re seen as more capable, and when we shine the spotlight on somebody else, we’re seen as more caring. So anytime we can put those two things together in a message, whether it’s an email, or stopping somebody in the hall, that’s going to be a really easy one for us to be able to do.

And then the other, I’m going to kind of go over into this second channel, because if you remember, I told you there were two channels of communication. One is us and the other is things other people have said about us. So, everything that’s known about Pete is things Pete has put out into the world or things that people have heard or known about you and they’ve repeated. And so, a lot of our status is not built by us. It’s built by other people talking about us in positive ways or they could tear our status down if they’re talking about us in negative ways.

But if someone else is talking about your status in a positive way, they’re doing a lot of your work for you, and they can brag about how capable you are all day long, and there’s no risk to you.

So, one simple thing is finding ways to meet more people. I always say people cannot sing your praises if they do not know you exist. And so, this whole idea that we’ve always been told to network and to meet more people, put yourself in situations to meet more people. There’s a million ways to do it and I’ll tell you the stories if you’re curious, but I’ll just start with this.

Some of the people who have been the most helpful in my career, I met them in airports, like strangers that you have a random conversation with, and next thing you know, within five minutes, something gets uncovered and you’re like, “Huh, okay, maybe we should stay in touch,” and you stay in touch and then the relationship forms.

The other one that I want to offer because it’s just the right way to be, and it’s also very valuable, is the easiest way for you to get someone else to go build your status for you is for you to build theirs first because human behavior is reciprocated. So, a simple daily practice that we can have, to be awesome at our job and build these relationships, is every time you observe someone and you think, “Wow, that was great,” whatever it was, tell somebody, put it out into the world, promote them, and say, “This person is amazing.”

It feels great to do it, but also because the grapevine is efficient, they will eventually find out that you were saying nice things about them, and human behavior is reciprocated. So, one of the easiest ways to build other promoters is for us to just cultivate a daily practice of promoting other people first. So, I have a rule and I always say, if I have a nice thought about somebody in my head, I do not let the thought die there. I put it out into the world somewhere. And that alone, as a simple practice, if that was all a person ever did, would garner them a lot of reciprocal other promotion in spades.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s say I have a nice thought like, “Oh, my buddy, Dave, is so funny.” I mean, I’m not sure where I would park that. I could just text Dave, say, “Hey, I really appreciate you. You’re funny.” Or, I mean, I could put a glowing message on a post on LinkedIn, he might be like, “Pete, what’s going on here, dude?” I don’t know. Where would I park that?

Alison Fragale
Yeah, so I think it depends on the context. One, sometimes I can just go back to the person to say, like, “I was thinking about this today, and it, you know, what your humor is just always like such a joy and cracked me up I was thinking about that.” So that could be appropriate. It doesn’t necessarily have to be, “I do it the moment I think of it.” Like, if I have a thought right now, I’m not going to hop off the podcast and go do something else, but I keep it there and I think about where it has an opportunity.

One of the things I often do is I’ll think about a mutually beneficial introduction that I could make, and when I make that introduction and I think, like, “Dave is hilarious. And what would advance Dave’s interests? And how would him being a funny guy actually be value-added to somebody else?” Even if it’s just two people who have a shared personal connection, I think they would really, really like to be friends.

So, I could introduce Dave to my other funny friend and that could be it, right? And so now, even if that intro goes nowhere, at least you’ve put to the other person in the world, “Hey, Dave is this funny guy.”

And I think when we do those kinds of things, a lot of them don’t go anywhere at the time. If it’s somebody you work with, then you have a lot of opportunities to think about this in terms of hallway conversation and things like that. The next time you’re in a meeting and let’s say you work with Dave, and Dave’s in the meeting, you could think about amplifying something Dave said, or to think about, “Dave is really good at doing X because Dave’s always the person who can put somebody else at ease. And so, I think we should be thinking about letting Dave lead this because he has great skills.”

So, it doesn’t have to be instantaneous. It could be just back to that person. But to think about, “If I think positively about this, who else would benefit from that person’s skills in a way?”

So, again, most people have a lot of positive thoughts about people and they aren’t using those positive thoughts to build that person’s status, and that’s an oversight that we should correct as much as we can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super. And when you talk about introductions, I’m also thinking about just when you happen to be at in-person events. I remember I was at a funeral banquet, and someone was just introducing me and others to each other, and it didn’t take long. It’s like, “Hey, this is Pete. He has a tremendous podcast which helps people do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s a thought leader, this and that.” I was like, “Oh, well, thank you.” It was like, “Oh, I like you more!”

Alison Fragale
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And then vice versa, the person who introduced me, “This person has a tremendous Star Wars memorabilia collection.” It’s just kind of fun and interesting. I mean, I’m not super into Star Wars memorabilia, so I don’t necessarily think that that person with a Star Wars memorabilia is extra amazing. But I’m more interested, like, “Oh, wow, huh, a collector. Okay. How did you get into that?” And so, it just seems like everybody wins when we just give a little bit more positive, good detail about who is this person when we introduce each other.

Alison Fragale
Exactly right. You’ve got it. It doesn’t take much. And even with something like Star Wars memorabilia, you might say, “This is the person who knows more about the Star Wars, like, canon and all the memorabilia than any person I’ve ever met.” And so, you would at least then respect some capability. It’s not a capability you would need to have yourself, but you’re like, “Huh, someone had to probably dedicate some actual effort, right? And so, now I see them as a more capable person, even if their skillset is not what I need.”

And you’re right, that we can do that quickly, we can do it authentically, and we can do it in person, we can do it over email, and just thinking about those positive things that we can say when we have our moment can be a great start to being able to build other people’s status for us. And then to your point, you said, “Oh, I had that moment where I thought more positively of them.”

I just had an email when my one of my oldest kids went to a Sleepaway Camp. He got an injury. I was emailing with the camp director to make sure the injury wasn’t going to keep him from being able to participate in camp, and it wasn’t. But when the camp director wrote back, he basically said, “By the way, I just got to tell you, like, how much I have really loved getting to know your son this year. What a leader he is among his peers. What a huge asset he is to camp.” It’s like two sentences.

But I observed, I was like, “Oh, I really like this guy now.” And so, I thought if the email had come the next day saying, “Our camp needs money,” I guarantee you I would have written a check and probably a bigger check than I would have written without that email. And so, I thought, “Oh, he complimented my kid. Oh, okay.” That makes me think he’s really smart because everyone thinks our kids are brilliant and “Oh, how nice.”

So, when I have these moments, like you had at the funeral luncheon or whatever, I unpack them to think, “Why did I feel so positively?” And the same, if I feel negative towards someone, “I like you as I think you’re an idiot.” What did they do? Because I don’t want to unintentionally be doing that thing. So that’s the armchair psychology that we all have in us, is unpack it when you experience it, because everyone else, we’re all like everyone, everyone else is just like us. So, if we felt that way, other people will too.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when we talk about doing self-promotion, what’s the right and the wrong way to do it? So, if someone says something like, “Oh, hey, how have you been?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m just absolutely crushing it. I’m going to have record-breaking income, maybe three or four mil this year.” It’s like, “Okay, good for you, dude, but this is kind of off-putting.”

So, I mean, one, based on your cultural context in the U.S. and some other places, sharing how much money you have, good or bad, is often kind of frowned upon and makes people uncomfortable. But in other cultural contexts, that’s sort of normative. How do we know some of the do’s and don’ts? We want to put the good stuff out there, but we don’t want to do it in an off-putting way.

Alison Fragale
So, look, this is where the art comes in of understanding your audience and thinking about what feels authentic for you. If it feels icky and you’re doing it as a strategy, I guarantee you it’s going to come across poorly. But if it feels natural, or it can start to feel more natural if you practice it a little bit, it’s better. First is, again, always think about, “Is there a way to do both? Say something good about myself and something good about another person.”

So, if I say, now the tone of voice, whatever that was, don’t do that thing again because that wasn’t going to work. But just the content of it, you know, the, “I’m on track to break three million, etc.” or, “I might have my best year ever, and I lead, as far as I can tell, the world’s best team. Like, this team is showing up in so many amazing ways, and I am just so excited about the success that I’m going to have and they’re going to have, and I don’t know how I got so fortunate.” Something like that where you can shine a spotlight on another person. That can be one way to do it.

The other is to say just a little bit and tease it and let someone else draw you out. Because if they’re asking you questions and you’re answering them, then it’s much more normative. Like, “How is this year compared to last year? Are you doing better?” And you say, “Yeah, I am doing better.” Then that doesn’t feel weird because you asked, but they have to make you curious about it. Like, “I just feel like things are really coming together at work in a great way that is making me really excited.” And you might be like, “Oh, well, what way?”

So, something that could pique a little bit of conversation, and then it’s not a dialogue. But another, you know, this is specific, but I’ll say the idea is to think about how to get that information out there under other purposes, like under the guise of other purposes. So, one example that I share with a lot of people is turning on your out-of-office message, which I’ve seen some people do really brilliantly, and it’s not a strategy I ever used, I still don’t use it as much or as brilliantly, but I’ve seen people, where whenever you’re out of the office, you turn on your message, “I’m gone. Please reach out to so-and-so. I’m back on this date.”

But other people have more flair in their out-of-office messages, and they communicate that the response will be delayed, but they say, “Here’s the exciting thing I’m doing.” Like, if you’re traveling to a conference, if you’re speaking at an event, if you’re, whatever it is, if you’re off talking to three clients, you can say, “Here’s what I’m doing,” and then add in some warmth, add in humor, add in some, “Here’s how I’m actually, like, the work that we’re doing is going to enable us to, like, grow in these markets is going to enable us to serve even more people who really rely on our product to be able to live their best lives,” or something like that.

And that’s an example of how you can start to use all your channels of communication. If you’re on social media, you can use your social media to talk about what you’re doing in a way that doesn’t feel as self-promoting as running around the office telling everybody, “Guess what I got to do?” or, “Here’s something,” you can just celebrate it.

Thinking about all those different ways to do it, but 100%, you have to know you and you have to know your audience because there’s not a script that’s going to say, “Oh, talk about it exactly in this way.” But the idea is if you don’t say anything about your capabilities, how will anyone ever actually know what they are?

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, before we hear about your favorite things, I want to quickly get your hot take on what about things like clothing, the fit of the clothes, the brands, or the up-dress, dress up, dress down-ness of them, and/or height, or vocal intonation, body language, posture, like these kinds of presentation things? How much of a status impact do they make?

Alison Fragale
They have a lot. They’re all channels. People are drawing conclusions from everything you put out into the world – your eye contact, your gestures, your tone of voice, your clothes, etc. Now, does that mean you can only speak in one way, that you should only gesture one way, you should only wear one outfit? Absolutely not. Authentic and strategic can coexist. But you should be aware, and this is one of the things I help people do, is understand all the different behaviors that are linked to status.

So, a common one is, “Why is it that the person who comes in the meeting and just yammers on about nothing all the time, always is considered so smart? It’s so annoying.” It is annoying. But it’s also from science, it’s true, that we associate quantity of communication, speed of responding, speed of speech as markers that somebody is more capable. And so, you don’t have to do those things, but you should understand the relationship.

And so, what I always say to people is, first is just do an audit of, “What signals am I putting out into the world?” And say, “Some of these signals are helping me show up as capable, some are helping me show up as caring, and some are actually doing neither, they’re taking me backwards.” Then the question is, “What do I do about these things, if any?”

I say you need to signal something in every as many interactions as possible that says, “I know what I’m doing,” and you need to signal something that says, “I care about other people.” But it doesn’t need to be all the signals, and you can have a couple that are counterproductive and still overcome them as long as you’re thinking about what else you would do to compensate.

So, I’m a really big apologizer. I say I’m sorry all the time for all kinds of things and just use the word. And I try to coach myself out of it. It was requiring way too much conscious effort and I was just getting annoyed, and every email was taking 36 minutes to write, because I’m like, “Oh, there’s an apology there. Oh, no, then what should I do with these exclamation points? They seem kind of, you know, not so strong either.” And like, then I got smiley faces. So, I said, “Forget it. And I’m going to do the apologizing. I don’t worry about it anymore.”

It’s a more submissive behavior, the opposite of assertiveness, but that’s okay because I have other things that signal capability. I happen to have some credentials that are good signals of credibility. I’m a professor, I have a PhD, things like this. And so, what I concluded was I have enough signals of assertiveness in the environments that I need to function, that I can have a couple of things that work against me that feel natural and authentic, and I can let them go.

So, that’s my general answer is. Those things do affect status. Yes, you should be aware of what the effects are. And then it’s for each individual to decide, “Do I want to change that or do I not?”

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

Alison Fragale
One that I will offer you here that relates to this is from Julia Child. “Never apologize for the food you serve. No one knows how it was supposed to turn out but you.”

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Alison Fragale
Deep Work by Cal Newport. I think his work really speaks to women and anybody else who is marginalized because we know that people who lack status are basically given the worst work. They’re given the non-promotable to do.

And so, I think the idea, the challenge of working deeply, and being able to work on things that matter, things that bring you joy, things that have high impact in the organization is harder for some people than others because they’re saddled with all the office housework. So, I really love Cal’s, all of his stuff, but Deep Work for that reason, because I think it has an important message for status, even though that’s not how he talks about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that people really seem to resonate with and connect with, an Allison original gem of wisdom?

Alison Fragale
Strategic and authentic are not opposites, that you can and should be both.

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

Alison Fragale
My website is a good place, AlisonFragale.com. When you’re on it, I have a free newsletter that I put out on Substack. It’s called “The Upper Hand” and it is behavioral science directed toward helping women advance. But as we talked about today, none of the things that I talk about are ever really only applicable to women. I talk about behavioral science that is tools people can use. So, if people are curious, it’s free. It’s on Substack. I write as often as I can, and I love sharing those kinds of ideas with people.

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

Alison Fragale
Ten, 10, 10. All right. Meet 10 new people. Make 10 small deposits, which is going to be an easy little thing you can do to show up as capable and caring, so, like, an introduction or solve their problems, something you could do that’s easy. Ten people, 10 small deposits, and promote 10 people to other people. So that was that tell them to say the good things that you think, and/or ask 10 people to promote you. Ask them to go build your status. That’s a scarier one that we haven’t talked about yet, but it’s really, really effective.

If you say to somebody, “Hey, person B really respects you. Will you go talk to person B and introduce me, talk me up, etc.?” So, 10, 10, 10. Meet 10 people, show up as capable and caring 10 times, same people, different, doesn’t matter, and promote 10 people, ask 10 people to promote you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alison, thank you for your wisdom. You are a super ultra mega baller. See what I did there?

Alison Fragale
I did. I love it. I’ll take it. Hey, there’s another thing. One of my favorite studies in social psychology, self-serving interpretations of flattery. It’s why flattery always works, is because people think, “Done to another person that might be considered flattery but to me it’s just accurate.” So, self-serving interpretation, so you can flatter people all day long. They never get tired of it. I love it. You’re amazing.