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Jul 02
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1165: How to Have Better Disagreements with Julia Minson

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Julia Minson reveals her strategies for making disagreements productive.

You’ll Learn

  1. The HEAR framework for productive disagreements
  2. The key to avoiding a stalemate in an argument
  3. Simple phrases that communicate curiosity instead of judgment

About Julia

Julia Minson, from the Harvard Kennedy School, studies the psychology of disagreement and conflict. Her work focuses on how people can communicate across differences without conversations becoming hostile or unproductive. She’s the author of How to Disagree Better and studies “conversational receptiveness” — the language patterns that make people more open, collaborative, and willing to engage.

Resources Mentioned

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Julia Minson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Julia, welcome!

Julia Minson
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about disagreeing better. Could you start us off with a key thing you’ve observed time and time again like the top thing you see that folks get wrong about disagreeing?

Julia Minson
I think there’s two things that sound like the opposite of each other, but they’re actually the same thing. On one hand, people avoid disagreement because they feel, like, intensely uncomfortable with it and sort of, like, really don’t want to get into it. And then on the other hand, you see people sort of flying off the handle and getting into very aggressive disagreements.

And you see both of these problems sort of all the time, and they’re actually related, right, because it’s usually when a person is avoiding something for a long time, eventually they sort of like blow a gasket, and then end up expressing their perspective in a very unstructured and unhelpful way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, and this is a learnable thing to not do that and to disagree better.

Julia Minson
Yeah, absolutely. So I am a psychologist at the Harvard Kennedy School, and I have spent my career trying to figure out how to help people do this better. And there’s really some, like, very concrete things that we get wrong, that if we fix them, life can get easier, conversations can get more productive.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone who saw a transformation in that regard?

Julia Minson
Sure. Well, I mean, honestly, I don’t know if you’ve heard this saying, “All research is me search,” right? So a lot of the time, academics study the type of thing that gives them the most difficulty, and I am absolutely the kind of person that used to be extraordinarily argumentative.

You know, I’m pretty smart and I used to love to show it to everybody who would listen. And I just learned over time that you get a lot more mileage by trying to understand where the other person is coming from because, so often, you start arguing and you don’t actually know what the argument is about, right?

You are sort of pushing a point and you don’t understand why the other person is resisting. But if you have some sense of where they’re coming from, it just really sort of transforms the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve got a cool concept, a turn of a phrase, conversational receptiveness, and I just think that is a very handy thing to have tattooed into our brains, if you will. Tell us, what does that mean and how is it helpful?

Julia Minson
So receptiveness to opposing views is your sort of tendency to think hard about stuff you disagree with, right? So we normally, as humans, do a really good job thinking about ideas we agree with and we ignore or look for flaws in ideas we disagree with.

So, for a long time, I was sort of really interested in this thing of like, “Are some people better at putting as much thought and putting as much effort into ideas they disagree with as ideas they do agree with?” And you could think, like, “Look, that’s probably a good idea because I will end up being a smarter, more well-rounded person.”

But once we figured out how you can measure people’s receptiveness, we also realize that people are quite bad at expressing it, right? So I can be thinking really hard about your perspective, I can be like, you know, putting in all this intellectual effort, but you have no idea.

So as the person I’m speaking with, if you don’t know that I’m trying, we are just as likely to have sort of very negative conversation and experience, you know, a bunch of conflict escalation and bad feelings towards each other if you don’t know that I am trying to listen to you.

So conversational receptiveness is a way to express the fact that you’re being receptive using words, right, using language, so that it’s, like, totally obvious and totally transparent to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you give us maybe a demonstration of some key phrases or indicators which share, “Hey, I’m receptive,” versus, “I’m not receptive”?

Julia Minson
So the best way to memorize kind of the basics of conversational receptiveness is using what we call the HEAR framework, so H-E-A-R as in, “I hear you.” And each letter stands for something, kind of a different idea.

So the H stands for hedging. So you might want to say, for example, “Look, COVID vaccines are safe and effective,” right? That’s a pretty sort of dogmatic statement, and a person who disagrees with you will start looking for holes in your argument and looking for counterexamples of, you know, they heard that somebody had some kind of vaccine side effect.

Instead, you could say, “Look, most physicians tend to believe that COVID vaccines are largely safe and effective,” right? So “most tend to” and “largely” are all ways of kind of hedging my claim. So it’s words like perhaps, maybe, occasionally, some people, right?

And what it does is it really kind of takes this wind out of your counterpart sides. It’s, like, you’ve demonstrated with your words that you understand that there is, in fact, another perspective, and you’re leaving a little bit of room for it. So that’s the H.

The E stands for emphasizing agreement. So the idea behind conversational receptiveness is not that we have to agree. It’s not that I have to, like, change my mind, I have to compromise, you know, I have to like meet you in the middle and give you a hug.

It’s that I recognize that any two humans agree on some stuff. It could be that we’re both concerned with something. It could be that we’re both upset about something. It could be that we just have some values that are in common.

So words like, “I also want to,” or, “I am also concerned with,” or, “We both would like to see, you know, XYZ happen,” just sort of puts us on the same side of the table for a second.

The A stands for acknowledgement. So taking a couple minutes to restate your counterpart’s perspective before you launch into your own argument, you know, “I hear that it’s really important to you that this project is delivered at a particular level of quality.”

Or, “I understand that you’re very concerned about the hours that the team has been working.” So it’s using my own words to demonstrate to you, like, unambiguously, that I was listening when you were talking.

And, finally, the R stands for reframing to the positive. So dropping negative and contradictory words like no, can’t, won’t, don’t, terrible, hate, kill, and replacing them with some more positively balanced words like, “It would be wonderful if,” or, “I appreciate it when,” or, “Great.”

So, “I hate it when people push me into stressful decisions.” Stop. It could be replaced with, “I really appreciate it when people give me more time to consider important choices. Thank you for understanding.” So kind of like same content, but a very different flavor. So H-E-A-R.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then you said using words. I mean, those are all words. I guess I’m curious also if there’s a degree of nonverbal things that convey receptiveness or lack thereof.

Julia Minson
Yeah, certainly. I mean, you can imagine, right? Like, if a person is nodding, if they’re smiling, if they’re not interrupting you, all of those things seem more receptive than the opposite. It tends to be the case that words are easier to control than our bodies, and actually easier to interpret than our bodies, right?

So a lot of the time, when people are listening hard, they look very serious and they kind of look sullen and they look like they’re staring into space. And it’s not because they’re not listening, it’s actually because they’re working really hard.

And so it’s very easy to interpret, or it’s very easy to misinterpret body language to mean something different. And people, like, misinterpret language language all the time, but language is clearer. So it’s, like, when we’re choosing between two imperfect tools, words are clearer than body language.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to acknowledging the other perspective, are there any tweaks you might put on the traditional notions of active listening, or is that just what this is?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so active listening is a really sort of interesting idea because it’s a mix of, like, stuff that happens in your head, the actual listening, and nonverbal stuff like nodding and smiling and eye contact, and some sounds, like uh-huh, and hmm, and huh, and then some restating.

And it’s really unclear from that whole kind of like menu of stuff what’s important, what really does the work for you. Like, if I’m nodding but not smiling, like, does that work? Or do I have to also be smiling? We focus on the language because you really can’t fake it.

Like, for me, to restate what you said in a way that’s accurate, I had to have listened to you. I can nod and smile all day long and have no idea what you’re actually saying. But for me to restate your words, that’s unfalsifiable proof that I was actually paying attention when you were talking. So that’s sort of why the focus on restating.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when it comes to the nods and uh-huh’s and okay’s, am I hearing you say that it’s unknown in the research if that is getting it done or not?

Julia Minson
So it’s not that it’s unknown. So we actually ran a very fun study where we wanted to see, like, you know, people always talk about how important it is to be a good listener, right? We all kind of agree on the fact that good listening is important.

And what we wanted to see is how good are folks at judging whether the other person is being a good listener, right? So imagine the setup where there’s a small lab room, it’s a little, like, slightly larger than your bathroom probably. And people go in there and it’s two strangers.

And what we tell them is that, “You need to have a conversation with this other person and get to know them, for example, as if you wanted to have them be a roommate. Like, what are the things you would ask them about and learn from them if you were interviewing them as a potential roommate.”

And in the room there’s two chairs. And behind one of the chairs, there’s a screen on the wall. And this screen is playing this, like, ongoing loop of commercials that are on mute, okay? And so one person sits down and their back is to the screen, and they walked in and they noticed the screen, and we’re like, “Ah, just ignore the screen. It doesn’t matter.”

The other person sits down and they’re facing the screen, right? So they’re facing their conversation partner and this person also has the screen behind them. And that person got special instructions. And so their special instructions are, “Either ignore the screen, talk to your counterpart, get to know them, or pretend you’re listening, and we will pay you extra money if you can memorize all the products for which there are the commercials on this screen.”

So it’s like if you go on a date, and there’s, like, a football game playing above the bar, and you’re wondering if your date is listening to you or, like, watching football above your head, like this is the experience.

And so then the person who had their back to the screen, what they have to do is they have to guess which condition their partner was in. So afterwards, we tell them, we’re like, “Hey, some people were instructed to listen carefully and some people were instructed to memorize commercials behind your head. Which condition do you think your person was in?” It turns out that people are terrible at this task.

Pete Mockaitis
Terrible at guessing?

Julia Minson
They’re terrible at guessing because they all think that the person sitting across from them, who is nodding and smiling, is listening to them, even though they’re not actually listening because they’re trying to memorize this other thing because they’re getting paid extra money for memorizing this other thing.

And so you can imagine, like in a meeting, for example, at work, you see this all the time. There’s a room full of people that’s, like, nodding and smiling and maybe even, like, typing on their laptops, right, but what they’re actually typing is their grocery list, or, like, they’re writing whatever, an email to their family, right? You have no idea what information is actually getting through.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating in and of itself. So I guess one takeaway is, “Hey, if you fake that you’re listening, you’re going to fool the other person. So I guess, good to know, but that doesn’t seem like a great strategy to do.”

Julia Minson
Well, it depends, right? Like, it depends on whose perspective you are looking at, right? So if you are trapped in an awkward situation and you’re just killing time, people are, like, very good at faking, you know, listening, smiling, like enjoyment, all of those things. Like, we are good at sort of getting along with people.

If you’re the person who’s trying to make sure that something is getting done, if you’re running this meeting, if you’re trying to brief people on a new project plan, if you need to make sure that everybody’s ducks are in a row, then you need to look for more reliable signals of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s super handy. Well, that HEAR framework, I like it and it seems to make great sense as you lay it out there for us. I’m curious if there are any finer points or distinctions or hiccups or little things that trip people up when they’re trying to execute this.

Julia Minson
The most common, I think, first experience is that it’s harder than people imagine it to be. So it seems super easy, you’re like, “Oh, H-E-A-R, I can memorize the words and I can say them.” But when you are in a disagreement, what you’re mostly thinking about is how to win. You’re thinking about how to come up with the best argument.

And so now, I’m asking you to do this extra thing that you have to do on top of thinking how to win, which might also feel like it’s going to prevent you from winning, because you now have to think about your counterpart’s argument and you have to take it seriously.

And so people just find that it takes some cognitive effort and it takes some practice. In the beginning, I always liken it to playing piano. Like, the first time you play piano, it does not sound like music. And so this feels awkward and effortful.

And then with some rounds of repetition, people start kind of getting into the groove of it, and becoming much more fluid at it. So I would say, the first thing to do is to not give up when it feels awkward the first time.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s a really key point there. We have a lot of our attentional resources on how to win, generally. And it sounds like that may not be the ideal stance in order to really listen and hear and receive someone’s perspective in the first place.

Julia Minson
Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, it kind of brings up another really fascinating idea for me, which is that, how many times have you walked into a conversation and thought, “Okay, what is my goal here? What am I trying to accomplish? Do I have strategies that are going to help me achieve my goal? And are those the right strategies?”

Like, most people don’t think about their goals unless it’s sort of a very important conversation that you have been planning for a long time. And so when we enter a disagreement, it’s usually spontaneous, right? Like, you’re sitting there having a conversation, somebody says something and you’re like, “Oh, no, like you’re wrong. Let me fix you.”

So our first immediate goal sort of stems from this assumption that, “I’m right. You’re wrong. I’m going to tell you how it is,” right? And quite often, that doesn’t serve us well. So the question of, “What am I trying to do? And what’s the right strategy to do it?” I think, is a really, really important piece of all of this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s super. So it sounds like you may be saying, if we don’t take time in advance to thoughtfully consider our goals, the default goal is winning, fixing them, and being right.

Julia Minson
That’s right. That’s right. And then, of course, if you have two people who are both pursuing that goal with some gusto, what you end up with is a stalemate, right? Nobody gives in, nobody is listening, and eventually people get frustrated with each other and, either it escalates into a fight or you just walk away from it, and you’re sort of like, “Yeah, this person isn’t going to listen to reason.”

And that’s terrible, in the workplace because both people are frustrated, nothing got done, and you have sort of soured a potential relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if the default goal is how to win, can you suggest some alternative goals that may very well be worth focusing on and pursuing in a given conversation?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so what’s interesting is that there are so many that people don’t think about. Like, if I’m with my manager, right, I might just want to impress them with, like, how smart I am, right? Or I could want to be funny. Or I could want to just pass the time because we’re stuck at the airport together. Or I could want to show that I’m sort of really well versed in a particular topic.

My favorite goal, and I think the goal that serves disagreements the best is the goal of understanding what exactly your counterpart believes and why they believe it. So in order to make any kind of progress on the disagreement, I need to know sort of, like, what you’re all about.

And quite often, and I have this experience all the time. People come to me with a disagreement. Since my book has come out, I’ve had these totally wild conversations where I’m signing books and somebody sort of stops the line and says, you know, “Julia, can I ask you for advice on like this?”

And then they start telling me sort of, like, this long extended story about their friend or their life partner who doesn’t do this or does something else. And I always say to them, I’m like, “Have you asked them why they think that’s the right way to behave?”

And I often get one of two responses. Either a person is just completely baffled and they’re like, “No, I haven’t asked them. Thank you for pointing that out. I’m going to go ask them,” which, to me, just sort of boggles my mind that somebody’s been in the conflict for days or weeks or years and has never asked their counterpart why they believe what they believe.

Or, I think the more potentially risky one is people say, “No, I haven’t asked them, but I know they’re this kind of person and they were brought up in this kind of family and this is why they are like that.” And so there’s sort of, this set of assumptions about, you think the other person believes what they believe for some set of reasons that you have, essentially, made up in your head and haven’t tested by asking the question, like, “Tell me more about your beliefs.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, a set of assumptions, and I have found my assumptions are often incorrect, and so it’s well worth asking. You said ask why they believe what they believe, and you used the phrase, “Tell me more.” I’ve heard that sometimes a why question can trigger defensiveness. Do you have any favorite approaches or questions you like to use in unearthing this stuff?

Julia Minson
Yeah, I think people, in general, struggle with asking questions or making statements that signal their willingness to understand, their desire to understand, and aren’t, like, gotcha phrases in sort of question form, right?

So you could say, “Why do you believe that?” That sounds like an attack. Or I could say, “Look, you know, I’m really curious to understand why you believe that.” That sounds more like curiosity, right?

And the why is there, but I think the real, you know, I have sort of this mental bar that I set for myself is, you know, if I asked a question that makes me feel superior in a disagreement, I shouldn’t have asked it.

Like, if I feel I just scored a point, then I’m actually losing, I’m losing at my own game of sounding curious and trying to gather information from the other person. Almost everything in disagreement that feels really good to ourselves is probably destructive to the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I hear you. So if you’re disagreeing on a science issue, you say, “Well, then why is it numerous systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials have showed, in fact, the exact opposite is what happens in experimental conditions? Suck on that,” you know?

Julia Minson
Right. Or, “Well, then how do you explain…?” blah, blah, blah, you know, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay. That’s a nice little internal emotional indicator there. All right. Well, I’d also love to hear, in the whole emotional game here, in terms of you want to win, there’s high stakes, you feel threatened or intimidated or disrespected, we can get hijacked in this emotional land. Any pro tips for dealing with all that?

Julia Minson
So emotional regulation, right, is something that people struggle with but is doable and it’s not just for conflict. It’s for all sorts of other things. A lot of the times, I mean, I’m going to say things that, after the fact, sound totally obvious but are profoundly true.

Our emotions come from our brains, right, which are, ultimately, physical organs that need rest and food and water. And so, quite often, if you are feeling yourself overtaken by emotions, what that means is it’s time to take a break. It’s time to take a break from this conversation or it’s time to take just, like, a break break, right?

And it goes back to this point of planning. Quite often, we end up in disagreements spontaneously with no forethought. And often, we fly off the handle because we are tired and because we’re stressed out and, you know, it’s Thanksgiving dinner, and, like, everybody has had a drink or two, and it’s in the evening and there’s all kinds of physiological and situational reasons why we are not at our best at that moment.

And so, one, if we have the ability to plan a conversation, prepare yourself to do it at a time when you’re at your best. And if you don’t have the ability to plan the conversation, you can always pause it and say, “Look, this sounds important. I’d like to talk to you about this thoughtfully. Can we schedule coffee for next week?”

So, like, when somebody comes after you over dinner about, like, “Well, why haven’t you guys gotten married yet?” or something incredibly sort of personal and triggering and random that can come up at a strange time, you don’t have to entertain it right then and there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s super. So just having it planned for a time when you’re at your best and you’re sort of mentally prepped for it, as opposed to, you know, surprised, shell-shocked, like, oof, getting disrupted. I’d love to hear if, for whatever reason that’s not so possible, “Oh, we got a meeting with the big account or the big executive, and I’m not going to be able to get back on that calendar for months,” do you have any pro tips for in the moment dealing with the stuff?

Julia Minson
Yeah, so, back to sort of this idea of question-asking and inquiry and showing curiosity, there’s two ways of thinking about this. There’s sort of like, “Are you trying to help your counterpart have a better experience? And are you trying to calm yourself down?”

And those things are intimately related, right, because when we are in a conversation, when we’re in a disagreement, the way you’re reacting to me is what’s causing my emotions. So if I can slow it down long enough to get you to calm down, it will also calm me down. I mean, I think one of the things that people really sort of forget about disagreement is that it is a dynamic interpersonal process. Like, you can’t disagree by yourself in a vacuum.

And so if I can stop myself from trying to make the argument and, instead say, “Hey, I’d like to understand where you’re coming from, I’d like to understand why this matters to you. Tell me why this is a big deal,” that very simple action tends to make the other person calmer, explain their perspective, kind of appreciate the fact that they were asked, and then that gives me a chance to calm down.

So the two things, really, like, reinforce each other. The contrast is I make a forceful argument, you make a forceful argument, I have to make my argument even more forceful. The next thing you know, we’re yelling at each other.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s really quite brilliant because you get a moment to regroup and the spotlight is off of you. So maybe they do ask, and you can’t escape or reschedule. It’s, like, “Why haven’t you gotten married yet?” And you’re like, “Whoa! What the heck, man? Kind of none of your business. We’re going to live our life the way we see fit. Thank you very much.”

But instead of saying that with that question of, “Oh, this seems like this timeline is really important to you. Can you tell me more about that?” A question along those lines shifts the spotlight off of you and can make them feel appreciated, and lets you take a breath and recollect all at the same time.

Julia Minson
Right, exactly. And, I mean, honestly, you can keep going and going, like, “Oh, are you married? How long have you been married? How is it going? Do you have kids?” Like, you can ask many questions, which serves dual purposes, right? One is what you just mentioned, which is, you know, giving yourself a break.

But, two, part of the reason that the person asked the question is because they have an opinion about what you should be doing with your life, and they want to share something. They feel like they have wisdom or advice or insight to offer.

And so you’re asking them, and they’re going to tell you, right, and they will feel wonderful about it. And they’re going to feel like you’re a great listener. And then by the time all is said and done, hopefully, you have a way of talking about your perspective that sort of resonates with what they are concerned about.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot because many of the times, it’s not really about you at all. They have a belief about how things should be with marriages and timelines and, I don’t know, you name it – fertility, population, furthering the species, whatever.

They may have an opinion and they’re not even directly attacking you. They just, generally, have some kind of worldview, and so you can inquire about that. And in so doing, they like it, they can talk about it, and they might not even have to return to you at all.

Julia Minson
Right. And this is sort of like, great, we’re running with the marriage example because I just spontaneously brought it up. But you can imagine, you know, let’s say these are your parents or, like, your uncle or whoever it is who has some stake.

And maybe they want you to get married because they want you to have kids, which is, one conversation. It could be that they want you to get married because they think that it’s, like, financially more responsible to put all your pennies together and invest in the American dream. That’s a totally different conversation.

And so the way you sort of talk about it would be different depending on what it is they are concerned with. Or it could be sort of this entirely different thing you were suggesting, which is it’s not about you at all. It’s about their, like, world views about the institution of marriage, which is a third type of conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And, Julia, could you share with us any of your most favorite and least favorite words, scripts, bit of verbiage when it comes to doing this conversational receptiveness thing well?

Julia Minson
So, the way I think about a whole conversation, right, is like having basically two big activities that you’re trying to pursue. You’re trying to understand where the other person is coming from. You’re trying to gather information. And then at the same time, or like in the same conversation, you’re also trying to convey your own set of beliefs and make your own argument.

And so, overall, people spend way too much time in the second part, the part where you’re trying to make your own argument. So the first thing I would advise folks to do is to re-balance your attention and your time to spend a lot more time in the place of sort of inquiry, and signaling curiosity.

So all those kinds of phrases around, you know, “I’d like to know more about how you came to hold this belief. I would love to understand why this is important to you. What would you like to see happen here? Have you seen this thing…” whatever it is, “…done very successfully? Would it be helpful if I did X, Y, and Z?” So they’re all questions that sort of are like getting around this person’s beliefs and values.

And then, at some point, you’re going to feel like, “You know, I think I get it,” right? And you might want to say, “Okay, so I think I get it. Let me tell you what I think I just heard, and you tell me if like I did get it or not, right?”

And so that’s sort of a transition because, once you restate what you heard, they might say, “Well, kind of, but not really, and there’s this other thing. And I forgot to mention…” blah blah blah blah blah, right? And so then you might have to spend a little more time there.

Or they might say, “Yeah, you know, that’s right. You got it. Thank you for listening to me. I think that’s exactly what I was trying to say.” And then you switch to the part where you are now making your own argument. And that’s where you use the HEAR framework, right?

So there, you can do your H-E-A-R to show that, “I have a point of view here, I have a set of beliefs, but I’m going to express it in a way that still, like, recognizes the fact that I just spent 20 minutes listening to you and I was actually paying attention.”

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

Julia Minson
I think that a lot of the time, people are hesitant to think about these topics, especially, like, if we are, for example, debating how to do a project at work, maybe I’ll say, “Well, you know, receptiveness is good. I need to understand where this person is coming from because I need to work with them.”

But sometimes we get into these topics that feel very moralized, like, if we talk about a company’s environmental policy, if we talk about affirmative action and hiring, if we talk about medical policies that support reproductive care. Like, there’s a lot of places, there’s a lot of topics even in the workplace that feel very, very moralized.

And I think people are afraid to approach those topics because it feels like, “Well, you know, how can I possibly condone that crazy perspective?” And that, to me, seems like a mistake because if you have a passion around a policy area and around a way that you would like to see the world changed, it’s very hard to wield influence if you keep walking away from people and walking away from conversations because you don’t think that they are sort of worthy of being engaged with.

So that’s something that I really like people to think about as, like, “How am I going to wield influence if I don’t engage?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well said. And when you talk about the moral piece of it, perhaps there’s a dimension of us that feels, even hearing out and providing a respectful opportunity to air the alternative view, which we may even see as evil, is to, in some way, support, condone, approve, welcome, entertain, negotiate with, whatever, the evil.

And I think that, if we evaluate that, that’s really more of an emotional vibes thing as opposed to a logical thing.

Julia Minson
Well, you know, it’s back to assumptions, right? Like, how do you know they’re evil. Like, that’s a big word, like evil with a capital E, that’s like a big accusation, right? So how do you conclude that without really thoughtfully engaging with a person and their beliefs, you know?

And most of the time, when you really listen to people, they say things that kind of make sense, at least in some dimensions or from the perspective that they see the world from. And, frankly, even like the people who are evil, if you’re in a conversation with them, it is often because you need them to achieve a certain goal.

If you can sort of, relegate them to the eighth circle of hell and never have to deal with them again, that’s great. But most of the time, we don’t have that power. Most of the time, we actually need to get things done. And so, again, if you’re going to get things done, you have to understand the other side.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, we’ve had Chris Voss, and other folks who’ve done hostage negotiation, on the show. And, in fact, even folks who are committing evil actions, in terms of they have hostages, they’re threatening to take their lives, providing some of this understanding stuff is tremendously helpful in untangling that dangerous situation.

Julia Minson
Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And I had a student last year who worked for an immigration non profit. And he said, “Well, how can I possibly have a conversation with these people that work for the government, and they’re hauling children away from their parents, and etc?”

And I said, “Well, if you want to help these children, do you think it would be effective to tell this person who is doing their government job, ‘You’re a horrible human being and I hate everything you stand for’? Like, do you think you’re going to get anything out of them after you say that?”

So there’s sort of the impulse to tell people what exactly we think of them. But, again, is it serving your goal?

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

Julia Minson
William Wrigley Jr., remember, like, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Wrigley’s Field? So a hundred years ago, he said, “When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”

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

Julia Minson
The famous Milgram experiments. The reason they’re so important to me, so, you know, in the Milgram studies, right, you had participants who gave other people, trained actors, but of course, they didn’t know that they were trained actors, gave them electric shocks, and they thought that they were participating in a study on learning.

And there was this experimenter in a white lab coat who kept telling them to give this other person electric shocks. And, in reality, it was a study of obedience to authority. And for Milgram, this was sort of this whole illustration of what happened in Nazi Germany and how easy it is to get people to obey authority through sort of very subtle changes to the situation.

Well, as a little girl, I grew up in Russia. And the reason I’m a psychologist is because my mom was a psychologist, and the reason she was a psychologist was because she read the Milgram studies. So, you know, she was a Jewish woman in the Soviet Union, and it, like, really resonated with her to the point where she learned English and got a PhD, and here I am, you know, a generation later.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Julia Minson
I read a lot of fantasy. And I really like an author named Alix Harrow. She’s got a new novel called The Everlasting that I wish I could wipe from my brain and read all over again so I could have the experience again.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Julia Minson
Espresso maker.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Julia Minson
Sitting on the couch after dinner, piled up with, like, my youngest child who’s ten, and our dog who’s 70 pounds, and we all watch an episode of “Modern Family.” And thank God, “Modern Family” is so long that, like, one episode at a time, we’ve been doing it for, I don’t know, two years.

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

Julia Minson
“Everything is negotiable.”

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

Julia Minson
So my website is DisagreeingBetter.com.

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

Julia Minson
Yeah, next time you disagree with somebody, pause and think about whether you understand where they’re coming from. And if you don’t, ask.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Julia, thank you.

Julia Minson
Thank you very much. This was great.

Jun 15
0

1161: How to Build Stronger Relationships through Emotional Attunement with Nidhi Tewari, LCSW

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW reveals the secret skill behind better trust, connection, and collaboration: attunement.

You’ll Learn

  1. The next evolution of emotional intelligence
  2. How to improve collaboration and performance with the CHECK-IN framework
  3. How sharing your own experiences can unintentionally shut others down

About Nidhi

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW is a 2026 Thinkers50 Radar award recipient and keynote speaker on work culture and wellbeing, drawing on 13 years of clinical expertise with high-performing leaders. 

She has worked with LinkedIn, Warner Bros. Discovery, TED, and NPR, among others, and presented at the World Economic Forum, Cannes Lions, TEDWomen, and TEDNext. Featured in The New York Times, Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company, she serves on the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council and Harvard T.H. Chan 2026 Creator Cohort.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Nidhi Tewari Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nidhi, welcome!

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Thanks so much for having me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat here. Can you tell us what does this word attunement mean, first of all, because we’re to be saying it a lot?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, we are going to be saying it a lot. Attunement is our moment-to-moment responsiveness to our emerging needs and the emerging needs of others. It’s our ability to perceive, interpret, and respond to the emotional, social, and functional needs of ourselves and others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you’re giving me flashbacks to psychology courses in which I remember the way that I was such a hack, the way I got through learning a lot of definitions. And for the multiple choice, I was thinking, “Okay, is this psychological word a good thing or a bad thing?” because then I can cross out, you know, half of the answer responses. Like, “No, no, this is a bad thing. Cross out good things. I’m left with two choices.” So it sounds like that’s a good thing, Nidhi, is that correct?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
It’s a great thing. It’s what we want to aim for. Think about when you really are vibing with somebody, you feel in sync with them, they get you, you feel understood and heard. That is the essence of attunement, except it goes a little bit deeper, and I’m sure we’re going to dive in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that sounds handy. Is it possible to overdo it, on attunement?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, you can be overly attuned. This is what I typically would see with some of my clients back when I was a therapist. A lot of my clients that had a trauma history were overly sensitized to people’s cues.

So, for example, like a subtle change in eye contact or a shift in body language or tone of voice would, all of a sudden, signal to them that, “Oh, my God, I must have done something wrong. They’re mad at me.” When in reality, it was just, they were tired after a long day of work and had nothing at all to do with them.

So, yeah, there are instances where we can be hyper-attuned and, of course, everything in balance, just like with most things in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and could you share with us, you know, your book is called Working Well, how is this attunement relevant at work? What does it do for us?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so it’s imperative at work. If you have learned about emotional intelligence, which is all about how we pay attention to our own empathy, how we regulate our own emotions, how we’re showing up in our interactions, attunement and relational intelligence is the next evolution of this.

It’s not only how we’re paying attention to what’s happening within ourselves and how we’re showing up. It’s what’s happening between us, between us in an interaction, in a conversation, in a difficult moment.

And it’s really handy in terms of a skillset to develop so that you can relate better with your colleagues, have a better relationship with your boss. And, of course, it extends beyond even the workplace to our romantic relationships, our friendships, our familial relationships, etc., too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share a story with us in terms of someone who was not doing so well in the attunement and that had some consequences at work, and then they upgraded it and what happened for them?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, this is where I have tons of examples. There’s lots of people that are really well-intentioned and think that they are self-aware and are connecting well with people. And then, in reality, it’s a total mess.

So one experience that I can share is of my own. I once had a boss who was teaching me how to teach. So I’m an executive coach, and part of her process was we had to submit these verbatim transcripts of what was said in a coaching session. And then she would review it and criticize us basically in front of the group.

So what I need in those moments is I need a little bit of a softening of the feedback. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. I can handle criticism. I can handle somebody telling me what I need to do better. But she went in on me.

I remember so vividly, she said to me, “Nidhi, you’re doing it wrong. Why do you keep doing it this way? You’re giving the answers to your coaching clients way too easily and you’re not letting them struggle enough. Like, I don’t understand why you’re not getting it.”

And I wanted to completely, like, turn off the Zoom camera, hide in a corner, eat some Häagen-Dazs. I wanted to cry my eyes out. I was like, “What is happening right now?” That was a moment of misattunement.

Now, sadly, she’s not a leader who necessarily learned how to do it better, but I can share an experience of somebody who got it right. There was a time in my life where I lost my best friend to stage four brain cancer. And this happened within a month of me taking a new position.

Previous employers had started off being really understanding and empathetic, but then something shifted and they told me to compartmentalize my grief. And so with this new team that I joined, I was absolutely dreading sharing this loss with them because I just assumed that they were going to can me, that they were going to say, you know, “Too bad. So sad. Here’s three days bereavement leave and you got to come back in.”

But this leader, her name was Cathy, she was so attuned to me. Her first response was to, first of all, call me. I texted her. She immediately called me. She asked me, “Nidhi, like, tell me about your experience. Like, I know how devastating this is. You were with your best friend as she was transitioning.” And she really connected with me on an emotional level.

And then, more importantly, when I came back to work three weeks later, because they donated their paid time off to me, I had zero hours accrued. They gave me three weeks. They didn’t check in on me to see about KPIs or to be able to get a sense of how I was delegating my workout. They instead really asked me questions about Laura, who was my best friend, about how I was grieving. And they gave me a space to help maintain her legacy.

So that’s an example of a leader who’s really attuned, they’re connected, they’re in-sync with what you need. And it made a tremendously healing impact on me and became the impetus for the work that I do today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very beautiful. And I’m certain, in terms of the dynamics of the team and your relationships and your ability to trust them and to disclose and to collaborate, I would imagine, get a real big boost from that kind of thing.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
A hundred percent. Yeah, I mean, it really showed me how imperative it is to be connected and caring in the workplace, and what attunement can really do. And it’s interesting because we, like, talk about attunement in the context of parent-child relationships or even our romantic relationships, but nobody had studied it in the context of the workplace.

Yet I saw, time and time again, through the work I was doing with Fortune 500 that this was the skillset that was really the linchpin for connection at work. And yet nobody had studied it and nobody had examined it or definitely was not teaching it.

And so we’re the first ones to do it. And that’s why I wrote the book and do so much speaking on this topic now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. And I’m thinking about, we had a great conversation with Michael Sorensen on the podcast, who wrote a book called, I Hear You, all about validation. And he is just, like, “Everybody is just starving for this stuff. I feel like I have this wild superpower when I do it, like at work, with my friends, you know, with romantic relationships. It’s powerful.”

And it sounds like there’s a healthy overlap between these two concepts. And I would love to get your take on, you’re the first to do some of this research and work at work, do we have any hard-hitting data insights about this stuff?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, absolutely. So, first, let’s dive a little bit deeper into attunement, which is really broken down into four key skills. So this is, like, the brass tacks of this concept. And we studied this in the context of a bunch of different outcomes: psychological safety, individual and team productivity, connection and team trust. We looked at so many different factors here.

And so those four key skills are flexibility, reading cues, self-regulation, and collaboration. So flexibility, being our ability to adapt and be agile in our interactions. So, for example, if a colleague has something that’s top of mind and you also have something top of mind, that you’re able to shift gears a little bit, adapt to what their need is in that moment. It doesn’t mean that you don’t eventually circle back. It just means that you’re flexible with them.

It also means that you’re able to adapt your intervention. So, like, let’s say that a colleague of yours is struggling with anxiety, and you have another colleague who also has an anxiety disorder. Recognizing that no diagnosis is a monolith, and that we need to be adaptable in terms of how we support each person. So that’s what that flexibility piece is.

Reading cues, being able to notice what’s not said in an interaction. Somewhere around 60% of our interactions are based in nonverbal cues. So we’re looking at body language, demeanor, leaning in versus leaning away. And also, of course, the cadence, the tone, and the literal words that are being used in an interaction. So being able to read those cues and shift gears accordingly, super important.

Next, we have self-regulation. So this is your capacity to manage your own emotions so that you can connect with another person’s emotional state. And there are some helpful tools that we can get into like 4-7-8 eight breathing, being able to just ground yourself and be present in this moment so that you can then maintain connection with the other person.

And then the last is collaboration. So this is basically letting the other person know that we’re an allied front, we’re on the same team. And I think, even more importantly, that you’re going to be learning from them just as much as they’re learning from you.

So what we found is with mastering these four key skills – flexibility, reading cues, self-regulation and collaboration – all of those main outcomes that I just mentioned – psychological safety, team and individual productivity, connections, so cohesiveness within the team – all of that improved as a result and it ended up being the key to working well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I like that clear rundown there. And so let’s hear it, what kinds of results do we see when folks upgrade these four skills?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so, I mean, their productivity improved significantly. So not only were they able to focus and do better work individually, but now they were working better together as a team. The ability to trust and have confidence and have faith that the people on their team actually have their back improved.

All of these different factors are absolutely the crux of a healthy work culture. And, ultimately, it affects the bottom line, right? When people are disengaged, distrusting, they feel disconnected from people, it cost the global GDP $8.9 trillion. So that’s 9% of the global GDP being missed as a result of this level of disconnection.

So if we can leverage these skills of attunement, we start to close in that gap and bridge the gap to fostering better connection and just better team relationships overall.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s tick through some of each of these here. With regard to flexibility, are there a couple key flavors or varieties you recommend engaging for folks? I think I had a guest who she said, “I might write a book about we need to have an inner monk and an inner David Goggins in terms of just the calm, deep, and then the screaming.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
And so those would be two of the extremes, I suppose, with regard to the flexibility and how you may adapt in your approach to someone. How do you think about the different varieties that we might flex into?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I mean, for somebody like myself, I’m a very open-book person, right? Like, I wear my heart on my sleeve. And so somebody would need to adapt to that. But there are lots of people in the workplace that don’t necessarily have that trust or don’t feel safe opening up.

And so part of being flexible is taking it at a slower pace and just meeting them where they are in that moment. Like, we can’t dive super deeply into connection and relationships without first building that foundation of trust. And sometimes we get frustrated when we’re trying to ask questions and check in with somebody, and they’re giving you kind of cursory answers.

I think part of that flexibility element of attunement is recognizing, “Okay, this is just the stuff that they bring to the table and that’s all right. They move at a slower pace than perhaps I would. I can be adaptable and just take it slower. And, eventually, they will get to a place where they feel comfortable opening up to me.”

So that’s kind of an example that I can give you about how flexibility typically will look like amongst colleagues or even between a boss and an employee.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s one domain of being flexible in terms of how disclosing and open we’re being in a given moment or stage of a relationship. What are some other domains of flexibility?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so I think that you need to be able to adjust your body language. So sometimes people, you know, paying attention to how you’re showing up in your interactions. Some people like closer proximity. Other people like to keep you at a distance. You have to kind of read what’s going on with the other person.

Another example with flexibility would be being able to shift gears to adapt based off of what their particular needs are in that moment. So the most common example I would see is, in the give and take of a conversation, we kind of come in with our things that we want to share and maybe different touch points in the workplace of this project and where we are with this level of communication with the client.

But if the person that you’re interacting with has something else that’s top of mind, just being flexible means, you know, adapting based off of where they are in that moment. So perhaps in the beginning of the meeting, or in the beginning of the conversation, you start off with where their concerns are. You validate, you listen, you actively listen in specifically.

And then you might be able to shift gears towards the end of the conversation to bring it back full circle to where you want it to begin. But being flexible means that it’s not always about you, right, in the conversation, that we need to be able to shift as needed based off of where they are in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And to the notion of flexibility, I guess this whole attunement business, it seems very generous, kind, attentive, giving. And I suppose I’m thinking one side of flexibility is there’s a time to give and I think sometimes there’s a time to take. And so how do you think about that dimension?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
A hundred percent. Absolutely, there needs to be balance in relationships. Attunement is not about, “Let me self-sacrifice to meet everybody else’s needs.” And this is the biggest pushback that I typically get when it comes to this framework is they’re like, “But what about my boundaries? And what about my mental health and wellbeing?”

Uh-uh. Nobody’s telling you to become somebody’s therapist. Nobody’s telling you to abandon your own needs and service of others, but there’s a way to be able to prioritize both, right? So we need to be adapting to other people’s needs, but also it’s okay to ask for help, ask for support from other people. And they then need to be attuning to you in that moment, right?

So there is that give and take that is absolutely critical for any type of relationship and, I would argue, is imperative for a healthy relationship. Otherwise, it becomes very unbalanced and you feel like you’re giving, giving, giving, and nobody is there to support you in your time of need either.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear about some of key cues to read.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so part of the reading cues is going to be really paying attention to the non-verbals. So what’s their body language doing? Are they closed off or are they open when they’re speaking to you? Sometimes we even subconsciously cross our legs, which can signal that, “Hmm, I might not be as open to what you’re saying as you might think I am.”

Often, even the cadence of the delivery, right, influences how what’s being said is being interpreted. So if somebody, when you ask them, “Hey, how’s it going?” and they’re like, “Oh, I’m fine. Things are great. Just another day in paradise.”

“Hmm, are you actually fine? Or are you just trying to skate past through this conversation so that we can get to the moving past it and talk about business now, right?” which is often what I would see in the workplaces.

You know, people are so quick to try to not open up. And that, in and of itself, is a signal to you that they are actually more stressed than they’re letting on, that perhaps there’s actually something going on underneath the surface that they’re not disclosing to you.

Another element is, literally, when we are in conversation and we’re uncomfortable, we will lean away to put distance between ourselves and the other person. We do this subconsciously and it’s our way to be able to try to protect ourselves and create space. So pay attention to those cues.

As you’re sharing something with a colleague or with a leader, are they literally putting distance between yourself and them because that might mean that you’re evoking discomfort within them and you might need to shift up the way that you’re sharing feedback or sharing the information that you’re disclosing to them in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fun. I’m reminded we had an interview with an FBI interrogator, Joe Navarro, who wrote about body language. And he suggested a number of things here, but he said, “The feet can often be one of the biggest tells in terms of once those toes are pointed away, that kind of means, ‘Yeah, I’d like to be out of here now.’” And it’s seems to be a pretty good reliable indicator of that kind of thing.

I’d love your pro tip here in terms of flexibility and reading cues, combine them together.  You said if someone seems like they’re in a rush, “I’m fine,” and they’re kind of want to move on to the business, well, now here we are.

On the one hand, we could accommodate what appears to be their desire, “Let’s go ahead and move on into the business.” Or, you could note, “Oh, it sounds like this person feels rushed or stressed,” so you could attempt to delve into that.

But then it seems like, well, I see that there’s branching possibilities that might not go so well. It’s like, “Hey, the cue was, ‘I didn’t want to go here.’ And now you’re trying to go here. Don’t care for that.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I agree with you. I think that we have to be respectful of people’s boundaries. But what I would push back on is that it all doesn’t have to happen in that exact moment, right? So you ask this question around, “Are you okay? How are you doing?” They give you the cursory, “I’m fine.” Okay, they want to move into business. We respect that. That’s great.

But then how about at lunchtime, we stop by and we say, “Hey, I know that you’re working on XYZ Project. How do you feel like it’s been going? Has it been stressful? Are there certain elements that you feel like you’re doing exceptionally well in? Can I support you in some way?” Right?

So now we’re asking a different kind of question. We’re not just, I also feel like, “How are you doing?” it’s not a great question. It just is too broad. I don’t feel like people, overall as a society, I don’t feel like we’re very open when people ask us that.

So if instead we can ask something specific and get a little bit deeper and a different interaction with them, they may be more obliging towards you, they may be more willing to share a little bit more deeply.

And, typically, it takes three goes at it before somebody really opens up to you. So don’t get discouraged if at the first interaction, they’re a little bit guarded, a little bit putting distance. Follow up a couple more times. And if they continue to be, like, cursory, okay, then respect that. But if they start to dive a little bit deeper, roll with that. Be curious. Ask more questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, and then self-regulation, what are your favorite moves here?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so self-regulation, this is what I think most people are not great at because our own discomfort is evoked in our interactions. Like, we often think about triggers in the context of our friendships, our family relationships, our romantic relationships, like that annoying friend that only hits you up when she needs something from you, which gets on your nerves, it really irks you.

Yes, that’s a trigger, but we are also triggered in the workplace, right? So think about the times where you’ve come up with a good idea, you’ve shared it with a colleague one-on-one, you’re about to share it in a team meeting, and they beat you to it. They take credit for it. Really, really frustrating.

Or that leader, where every time that you receive an email from them, your body tenses up because you just know it’s about to be some sort of criticism or some sort of you being underneath the microscope. And so those are also triggers at work.

So if we can self-regulate, meaning we manage our own emotional state and we are able to manage our emotional responses in the moment, that ensures that we’re not reacting and we’re instead responding. So a couple of tips to use here and a couple of techniques that I can share.

One is 4-7-8 breathing. This is a science-backed technique that has been proven to reduce your blood pressure, provide more oxygen to your brain and to your organs, and it helps to reengage that critical thinking center that tends to go offline when we’re stressed and when we’re triggered.

So the way that it works is you breathe in through your nose for four seconds, you hold in the breath for seven seconds, and then you exhale through your mouth for eight seconds. And what you’ll notice is if you do this three, five, as many times as you need to, to calm down, you really feel a bit more grounded, and it gives you a bit of space between reaction and response.

Another really easy one that you can do if you’re just sitting at your desk and you’re just like, “Oh, my God, I’m feeling really stressed out,” is you could just rub your arms, you could do a quick stretch. Things like that bring you back into your body and helps you to get out of your thinking brain and back into your physiological state, right? It helps to regulate that nervous system response.

The last one that I’ll share that’s really simple is you can just turn your head from side to side and scan the room for threats. And what this does is it helps to orient you because the orientation centers of your brain are located in your eyes, ears, and neck.

And you’re basically signaling to your nervous system and to your brain that, “Hey, nothing is physically threatening. I’m okay in this moment. Like, I can take a deep breath and I can relax.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, the word threats, there are so many. I see a printer light just flashing and I find that slightly annoying. I didn’t even notice it before. I guess I’ve scanned and identified the smallest of threats. I suppose what we’re trying to accomplish here is you realize, “Oh, hey, there’s no one coming after me to do an attack.”

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Right. Exactly. Yeah, and even that you’re emotionally safe in that moment, it’s like, “Okay, this moment might feel really bad to me. I got an email from HR. That sucks. Nobody wants to get that email, right? As long as it’s not a layoff email, that’s a different story.”

But let’s say that HR is like, “Hey, I want to touch base with you,” and you have no context of what that means. And so you immediately jump to the worst conclusion possible, which is, “I’m getting fired,” or, “I’m being reprimanded in some way.” When in reality, they just want to do your onboarding or they need you to do this yearly training, right?

That’s the type of threat that we’re scanning for. And if we could just take a moment and be like, “Okay, what are alternate explanations for what’s going on?” Like, once we soothe, then we can start thinking it through. And that will help to deescalate you emotionally when we jump to these negative conclusions in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then collaboration?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Collaboration, super simple. It’s just simply letting the other person know that, “I’m on your team. I have your best interests in mind. You also have my best interests in mind. And we’re going to be working together to a mutually agreed upon outcome.” So this is where we’re going to be reciprocating in a relationship. That give and take that we referenced earlier is going to be part of a collaborative approach.

It’s also making sure that you’re in a learning position. Even if you’re in a position of leadership or, you know, let’s say you’re the team lead or somebody who’s heading a project, that you’re also opening up the conversation to learn from the other people on your team, because that collaborative approach helps to foster psychological safety and trust amongst yourself and the people that you’re working alongside.

Pete Mockaitis
So I understand that sometimes, when we’re trying to help, to encourage, to fix a situation with somebody that we’re doing it with the best of intentions, but that, with this attunement world, can totally be a miss. Can you unpack some of this for us?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, absolutely. It is well-intentioned, right? When we jump in to give advice, it’s because we feel helpless and we want to be helpful. And so what ends up happening, though, is before the words even leave the other person’s mouth, we’re like, “Well, have you tried this? Did you try setting better boundaries? Have you tried using Trello as like an organizational tool for you because you’re feeling overwhelmed?” Right?

Like, we offer all of these solutions to people. And what ends up happening is that, one, we’re trying to bypass their emotions to get them to a logical state of mind. And that’s not what they need in that moment. Two, it also feels very presumptuous. Like, we’ve somehow gotten the other person’s dilemma figured out better than they have it figured out.

And so instead of it feeling validating or feeling as though we’re being helpful to that person in the moment, it actually creates distance between us and creates what I call connection gap. So we don’t want to jump towards fixing. And there are a couple of other traps that we tend to fall into as well. Like, we tend to avoid.

So we either change the subject or what I see more commonly is we offer platitudes like, “Don’t worry, it’s going to get better,” or, “You’ll be fine. You’ll get through this.” Once again, well-intentioned, but we’re emotionally bypassing, and it invalidates the other person’s emotional struggles in that moment. And then the third most common connection gap or misattunement style that I see is people that are connectors, which sounds really good, but it’s not actually the style that we want to aim for.

Because connectors are the ones where, when we share something with them, they immediately jump in with, “Oh, my God, me, too. Totally get it. You’re struggling with burnout? I’ve been burnt out for seven years. You have a toxic boss? I dealt with a toxic boss for over a decade. Let me just tell you all about him, right?”

And what happens is, yes, well-intentioned, we’re trying to relate to the other person, but, unfortunately, the spotlight that was supposed to be shown on them has now shifted to you. And they go from a place of needing support to caretaking you.

So those are not the ways that we want to show up and support people in the workplace. Instead, what we want to do is we want to be an explorer. We want to be a person who is connected, who asks great questions, uses curiosity as a way to be able to dive a little bit deeper, that we’re good listeners, we hold space, we actively listen to what the other person is saying.

And if we can just explore, go a little bit deeper, it really does help the other person to feel seen, heard, validated, and they feel much more connected to us as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that sounds lovely. I’d love your take, when folks are trying to do this, where do they fall short?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
When they’re trying to be an explorer, what ends up happening is that their own discomfort is what gets in the way, which is why we default to being a fixer, an avoider, or a connector. And it goes back to that self-regulation piece of things, right? Our own discomfort is what often leads to the connection gaps.

So if we can just manage our own feelings of helplessness, our own feelings of, “What do I say right now? I don’t know what to do. Like, they are coming to me sharing about how they have mental health concerns. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know what to say in this moment.” That’s our own discomfort bubbling up, right?

And subconsciously, that’s then going to be read by the other person because they’re attuning to you in that moment. They’re going to pick up on it and they’re going to pull back as a result. So we just simply need to manage our own discomfort, manage our own emotional state, regulate. And that’ll help us to stay connected and be in step with them in those moments of uncomfortable conversations that come up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think you really zeroed in on something there. And I’m thinking about, when someone dies, I think it’s very common, I’ve discussed this with my mother, that folks, they’re uncomfortable. They don’t know what to say or what to do. And so they might just not show up at all. Or it’s just awkward because they don’t know what to say. Because, in fact, there is nothing you can say.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just going to say, “Oh, you know what? I am not sad anymore.” Like, there’s no such words that exist. And so it is uncomfortable. And so your message here is, well, you know, that that’s kind of a you problem, kind of learn to manage that discomfort. And do you have any pro tips on what do you say when it’s just hard and you have no idea what ought to be said?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
In those situations, it’s less about what you say and it’s more about how you show up, right? So you’re exactly right. There are no perfect words. There’s nothing that you can say when somebody’s parent passes away that’s going to make it better for them.

So that can’t be the goal at the end of the day. It’s not, “How can I alleviate your grief for you?” It’s instead, “How can I, literally, just be present with you in this moment, listen, and if you’re willing to share, for me to ask some really good questions, right?”

Like, “Hey, I know that this loss has hit you really hard. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re doing right now to take care of yourself? Or, what’s been the hardest part for you losing your parent in this moment?” Sometimes just simple questions like that open up the dialogue.

And sometimes there are moments where people don’t want to talk about it at all. And instead, if you’re going to attune to them, then, okay, then you just show up, you watch Netflix with them, you order some takeout, right? You talk about anything else under the sun besides the fact that they just lost this person that they love so desperately. And sometimes that’s the most attuned response.

And so I just want people to take away that it’s not the words that you’re saying, there’s no perfect statement. It’s instead, “How can I be present and pick up on what’s really needed by the other person and show up for them in that way, in that moment?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s great, and I like the range of things you shared there. And I’m reminded, my mom, she’s told me this story several times. When my dad died, she had a good friend, and there’s a lot of this going on, like, “I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry for your loss,” right?

She had a good friend, it’s like, “You know what? You’re going to have a lot of people showing up bringing you food. How about I just clean up and organize your refrigerator and freezer?” And she’s like, “That would be amazing. Thank you.”

And, I mean, it was perfect for her in that moment because that was not on any of our minds, but it was an outside perspective, and it was so useful and considerate. Well, you know, we remember it decades later, so, yeah.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Absolutely. Yeah, and I think, to build on that, what your mom did in that moment, or what she received in that moment rather, was exactly what I would recommend as well. Just provide people a menu of options.

Like, if you don’t know what to do and you want to do something, better than not showing up at all, better than just, you know, “Oh, I’m just going to ask them. Hey, what do you need right now?” which people don’t know what they need in a moment of grief, they just don’t.

You can just simply say, “Hey,” like your mom received from whoever that person was, like, “I notice that your fridge might need a little bit of help. Can I pop in and take care of that for you?” “Hey, I noticed that groceries might be something that is difficult to run while you’re dealing with all of the logistics of funeral planning. Can I take care of that for you?”

“Hey, I noticed that you might need a little bit of vacuuming around, like, the basement. Can I take care of that, right? Which of those sound like a good option to you?” It reduces the decision fatigue that people feel, and it still is showing up in a way that’s meaningful to the other person.

And most importantly, it gives them agency and empowers them with choice in a moment where they feel completely out of control. It gives them some level of control over how you’re going to show up for them as well.

Pete Mockaitis
I also want to hear about your check-in framework, some sophisticated use of acronym there. Can you give us the quick rundown on these? What is it for and what are the steps?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, so it’s for conversations just like this, right, where you’re dealing with somebody who’s disclosing something difficult with you. They’re burnt out, right? They’re struggling with depression. They just lost somebody. They’re caregiving for an elderly parent.

And so CHECK IN, as the acronym, C is for curiosity-based questions. So questions that are open-ended, like, “Tell me more about,” “Could you help me to better understand?” “Would you be willing to share a little bit?” Right? They just are an invitation to the other person to share a bit more about what’s going on.

Then when they’re sharing, H is for hold space. We need to be open, not judgmental. We want to listen intently, and we want to resist the urge to jump in or to fix it. So we just need to be present in that moment.

E is for exploring support. So once you’ve heard what the challenges are, you’ve been able to hold some space for them. Now you need to empower them. So this is where that menu of options is very helpful. And one of my favorite questions to ask is, “What’s been working for you in the past? What has worked for you in the past? And what hasn’t worked for you?” so that you can now explore support that’s going to be meaningful and advantageous to them.

Once you explore the support, then you have to Congruently respond. So that just simply means follow through. If somebody says that they need more frequent check-ins, give them more frequent check-ins. If they tell you that part of what will help to alleviate their stress is you covering a meeting for them, cover the meeting for them, or communicate effectively that you won’t be able to do it.

Because if you don’t follow through and if you don’t communicate, it’s going to be detrimental to the trust that exists between you. So that’s what congruently respond is all about. And, inevitably, when we drop the ball, we have to, K, know how to repair. This is little bit of a stretch with the K, but that’s okay. We’re going to know how to repair, meaning we have to acknowledge the misstep, validate the feelings, and create a plan for how we’re going to prevent this from happening again.

So acknowledge, simply saying, “I know that I dropped the ball uncovering that meeting for you. And I’m really sorry. I know that that set you back in terms of your workload.” Validate. “I can imagine that was really frustrating for you. Like, you probably feel even more stressed now because I dropped the ball and now you’re having to do double time to make up for that.”

Plan. “What I’m going to do going forward is, if I’m not able to cover a meeting for you, I’m going to make sure to give you at least 24 hours notice so that you can make adequate plans for somebody else to cover that gap. Boom! It’s as simple as that. That’s how simple repair can be.

You notice how I didn’t give excuses. I didn’t try to explain away what happened, why I didn’t cover the meeting. I just simply acknowledged, validated, and planned. And then I-N is interrupt discomfort. So using all those emotional regulation tools that we just talked about earlier, and reset, which is another framework. But basically, it’s about being able to move from reaction to response.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love your hot take, with regard to our emotion regulation, do you have any novel, wild, emotional regulation tricks?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, the most helpful one that I can share with you is it’s by the acronym RESET. So super easy, but this has been a game-changer for me. It’s been a game-changer for my clients, both therapy clients and Fortune 500 clients. It just helps you to pause a little bit so that you can respond.

So the R in RESET is for reaction. Just noticing your physiological response. Do your muscles tense up? Do your palms get sweaty? Is your heart racing? Did your breathing get ragged? Because our physiological cues are going to precede our emotional or cognitive cues, meaning what you’re going to notice physiologically is going to come before what you’re thinking or feeling in that moment, right? So just notice what’s happening there.

Then we have to notice the emotions. Dr. Daniel Siegel, who’s written many a New York Times bestselling book, talks about name it to tame it. And the research has found that if we can just simply put a label to an emotion, it helps to regulate our nervous system.

So something as simple as just acknowledging out loud, “I’m feeling embarrassed,” “I feel caught off guard,” “I’m feeling stressed,” “I’m feeling fearful,” anxious, numb, exposed. That will help to regulate your nervous system.

What I don’t want you to do at this step is to try to think your way through it. Because, once again, that critical thinking part of your brain is offline and we need to do the next step, which is soothe before we’re able to explore.

So soothing is that 4-7-8 breathing, grounding techniques, rubbing the arms, scanning your environment, body scans, those are all going to help to soothe your nervous system and help to reduce that physiological activation.

Now we’re finally going to explore. So we’re going to notice past, present connections, because the way that we respond in this moment is not actually just about what’s happening in this moment. It’s often linked to past experiences. And a mentor of mine once told me that if your reaction is hysterical, its roots are historical.

So just pause for a moment and think about, “Okay, hmm, how does this look like, sound like, and feel like a past experience? Have I been caught off guard before? What does this remind me of?” Just linking and connecting those dots is really helpful.

And then, finally, the last, T is for tell. Just talk to somebody about it, process it. Being in connection and in community is also a nervous system regulator. And if you’re at work in your cubicle and you can’t, journal about it and then share it with somebody when you get back home that you’re able to trust and can feel like you can be vulnerable with.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
You know, I think that the biggest thing that I want the audience to really be reflecting on is where do you fall on the spectrum of interactions, right? Like, are you the fixer? Are you the avoider? Are you the connector?

And how can you start practicing some of these key attunement skills to move towards becoming more of an explorer? I think if we’re able to just develop the self-awareness, become more in tune with ourselves, we will naturally become more in tune with others.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, there’s a quote from Prentis Hemphill that goes, “Boundaries are the distance with which I can love you and me simultaneously.” And I love this quote because it really speaks to the fact that there is a way for us to hold both, hold ourselves and another person simultaneously, but we need to be able to protect our space and create that distance that will help us to facilitate that.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I mean, something that I quote a lot in my keynotes is shocking, actually, statistics from Forbes, where they found that over 50% of employees would forgo a 10% pay increase to be able to just feel more connected at work, which was just mind-blowing to me, because you always think about how people just want to get paid more, which is important.

But people, if they were making $100,000 a year, would give up 10,000 extra dollars in their pocket just to feel like their boss or a colleague cared about them and was connected to them. It just really blew my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
One of my favorite books is Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. I love it because I think it really gets to the core of why we’re doing the work that we’re doing. And he’s got so many great examples and case studies in there. It just is a masterfully written book.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
I personally have a routine that I do at the end of my day. I think that my after-work routines are what helps me to be effective in my work. So I do like a virtual commute because a lot of my work is remote.

So I’ll go for a long walk. I’ll physically change out of my clothes. I’ll make sure to sit down and watch my trashy reality TV. They’re all just part of my after-work routine that helps to signal to my brain, “You’re done with work.” And then when I do show up for work the next day, I’m able to be in the zone and focus.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks, they quote back to you often?

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I’ll share two little gems. One is that, “We’ve confused communication with connection.” People love that quote because we have Slack channels, we’ve got all-hands meetings, we’ve got email exchanges, Teams meetings, but those are just focusing on communication. They’re not actually forging connection and bonds with people. So people really like that one.

And then the second one is that, “We don’t slow down because stillness feels unsafe.” We have these go, go, go schedules because we think that that’s how we’re going to avoid all of the stuff that exists within us. And if we did slow down, we would have to face the anxieties, the worries, the stress that we’ve been staving off.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
So two places, one, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. The second is through my website, NidhiTewari.com. You can find my speaking offerings there, and reach out to me through a contact form.

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

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Yeah, I think that, ultimately, we all want to be doing better at work. We all want to be working well. But what gets in the way is these moment-to-moment exchanges that we have. I think every opportunity is a choice.

You can choose to build trust or diminish it. You can choose to be connected or be disconnected. You can choose to attune or misattune. And the choice that you make in that moment is going to determine whether you’re working well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nidhi, thank you.

Nidhi Tewari, LCSW
Thank you so much.

Jun 11
0

1160: How to Create Trust During Tough Conversations with Justin Hale

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Justin Hale reveals the key to communicating difficult truths while strengthening relationships.

You’ll Learn

  1. How avoiding conflict erodes trust in teams
  2. How to set expectations that leave no room for misunderstanding
  3. The mindset shift for calmer conversations

About Justin

Justin Hale is an author and keynote speaker who has worked with hundreds of organizations worldwide, helping leaders and teams communicate better, elevate productivity, and build healthier cultures. He is the coauthor of the New York Times best seller Crucial Accountability: Proven Skills to Build Trust, Address Disappointment, and Get Results.

His research and writing has been published in places like Harvard Business Review, CNBC.com, Fox Business, Bloomberg, and Fast Company. Justin’s coaching and advice is also published regularly in the Crucial Skills newsletter.

Resources Mentioned

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Justin Hale Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Justin, welcome!

Justin Hale
Thanks, Pete. Good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting about crucial accountability. Could you maybe kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and accountability from all your research?

Justin Hale
What was actually surprising is how much we haven’t changed. We haven’t learned our lesson. The first version of this book was published in 2005. It had another revision around 2014. And now as my partner Joseph and I began researching and rethinking this revision, and to your point, sort of getting a sense of what the world is like today, there are some places where we’ve improved in terms of our frequency of speaking up around accountability issues and being honest and candid.

You’ll see some of that a little bit in healthcare and some areas, but we’re alarmingly still the same in terms of, you know, allowing situations to grow and build and to choose silence over honesty when we should be holding people accountable to, you know, mistakes, things like that.

So it is sort of scary to think about the fact that we’ve allowed certain disasters or other things that have happened in our world as a result of silence, and yet, those kinds of things continue to happen. So that was actually one big alarming discovery we had as we dove into this new revision.

Pete Mockaitis
So accountability, speaking up, how are we thinking about these things, definitionally?

Justin Hale
Yeah, so when you think about crucial accountability, it’s really about one key moment, which is those moments where there’s a gap between what you expect someone will do or deliver or how they’ll perform between that and how they’re actually performing, what they’re actually delivering, what they’re actually bringing to the table.

It’s that gap between expectations and actual performance that brings about this really high-stakes moment, this high-stakes conversation that’s incredibly difficult and, sadly, mostly avoided.

And so when we talk about these gap moments, what we’re really asking is, “How do you handle them in your family, in your team, in your community, in your society? What’s the norm? Is it to step up to these gaps and to address them candidly and respectfully? Or is it to let them simmer and to hope they just go away or resolve themselves or to sit and gossip behind people’s backs rather than addressing those gaps head on?”

And that norm really predicts so many of the results that you experience and how you handle or mishandle or don’t handle at all these gap moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Justin, now I’m thinking about one of my favorite comedians, Nathan Fielder, and his latest season of “The Rehearsal” in which he explores this very concept in terms of, like, co-pilots feeling nervous about speaking up and the dangers. And so it’s fairly trippy because, like, “Wait, this is a comedy, but it’s a reality, but this is a serious issue and you’re bringing awareness. But is it a joke?” And that’s kind of where he likes to play?

It’s like, “I’m bending genres and thoughts as you observe.” But it was quite intriguing. Could you share with us, what are your thoughts on this series and this dynamic with co-pilots?

Justin Hale
Yeah, this has been something that’s been an issue for over 50 years in the airlines. Actually, my father was an airline pilot for decades. And so I’m pretty familiar with the culture that exists there.

But you can even look at examples, like Florida Flight 90, which is about 30 years ago, right, where there’s a situation where we’ve got the captain who’s got a perspective about the weather and whether they should take off, and the co pilot sitting there saying things like, “I could see the ice building on the wings and I was seeing certain numbers in our mechanics that made me kind of wonder.”

And the co-pilot, feeling concerned about speaking truth to power, about being honest to authority, deferred and would maybe throw hints out and say things like, “Man, that’s a lot of ice. Does that seem right?”

And rather than being honest and speaking up about a potential miss or a mistake or a risk, this co-pilot, in some ways, just couched the truth. That airplane ended up crashing right into the river and a number of people died. And that’s one of many examples.

There was an Air Korea flight. There was a number of examples similar to that where there’s this culture of deference to authority, fear of being honest, and that exists. We see that on oil rigs. We see that in executive boardrooms. And, sadly, you often see it inside of airline cockpits.

And yet, about 20 years ago, many of the airlines, because of a few key mistakes and fatal crashes, they really tried to take this more seriously, created this whole CRM program that was all about addressing the conversational culture within the cockpit. And yet, what still permeates is this sense of, “Is it okay for me to question someone who’s more senior than me?”

And so it really is interesting. It is a tragic comedy to really think about how that same dynamic is true in so many areas of life. And it’s interesting because I also think we tend to look at those stories and we put a lot of the onus on the junior person, we’re like, “Why didn’t you say something? Why don’t you speak up? How could you let that happen?”

And yet, the culture of candor or culture of silence, whichever you’re getting, is more determined by how the senior person is behaving than really how the junior person is behaving, right? Does the senior person create an atmosphere where they invite that junior person to speak up, to disagree, to hold them accountable, to call out a mistake, to notice an error?

And we like to say that the health of any relationship, team, or culture is a function of the average time lag between someone seeing an issue and saying something about it. And if you’re talking about airlines, you can’t let that time lag go on too long because now you’re talking about fatal mistakes.

It’s the same thing. We see this, actually, in hospitals. We did a massive study called “Silence Kills.” We interviewed hundreds of people, surveyed thousands of people in hospitals, looking at the prevalence of silence within hospitals, especially relative to mistakes.

And it was scary how often junior people, on a clinical team, whether that be a nurse being faced with seeing an error that a doctor was making, or a more junior nurse speaking up to a nurse manager. And the prevalence of silence was, at least anecdotally, we could connect to a number of different mistakes that were made, which is scary.

Because if you’re talking about airlines, you’re talking about hospitals, mistakes aren’t just things where a project goes poorly, or there’s a bug in the software. We’re talking about human lives. I remember one, we were doing this large study in this hospital and there was this nurse manager who said, “You know, I have a nurse who works for me, who works under me who is…” these are her words, “…dangerously incompetent.”

And so you’re like, “Oh, my gosh. Talk about a gap,” right? And so we said, “What do you do about it?” She said, “Well, after this nurse leaves the patient’s room, I send in other nurses after her to double check all of her work.” And you’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” hand-to-face moment, like, “Are you serious?”

And yet, if you were to ask this nurse manager why and other people like her, in our study, they would say things like, “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” “I didn’t want to get into a confrontation,” right? The risks of speaking up were greater than anything else, the feeling of being uncomfortable, the argument, the hurting feelings.

And yet, think of all the risks of not speaking up in that moment. It’s expensive because now you’re paying people to double check work. It’s inefficient. This nurse isn’t getting any better. Most importantly, it’s dangerous. You’re putting a patient at risk.

And so a lot of what we tried to double down on in the new version of the book and gave some examples that were relevant that have happened over the last decade or two is examples where people made this sort of boneheaded calculation where they were trying to, they looked at a gap and they said, “Should I say something? Should I speak up?”

And in their calculation, they start focusing on and emphasizing all the short-term costs of being honest, “Oh, it’s going to be painful. It’s not going to go well. They’re going to get defensive. I’m going to…you know, they’re going to question me. I’m going to be labeled as a troublemaker.” All these issues of speaking up.

And in those calculations, they almost completely ignore all the long-term costs of not saying something, all the risks of silence. And so it’s this terrible mental calculation that we do that results in this ongoing silence, even when it matters most, is really alarming.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah, I hear that. Mercy. And what’s intriguing here is, you know, these scenarios are among the most intense and thrilling emotionally, “Junior person sees life-threatening situation. Will they speak up in the cockpit or in the emergency room, the operating theater?” And yet, this also shows up in more mundane areas, I might venture to say, nearly every day in workplaces that have teams who are regularly communicating with each other.

Justin Hale
Oh, constantly. Think about a simple example as you and a coworker rely on each other for work. And so you’ve got this coworker who maybe is a copy editor and helps you out a lot. And that’s part of their job, right?

And so you say, “Hey, will you review this proposal that I wrote up for the executive team?” And they say, “Great. I’ll take care of it.” And you say, “Hey, can you get it to me by Friday at noon?” And they say, “Absolutely.” Friday at 4:00 p.m. rolls around, no proposal back to you. Monday morning, 8:00 a.m. rolls around, no proposal back to you. So here you go, you’ve got a gap.

Or how about, you’re a sales manager and you manage a group of 10 reps and, “Here we go again, it’s the third quarter in a row that one of my reps is missing his quota.” So, to your point, the gaps are not only incredibly consequential, they’re just common. It happens in our daily life.

I mean, I was having a conversation just last night, my wife and I, with my son, about the fact that, you know, hey, he’s 12, he wants to play with his friends, he wants to go to a sports, he wants to have a good time, he wants to loiter here and there, you know, like classic teenagers.

And yet, what we asked from him is, “Hey, you got to keep up on your homework. You got to get good grades. Everyday you need to come home, look at your missing assignments or assignments that have a poor grade and go back and make adjustments, make fixes,” and he wasn’t doing that. And he has a massive pattern of doing it.

We have a situation with a neighbor who maybe is parking her car on your side of the driveway or on your grass. All of these are gaps. And so, to your point, we face them every single day, some small, some big, some medium size. And yet, if you’re a human being that has any relationships with other human beings, you’re going to have gaps.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, it’s funny when you mentioned neighbors, I’m just thinking about homeowners associations, HOAs, and it’s amazing to me because, and this plays a larger topic that neighbors tend to not know each other.

And it’s sort of a social norm such that I even feel weird, like, I’d like to meet my neighbors, but it almost seems odd for me to knock on the door, and say, “Hello, I am your neighbor. Welcome. I would like to meet you and know you and be familiar with you. And if you need a cup of sugar or whatever, come on down.”

That seems like a very natural human wholesome instinct. And yet, I myself, I say, “Oh, no, that’s kind of weird. People don’t really do that. I don’t know how they’re going to like that. And then are they going to get into my business?” So, yeah.

Justin Hale
Yeah, that’s an important insight, though. I love what you’re saying, because we don’t do that in the same way that we probably used to in terms of building some relationship with the people in our community – small c – right, in our neighborhood.

And yet, you will face moments of accountability or gaps or mistakes or things that bug you that they will do, or you will do to them, right? It just naturally happens. If you’re in a family, it happens. Like, if you’re in a relationship, people will let each other down.

But because we don’t build relationships, it makes having those conversations very difficult and, in some ways, almost impossible. We have no basis of trust or understanding or anything. And so what you see instead, and it’s hilarious, you bring up community, you know, communities and HOAs.

In my community, what you see all the time is just people post their gripes on the community Facebook group. And they just lay into people. And the other day, and it’s hilarious, because they’ll weave it into politics in the most cutting ways.

The other day, someone was complaining about the local school, “It’s the last straw with the school. Let me tell you my story.” And I’m thinking to myself, “You know who you should probably address that with? The school.”

And so we’ve become accustomed to this very indirect complaining, gossiping, shouting our frustrations to the social media world, and rarely do we go in person, face-to-face, to the person we have real concerns with who can actually do something about it and have the honest conversation.

And maybe we end up getting there, but we start with complaining and shouting into social media. And the problem becomes is we build up this emotional distance between us and the person in which we need to have the conversation with.

Same issue you’re talking about with neighbors. When I don’t know you, I have no relationship with you, we haven’t connected on something common, we haven’t talked about our kids and shared a little story, “Oh, you’re a fan of this team. I’m a fan of this team. You grew up there? So did I.”

That commonality builds relationships. And why does that matter? Because if you ever want to talk with someone about issues, having a relationship of trust allows that very crucial conversation to go much more effectively when you believe certain things about each other’s intent.

I mean, this is sort of a principle that is weaved throughout the entire book. That if people can feel psychologically safe, you can talk with them about almost anything. But when they don’t feel that way, it doesn’t matter how flowery or how well spoken you are, they don’t want to hear it. No matter if what you’re saying is true about their mistake or not, if they don’t feel psychologically safe with you, they don’t want to hear it.

And that doesn’t mean always comfortable, but it means safety is a function of intent, not content. Meaning, whether someone, a neighbor or someone in your community, is willing to hear you speak up about your concerns or hold them accountable, is all about their belief in your intent.

If they believe your intent is good and you’re trying to help or you’re trying to address some common interest or that you respect them, and so you respect them enough to share this feedback with them, they’ll be much more likely to hear you.

But if they believe that your intent is malicious, or you’re trying to hurt them, or you’re a threat to their goals, or that you don’t respect them, it doesn’t matter how nice you say it, they will shut down, they’ll go into self preservation mode, right?

And so it really is, I think you make a great point around safety, around building a relationship. In the book, we state it this way, we say when people feel safe, they’re more likely to embrace uncomfortable truth. And when they embrace uncomfortable truth, they’re much more likely to take responsibility.

And that’s really what we’re after, is that we want people to just own up to their mistake. And, honestly, that’s so rare that when we see it, we’re like, “Oh, thank you. I’m good.” And our respect for them goes up immediately.

And so that idea of, when people feel safe, they’re more likely to embrace uncomfortable truth. And when they embrace uncomfortable truth, they’re more likely to take responsibility.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, these are good solid principles and they resonate in terms of being true, that widespread complaining indirectly on the HOA Facebook or to the HOA presidents, often, I think folks hear revelations in an exit interview. It’s like, “Oh, I had no idea that was the thing that you wanted, or that was troublesome for your work experience this whole time.”

So that’s sort of the lay of the land, the core principles, and the problem. So what are some of the best practices you suggest for folks who want to shrink gaps between expectations and performance so that we’re getting great performance and rocking these conversations, no problem?

Justin Hale
There’s two views we can look at this through. Let’s start with the leader and then we’ll go to the employee. And if you want to be, you’re talking about being awesome at your job, if you want to be an awesome leader, like a great manager, someone who is rare out there, you need to focus on clarity. I mean, that is just such an underrated skill when it comes to leadership.

And what I mean by that is so many of the gaps that leaders find themselves dealing with started at the moment where the expectation was set. And it wasn’t the employee’s fault, it was the leader’s fault. Meaning, maybe they say something, maybe you and I are meeting in a quarterly review or something and I say, “Hey, look, Pete, you’re doing a great job in general.”

“And I know you want to grow to this next role, you’re looking for that promotion, I want to help you get there. What I’d like to see you do more in the next quarter as you’re in these project meetings and working with the marketing department and all these kinds of things, I want you to be more collaborative, okay? If you can do that, I see great things for you.”

And you shake your head and go, “That sounds really nice,” and you walk away. Right away, we probably have a gap. Why? Because what in the world does collaborative mean? “Do you mean you want me to be friends with these people? Do you mean you want me to attend certain meetings I’m not attending? Do want me to, you know, go visit and meet one on one with certain people I’m not visiting with and meeting with one on one right now? What in the world do you mean by collaborative?”

Or maybe I say, “Hey, listen, you’re really technically solid in your job, but the part of your job I want you to get better at is I want you to be, I don’t know, I want you to be just take more initiative, right? Like, I really want to see you be a go-getter this year, and then that’s really where I want you to improve.” And, like, boom, right off the bat, we’ve got a gap. Why?

Because leaders use these vague terms, you know. “Take initiative and be more responsible and be a team player and be more collaborative.” And in their mind, they have a picture of what that looks like, but they don’t spell it out. They use these vague sort of, you know, business school terminology that sounds nice.

Pete Mockaitis
“You should be more synergistic, Justin.”

Justin Hale
Yeah, exactly, right? “Let’s take this offline and be more synergistic,” right? It’s those kinds of things. And the employee walks away from the conversation with their own understanding of what they think that means. And there’s a high likelihood that those two understandings are different.

And so right off the bat, we have a gap from the beginning, which grows wider and wider as time goes on between what the leader wanted and what the employee thought they wanted. So first big tip here is, if you’re a leader, get crystal clear about what you want, get behavioral. “You can’t be too specific,” is what I tell people in terms of your expectation.

Another tip that I found helpful, one leader that I worked with was excellent at this. We have a meeting, she’d talk about expectations, and then she would just send an email to me within a few hours, like sometime that day, and she would just simply say, “Hey, I’m not sending you this to micromanage you. I’m just sending this because I don’t want you to feel unclear, and I don’t want you and I to ever be on different pages. So my understanding is, from the chat we just had a couple hours ago, is that we’re going to do X, Y, and Z by this date. Is that how you see it?”

And it just gave me a chance to review her understanding of the expectation and for me to either say, “Oh, I actually saw that a little differently.” And then to come back with my understanding, or to say, “Yep, that’s how I understood who was going to do what by when and how we were going to follow up and all that stuff.” And then, boom, it’s locked in. And it’s also documented.

And if you do it in a very, like, simple, informal way, it doesn’t have to feel weird. And, by the way, you’re doing it for them, for the employee. You’re doing it for both of you to be on the same page. So that’s a huge first tip is, as a leader, you’ve got to create a ton of clarity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I love that in terms of getting super specific and behavioral, like, “What does it mean to be collaborative, to have initiative, to be proactive, to be strategic, to have ‘executive presence’?” There’s dozens of things that any of those could mean. Could you share a few examples of going from vague adjective to specific behaviors that paint the picture?

Justin Hale
Yeah, a really common one is take initiative. And it’s because what leaders really want is their people, they say, “I want you to be proactive.” What they’re really looking for is, “Hey, when you’re asked to do something, get clear on what the action is, and I want you to take it, right?” That’s essentially what they’re saying.

So one way to be proactive, say something like, “Hey, I’d you to be more proactive.” The employee might say, “What do you mean by that?” And the leader could say, “Hey, when we’re at the end of a meeting, and you’re unsure if you’re supposed to do anything relative to the meeting, I just want you to ask a question which is, ‘Hey, group, just double checking. Do I have any next actions? And if so, when do I need to finish them by?’”

“I want you to just ask those two questions. And then if you’re given assignments, I want you to make sure you capture those somewhere not in your mind. And I want you to focus on completing that next action by the due date. And when you show up to the next meeting, just give a quick 30-second report back on where you’re at with that. That’s it.”

“If you do that one small thing, to me, that is a great representation of being proactive relative to our team and our projects and all these kinds of things. I want to see you do that more often.” Or it might be an example of saying, “I want you to be more proactive,” and the employee says, “What do you mean?”

And they say, “Well, you’re leading these meetings. And so what I want you to do is I want you to create an outline for the meeting in terms of how you’re going to spend your time. And I want you to put that in the meeting invite to the rest of the team so that everyone knows why they’re coming, and what we’ll be talking about during that meeting. So I’d like you to be more proactive around meetings and discussions and conversations by doing that action.”

So it’s really about taking any vague, you know, trope that leaders are used to giving, and really saying, “Okay, what would that look like? What would you see people do behaviorally that would be a manifestation of that attribute that you’re looking for?”

“I want you to be more collaborative. Okay, what I mean by that is, you know, I want to see you work more closely with the sales team. So I want you to set up an ongoing once a month meeting with the sales director, Tim, and I want you guys to meet once a month to talk about gaps he may be seeing and how you guys are providing resources for them and any feedback you might have for the sales team in terms of using the resources you’re creating for them. That’s how I want you to be more collaborative moving forward with the sales team.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s intriguing. In some ways, as you spell out these actions, it almost feels as though this is a conversation with a more junior employee, but I suppose it could also very well apply to folks who are deep into their careers.

Justin Hale
Absolutely. The thing that we continue to see over and over again in this work that we do is that people that are senior will often say, “Yeah, this is common sense,” or, “I need to be holding these conversations.”

But common sense is not common practice, right? And you don’t just automatically become better at these as you become more senior in your career. Actually, often the opposite is true, which is sad. People become, they start to really get good at being bad at these kinds of conversations, right?

They develop early in their career poor habits and they think those work because maybe they’re technically successful, and so they’ve been successful in spite of the fact that they’re poor at these conversations. They think they’re good at them because, hey, they’ve risen in their career.

And so, yes, it is essential for you to be crystal clear. Actually, one of my colleagues, David Allen, who’s the author of Getting Things Done, he talked about, you know, one of the zeros and ones of that methodology, that productivity methodology that he would say is outcome and action thinking.

And it actually came from years and years of working with executives, where you’d be sitting with, you know, he and his colleagues would be sitting with executives in meetings, and they’d say, “What are you dealing with?” And they’d say, “Well, we have the same problems this year as we had last year.”

And they’d say, “Let’s do a simple exercise.” And these are with high powered executives of Fortune 50 companies, that kind of stuff. And he’d say, “Okay, I want each of you to take a second and grab a piece of paper and I want you to take your biggest concern and write it down on a piece of paper.”

And they’d all write it down, their own individual large concern, the thing that’s keeping them up at night. And he’d say, “Okay. What’s your desired outcome? What would have to be true for you to say that this concern was resolved or solved or completed or taken care of? Paint that picture for me. Write it down on the paper. What would have to be true?”

And they would, essentially, be spelling out their desired outcome in more clear terms. And then he’d say, “Okay, if we ended the meeting right now, this executive offsite, and you had nothing else to do in your world, except for start moving on closure on this thing, what would I watch you do? What would be your next action?”

“Would it be to pick up your phone and make a phone call? Would it be to schedule a meeting? Would it be to draft an email? Would it be to open up a PowerPoint and begin creating a proposal? What would I watch you do?”

And these experienced, decades of experienced executives, would finally get dislodged from months and sometimes years of procrastination, putting things off, spinning their wheels on large problems that were the same problems as they had last year, simply because they couldn’t get beyond.

I mean, these are people who, you know, leaders are often very good at being strategic. But what they’re often not good at is getting into the minutia of, “Okay, what’s the next action? What’s the next step? What are you going to do? What would that look like? Tell me more about what your next step is, right? Don’t just tell me about your goals.”

They obsess over goals. They meet over goals. They fly all over the world and go to these resorts to talk about, “What are our goals? What are our goals? What are our goals?” And yet, they often stay stuck because they can’t get down to the specifics of, “What’s the next action?”

And so, to your point, these are conversations, when it comes to gap moments and accountability, where you can’t be too specific no matter the level of the person you’re talking to. I mean, this is something we see all the time, by the way.

We talk in the book about examples where employees should use these skills to hold their leaders accountable. Do leaders ever make mistakes? Does your boss ever let you down? I’m sure he or she does all the time. And you should be able to use these skills as well.

And that specificity becomes even more important when you say to your boss, “Hey, look, I’ve been noticing some of the ways that the meetings have been going. I just feel like we’re not getting a lot accomplished.” And they say, “Okay, I’ll get better at that.”

And you say, “Well, let me give you some more specifics. What I mean by that is I’ve often found there’s a pattern. We spend the last 20 minutes just talking about processes rather than talking about action. And I feel like we’re having meetings because we didn’t actually establish clear action. And so we’re having more meetings than we need to. And I want to talk about how we can get better at that.”

This is employee initiating that conversation. So I think you’re right. This principle goes from the first-time intern to the senior executive.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. And David Allen has been on the show a couple of times, and “What’s the next action?” is such a power question to cut right through things and get them moving. So great principles there in terms of super clear on what the expectation is, down to the next action, the specific behaviors. What are some other core principles here?

Justin Hale
Yeah, so there’s a few. I don’t know if your listeners have ever seen the movie “Groundhog Day,” classic Bill Murray, I mean, it just never goes out of style. But there’s this phenomenon we like to call living Groundhog Day in your accountability conversations.

Meaning, so often, we are holding the same conversation over and over again, we’re living Groundhog Day. And people come to me and complain about this all the time, like, “I’m hitting my head up against a wall, Justin, because I keep having the same conversation over and over again. It’s not getting better. The gap is not closing.”

And I’ll often be honest with people, and say, “That’s on you. That’s actually your fault. If you’re having the same conversation over and over again, the problem isn’t them, it’s you.” Like, “Oh, what do you mean?” “What I mean is you’re having the wrong conversation. So before you even open your mouth, you’ve got to get really clear about what the real gap is, what the issue is.”

We have this really powerful skill called CPR. It’s an acronym that stands for content, pattern, relationship. It’s a great diagnostic tool. So, essentially, you look at a situation, say, “Oh, I’ve got a gap.” And I would say, “Okay. Well, is it a one-time issue? Meaning this mistake has happened only once.”

That would be a content conversation, “Hey, I noticed you missed this one deadline today,” one time. Most of the time, though, people are frustrated, not because something has happened once, but because it’s a pattern, P, right, because it’s happened three or four or five times.

The issue isn’t today’s episode of the mistake. The issue is the last four episodes of the mistake. And the problem that we run into, one of the reasons we live out Groundhog Day, is because we go to hold the accountability discussion, we go to address the gap, and we talk about the most recent episode, and the person has a good reason for why they made the mistake or they had that miss.

And so we say, “Oh, that excuse, makes mistakes” and we walk away and we feel initially resolved. But then two or three days later, we’re back in the same conversation again, and we’re, like, flabbergasted. Why? It’s because in that moment, you were holding the wrong conversation. The issue wasn’t yesterday’s episode. The issue was the fact that it’s happened four or five times.

So let’s say I’ve got an issue with someone who shows up late to work, and we work in an environment where they need to be on time because we’ve got patients coming in or customers coming in or something like that. And this person has shown up late five times in the last month.

And I go to them and say, “Hey, I noticed yesterday you were late.” And you go, “Oh, my gosh, you wouldn’t believe what happened to my son. We had to take him to the hospital.” And you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I feel so bad.” And you’re like, “I’m so glad your son’s okay.” And you’re good and you walk away.

You haven’t really resolved the real issue. The real issue isn’t yesterday’s episode. The real issue is it’s happened five times. And so it would be the equivalent of having like a dandelion weed in your front yard, your beautifully manicured grass.

And you walk out of your front door and you say, “Oh, what an ugly weed,” and you walk over and you rip the top off and throw it away and you tell yourself, “I took care of it,” which we know is a lie. It’s going to grow back because of the roots. That’s a great metaphor for thinking about conversations.

If a situation has persisted, if a gap has gone on for a while and your frustration is growing, unless and until you address that pattern, or you address the deepest level, which is the R, or relationship, how the relationship’s being impacted or trust is being broken, or respect is being strained, until you address a deeper level of the conversation, the ongoing issue and how it’s affecting your relationship, until you address the root, that gap will not go away. That gap will not close.

So the first skill we really teach people is choose the right conversation. Is it a content issue, one time? Is it a pattern? Or is it a relationship-level issue where trust is an issue or competence is coming into question or there’s a respect concern?

And so many of us would benefit from holding the right conversation, even if we hold it awkwardly or imperfectly. If we’re talking about the right issue, we’re much more likely to get unstuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And it really does seem quite easy to get sidetracked, distracted by the one-off, the exceptional, and then you’re kind of lost.

Justin Hale
That’s the 200 level of this skill, right? That’s where that comes in. If you’re a leader and you come up and say, “Hey, I want to talk to you about something that I’ve noticed, there’s this pattern,” and you start talking about the pattern.

And what often happens is that person wants to suck you back into content. You can’t fall for that. To your point, you’ve got to stay focused on the real issue. If someone says, “Oh, but…” Say, “Look, I understand that there may have been an extenuating circumstance, but that’s not my real concern. My real concern is that this has happened five or six times. My issue is the pattern.”

And so, to your point, that’s where the advanced portion of this comes in is you’ve got to both notice what the right conversation is and have some fidelity to that as the conversation progresses.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us some best practices for actually doing the conversation?

Justin Hale
Yeah. So once you know what you need to talk about, you’re in a really great place. One quick tip for when it’s time to start the conversation, which is a skill we teach called describe the gap, which is simply state the facts related to what you expect and what you’d observed. Most people begin these conversations with emotion, with conclusions.

Pete Mockaitis
“I was really worried when I noticed this. I felt disappointed, sad, angry, frustrated.”

Justin Hale
Hurt. Yeah, frustrated, right? And so, because that’s what’s front of mind to us is the impact of their behavior. And so we want it to be front of word, meaning it’s the first thing out of our mouths. And that is the last thing you should do.

These conversations will inevitably go poorly when you start with emotion, assumptions, conclusions, judgments. Don’t do that. Now, I’m not Pollyanna. I get that you’re frustrated. I get frustrated. I’m not saying you’re not going to be frustrated about gaps, about mistakes that people make. You will be. But if you lead with that frustration, they will get defensive.

So even before you open your mouth, there’s a little bit of a pre-skill here, which is, it’s actually funny because I’ll have people come to me and say, “You know, I’m really frustrated about this. I need you to help me. Give me some coaching and some training on my body language. I want to make sure I don’t come off as frustrated.”

And I’ll laugh and say, “You want me to teach you how to lie, essentially? You want to be bubbling underneath the surface and angry and frustrated, but you want me to teach you how to pretend that you’re not? No, I’m not doing that, right? What you need to do is get at the source, right?”

Your emotions and frustrations are actually not a function of what the other person has done. You think they are because you say things like, “He pushed my buttons,” “She makes me so mad.” What we know from the science is that your emotions are a function of the story you tell yourself about what other people are doing.

So if you look at the brain, the way it works is, is it’s kind of an interesting four-step process when you go from observing something to acting. First, you see, hear, and observe something. Maybe you’re sitting in a meeting and you hear someone say something, right? There’s the observation, there’s the fact.

Then what your brain does is your brain makes a judgment. It wants to make sense of what you just saw. It comes to conclusions, it makes judgments, it makes assumptions, it fills in blanks. It essentially adds color to the situation you just saw. And much of that story, we would call it, is based on previous experiences, your own paradigms, your own mental models, right?

That story then drives your emotion, “Is what I just saw and heard good or bad? Is it negative or positive? Do I like it? Not like it? How do I feel about this?” And then how you feel, that emotion then drives your action.

So this is what we call the path to action. You see something or observe it, you tell a story, you feel a certain way, and then you act. And yet, your brain does that four-step process like that. I mean, it’s like lightning, right?

Now, why should people care about this when it comes to starting conversations? That was your question. If your story about why someone has done what they’ve done is something like this, “They don’t care. They’re lazy. This is not a priority to them. They’re just out to get me.” If that’s your story, can you guess what your emotion’s going to be?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, you’ll be angry and resentful and frustrated, all the things.

Justin Hale
All that stuff. You will come in with this judgment which will show on your face, your tone, all that stuff. You are screwed from the beginning. I mean, period, right? No matter how much you try to say it in the most refined words, your emotions will show in all the nonverbals, and they’ll get defensive, right?

And so what you’re trying to do here, the biggest threat to progress before a conversation happens is disgusted certainty. This judgment that the other person is this certain way or their intent is this. And then you latch onto that with this certainty that you’re right, that your story is correct. We tend to believe that our stories are facts.

And so, but when you can challenge that with determined curiosity, when you can challenge your story, I’m not saying be Pollyanna and say, “Well, I’m sure that they made this mistake for a good reason. I’m going to let it go,” nope. That’s not what I’m saying.

What I’m saying is challenge your story by asking questions like, “I wonder, you know, why would a reasonable, rational, decent person do what they just did?” or, “I wonder if there’s some circumstances I’m not totally aware of that might be contributing to the situation?” or, “I wonder if I did anything to contribute to this. What’s my part in this?”

When you start asking some of those questions, what you are doing, essentially, is you are interrogating your own story because our stories tend to be pretty self-serving. They tend to be pretty one-sided. And when you ask questions, you start to make your story consider other options, “Maybe I’m not 100 % certain what’s going on. Maybe there is something more to this. I’m not sure.”

You see what I’ve done here? I haven’t become more certain about some Pollyanna positive outcome. I’ve just become less certain about my initial disgusted belief. And so now I’m more curious and my story is like, “Hmm, I wonder what’s going on here? I ought to go ask. I’m going to go have a conversation.” You’ve now replaced a disgusted certainty with determined curiosity.

So back to your initial question, “How do I start a conversation?” You begin the conversation with an attitude of determined curiosity, “I’m going to go find out. I know here’s what I’ve seen. I’m going to go find out why. I’m not 100% sure. Sure, I have a little bit of my beliefs in my back of my mind but I’m not sure that those are factual. I’m going to go ask some questions.”

And when you’re ready to start, now it leaves you space to be a human being. It leaves you a space to fumble a little bit. You don’t have to say things perfectly. Why? Because it shows on your face that you are legitimately curious. You’re like, “Hey, I want to check something out with you here,” versus, “I can’t believe you did this.” Can you feel the difference, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Justin Hale
So once you’re ready to start, then you can describe the gap. You can say, “Hey, here’s the facts. Hey, you and I discussed last week that you would, you know, finish this report analysis for me and send it to me by Monday. It’s Tuesday afternoon, I haven’t gotten the report yet. What’s up?” That’s it.

Because the beginning of these accountability discussions is an initiation of a longer dialogue. It is not holding court, giving out the judgment all in one statement. It is simply stating the facts related to the expectation, the facts related to the observation in terms of the actual performance, and it’s just asking a question. That’s it, open-ended. And we’re trying to just initiate the beginning of a dialogue.

And when you open like that, you are much more likely to get honesty rather than hiding or skirting or lying about the truth about what’s going on.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Okay, so we’ve done some pre-work, got the curiosity going, we simply describe what’s up instead of leading with emotions. Any other pro tips for the actual conversation?

Justin Hale
In that situation, if you do those things, here’s our experience, 95% of the time, you will get to a dialogue, they’ll be honest with you about what’s going on, and then you can just talk. You can talk about, “Oh, here’s what got in the way, and here’s why I missed it.”

And, “Okay, let me help you solve for that. And in the future, can you please speak up to me a little earlier when you run into that kind of barrier. And, great, and we’re moving on towards solutions.” Sometimes, though, maybe we don’t do a great job of starting, we don’t get our emotions right, and the person gets defensive.

And so now you’re talking about restoring safety, “What do I do in the middle of the conversation? What do I do in the middle of the conversation when the other person doesn’t jump into the dialogue? They start shutting down. They start blowing up. They start getting frustrated. How do I address that issue?”

And we teach the skill called “Make it safe.” Now, what does that mean? That does not mean make it comfortable. That doesn’t mean that giving feedback and talking about gaps is always touchy-feely and it’s always so comfortable.

I have gotten some of the toughest feedback in my career that I was willing to hear that was incredibly uncomfortable. And yet, I wanted to hear it. Why? Because it goes back to something we talked about earlier. Safety is not a function of the content or the topic. It’s a function of people’s belief about your intent.

So when I see someone, and to your point, in the middle of a conversation getting defensive, I have to ask myself the question, “Okay, whoa! What are they believing about my intent that’s making them get defensive here?”

It’s one of two things. Either they believe that I don’t have mutual purpose, which is what I want, is a threat to what they want, that I don’t share their goals, their struggles, that I don’t care about what they care about. Or it’s a lack of mutual respect. I don’t respect them or care about them as a person. And if there is a lack of mutual purpose and or mutual respect, safety is gone out of the room, right?

It gets sucked out of the room completely and people go into self-preservation mode. They want to protect themselves, right? Because they feel threatened. Their belief about your intent is, “Hey, she’s out to get me,” “He’s out to get me,” “He doesn’t care about me,” “He doesn’t respect me.”

And so your job in that moment is to put a little bookmark in the topic. Let’s say we’re talking about a gap around deadlines or sales quota or parking your car on my driveway, and take a quick sidestep to address the conditions in that moment, “Let me address your belief about my intent, because I have no hope of you hearing about the actual problem if you are stuck in self-preservation mode, if you’re feeling defensive and unsafe.”

So a great skill that I find helpful is called contrasting, is that if I’m noticing that my intent is good, but that you believe my intent isn’t, I simply contrast what I don’t intend with what I do intend. So if you and I are having a conversation about you parking on my driveway, and I say, “Hey, you know, you and I talked about this before about my grass and it’s important to me. And we talked about where we park our cars.”

“I noticed that over the last couple of weeks that your car has been parked on my grass and it’s left these marks that I now have to fix. I just wanted to find out what’s happened based on our initial conversation?” And you go, “I can’t believe you. You don’t care about the fact that I’ve got five kids in here. I’ve got two adult kids that are struggling, and we’re just trying to make ends meet.”

And it’s that moment you go, “Whoa!” right? They think that I don’t respect the fact that they got a busy life. And in that moment, they’re perceiving that my intent is that I don’t share their concerns. That’s actually not true.

Like, I got a lot of kids myself and I can respect that they’re trying to juggle a lot of balls all at once. Before I keep talking about the parking issue, I got to address the fact that they’re questioning my intent.

So I might say something like, “Oh, I apologize. My intent, I’m not trying to say that I don’t recognize that you’ve got a lot going on, and I know that feeling of having lots of kids and trying to make space for their cars, and you got kids running around and I totally get that and I can empathize with that. I’m not trying to question that that’s a lot to balance.”

“My concern is that you and I have talked before about this, and just like you, I’m trying to take care of my own house and my grass is important to me, and I just want to find a way to be sensitive to the fact that we’re both juggling a lot and keep my grass in good shape.”

So it’s just a simple way to say, “Here’s what I don’t intend. Here’s what I do intend. I’m going to address what I think is your misunderstanding, your belief about my intent. I’m going to go right at that. And then I’m going to clarify for you what my real intent is, right, smoothing out that psychological safety by helping you understand that.”

And like we said before, when people feel safe, they’re more likely, it’s not guaranteed, they’re more likely to embrace the truth that you’re trying to share. And when they embrace that truth, they’re more likely to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m wondering about, even if they don’t think that, “This person is out to get me,” do you believe, or is there psychological research data on this, that a subset of people may simply have a high level of defensiveness, feeling threatened-ness, unable to receive criticism of any sort, no matter how delightfully and positively you’re intending it? Like, what do those percentages look like?

Justin Hale
I think that’s great. I think, absolutely, that is true. But I don’t know, our experience has not been that that is necessarily always consistent across every relationship and every part of someone’s life. So if we were to put it on a scale of zero, which is never defensive, to 10 of always defensive, that someone who’s a nine at work doesn’t mean they’re always a nine at home. They might be.

But I think that previous life experiences drive people who might be a three up to a five. I see this all the time with people I work with in organizations where they have a boss who’s pretty tyrannical and hard on them.

Maybe they were a three when they started that job in terms of their own mindset of other people’s intent and how often they get defensive, and their belief about other people’s intent being malicious. And by the time they leave that job, they’re at a five. They’re a little more leery of people’s intent, especially leaders. They’ve become more skeptical, more cynical, okay?

And so, yes, I do believe that our life experiences, and our experience has been working with hundreds of thousands of people doing this training and consulting and coaching with these conversations, is that you can have, especially when it goes on for long enough, you could have the kinds of experiences that prime you to have a little bit quicker of a negative belief about other people’s intent.

But here’s the good news. We’ve also found that that can be retrained. And someone who may be, because of life experiences, maybe because of an upbringing, and their family, or an environment they’ve worked in, that they’ve become an eight.

That doesn’t mean you’re an eight for the rest of your life, that you can learn and skillfully move yourself down to a three, back down to a two, that that mindset or that belief system about other people’s intent can be retrained, which is great news, right? It’s great news.

And so with any of these things around conversations, we have found that it’s not one of these things that you’re either born with or not, that it’s a skill that you can develop and you can become world-class at it if you weren’t born in a family that was great at talking about issues, or that your first job was an organization where candor was the norm, but that you can become highly skilled at that.

And that’s been our experience with people we’ve worked with, executives, leaders all over the world. Most of these people didn’t just automatically come from a background that they were good at it. They developed it. They practiced it. They were aware of their own deficiencies and lack of skill and their own poor behaviors up to that point.

And we worked on saying, “Here’s a replacement behavior. Here’s a better skill. We’re going to practice this. We’re going to have you try it out. Oh, it didn’t go super well. Why didn’t it go well? Let’s give you some coaching. Let’s have you try it again.” And through time, they become masters at holding these accountability discussions.

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

Justin Hale
I think two big things, kind of going back to the beginning, is I think we tend to obsess over the risks of speaking up, and we minimize the risks of not speaking up. And I would encourage people, if you’ve got a gap in front of you that you’ve been putting off, just do a little analysis for yourself.

Sure, make a list of all the risks of saying something, “Oh, it’s uncomfortable. It’s going to be a confrontation. They might get defensive.” But then I want you to take equal amount of time, writing down a list of things that could happen if you didn’t say something.

What if this continued over the next five years? What would that mean for you emotionally, for the organization, for the team, for the results, for this person? In that relationship, that personal relationship, let’s say, with your spouse, if you didn’t bring up this issue you have with them about the way they treat you, and you didn’t bring it up, what would happen over the next 10 years in your marriage? What would that mean for your relationship, for the feeling in your home?

So I would encourage people to really shift that risk analysis, and I guarantee they’ll start finding that honesty coming out more often. And the second thing I would say is that we talk about this in the book that all lasting happiness and satisfaction depends on our capacity for both truth and love.

Not just love. Not just care. Not just respect, but our capacity for happiness and fulfillment is about that truth, that honesty, the having that conversation, and about caring and loving people. We tend to believe we have to choose one or the other. You can either be honest with someone or you can tell them the truth.

And our ability to achieve the greatest level of happiness and fulfillment and development of people is about our tireless effort to accomplish both of those things. Be honest and be caring. Be truthful and be loving.

And that’s where you start to see relationships flourish in ways you can never imagine because they’re no longer shrouded with hiding and dishonesty and masking and silence. They’re now filled with a beautiful amount of candor.

And so those are two big things I would suggest for people to consider as they start to face these conversations.

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

Justin Hale
Well, we talked about David Allen earlier. That is one of my favorite quotes is the big David Allen, you know, quip where he said, “Your head is for having ideas, not for holding them.” I absolutely love that. It’s been one of those things that has transformed my life. And if you talk about being more productive, high-performing, get stuff out of your head and you’ll start to see it get done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Justin Hale
Any research on social proof, I find to be super powerful. It turns out that we think that we’re individuals with our own minds, but we tend to do what other people do. One study I found really was fascinating where they were trying to get people in hotels to reuse towels to try to save water.

And so they put a variety of different signs next to the towels to try to do an experiment to see which sign increased the percentage of people reusing towels. And they would say things like, “Oh, if you reuse your towels, you’ll save this amount of water,” or, “If you reuse your towels, we’ll give you some points on your rewards program,” whatever.

The one that had the greatest impact was any sign that they put that said, “X percent of people do this,” “70% of people recycle their towels or reuse their towels.” The ones that were related to social proof, aka, “This is normal. Most people do this behavior,” was the one that had the greatest impact on whether people reuse their towels or not.

And there are dozens of studies like that where we, essentially, say, “We like to fit in,” and that’s a powerful thing to know about why we do what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Justin Hale
A book that I picked up as an undergrad, walking through the university library, looking for something to spark what I wanted to major in, what I want to do with my life, a book called Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci. It’s all about motivation, what drives us. Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic. Loved it.

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

Justin Hale
Note to Self. So this goes back to the David Allen thing. I got a lot going on. I got stuff to quickly get stuff off my mind, but I don’t want to lose track of where it goes. And for a while, I used to email myself. I used to open up my email app and put myself as the who I’m sending it to, and have to put a subject line in, and then put in whatever message I wanted to, had on my mind.

Note to Self just cuts through all of that. It, essentially, is just, you open up the app and it’s just blank digital space. And all you do is type something and just push send. It automatically emails you. It’s true with images. I take a picture of something and then automatically just, Note to Self, boom, send it to myself.

So, in five seconds, I can go from thought to, it’s in an inbox somewhere that I trust and I can let it go. And so I love that that app, increases my efficiency, so.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Justin Hale
Making my bed. I love that. Love just making it nice, making it look good. I feel like, for the rest of morning, as I walk through my room and I see that done, it sends a message to my brain about, you know, accomplishment, performance, who I am, who I want to be.

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

Justin Hale
There was a leader that shared this with me, and she said, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled.” And that really connects to why we wrote the book Crucial Accountability and why the revision, was that our success has a lot to do with not moments when things are going well.

It has to do when things go wrong, when people make mistakes, if I’m a leader or a parent or a friend, what determines the success of this relationship is often how we handle mistakes, how we handle moments when things don’t go as planned.

And so I’ve shared that with thousands of people I’ve spoken to or worked with, and I hear that back a lot that people find that to be especially powerful, “The road to success is paved with mistakes well-handled.”

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

Justin Hale
Yeah, CrucialLearning.com is a great place to go to learn about not just our books, but our training program, consulting and coaching. And people can find me on LinkedIn, Justin Hale.

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

Justin Hale
Well, during this podcast, people inevitably had a thought, “That’s really cool.” And my challenge for people would be to say, “Okay, but what’s your next action?” Don’t let that cool thing reside in your hope and as hope in your brain. What are you going to do about it? Pick a small little action, go take that action.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Justin, thank you.

Justin Hale
You’re welcome! Thanks for having me.

May 28
0

1156: How to Make Great Meetings that Stop Wasting Time with Rebecca Hinds

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Rebecca Hinds discusses the simple shifts that turn meetings from time-wasters into value-generators.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why most meetings don’t feel like “real work”
  2. Why every organization needs a “meeting doomsday”
  3. The easy agenda fixes that save so much time

About Rebecca

Rebecca Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work.

She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work—from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption and organizational change.

Resources Mentioned

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Rebecca Hinds Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Rebecca Hinds
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too. Me, too. And I am excited about making meetings fantastic. Could you share with us perhaps one of your most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while you’re putting together Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve long been fascinated by this phenomenon that’s called the Babble Hypothesis. Research shows that, when people talk more, talk more in a meeting, outside of a meeting as well, we perceive them to be a leader more than they are regardless of what they’re saying.

And I think, you know, so much of our meetings are performative, they’re skewed by status dynamics and power dynamics within the organization, and I think this Babble Hypothesis really speaks to the fact that we need to be much more intentional about how we show up to meetings because talking, hogging the airtime isn’t just annoying. It isn’t just frustrating. It actually skews our perception of the people in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so fascinating and, boy, you’re bringing back memories of high school. I remember Robbie Klaver – shoutout to Robbie, wherever he is – told me, I was starting up a Model United Nations chapter at my high school.

And he said, “If you want to win awards, all you have to do is talk a lot.” It was like, “That’s it. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be insightful, it doesn’t have to be helpful. Just get in front of that microphone a lot, and that’s how you get awards.”

And it’s like, “Robbie, surely not.” But, no, it really was exactly what I witnessed. And, whatever that had implications for, I guess, people’s college applications and all that. But this high school Model UN principle rings true decades later in workplaces all over the world.

Rebecca Hinds
As does so many other things, so many aspects of high school, you know, the homogeneous people coming together and sticking together, birds of a feather and, you know, jargon, too. We’re often told to use fancy words.

I talk in the book about how that’s often counterproductive because using jargon, using big words, using technical words, as I often see in meetings, it alienates other people, and we actually trust them less because they’re not speaking our language and they’re less relatable.

And I think that the science behind all of this is incredibly fascinating, in part, because it’s incredibly human. And probably what happened in high school is still showing up in some way, shape, or form in our meetings as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thinking about high school jargon, if I may attempt, as I’m 41 years old, jargon-maxing is not good, but talk-maxing is good from your perception as being a leader, and wise, and all those things, but it’s not great from the meeting experience or the outcomes.

Rebecca Hinds
And I think maxing is such an interesting word. We’re seeing it everywhere now, certainly with token-maxing and more is better. My colleague and mentor at Stanford, Bob Sutton, will call this addition sickness, right?

We are hardwired as humans to solve problems through addition. We have a problem, we throw more money at it, we throw more people at it, we throw more meetings at it, we throw more people in the meetings, more meeting minutes, and it’s very dangerous because, often, we don’t take time to subtract.

And there’s also a great research from my colleague, Leidy Klotz at University of Virginia that shows, “If you do prime people to subtract, it dislodges that addition sickness and they start to adopt a subtraction mindset.”

It’s often not that we dislike subtraction. It’s often, it doesn’t even occur to us as an option. It doesn’t even occur to us that, as we add another person to the meeting, what we should probably think about, “Is there someone we can remove where the meeting is no longer relevant to them or as relevant as it once was?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take for this notion of the person who speaks more is perceived as the leader more. Are there any compelling studies or experiments or data points to highlight just how substantial an effect this is?

Rebecca Hinds
Interesting. So I think that the study that I anchor, and in the book, I believe it was for every 34 seconds of talk time on that order, people gained an extra point as a leader.

Now this was done in a context where there was no natural leader in the meeting in terms of having a bigger title than anyone else. But it skewed the perception in the room. And what’s also fascinating is, in this particular study, and there have been other studies where they didn’t find this effect, but in this study in particular, men automatically earned an extra point for being a leader, just for being male.

And I think that’s also a key part of the power dynamics is, you know, the gender, the diversity in the room, how quickly you speak as well. If you speak more quickly, in general, you’re perceived to be more competent.

And a lot of these cues, and we’re seeing it with AI as well right now, you know, depending on the way an AI tool is framing the output, how sycophantic it is, we also know that if people agree with us, we tend to view them as more intelligent and more capable. And all of these biases, you know, they are front and center in meetings and something that we need to pay very close attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are tantalizing tidbits. But maybe we should zoom out and say, what’s your big idea, main message, key thesis of Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
So the big idea is meetings are a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They’re where decisions get made, culture gets built, alignment gets set, and yet they’re also the least optimized. They’re the least optimized product in our entire organization.

And when we think about great products, great everyday products, well, they have certain product design principles. We should be applying those same product design principles to meetings. So the seven chapters of the book each walk through a product design principle applied to our meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you say product, I can read that word in multiple ways. Like, a product might be a physical item that I can purchase at a store. Or, in the tech world, products are not so much physical. They’re software things with features and experiences and a user interface. So how are you using the word product here?

Rebecca Hinds
In a few different ways and with a few different dimensions. Meetings are a communication tool. They’re a communication and coordination and collaboration mechanism within our organization. So they’re intangible in that way.

But what I’m getting at with the idea of product is intentionality. Just as we would think very carefully about how we build products and services for our customers, well, we need to approach meetings with the same discipline.

We would never launch a product to our customers without design, feedback, refinement, iteration. We do that with meetings every single day. We throw them on the calendar and they’re often our default reaction to any sort of uncertainty or ambiguity within the organization.

We don’t treat them like a product we would sell or give to our customers, which, in the context of meetings, those are the attendees in the room. They are not ourselves as organizers of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the product is something that needs to be thoughtfully, carefully considered and not just knee-jerk default, “Here’s meeting,” and to put some upfront effort into crafting how that’s going to be effective. Can you share with us some additional implications of the product mindset toward meetings?

Rebecca Hinds
Countless. You know, countless implications in terms of employee engagement. We know that meeting effectiveness is a strong predictor of employee engagement within the organization, even controlling for the factors that you would think to be important, your manager, your role within the organization.

Real business results, right? I think I often work with organizations where you’ll go in and you’ll start to hear people talk about meetings as if they’re not the real work, you know, “Oh, I have to get through all these meetings and then I can finally get to my work,” right?

If we design meetings correctly, they should be the real work, right? They should move work forward. So often, it’s not the case because they’re used performatively. They’re used as a box-checking exercise and not a mechanism, not a product that moves our work forward.

And so key business results, you know, moving work forward, better engagement, better cooperation, better relationships between the manager and the direct report, you know, meetings are the most common form of collaboration within our organizations.

As knowledge workers, as desk workers, we spend 90% of our time collaborating. There is nothing that we can do as leaders within organizations that is more impactful in boosting collaboration, improving that 90% of time than meetings because they’re so ubiquitous, they’re so common, and they’re so dysfunctional.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well said. So I like that notion of box-checking versus moving the work forward. And, boy, that’s a really good, bright line of distinction associated with, “Is the meeting real work or is it not?” You’re thinking about effectiveness on these dimensions over the relationship, as well as moving work forward.

Can you give us some more clarity on how I can assess, “Is this meeting amazing, terrible, okay, pretty good?” How do I get a gauge on how effective or ineffective a meeting is?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s such a great question, it’s a hard question. And the reason why it’s a hard question is we have what I call a meeting-suck reflex. Meaning we are conditioned to dislike meetings, and we are conditioned to believe that that’s how we should behave, right?

There are a few things that bond coworkers more than lamenting over that meeting that could have been a two-line email. And because of that, you can’t just go into an organization, your own organization, and ask people, “Are your meetings effective?” because you’re going to trigger that reflex and not the reality. And that’s why we need to be very careful about meeting measurement.

One of my top recommendations is, if you want to gut check into how effective your meetings are, the ones you run, after about 10% of those meetings, ask attendees, “On a scale of zero to five, was this meeting worth the time you invested?”

My colleague Elise Keith calls this ROTI, return on time investment, and it does a couple things. One, it’s usually, in almost all cases, anonymous, so it avoids that temptation to either inflate or deflate the ratings.

Two, unlike meetings, which are socially loaded, everyone has some intuitive sense of the value of their time, and they know more or less whether this has been a good investment of the time. So you avoid that sort of meeting-suck reflex and it’s simple, you know, it’s not after every meeting. Survey overload is real with an organization.

Finally, it’s coming from the attendees and not you as the organizer. My colleague, Steven Rogelberg has done fantastic research to show there are two people that tend to leave the meeting most satisfied, two types of people. One is the organizer and, two, as we’ve talked about, is the person who has spoken the most in the meeting.

And so we can’t ask those two people whether the meeting has been effective. Their ratings will be inflated. We need to ask the users, the attendees of the meeting, whether this meeting has been worth the time.

Often you see split ratings. Often you see a cohort rating the meetings five and four versus zero and one. And that can also be very helpful information to understand, “Okay, this meeting was worthwhile for some cohort of folks, but not for the entire attendee population. Well, now we can redesign the meeting and design it to be much more effective.”

Pete Mockaitis
Worthwhile. And I hear what you’re saying that it’s tricky because meetings have different objectives and that’s a handy gauge. I imagine every potential measure of meaning effectiveness could have some limitations.

This one is like, “Well, hey, you didn’t think it was effective, but, by golly, you needed to know that. And now you do. And it was essential that that occurred,” and emails get ignored. So I suppose there’s a big gray zone, too.

Rebecca Hinds
There is, and that’s why the agenda is also very important. I recommend framing every agenda item as a combination of a verb and a noun. So it’s not just budget discussion, it’s “align” or “decide” on the Q2 budget.

You’re being very clear about, “What is the verb we need to accomplish?” because then you can assess or you can now use AI to assess, “Have we done the thing?” because that is now a measure of effectiveness within the meeting. If you’re unclear on what you’re trying to achieve, well, it’s impossible to determine what it even means to be effective in terms of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if your verb is “inform,” what do we think? Some schools of thought would say, “Well, if all you’re doing is informing and it’s not a collaborative back and forth, then you should just do an email or some alternative medium.” What’s your take on that?

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly that. Information exchange is not a good purpose for a meeting. In the book, I talk about the 4D CEO rule, a two-part test to determine whether that meeting deserves to exist. First test, a meeting should only happen if the purpose is to debate, discuss, decide, or develop yourself or your team.

Information exchange, status updates, boss briefings, often these meetings are designed for the organizer, often for the powerful person in the room who either needs to consume information or disseminate information. In those settings, it is far more effective to communicate asynchronously through email, through Slack, and let attendees self-serve the information.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very handy and sensible and that feels true. I’m wondering about this tricky challenge of, when folks have overwhelming inboxes and too much just flood of information coming at them, but it is essential that something gets to them, I think that’s one of the top reasons folks are tempted to do meetings, like these town hall meetings.

It’s like, “No, everyone really needs to know this. So we’re going to, by golly, put it on the calendar to make sure it gets there.” I’m curious, what’s your thought on making sure, in a world where that is not communicated via meeting, how do we make sure that the memo is sent and received?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s a great point and, you know, there’s the ideal case in organizations, there’s always the ideal case, and then there’s the reality. And the reality in many organizations is workers are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed with information and, often, the meeting feels like the most reliable way to get people’s attention to share the information.

There are certainly cases where that makes sense and that’s the unfortunate reality of our organizations, but in the best cases, we’re designing a communication system so that employees get the information they need and are able to distinguish between what’s important and what’s urgent.

And that requires being very clear in terms of, “What is the purpose of a meeting? What is the purpose of an email?” Ideally, you’re designing the asynchronous channels to be consumable and digestible, right? It’s not a memo that’s 20 pages that employees are needing to sift through.

You make it engaging. You make the asynchronous update a video. You make it a video where the CEO or executive team is in a location that has some personal relevance and it’s engaging to people.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s TikTok dancing.

Rebecca Hinds
There’s TikTok dancing, there’s family. One of my favorite all-time sales leaders would record videos after a run, dripping in sweat.

And that’s so important right now, that connection to leaders, not feeling like they’re on a different pedestal than the rest of the organization, which is often what happens in town halls or all hands or all staff meetings is you get this very rosy picture of reality in a way that does very little to strengthen the relationships between individual contributors and the people at the top of the organizational totem pole.

And even in the context of town halls, it’s usually significantly more effective to do those in smaller group settings. We know that as soon as a meeting or any team size gets above seven, eight, nine, 10 people, people start to check out.

Social loafing kicks in, people feel less supported. And so even if you’re doing far fewer town halls, but you’re doing them very intentionally in a way that can encourage back-and-forth dialogue between the individual contributors and the managers, well, that’s going to do so much more to boost the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say designing a communication system, that sounds very sophisticated, could you give us some examples that maybe we’re not thinking of, like, “Sure, I could say an email, maybe a loom video”? Are there other elements of a communication system that are super effective but underutilized in your view?

Rebecca Hinds
So there’s a really important delineation between synchronous ways of communication and asynchronous ways of communication. And a common misconception is inherently technologies are either asynchronous or synchronous.

We often think of Slack as an asynchronous communication channel, right, because it doesn’t require real-time communication – similar, email. But the reality is any technology can either be used asynchronously or synchronously, right?

We can, and we often do, operate in a world where Slack is treated like a synchronous communication. We get the ping and we’re immediately either drawn to it or respond to it. There is an implicit expectation that you are always available and responding. It’s far more important for organizations to think not so much about the technologies but around the cultures and practices and norms associated with asynchronous communication.

In order for asynchronous communication to work, in order for you to be able to transmit, convey information through asynchronous channels, there needs to be strong, strong documentation culture, right? There needs to be single sources of truth for this information, for the meeting transcripts, for the memos. There needs to be very strong written communication cultures.

And this is something that remote-first organizations tend to do really well. They even train their employees on, “How do you communicate in an effective way asynchronous?” That often requires significantly more context than in face-to-face interactions when you can ask the follow-up question.

I worked with an organization a couple years ago where they had a norm, a company-wide norm, that employees were evaluated on around “No lazy asks.” If you’re going to ask someone for something, it can’t be a lazy ask. You can’t remove context, fail to include context, include the deadline, include the why, include the what, right?

All of these things ensure that we can communicate more efficiently asynchronous, because if there’s ambiguity, if there’s uncertainty, well, people are going to schedule that meeting to get the information they need to move the work forward.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I can’t help but think of the episode of “The Office” where the new boss asked Jim Halpert for a rundown, and he’s like, “Okay,” and so he spends the whole day worrying, “What does that even mean? What is a rundown?”

Rebecca Hinds
Yeah. And that’s the jargon, those are the acronyms, right? And we’re alienating people, in addition to adding ambiguity within the organization. And we see this all the time, you know, with the office jargon, the synergies, the circle backs.

Now with AI, people are, you know, it’s AI everything, “What are you talking about? And do you even need to include AI in what you’re saying?” It’s very important. I think written communication has never been more important, as well as verbal communication, right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And are there certain key things you’re looking at to ensure you have clarity and comprehensiveness or completion when you’re making an ask or trying to communicate a thing?

Rebecca Hinds
Deadlines are very important and, especially, I work with lot of global organizations being clear on what time zone. It sounds simple, but end of day Friday means something completely different in Japan versus San Francisco, as well as depending on your culture.

The why is very important, and we continue to see the why is significantly impactful in helping employees feel bought in to the ask. I see this especially, too, with policy, any sort of policy within an organization. We saw it with remote work, with remote and hybrid policies. We’re seeing it with AI right now.

One of the biggest predictors of whether people get on board with a policy is whether they understand the rationale behind it, even more so than whether they agree with it. And that helps them understand, “Is this worth my time? Is it worth my time to invest in this ask?”

If they can understand the why, the rationale behind it, and it’s something bigger than themselves, that’s going to motivate them to complete it, complete it well, and complete it on time.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got a couple interesting concepts in your book I’d love to hear about. What is your meeting doomsday?

Rebecca Hinds
Meeting doomsday is my favorite meeting strategy to improve our meeting culture. It’s a 48-hour calendar cleanse. Employees delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then they re-add meetings back to their calendar in a way they think is going to be most effective.

So many meetings never make it back on the calendar. They’ve outlived their purpose. Perhaps they never had a purpose. For the meetings that have some value, they are redesigned. So thinking about the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, every meeting on our calendar can be redesigned to be most effective.

And we see significant benefit of this doomsday activity as opposed to a traditional meeting audit. We talked about addition sickness at the beginning and strategic subtraction. Well, what the doomsday does is it jolts you out of the status quo and makes subtraction the default.

When people are doing a meeting audit, they tend to justify the meetings because the meetings are still on their calendar. Whereas, the doomsday, it forces you out of the status quo and it gives employees social permission to delete the meetings in a way that removes that social guilt we all feel when we think about canceling meetings or think about not showing up to meetings.

Meetings are so personal that we often think people will take it personally, and they often do, if we cancel or don’t show up to the meeting. And so I recommend every organization do a meeting doomsday at least once a year. And, again, not just to save time, and we do see big time savings, but to reset our assumptions about what actually deserves to be a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay, can you walk us through step-by-step in practice, if we’re saying, “Ooh, we like meeting doomsday. We’re going to do it”? How do I execute that step-by-step?

Rebecca Hinds
Lots of planning. It’s a radical effort. It requires lots of planning. It requires understanding, “Are you going to do it at an organizational level?” That’s ideal. Or, “Are you going to do it on a team level, department level?” I’ve done both. I’ve done as small as a nine-person team.

And then it’s about preparation, making sure there’s leadership buy in. The leadership is communicating the why behind this. There are clear instructions in terms of, “When are we going to do this? We’re not going to do this at the busiest time of the year. We’re going to do it in a lull period.”

How are people going to assess whether the meetings should be brought back? What dimensions are they going to use? Increasingly, I’m working with organizations to use AI to identify, flag those dysfunctional meetings. That becomes very exciting.

And then how are we going to celebrate? How are we going to celebrate along the way the success stories? This needs to be something that is fun. There’s a reason I call it meeting doomsday, right? There needs to be a rallying movement around it.

Meetings need to be the enemy. It’s not the person who scheduled the bad meeting. And we need to create a sense of energy around it. Get people bought in. And you start to see this becomes a big culture-building movement when done right.

And people become very excited about not only doing the doomsday, but also sticking to it. And meetings never are set in stone in terms of being effective. This is something we need ongoing maintenance to do. And, again, doing it at a consistent cadence every year is a way we continue to instill this practice of meeting hygiene.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So then, when they are executing this, “It’s on this day,” I guess that’s the doomsday, “On this day, all recurring meetings, organization wide are deleted.” And then the hope, and with your prep and your communication and your pre-work, is that the new meetings that are established will be good and better ones, as opposed to just, “Oh, hey, I need that meeting. Let’s put it back on the calendar.”

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly. And there’s a big difference. I’ve studied two types of organizations. One, they’ll do this doomsday top-down. They’ll write a script, the IT team will come in and do a massive wipe of the calendar. I’ve seen that. You know, Dropbox did that. Shopify did that. Slack did that.

The meeting doomsday is explicitly designed to put that determination in the hands of employees because we know that, when employees do something themselves, they feel significantly more valuable. It feels significantly more valuable to them, and they’re more likely to stick to it.

Sometimes this is called the IKEA effect, right? When we build something ourselves, whether it’s an IKEA desk, a newly built idea, a newly built calendar, we’re much more likely to stick to it and value it even if it’s a little bit wobbly.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is your rule of halves?

Rebecca Hinds
The rule of halves, inspired by two folks I’ve talked about, Bob Sutton and Leidy Klotz, it’s essentially look at the four dimensions of your meeting – the length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items – and decide one, two, three, or four dimensions you can cut in half.

And often this is a valuable practice as you’re doing the doomsday, but you can take any dysfunctional meeting or any meeting that you know isn’t fully optimized, and pick one dimension, cut it in half, take that 30 minute meeting, try to run it for just 15 minutes, take that six person meeting, “What if it’s three people?”

And what you often find is you didn’t need all that time, you didn’t need those attendees. You might cut too deep, but it’s also often in those moments where you go one step too far, do you realize what was actually essential and what was dead weight.

And so I think that’s, you know, whether you’re doing it one, two, three or four dimensions, the rule of halves can be another effective way to jolt us out of the status quo. I think we often, in organizations, suffer from what’s called Parkinson’s Law, too, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted.

If we give a meeting 30 minutes, if we give a meeting 60 minutes, which is what our calendar tells us should be a meeting, well, it’s probably going to take that 30 minutes, 60 minutes because of this Parkinson’s Law. Whereas, if we cut it to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, it’s more diligent in terms of encouraging us to stick to that time. We’re more diligent because we only have that time available.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are those four dimensions again?

Rebecca Hinds
The length, so the duration of the meeting; the cadence, so thinking about weekly versus monthly, quarterly meetings; the attendees, only inviting stakeholders, not spectators or meeting tourists; and the agenda items. So thinking about, very carefully, “What are the agenda items we want to include on the agenda?”

We also know that agendas suffer from what’s called the law of triviality, meaning, we will disproportionately spend more time on the agenda items that are the least important, the most trivial. And so it’s very dangerous to add agenda items that are trivial, much less important than the higher stakes one, in part because they feel safer.

They feel safer for people to weigh in on. In general, most people want to hear their voice in the meeting, as we’ve talked about, and everyone feels more safe to weigh in on the trivial topics as opposed to the higher stakes one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m thinking about this a lot when it comes to, like, color choices or names of something. And it’s kind of, like, “You know, if people like it, they’re going to buy it no matter what colors on the website or what we call it within reason.” And so, yeah, that is a great observation.

Rebecca Hinds
Naming, font sizes, what do we do over the weekend, what are we eating at the offsite, you know, all of these things. And we see it all the time in meetings, and it’s a reflection of the law of triviality. The other bias is the primacy effect, meaning we will also spend disproportionately more time on the first agenda item. And so agenda design is very, very important as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about injecting delight into meetings. What are your favorite approaches for this?

Rebecca Hinds
Yes, delight. Now, delight is interesting because delight is a combination of two things. It’s a combination of joy and it’s a combination of surprise. So, delight needs to have an element of surprise. Employees, attendees can’t be expecting it for it to work.

And so, this is something that I recommend it be 10 seconds, a minute in the meeting, an unexpected shoutout for an employee that has done something well. You’re bringing some, you know, food item. Food is a great engagement booster in the meeting that has some personal connection.

Something that is going to leave employees remembering the meeting and wanting to show up the next time. It sounds trivial, but so much of our meeting dysfunction is driven by the fact that employees dread meetings and they’re largely rinse and repeat.

Delight ensures that there’s that moment of surprise that’s positive and joyful that employees will keep coming back to and keep wanting more of.

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

Rebecca Hinds
No, I think that the common thread through all of this is intentionality and intentional design and how do we ensure that we are treating meetings as that important product.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve always loved the quote, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” And I really believe that.

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

Rebecca Hinds
So we’ve done some research over the past few years looking at the mental models through which employees approach AI.

And what we’re starting to see, we’ve seen it for years, we’re still seeing, is depending on whether people are approaching AI from the mental model of a tool versus teammate, they interact with the technology differently and they’re significantly more likely to be productive when they approach AI with the mental model of the teammate because they’re not just asking, “What can the technology do for me in a really transactional way?”

They’re asking, “What can I do with the technology?” They’re also recognizing that AI is not perfect. They’re not giving up after the first prompt. They’re pushing the technology to think and act deeper. And I think that’s at the core of a lot of the failures of AI transformation right now, is not recognizing how important the psychology is and how important that relationship between humans and AI is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rebecca Hinds
So I’m a massive fan of both Bob Sutton and Adam Grant’s books, so Give and Take is a key one that has influenced so much of my life, as well as Bob Sutton’s book, Scaling Up Excellence, The Friction Project.

I think “The Friction Project,” in particular, is so relevant right now in terms of, “How do we ensure that we are injecting good friction into our organization through the use of AI,” for example, “and removing the bad friction from our organization’s dysfunctional meaning?” are one great example of negative friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rebecca Hinds
So I work at Glean. Glean is my new favorite tool. I use it for all things AI. It’s my first pane of glass into my work in the morning, and it’s a highly intelligent teammate that helps me do my work.

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

Rebecca Hinds
You know, I think I work with a lot of organizations on change management, and I think my mantra is always “Change doesn’t fail because of the technology, it fails because of the humans.” And as we think about AI, in particular, but also meetings and everything in between, making sure that we’re designing for the humans involved is super important.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’m on LinkedIn. My book, Your Best Meeting Ever is at all your favorite bookstores. And my website is RebeccaHinds.com.

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

Rebecca Hinds
Do that meeting doomsday. I think it’s the single most effective way to jolt you out of the status quo and get a small team and do it together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Rebecca Hinds
Thanks so much, Pete.

Apr 27
0

1148: How to Build Cultures Where Everyone Knows They Matter with Barry-Wehmiller’s Bob Chapman

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

Bob Chapman reveals the foundational leadership principles behind Barry-Wehmiller’s stunning success.

You’ll Learn

  1. The case for caring as a business strategy
  2. The one skill to transform your relationships
  3. How to dramatically boost team morale with one simple practice

About Bob

BOB CHAPMAN is the chairman of Barry-Wehmiller, a $3.6 billion global manufacturing company. Under his leadership, the company grew from $20 million in revenue to over $3.5 billion while pioneering “Truly Human Leadership”—refusing to lay off employees during the 2008 recession and instead implementing shared sacrifice that saved $20 million while protecting everyone’s livelihood. 

Featured in a Harvard Business School case study taught at 70+ business schools worldwide, Chapman has addressed the United Nations, Congress, and leading academic institutions on human-centered leadership. His approach has been validated by research showing that workplace stress is the fifth leading cause of death in America, and that good bosses create more wellness than wellness programs do.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Bob Chapman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bob, welcome!

Bob Chapman
It’s good to here. It’s good to have this exchange.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited for this truly human exchange we’re about to have and to hear about your truly human leadership. What on earth is that?

Bob Chapman
It captures kind of the transformation we’ve been going through for the last 20 years. It’s kind of contrary to my education and my experience in the business world, which is about using people to achieve results.

Truly human leadership flips the lens through which we see those people we have the privilege of leading, to seeing them as somebody’s precious child and treating them with respect and dignity, which is truly human leadership, understanding the impact we make on people’s life, their health, and the way they go home and treat their families. So, truly human leadership is a totally different way of looking at the people you have the privilege of leading.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds good and wholesome and the way it “should be” in terms of the human experience. Tell me, what is the alternative? What is the norm?

Bob Chapman
Well, you know, I look back on my business education, I took management classes, got a management degree and got a job in management so I thought my job was to manage people, to achieve results. And if we needed to lay them off, fire them, you know, it’s just business, you know? And so, I saw people in my education and my experience, they were functions for my success.

I was a nice guy. We had a nice company, but the way you see people impacts the way you treat people. And so, you know, our education system doesn’t prepare us to care for people. It prepares us to use people to achieve results, and people don’t get promoted for caring for people. They get promoted for achieving results.

So, it’s a totally different way of looking at leadership as a profound responsibility to the people you have the privilege to have in your span of care.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s interesting. You mentioned layoffs is one place where the rubber meets the road. So, in your world, layoffs don’t happen or under what circumstances would they happen?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the best way to look at it is, again, we’re taught it’s about achieving financial results. And as you know, I think in 2025, layoffs are at an all-time high. Only 2020 had so many layoffs. So, you’re seeing major corporations using layoffs, announcing layoffs to send a message to the shareholders that they’re going to make more money. And we use people to achieve that signal.

Because why would a company announce they’re going to lay off 10,000 people? Why would they announce that when they’re going to, we know psychologically the damage done to the people who get laid off is horrible? And we know the impact on the people that don’t get laid off that are still there, they don’t feel safe because they could be next.

So, again, we never discussed layoff in my education, in my experience. It was just things we do. And so, the transformation was, when we saw people not as functions for my success, but we saw them as somebody’s precious child, a revelation I had, you can’t lay off your kids.

And so, I would say to you that it’s, you know, having been in business leadership for 50 years, the first half of my career was pretty much, “That’s just things you do. It’s not pleasant. You don’t really want to do that, but it’s the way you make numbers work and the market rewards you.”

So, layoffs hang over most people’s heads. They don’t feel safe, “How can I decide to raise a family, buy a home, get married, if one day they’re going to walk in and say, ‘You know what, to improve our earnings, we’re going to have to let you go. I know we recruited you, but right now we’re going to have to let you go.’”

So, a lot of people in our country feel a lack of dignity because they don’t feel safe. They feel they’re being used. I think Tom Friedman said it beautifully to your audience and they’ll like this. He said, “More than a poverty of money, we have a poverty of dignity.” And when people feel used, not cared for, they feel a sense of humiliation. And when you feel a sense of humiliation, you’ll see anger and unrest like you’ve never seen before.

So, what are we seeing right now? We’re seeing anger and unrest that confuses us. Why? We have a very prosperous economy but we don’t know how to care for each other. And that is the foundation of truly human leadership. And layoffs are just one of those tools that we are taught in business school and rewarded for by the public to achieve financial results. And that, it’s sad.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, let’s talk about, perhaps, that tension there. I think that there may be a subset of folks who say, “Well, Bob, I mean, that sounds really nice and pleasant and enjoyable, and, yeah, I’d like to work in such a place, but in reality, we have a duty to maximize the shareholder value and, accordingly, costs need to be kept at their minimum relative to the revenue that is attached to them, etc.” So, when folks push back, what’s your response?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, well, then I’d say to if you want to optimize your profitability, which is our responsibility, because the business model, it’s interesting, and I think I want to get this message across to your audience. When Harvard wrote the case study on our company about 10 years ago, they invited me up to be in the class and then the professor asked something I never thought of. He said, “Is Barry-Wehmiller’s success its business model or its culture?” And they voted. Seventy-five percent voted our culture was the key to our success. And then Jan Rivkin, the professor, looked at me and said, “Bob, do you want to comment?”

And I got up and I said, “I understand why you think our culture is the foundation of our success, but let me tell you how I would answer it. The foundation of our stewardship of our people is the business model. It’s not about getting the right people on the bus. It’s about building a safe bus, which is your business model. And then having drivers who are your leaders who know where they’re going and how to drive that bus safely. And anybody that gets on this bus is going to be safe.”

So, it is the responsibility of leaders to design a business model and to keep that business model efficient and to not use this brutal tactic of layoffs and rightsizing and downsizing and justifying that we failed to do that. We failed to keep this company efficient and we had to hurt people to achieve the efficiency.

You know, I was on a panel with a CEO of a major bank, a very impressive gentleman, and he said they went from, and I think this case, from 300,000 people to 200,000 people without a layoff by using natural attrition. When somebody retires, they brainstorm how they can redesign the work to not have to replace that person.

And if you do that every day, which is a matter of, you know, “I don’t want to gain weight so I don’t have to lose weight.” So, it is a way of viewing your responsibility. If you think your responsibility is only to the shareholders and you don’t care about the people that you impact, that’s sad. Your responsibility is to all the people who put their trust in you – shareholders and all other stakeholders.

But again, it’s not just about being nice. It’s making sure you have a good business model, and that a business model stays efficient, not has to be hammered once in a while with 20,000, 30,000 layoffs. Layoffs are a tool that the market likes, and it rewards you because you’re going to be more profitable. But if that is all you’re in, that’s sad.

We are absolutely destroying our country for economic gain and not human gain. So, we’ve got the most prosperous economy in our history and have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we’ve ever had. Why? Because people don’t feel they matter. They’re just tools for somebody else’s success.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you, perhaps, unpack for us what an efficient business model that has no need to ever do layoffs looks like, as compared to a more typical business model that has layoffs just in part of the cycle?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the story that most people tell about Barry-Wehmiller, in our book and a lot of people talk about is ‘08, ‘09, which hit all of us. And we had developed what we call the Guiding Principle of Leadership, kind of the constitution of our culture. These are things that define and guide us in our culture.

And I was flying around the world, talking to our team members about this. And the more you talked about it, the more it was implanted in my heart and soul. And ‘08, ‘09 hits, I walked in to our board meeting in January of ’09, and my board looks at me and said, “Bob, don’t you need to lay off people?” And I said, “Why do you say that?” They said, “Well, everybody’s laying off people, Bob.” And I said, “No, I think with our backlog, we’re going to be okay.”

About a month later, I was in Italy, visiting our operations in Italy, I get an email from the United States, our largest customer, major customer, put on hold a major order we had that was giving us significant work. It’s one thing not to get a new order. It’s another thing for the orders you’ve got to disappear. And I sat in my hotel room.

Prior to us having these Guiding Principles of Leadership, I would have done what everybody else did. I would have said, “Well, we need to let people go. We need to let 20-30% of our people go because we don’t have work for them.” But because I talked about, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people,” which is our guiding, our North Star, I sat there in my room, and said, “What would a caring family do if a member of the family was in stress?”

We would all take a little pain so that family member would not have to take that pain. That stimulated an idea I had never heard of before, never considered, and it was, “What if everybody took a month without pay, whenever they wanted, so they could be with their family, their friends, time of year? We’ll give you a month without pay, and we’ll get through this without letting anybody go.”

I emailed back to the United States, flew back to the United States a few days later, they were ready to implement it. The reaction of our team members was unbelievably positive. They were more than willing to take a month without pay. A, they got the time with their family, but, B, they felt they were helping their fellow team members keep their job. This cloud over their head disappeared because, all of a sudden, they felt safe.

We even had people volunteer to take somebody else’s time off because they knew the other person wasn’t in as good a financial position than they were. It was unbelievable the environment we created. And it was only because we had this North Star that said, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”

And after that, we learned what’s called Business Excellence Staffing Model. As much as you want to design your products to be efficient, cost-effective, you need to design your organization to be cost-effective. And that’s a powerful tool. And so, we constantly are monitoring, when somebody retires or moves away or whatever reason somebody leaves, that natural attrition, we brainstorm, “Is there a way to redesign that work, not to dump it on somebody else, but to redesign it, to eliminate it?”

So, it’s a constant process of being efficient so there’s no need to let people go because you didn’t gain any weight. You are trim and fit to fight. So, again, that’s what a major financial institution did that I was incredibly impressed with. We learned about it through a Lean event up in Canada, but it is profound.

So, it’s a failure of leadership when we lay people off, but the market rewards us and the boards see the share price go up. So, it’s a hard struggle because they weren’t taught to care. They were taught to use people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a very beautiful story. And I love, one, you asked a novel question as opposed to, “Hey, we lost an order. I guess we got to shrink the staff. Badda bing. Badda boom.” Wait, stop, pause, think, ask a fresh question, “If in a family, what would we do? Okay.” And that gives rise to a novel solution.

And, boy, I can sure imagine that, yeah, when you are thinking about that decision-making and your own autonomy is preserved, “Okay, do I want to take a month off and which month? Okay, and maybe multiple. Got it,” that feels a lot better. And it’s, in a way, a win-win when you don’t have the money, but it’s like, “Okay, I’m helping my colleagues out and I’m getting to be with family or do a cool thing with this time.”

And I could really see how that can dramatically improve the connectedness among teammates. So that’s very cool, Bob. Lay it on me, what are some additional principles and practices, specifically, that folks in all kinds of organizations can implement?

Bob Chapman
Well, seriously, again, I had never heard of this practice until our team came up with it. But every organization should look at, “Are the people I invite into our organization, with the expectation of being with our company, are they safe? Is our business model designed such that there is a job for them and they can trust us?” That is a foundational responsibility when we invite people into our company.

And so, we work extremely hard to stay financially, absolutely, rock solid, which we are, okay? And I’ll just add, our share price has gone up 12% compounded for 25 years, okay? And so, you’d say, “Well, gee, we outperformed some of the legendary investors in this country because we are good stewards of our business model.”

So, you know, business needs to be more human. And again, we originally called it People-Centric Leadership, leadership focused on the people we have the privilege of leading. But Simon Sinek came along and said, “No, no, Bob, this is truly human leadership. This is the way we are called to treat others.”

Again, when you see the issues that we face in our country and the people who, you know, 65% of all people would give up a salary because if they could fire their boss. We have TGIF, “Thank God it’s Friday,” get the hell out of this place and have a beer and kill the pain. I imagine a day, as you will understand, where we have TGIM, “Thank goodness it’s Monday. Get away from the kids, the spouse and be with a group of people who I really enjoy being with, okay?” That is my goal, TGIM.

And again, this is not an American issue. This is a global issue. People don’t feel they matter. And when people don’t feel they matter, you get this poverty of dignity. And I’m sure your audience will understand that because leaders weren’t taught to care for people. They were taught and rewarded to use people.

So, it’s just a totally different mindset and takes extra responsibility to make sure your business model, when you invite somebody in there, you can look them in the eye and say, “You are safe in my care.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. I also learned that one of the top things you teach throughout the organization, in order to have the great powerful culture, is empathetic listening. Can you speak to this?

Bob Chapman
Yes. Through these series of revelations, I had three revelations that converted me from management to leadership, and we realized that we had been blessed with a vision of the way that would heal the brokenness in the world. And a young man, about 20 years ago, said to me, “You know, Bob, what is your greatest fear?” Now I’m an eternal optimist, so I had to think a minute and I said, “My greatest fear is we were blessed with a message that could heal the world and it would die with me.”

So, we got up the next morning after that dinner, and said, “Okay, what do great religions do to survive over centuries?” They articulate their beliefs and they have disciples that carry those beliefs forward. So, I said, “We need to create some disciples. We can’t send them back to universities because universities don’t teach people to care. They teach people to use people and reward them.”

And so, we decided we had to create our own university. I mean, this was just a breakfast conversation. And the good news is we had a whiteboard, no preconceived notion. And so, when we decided, “Well, how are we going to create disciples?” This incredibly talented team came up with three things, and the foundation, the one you mentioned, a gentleman named David Vandermolen said, “We’re going to teach empathetic, which is the greatest of all human skills, okay, to listen without judgment.

When you listen without judgment. You don’t listen to debate. You listen to validate the worth of others. I thought when you cared for somebody, you went over and talked to them. It turns out, when you listen to somebody instead of talk to them, it profoundly changes the person you care about. So, it’s just the opposite of everything I was taught and learned.

So that is the foundation of truly human leadership. That, plus recognition and celebration. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to let them know they matter in thoughtful, appropriate, timely ways all over the world, and then a culture of service. Bill Ury uses the word, “We need to move from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, where people genuinely care about others, not just themselves.” So those three classes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got the three lessons. So, within these three revelations – empathetic listing for validation, recognition and celebration, and culture of service – could you give us the rapid-fire, quick do’s and don’ts within each, just a couple powerful bullets?

Bob Chapman
In empathetic listening, the rapid-fire is don’t listen to the words because 80% of all communication is nonverbal. Don’t listen to the words, listen to what the people are really saying. That is the key, to look behind the words with the combination of their face and how they express it because a lot of times people will tell you what they think they mean, but there’s much deeper. And that’s one of the skills we learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example for what that looks, sounds, and feels like in practice?

Bob Chapman
I’ll give you a personal example that I think makes it really simple. When our son was young and about to move in his own bedroom, I walked into the house after work, and my wife, Cynthia, said, “I want to show you this wallpaper I picked out for Kyle’s room.” So, we walked up to the bedroom where he’s going to stay, and she holds this wallpaper, and said, “What do you think?”

And I’m trying to be a good husband, trying to be very thoughtful, and how do you misinterpret, “What do you think about this wallpaper?” You can’t really misinterpret, “What do you think?” So, being very thoughtful, I said, “You know, it’s really an interesting wallpaper, but don’t you think it would look better in the family room because I couldn’t imagine it being in my son’s room?”

She took the wallpaper and threw it to me, and said, “If you’re so smart, you pick out the wallpaper.” And what I realized is what Cynthia asked me, she didn’t even know it, what Cynthia asked me is, “As your wife, am I capable to pick out wallpaper for our son?” And what did I tell her? “No.” So, she didn’t even know what she was asking. I see this all the time.

There’s a lot of deeper meaning what people are asking than when we superficially think. So, taking some time to listen and think and flex to the personality type of the person are keys. Again, we’ve taught this to 20,000 people around the world, and the most common statement is, “It changed my life just to learn to listen without judgment.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, yeah, there’s words, but, in that example, I think it points to a common reality, which is there are deep-seated emotions, values, stakes, that feel rather personal in many, many things that we’re talking about all the time.

Bob Chapman
And I will tell you, it is the most powerful thing we have ever learned in our 22 years journey.

Because when we look at the world we have today, we teach people how to speak, articulate your beliefs. We teach people how to debate, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” But guess what we don’t teach people? We don’t teach people how to listen without judgment.

So, again, the key to me was, I am astounded 22 years later, we have taught over 20,000 people around the world to listen without judgment. And what’s equally amazing to me is that we did this in a business context. We were trying to convert managers into leaders, people who manipulate people to people who care for people. And 95% of the feedback when we began teaching these classes, was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their children.

It never occurred to me that the way I would run Barry-Wehmiller would affect your marriage and your relationship with your children. So one of the expressions of our book is “The way we lead impacts the way people live.”

So this message of truly human leadership, given all the issues we’re facing in this country right now, is the way we could heal all of the brokenness we’re feeling in our families, in our communities, between our countries, because we would learn to listen without judgment, to learn to listen, to understand, as opposed to, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so let’s hear it. So this empathetic listening for validation, we’re listening without judgment, and that’s super transformational. Can you share with us some tips on how that’s done?

Bob Chapman
Well, what we do is we do a DISC profile, which is basically an X-ray of your personality, okay? And then we begin, start the class with everybody kind of looking at their DISC profile, and we find you’re uniquely different.

I knew that, in life, that people are born with different hair color, different eye color, different skin color, but it never occurred to me you were born with a different personality. And that personality, you didn’t choose anymore than you chose your eye color, it creates a lens through which you experience the world, okay? A lens through which you process data.

That is why two people, two perfectly find people, can see the same exact facts and see them entirely differently. But we don’t teach people to understand how you see it. We teach people to say, “The way I saw it is right.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Now, within the listening class, could you share a transformational takeaway or exercise or thing that they do that is so valuable?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think it starts with that, what I said to you earlier, when you do the DISC profile, and you look at it, and you say, “Is this me?” And we say, “Why don’t you go home and ask your spouse?” And they come back the next day and say, “Oh, my God, this is me.”

So I think the revelation, the biggest revelation is when you see an X-ray of your personality, and you had no idea that you had these traits. And we call it style flexing.

You can’t deal with everybody the same. The golden rule is, “Treat others as you’d like to be treated.” What we realize is you need to treat others as they need to be treated, not you need to be treated because you are uniquely different.

You know, I thought, you could have a positive attitude or a negative, but when you do the DISC profile and you see the personality of people, and they then understand why they behave the way they do because of their personality, it is revealing. I mean, it gets emotional.

So that is probably the most revealing aspect of it, and also effective confrontation. It’s called Bend the Knee. How do you tell somebody what they could do to help you deal with them in a better way. It’s called effective confrontation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us some best practices for great recognition and celebration?

Bob Chapman
That’s a great question because what we found is, in business, the expression is, “I got 10 things right and I never heard a word. I got one thing wrong and I got my ass chewed out.”

And so what we developed was this cadence of looking for the goodness in other people, holding it up and saying, “Thank you,” in thoughtful, meaningful, timely ways. And it is profound because people said, “I had no idea that you thought that of me.”

It’s not about, “Okay, your five-year anniversary, top salesperson.” It’s about looking for the goodness in others, and in thoughtful, timely ways, holding that up for everybody and saying thank you. And it becomes part of your DNA to constantly be looking for the goodness in people, not the brokenness in people, the goodness in people. So that is a key to recognition and celebration.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you see it, how do you celebrate it?

Bob Chapman
It’s called FBI – Feelings, Behaviors, and Impact. We pause and we let somebody, an individual know that they have been very significant to your life. And if you just watch the body language, I mean, people say, “It’s the most meaningful event I’ve ever had because I never knew people thought this of me. It meant so much to me.”

So, it’s a skill. Again, it’s not about five years anniversary with the company. It’s not about top sales. It’s about being a good person and people wanting to say to you, “You know, you’re a good person. Let me tell you why.” And you stand there in front of a group of people gathered, And it just creates this cadence of goodness.

This cadence of always looking for the goodness in people, because we leave this world and we’re inundated through the media with the brokenness of the world. And so when we send people home, constantly being involved in recognition events, where we pause and say, “Thank you for who you are. It’s meant a lot to me.” It just gets part of your DNA and it makes a huge impact on the organization.

Again, not some big badge once a year. The cadence of this is spontaneous and it’s called Shine the Light. Shine the light in the organization, look for the goodness and hold it up and say thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that structure in terms of the feelings, like, “I feel this way because of your behaviors, and it just made this impact.” And then it is quite potent, I imagine, to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like, “Oh, this guy is totally authentically sincere about this. And these are facts, at the same time, I did do those things, and I didn’t know it made that big of an impact. Wow, that’s really cool. That just sounds like a fantastic thing to hear.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now let’s hear about your revelation about culture of service. Any best practices or do’s, don’ts you’d like to share there?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, that really came from probably 20 years ago. It occurred to me that we work with our customers to try to convince them to buy our product. We’d take them to dinner, we’d give them the information they need, and finally the customer says, “Okay, we’re going to buy your product.” And we’d say, “That’s great.” And we move on to try and get the next customer to buy it.

And, all of a sudden, it occurred to me, “What if we actually treated our customer better after they made the decision to buy it, rather than to get them to?” So I challenged this young lady, a very talented young lady, “How can we treat people better after they make the decision rather than to get them to make the decision?” And she ended up, probably spending six months, studying the idea of service.

And she ended up with an expression, “Seizing the opportunity to serve others.” Moving from, “It’s all about me,” to, “It’s all about I care for others.” And I’ll give you a trite example from my specific experience.

Cynthia and I were playing golf, and we were on a particular hole and on the green, and I said, “Cynthia, don’t forget your iron that you left on the side as we walked off the 18.” And thinking of culture of service, seizing the opportunity to serve others, instead of telling her, “Don’t forget to pick up that iron,” I went over and picked it up and handed it to her.

And, to me, business, these organizations could be the source of healing in the world if we didn’t just use people to achieve our goals but we actually became stewards, and we actually gave these people the skills to care for others as we achieve these goals.

So, again, all I can say to you, 22 plus years into this, nobody has ever debated what I just shared with you. People feel it is the key to the world the way it was intended to be, and it could heal this poverty of dignity we have in the world, where we have economic prosperity, but we don’t have human prosperity.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now could you share with us a favorite book?

Bob Chapman
My favorite book was a book called The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. And it made leadership seem so simple about caring for people. It was probably 30 years ago I read it.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite habit?

Bob Chapman
Pause and think. Too much to me of people’s lives is reacting to how to impact as opposed to creating their future.

One of things I would leave your listeners with is, in the context of these questions, is write your eulogy. What do you want people to say about your life someday when that comes that you’re going to leave this world, 100 years from now? But think about, what do you want people to say about your life? And then go make it true. Live life with kind of a North Star about who you want to be.

Because I find that most people, 95% of people, simply react to what happens, as opposed to putting it in some context of where you’re going. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know how to deal with things? So writing your eulogy is a critical aspect, to me, of living life with intention and purpose so that someday, when your day comes, you look back and say, “I did my best and used my skills fully in the service of others.”

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

Bob Chapman
Well, we have the Chapman and Co. Leadership Institute where we are sharing with companies around the country about how to embrace this. We have the Chapman Foundation for Caring Communities, and we have Barry-Wehmiller Outreach.

So there’s a massive amount of information on the internet about this journey. And, obviously, the book is a story of my journey from management to leadership and then how to do it. And then the latest edition came out with what is the impact.

And, again, the way we lead impacts the way people live. And we can begin to heal this brokenness we’re all feeling if we embrace our profound impact we have on other people’s lives, moving from a me-centric world to a we-centric world where we care for others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Bob, thank you.

Bob Chapman
Thank you for your interest in the message. And my hope is that your listeners will wake up tomorrow with a better hope for the future that we can heal this brokenness in the world if we learn to care for each other.