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Mar 20
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849: How to Build Better Teams through Better Inclusion with Sally Helgesen

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Sally Helgesen says: "It’s easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting."

Sally Helgesen provides practical ways to foster solidarity and inclusion rather than division.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The merits of true inclusivity.
  2. Why it pays to give the benefit of the doubt.
  3. How to manage your triggers effectively.

About Sally

Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach, honored by the Thinkers 50 Hall of Fame. Her most recent book, How Women Rise, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women, and its rights have been sold in 22 languages.

Her previous books include The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership, hailed as the classic in its field and continuously in print since 1990, and The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, which explores how women’s strategic insights can strengthen their careers. The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, was cited in The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership of all time and is credited with bringing the language of inclusion into business.

Resources Mentioned

Sally Helgesen Interview Transcript

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

Sally Helgesen
Thank you, Pete. It’s wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace. Well, Sally, I’d love to kick it off by hearing about a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made along the way when it comes to this inclusion stuff since you’ve been studying it for quite some time.

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, Pete, I’d say the thing that most jumps out at me is that the approach to inclusive culture that’s taken in many organizations, which focuses on unconscious bias, is possibly the least effective focus that we can take. And I know a lot of people have been through unconscious bias trainings, and sometimes they can stir real insights, and sometimes they can make us pretty angry, but whatever the response, they usually don’t lead us with much of a path forward to creating more inclusive relationships, getting along better with people we perceive of as different from ourselves, or creating inclusive teams or cultures in the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s intriguing. Let’s dig into that. And maybe, first, just to make sure we’re all on the same page with regard to terms. What do we mean by being inclusive, fundamentally?

Sally Helgesen
I think an inclusive culture, whether it’s a team, whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a community, we always know it because it is one in which the largest possible percentage of people feel that they are valued for their potential, not just their contributions, so they really feel seen and feel as if they are part of a ‘we’ not a ‘they.’ So, it’s a real cultural belonging in that sense, and that’s why it’s kind of the acid test. If you have a culture and people talk about the organization, say, or the team as a ‘they,’ you can be pretty sure that they’re not perceiving it as inclusive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful, or corporate, or ‘they,’ it’s like the other folks.

Sally Helgesen
Yup, exactly. So, there’s no possible way that the person who’s using the word ‘they’ perceives themselves as really seen or valued, and so that’s how we know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, fundamentally, what are some of the key drivers that get in the way of having a real big ‘we’?

Sally Helgesen
A lot of times people are concerned about, or shy about, or fearful of saying things, for what they might imagine would offend somebody who they perceive as having a different background, different values, people across gender, race, age, ethnicity, etc., so people may feel and sort of do a self-censuring so they don’t really feel like they’re being themselves when they’re talking to people who they perceive as being different. And then the other person picks up on that and recognizes that they’re rather stiff because of this perception of difference. So, that’s one of the things that can get in the way.

On the other hand, another thing that can get in the way is we can have an awareness of what someone else might perceive as problematic. So, a lot of it comes down to both of those situations I’m describing, is trying to read other people’s minds and figure out what they might be thinking. Much better to be really transparent and to just ask questions, “How do you like to be spoken to? How do you like to…? What enables you to bring your best talents to work? What talents do you have that may not be viewed? Is there anything that really upsets you when people say it?”

Those kinds of conversations are really helpful at building relationships across boundaries in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you say something that often is not getting the job done is unconscious bias training. Could you paint a picture for what does unconscious bias training look, sound, feel like in practice so folks can sort of recognize that, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I did one of those a few years ago”? And then why isn’t it getting the job done?

Sally Helgesen
Well, what it looks like in practice often, and, of course, there is some unconscious bias training is more effective than others, but, basically, what it looks like is people being asked, either through a test or through a conversation to understand where they might have biases, prejudices, beliefs about people. It can be anything. It can be gender or race, but it could also be people with tattoos on their necks or whatever it is.

So, something that really tests and helps you identify what your beliefs are is where it’s focused. And that can be fine as far as it goes, but there’s no how there, there’s no, “How do you move forward from that?” As someone I worked with once said, “It’s all aha moment, and no ‘now what?’ We don’t know how to proceed.”

And what I’ve tried to do in Rising Together and in the work I’ve been doing, generally, for decades is focus on the how, what are the practices. People perceive us based on our behaviors not on our biases. Really, whatever happens to be running through our heads at the time, that’s how they’re impacted, that’s how they’re affected.

So, I think a stronger approach is to start by practicing more inclusive behaviors with people. It’s also easier to, as I like to say, to act our way into new ways of thinking as opposed to thinking our way into new ways of acting, because once we try out something, we may learn something about it. And so, then we’ll think, “Okay.”

Well, for example, you might think, “Well, this person seems to be this way.” And then you have a conversation with them, and you realize that your presumption was wrong. But if you were trying first to address what was in your head, what your thoughts were, you wouldn’t have any evidence to begin changing.

So, it’s interesting that we seem to often get it backward. We think we need to change our minds so that we can change our behaviors rather than change our behaviors so that we can change our minds.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful, Sally. And I was just about to ask, if some folks have had the unconscious bias training, and they had the aha moments, but not the ‘now what?’ I was just going to ask, so folks have determined, “Okay, I’ve got some unconscious bias against people with tattoos, or trans people, or Trump voters,” I mean, you name it, you have some unconscious bias about any grouping of folk. What is the ‘now what?’ And maybe it sounds like your answer is maybe don’t even bother to think yourself into new ways of acting. Is that fair? Or are there some useful thought-to-action approaches as well?

Sally Helgesen
No, I think it should be action to thought rather than thought to action. It can really keep us stuck because when we’re thinking, “Well, what about this person? Or, what if they…?” etc. So, I would really recommend in those situations going to action. We’ve all had this experience where you go into a store and it looks like you’re going to have a slightly hostile encounter.

So, you practice being almost aggressively nice to that person. You act as if you never noticed any hostility from them. You act as if they were treating you superbly, “Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that,” without being too sucky-up but acting as if you don’t notice that they’re treating you in a slightly disrespectful way.

Often, not always, but often they will kind of…you’ll be cuing them, “Oh, yeah, you know, I am a nice person. This person, okay, they seem to be responding to me in a positive way.” And nine times out of ten, they’ll switch their response to you. I know, I’ve watched this be true throughout my life. Somebody’s water is dripping down from their bathtub in an apartment above mine, and I know it’s because they were having kind of a lost weekend, and I knock on the door, and say, “I can’t believe you would…” and all that kind of stuff. Well, it’s going to escalate.

If I go up there and trying to diffuse the situation by giving them the benefit of the doubt, “I’m sure you didn’t realize this but the water in your bathtub overflowed and it’s doing whatever it is. And I’m sure this isn’t something that you had any awareness of,” then they’ll, “Oh, well, okay. I’m so sorry,” etc. We don’t do this, and part of the issue in the workplace today is people are kind of primed to be on the search often for microaggressions or, “Does that person think…?” or, “What about their response?” and so we’re not accustomed to diffusing those situations. We feel like we have to react to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to ask specifically about getting people a benefit of the doubt. I think most folks are, generally, familiar with what that phrase means. But could you expand upon, in practice, what are the thoughts, the assumptions, the practices, that one embodies when they are just habitually giving people the benefit of the doubt as their default way of being?

Sally Helgesen
Well, I’m not advocating passivity because passivity, when we do that…what I’m really talking about is being able to write a script for yourself. Okay, somebody, let’s talk about gender. So, a woman thinks, “Oh, men just can’t listen to women.” She feels unheard in a situation, “Men just can’t listen to women.” If we just kind of passively accept that, or grab a friend and complain, “I can’t believe that guy. Men can’t…” etc. that’s not an approach that’s going to be helpful.

But often, just saying, “You weren’t listening to me. Men can never listen to women,” that’s not a good path forward either. So, we want a way to give that person the benefit of the doubt. So, in our head, we can write a script, “You know, maybe he couldn’t hear what I was saying because there was noise in the room,” or, “Maybe I didn’t phrase this using language that was that familiar to him. I think I’ll give it another shot.”

Then you go to the person and you say, “I noted that you didn’t seem to hear what I said in that meeting, and I figured it might be helpful to you if I were to rephrase it,” and then you do that. Well, usually, they’re not going to say, “No, I didn’t hear what you said because I wasn’t interested,” or “because I have a terrible time hearing women.” Generally, they’re going to say, “Oh, okay, thank you.” Then you have a way to begin a constructive situation. So, it’s neither defensive nor is it passive.

Now, what is so remarkable, and I’ve used this in coaching for quite a while, what is so remarkable about this technique of writing a new script is that it is effective whether or not we believe that person really earned the benefit of the doubt. If we think that they might have intentionally said something to us in a way that bothered us, or if we think this is part of a pattern with them that they never really listen to us in a fruitful or effective way, even if we think that, if we write that script and then act as if we believe it, it will usually serve us better than the stock response or negative script that we’ve been invested in, in the past.

It will usually serve us better and it will also give us a path to potentially building more of a relationship with that person where they could serve in some way as an ally for us, and we could serve as an ally for them. So, it’s very effective even if we don’t necessarily buy it. And knowing that you don’t necessarily buy it is where part of your power lies in doing this because it’s not a Pollyanna, “Oh, they must be a wonderful person even though…” It’s a very realistic testing and probing to see, to discern an alternate path so that you can connect with that person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s beautiful. Thank you. Well, now I want to hear, in your book Rising Together, you identify eight common triggers that undermine our ability to connect. Could you first define what do you mean by trigger? And then could you give us the quick rundown of each of these eight?

Sally Helgesen
Sure. What I mean by trigger is any situation or stimulus in our environment that stirs an emotional response in us.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is this a negative emotion response?

Sally Helgesen
It can be a negative or it can be a positive response. It could be positive as well as negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “I’m delighted by this.”

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“You triggered delight in me, Sally.” Okay.

Sally Helgesen
Wonderful, Pete. I’m so glad to hear it. So, they can be negative or they can be positive, but it’s the negative ones, obviously, that are more likely to undermine us in the workplace, so that’s why I’m focusing on triggers that can often stir a negative response. But what’s important to recognize is that they’re environmental. They happen in the environment so we can’t really control what triggers us.

They lie outside our circle of control, if you will. We can only find a more effective way to manage them than we may already be doing. So, I think we waste our time by trying to create an environment in which we are shielded from any potential triggers, and that’s what’s happened to a lot of younger people coming into the workplace because, in their colleges and universities, there’s such an emphasis on trigger warning, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Sally Helgesen
Guess what? Our environment is always going to give us trigger warnings. What we need is to understand an effective way to address them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you then share with us some of these common triggers?

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, a couple of them that really stand out, one is visibility, which we don’t necessarily think of as a trigger but it really can operate, and it can operate in a number of ways. Number one, we can feel triggered by people we feel are very good at being visible, “Oh, he’s such a showboat. He’s always talking about himself. He’s that kind of person. I’m a wonderful person. I’m not like that.”

Or, we can just simply feel triggered by our own lack of visibility, “Oh, nobody ever notices me. I guess I’m just not the kind of person who grabs attention. Oh, well, I know that I’m a good person, and this, that, or the other, couple of my friends like me,” but we’re being triggered by that, by that reaction. Or, we can, if we are really good at it, and I’ve seen this with senior executives I’ve worked with, if we’re really good at it, we can be triggered by people who are not good at positioning themselves to be visible.

We think we can dismiss them, “Oh, well, he’s not a player. He’s not very good at bragging on himself or tooting his own horn. He seems to have some moralistic inhibition against doing it, so I’m not going to waste my time with him.” I heard that a lot from people who are good at it. So, it can trigger us in all kinds of ways.

But, here, you see this is a really good demonstration of how triggers work. What they do is they stir up a kind of automatic or stock response in us, “Well, he’s a showboat. I don’t want to be like him.” And I’ve heard people say this for years, “Yeah, well, if I act out like that jerk down the hall to get noticed in this organization, no, thank you.” Why is he a jerk, because he gets noticed? Maybe learn from him.

So, they stir up a stock response, and then that response keeps us from being able to think of a more positive way to address the situation, “Hmm, okay, I see that I am being triggered by that person’s skill at getting noticed. I wouldn’t necessarily want to use the same techniques, but I think that there is probably something I can learn here. Maybe I’m going to start watching him and thinking about how I might rephrase things he says in a different way, a way that’s more comfortable for me.”

“So, for example, if he’s saying, ‘Well, I had that client eating out of my hand,’ we might think, ‘Okay, that’s helpful.’ Maybe it would be more useful for me to phrase it, ‘Well, that client and I really bonded together.” But it’s helpful to understand and watch what he’s doing in a constructive way so that we’re rewriting that script, “Hey, here’s someone I can learn from.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of the notion of our automatic response, and it just closes down the whole universe of possibility and opportunity. And I think we do this all the time with so many things.

Sally Helgesen
We do. We do.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us, Sally, what are some ways to catch ourselves in the moment regardless of what the trigger is?

Sally Helgesen
Well, I think, number one, when we recognize ourselves going into telling ourselves a story that’s kind of negative and defensive, or telling ourselves, in particular, a story that’s very self-serving about who we are, “Well, I’m not the kind of person who would ever…” The minute we hear ourselves telling ourselves that kind of story in our heads, we should recognize that, “Ah, okay, I’m probably being triggered.”

“Now what is triggering me here? In this case, it’s the fact that I feel that that person is better at getting noticed than I am. Okay, that’s triggering me. How could I rewrite this or take a different path of action that would be more helpful to me, that would serve me better and might also help me figure out a way to connect better with this person instead of, judgmentally, dismissing them?”

So, defensiveness, judgment, self-serving narratives, these are all keys that we are being triggered. And if we want to address them, we should take heed and then think about how we might more skillfully and usefully respond.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so given those things to be on the look out for, could you share with us another one of the common triggers called ‘that’s not funny’?

Sally Helgesen
‘That’s not funny.’ Exactly. These are triggers that are based around humor. And humor has become, I think, are really challenging thing to deal with in today’s workplace because people have different perceptions in terms of what they think is funny. Also, jokes, especially jokes that would’ve been acceptable and thought of as sort of fresh and interesting a number of years ago, now have a way of giving offense to a lot of people. And that has made humor, to some degree, really challenging in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Sally, could you give us an example of a joke or piece of humor or reference that might’ve been fine and dandy five to ten years ago, and now is, ooh, risky business?

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, any joke that has to do with gender, lots of jokes that were in the workplace – I don’t want to necessarily repeat them right now – that had to do with women who were sort of hot quantities or a presumption that men were always trying to seduce women in one way or another, those kinds of jokes. I came of age; I was in the Mad Men era when I started working. I worked in advertising and it was really like Mad Men, and there were all kinds of stuff that, today, would get somebody fired on the spot that was happening.

So, there are a lot of people who kind of come from that era, or just a bit afterwards, when it was sort of rock and roll time, and anything would go. And there could be jokes about who somebody picked up at the bar last night. Well, that’s fine, that was then, but now that’s going to rile up a lot of people. Anything that pertains specifically to someone’s looks or appearances is really out of bounds. Even very simple things.

Like one example I give in the book, which is a classic sort of golf joke where the husband comes home, and the wife said, “Well, how did it go?” And he said, “Well, it was fine until the sixth hole when Charlie had a heart attack.” And the wife says, “Oh, poor Charlie. What happened?” And he said, “Well, he expired on the sixth hole, so it really was a drag after that because it was all hit the ball, drag Charlie, hit the ball, drag Charlie.”

I heard this joke told probably far too many times at various conferences in Palm Springs, right up through the ‘90s into the end of the last century, as it were. And people would always laugh, depending on if the joke teller, number one, was skilled in telling it, and, number two, if he had a high-enough rank in the organization, everybody would yuck it up. But today it wouldn’t work.

For example, a lot of younger people would think, “How is this relevant? It sounds like the wife is at home waiting for the husband to come back from a golf game. This isn’t a situation I identify with.” Or, people who had had a relative who had a heart attack would be prone to think, “Well, that’s not funny.” That wasn’t how people thought 30, 40, 50 years ago. It just wasn’t.

So, people need to be a little more careful but, very importantly, we cannot ban humor from the workplace. We absolutely can’t do it. It is one of the most important qualities that helps people bond and create relationships, and it makes work more fun, so we can’t get into a very uptight situation where we’re constantly scanning the room to think, “Who could this offend? Who could this offend? Oh, better not do this. Oh, better keep my mouth shut.”

Much better is to create an environment where we look at things that are obviously meant to be offensive, and there are a lot of them, and things that might misfire a little bit, like that ‘hit the ball, drag Charlie’ joke. They might misfire, somebody thinks, “Wow, so and so just had a heart attack. How is that going to play with them?”

And we need to be, I think, a little less hard on people, unless we perceive that they were really trying to be provocative and offensive. It’s also important to try to find the humor in situations rather than dragging in jokes, because jokes rely for their power on their capacity to be provocative and, to some degree, outrageous. They cross boundaries. That’s what they do. That’s where that sort of twist that makes a joke funny comes from.

And so, having an awareness that, “Let’s find the humor in our situation,” in self-deprecating humor, making fun of yourself, not too much, but enough when something goes wrong, when you say something stupid, that is especially effective if you’re in a position with some degree of power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Sally, we talked about a few behaviors and habits that are great in terms of giving people the benefit of the doubt, and watching yourself and your triggers, and if you’re just riling people off, and constructing self-flattering narratives that are defensive left and right. Are there any other key inclusive behaviors that make a world of difference for folks in organizations?

Sally Helgesen
Oh, certainly. One of the things that I really heard a lot about when I was working on the book was the power of nominating other people for awards. And one of the women I interviewed, she said, “I really learned a lot about creating allies from a much older executive when I was very early in my career. And this executive came up to me, and he said, ‘I am trying to see if I can get a certain number of nominations for some big award in the industry.’ And he said, ‘I’m wondering if you would nominate me.’”

So, she said she was shocked on two fronts. Number one, she said she was shocked because she didn’t know that that’s how it was done, that people who got awards often lobbied for it. She said, “I just thought they got awards.” She said, “I never really thought it through.” She was early in her career at that time.

But she said, “I was also astonished that someone who was at such a senior level would ask someone junior like me.” She said, “Again, that really, really…I didn’t know you could do that.” She said it made her very aware that this is something that you can do that earns you tremendous gratitude from your colleagues. It’s not only agreeing to nominate them but volunteering to nominate them, “You know, you’ve really been in this job, and I saw that…” whatever it is, whatever entity it is “…is taking nominations for people who are outstanding in our sector. I thought that I might nominate you. How would that be?”

Well, this is something that people really, really respond to. And, again, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something that we can do really early in our careers. We can also ask people what would be helpful to them. And, again, we can do this even if we’re very junior in our career. We can recognize that part of our job is always going to be trying to make our bosses, our leaders, the people we work for, part of our job is making them look good, so we can be clear about this.

So, we can say, “I understand that I want you to look good in this initiative. Is there anything I can do that would be especially useful to you in letting the people in the organization know what a terrific job our team is doing, and, therefore, you, as our team leader.” So, asking a question like that can really be eye-opening and it does a couple of things.

“You solicit my ideas for how you could be helpful,” but it also suggests to the person that you say that to, that you really understand how things work in an organization, and that you’re not naïve about it. You understand and accept that part of your job is making them look good. So, that kind of puts you on a different footing than you might’ve been before.

Of course, there are plenty of things senior people can do as well, “What talents do you have that you feel you may not be using? Do you have any skills in this job that you would particularly like to develop? Is there anybody you would like to meet that I might know who could be helpful to you in the future?” Those kinds of questions, we don’t ask those kinds of questions enough wherever we are in our careers.

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

Sally Helgesen
A couple of things I do want to mention is it’s very hard to try to identify when we’re being triggered and then think of a different path of action. And we will always be more successful at it if we are bringing other people along on our journey. This is part of this theme of asking, of saying, “You know, one thing I’m really trying to work on…”

Fairness is a trigger in the book we didn’t talk about, “One thing I’m really trying to work on is coming to a better understanding of what is fair and what isn’t fair in this organization because I realize that I often think something is unfair but it may not be as unfair as I think it is, or I often recognize that something is actually much more unfair than I was thinking it was. Can I bounce my ideas off you once I have a perception about this and kind of get your thoughts on it?”

So, it’s a kind of seat-of-the-pants pure coaching where we engage other people in our own development. In this case, our development as we try to think about what undermines us in terms of building strong relationships really broadly.

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

Sally Helgesen
I think a favorite quote of mine, because it’s one that I use virtually every day, and I referenced it a bit earlier, comes from the really terrific old self-help book by Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And it was, “Always seek to discern what lies within your circle of control, and to align it with your circle of concern.”

In other words, don’t waste your time trying to address whatever concerns you but you can’t control. And, in fact, probably don’t spend too much time being concerned about it if you can’t control it.

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

Sally Helgesen
I would say that the research done by Daniel Kahneman, who basically invented the whole field of behavioral economics, about how people don’t always, or even often do what really serves their own long-term interests, that we’re often a lot more irrational and reactive in terms of how we respond to everything, ranging from how we manage our financial lives, to the decisions we make about where we live or how we interact with our families, that we often make decisions that don’t serve our own interests.

And I think this work was so important because it brought a whole recognition of the fact that humans are not as rational as they imagine themselves to be into the discussion. And, in fact, that’s really influenced a lot of my thinking about how triggers operate. We tend to be triggered by things and respond in ways that do not serve our interests.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Sally Helgesen
I think my favorite book, in fact, I know this because I start most of my days reading it, is Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which translates as a manual for power. It is a complete listing of deeply counterintuitive insights about the nature of power and how we use it, especially in the RW Wing translation. I find it a fantastic way to begin every day. Real insights into human behavior and how to understand human behavior but also use it in ways that serve what we’re trying to be and contribute in the world.

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

Sally Helgesen
What I use to be awesome at my job is basically Word documents. I’m a writer and my preferred method for communicating with the world is, and always has been since I was a little child, writing. And I find Word such an improvement upon typewriters, and that sort of stuff we used to use to erase words on typewriters. So, I just absolutely love it and couldn’t live without it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Sally Helgesen
My favorite habit, I think, is my ability to admit vulnerability. When I don’t have a skill, when I’m not good at something, I don’t try to cover it up. And I think that really helps me. I deal with a lot of things all day long, and if I had to spend energy trying to pretend I was good at what I’m not good at, I don’t think I’d have much success.

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

Sally Helgesen
I think it relates to something that I said earlier, that it’s easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting. Since my work has been focused upon the ‘hows’ for the last 35, 40 years, that really resonates with me. I think we want to act in thoughtful ways, learn from how we act, and then let that shape what our opinions and our views are.

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

Sally Helgesen
Well, to my website, SallyHelgesen.com. And I’m active on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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

Sally Helgesen
Yes, I do. Being awesome at your job requires a little bit of humility, a little bit of willingness to recognize when your stock responses do not serve you, but it doesn’t require self-effacement. We should never equate being humble with being humiliated. We can be humble and acknowledge what we need to learn without beating ourselves up or telling ourselves a negative story about who we are or what we’re trying to do in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sally, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in rising.

Sally Helgesen
Thank you, Pete. Thank you so much.

Mar 13
0

847: How to Enhance Your Team’s Greatness through Coaching with Sara Canaday

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Sara Canaday says: "Anyone can be a good coach. … with the right tools, understanding the core skills that it takes and how to sharpen them."

Sara Canaday shares the essential skills that help managers level up their leadership and engage employees.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The surprisingly simple principles of coaching well.
  2. The two types of coaching and when to deploy each.
  3. A step-by-step guide to coaching effectively.

About Sara

Sara Canaday is a leadership strategist and award-winning author who helps arm professionals with the practices and strategies they need to make the critical shift from informed to influential, from doer to driver, and from manager to leader.

When she’s not speaking or working with her clients, she’s cheering on her son’s football team or hiding new shoe purchases from her husband and 20 year old daughter.

Resources Mentioned

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Sara Canaday Interview Transcript

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

Sara Canaday
Thank you for having me back. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom about coaching but, first, I need to hear the story. You became a Cupcake Wars judge which was a longtime dream of yours. What’s the story here?

Sara Canaday
Oh, yes. Well, okay, so before anybody gets too excited, I didn’t actually appear on the Food Network show by the same name but what I did do is, for my birthday, I had my husband recreate the show right here in my home. So, we invited, I want to say it was, eight couples, and part of the invitation meant you had to show up with a homemade, not store-bought, from scratch cupcake with a Texas theme, or something that’s inspired from the year of my birth, the year I was born. And so, these cupcakes were going to be judged on taste, theme, and presentation.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many people did you get to sign up for this punishment, Sara? “Show up with some work and I’ll judge you.”

Sara Canaday
Every single couple came with cupcakes. One couple’s daughter ended up making them, they admitted it to me. Some couples had a blast doing this on their own together and were extremely competitive, I couldn’t believe it but, nonetheless, I got to sit and taste eight different cupcakes and judge them. And so, hey, I may not have been on the actual show but recreating it was just as good if not better.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, fun, I’m glad that worked and good birthday memories there.

Sara Canaday
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Way to do it up as opposed to just like, “Oh, I guess we’re going to go to dinner…”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“…for my birthday.”

Sara Canaday
We did something different.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. Well, let’s hear about your latest book Coaching Essentials for Managers. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Sara Canaday
Well, nothing extraordinary other than I’ve had people tell me that it is a really good handbook more than just a book. It serves as a guide. There’s a lot of how-to’s in there. There are powerful phrases you can use to kind of get you off center under varying circumstances of coaching. There’s a coaching prep sheet that you can use before a coaching session so you can feel more confident with the process.

And then there’s a myriad of actual scenarios that you can read about so that if something similar happens, you have a way to navigate the conversation. So, it is a book but most people tell me it’s like a nice handbook, like a guide.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what’s the main idea or key takeaway or thesis here?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think the main idea is that anyone can be a good coach. I think we used to think that a good coach is somebody who’s really charismatic, and they know how to be uber patient, and they just have this knack for more of a counselor-type approach, and that’s not true. Again, with the right tools, understanding the core skills that it takes and how to sharpen them, anybody can pursue coaching today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And we talked about the book title there says, Coaching Essentials for Managers: The Tools You Need to Ignite Greatness in Each Employee. You say anyone can coach. Any thoughts for non-managers in terms of, are there particular skills or tips that you think would be resonant for those folks who don’t yet have direct reports reporting to them?

Sara Canaday
Absolutely. In fact, I am working on a course right now for LinkedIn, and the title is Peer Coaching, and it derives a lot of the same applications and concepts and skills from leadership coaching. So, the very types of attributes and formulas that work for leader-to-employee coach also work for peer-to-peer coaching, and that’s becoming a really growing trend in corporate today.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And so, with peer-to-peer coaching, is it sort of like we switch off in terms of, “Okay, you coach me then I coach you”? Or, how does that go down?

Sara Canaday
That’s exactly right. And it can be a pair, a partner, of coaches but oftentimes it’s a group of about four or five people together that peer-coach each other. And so, there’s a streamlined approach, certain questions are asked, “Bring your latest challenge to the group,” and everybody gets their turn, and then peer coaches are listening not to fix – this is the hard part, it’s just like a leader with an employee – resists moving to fix-it mode right away.

But they’re listening to ask the right questions so that that person that has a challenge can put more structure around their thinking so that they can reflect on what exactly they want to have happen, and then they move in to potential solutions based on what they’ve already tried, based on what the potential roadblocks are or facets that are part of the issue.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve had really cool experiences with peer coaching. I did the first course in the Co-Active Coaching, the CPCC folks, and I was amazed at, okay, none of us were coaches yet, certified. We’ve done the first course out of, like, six, I don’t remember, and yet folks are having these wild breakthrough conversations with tears and whatnot, it’s like, “Huh.”

To your point about anyone can coach, it’s true. It doesn’t take a superhuman with crazy almost psychic-like empathy skills but rather it’s just, hey, you’re paying attention, you’re equipped with a few tools, and you have just a modicum of patience and good listening and discipline and humility to not try to make the mistakes that really shut down a conversation that’s going somewhere, and away you can go.

Sara Canaday
Yeah, it is amazing. And it’s hard because, for leaders especially, and any high-achievement professional, we’re wired to fix. And coaching, you have to sort of sit on your hands because you want right away to say, “Oh, either that happened to me,” which isn’t very helpful. It can be but to say, “Oh, that happened to me and this is what I did,” it doesn’t let the person you’re coaching reflect on their particular situation because what you did to solve something may not even be applicable or work for them.

And you have to just be patient with asking the right type of questions, open-ended questions not yes-or-no questions because you won’t get anywhere with those. So, absolutely, anybody can do it but it does take discipline because of the way we’re naturally wired.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you share with us what’s at stake, or what’s possible, or what’s at risk if we are coaching well versus not well or not at all, or being coached well, or not well, or not well at all?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. Well, this is interesting because when I was writing my book, I did a lot of research around different statistics because I wanted to compel readers about the advantage of coaching.

Pete Mockaitis
As many businesses would start, yes.

Sara Canaday
Yes. And so, there are numerous studies that show that well-coached individuals are higher performers, are more productive, and they’re more engaged. Now, that seems to be a benefit for the leader and the company, but from the employee’s standpoint, there were other studies, Gallup being one of them, that found that when employees were well-coached and they felt like a leader had their progress and best interests in mind, that they were much more loyal and they didn’t feel that they had to look elsewhere to grow and for opportunities.

And I think that latter part is probably what’s going to get people’s attention because, right now, we all know that retaining talent is a challenge. And what studies have found, multiple studies, is that what people want more than a larger paycheck is the idea and the feeling that they’re progressing. And let me just say, that progression doesn’t necessarily mean an advanced position.

And I say that because I think that’s why leaders tend to hesitate to do what I call developmental coaching, which is more about, “How do I help you get more of what you want and do more of the work that you want to do?” Because I feel like, “Well, I know there’s no position for me to advance them to, so why am I going to start this conversation if I can’t promote them?” But nothing is further from the truth here, in that those conversations aren’t strictly about advancing and getting a new role.

They’re about sharpening new skills. They’re about maybe getting a broader network, being introduced to more people. Maybe they’re about taking on a project where they can shine a light on something other than what they typically do. So, there are a lot of things leaders can do to help people feel like they’re progressing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so let’s hear about that. We talked about developmental coaching. You say we’ve got two types. We got performance coaching and developmental coaching. Can you expand upon what each means and the difference between them?

Sara Canaday
Of course. So, performance coaching, for many people, they think in terms of short term. It’s any conversation that points towards helping the employee improve their performance, meet performance expectations. Whereas, developmental coaching is more future-oriented, and that serves to help and support an employee who wants to grow and develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so then, do you recommend both or one under certain circumstances versus one is more appropriate for another context?

Sara Canaday
I absolutely recommend both. I think a natural cadence with a leader and an employee, or peer to peer, is there are going to be situations that call for both. If you’re having regular one-on-one meetings with your employees, sometimes you’re going to talk about missing a deadline, and what may have caused that. And so, that’s performance coaching.

But other times you’re going to circle back to, “Hey, I noticed that in your individual development plan, you want to get advanced knowledge in Excel, you want to learn how to do pivot tables. Where are we on that? How can I help you?” Two different things but both are scenarios that are perfectly within the realm of happening to the same individual in the same month.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then you’ve got a five-step model we’re going to chat through. But, first, could you share with us are there any key guiding lights, fundamental, essential principles that we should keep in mind if we think, “Yeah, coaching, that’s something I should do more of or I’d like more of”? Are there some must-remembers before we dig into the one, two, three, four, five of the five steps?

Sara Canaday
Well, I think it’s a little bit of a mindset shift because those of us who are in corporate for years may have seen coaches or coaching reserved for individuals who weren’t performing at their best. So, instead of it being a positive, it was almost a negative. So, that’s number one. Now, coaching is, in some cases, reserved for those who are being groomed for the next level. So, it can be absolutely a positive thing.

Also, performance coaching, to me, does not include corrective action, so I just want to make that clear. If you were to read and go through any of my literature on coaching, some people may think, “Okay, what’s the deal here? This sounds a little too soft.” Well, that’s because I’m assuming that this is not corrective action. You’ve not coached the person multiple times before on an issue. You’re not to the point where you need to think about whether this is even the right fit for the person or whether they need to move on. So, coaching is not corrective action.

Coaching is a conversation. At the heart of it, that’s what it is. And it is a way for you to partner with the employee and discover mutually what the issue might be, and then co-create potential solutions to rectify, to close gaps, to move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got it. Understood. And so then, you’ve got your five-step model for coaching. Can you walk us through each of the five steps?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. The first one is what I call just assess the situation, and that can happen before you even have the conversation. So, whatever data you have, let’s say it’s performance coaching, let’s say you have monthly reports of somebody in a call center, and you’re able to see from the reports how many calls they’ve taken, how many calls they kept in queue, what was their hold and wait times, whatever it is you’re measuring, and/or you’re collecting feedback from others who are on a project team with that individual, or somebody has come to you with feedback.

That’s part of the assessment but it doesn’t end there. You’re continuing to assess it at the first conversation because one of the first things that I always recommend is that you get the employee’s perspective of the situation. Even if you feel like you understand it, you know it, it’s pretty clear, I would say give that person the opportunity to share their perspective.

So, the question goes, “How do you think that meeting went yesterday? Tell me about the project. What’s new? Do you have any concerns? Where are we on this initiative? Is there anything that’s making you uncomfortable?” So, you’re starting to get their perspective so you have the entire picture instead of jumping to any conclusions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So, that’s one, we assess the situation and then, two, we generate ideas.

Sara Canaday
Generate ideas, right, and this is the co-create part. I think this is another reason maybe leaders hesitate is because they’re like, “I’ve got a multitude of things happening, I’m not sure I’m going to have the exact answer for what’s plaguing this individual or what’s keeping them from meeting these goals at my fingertips, so I’m a little intimidated.” Well, you don’t have to have the answers.

You simply ask the person, “What could you have done differently?” You might have ideas but that’s how the conversation continues. Or, you say, “What might be missing? What’s keeping you from showing up as your best self or for meeting these metrics? What do you think is keeping you?” And even if they don’t have any idea, you come to the table, “Do you feel knowledgeable about the products that you’re selling? Do you feel that you can manipulate all the platforms within a given phone call? Is that what’s plaguing you here?”

So, you come up with solutions together of how to move forward, to get the performance on track, or to help the person feel like they’re progressing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And to your previous point associated with not leaping in and saying, “Oh, this happened to me and this is what I did,” you also talked about co-creating. How do we do that dance associated with we’re not jumping in and doing the idea generation, we’re prompting them? How does that work?

Sara Canaday
Yeah, and I’m glad you asked me that because I will say that true coaching that uses what you have heard as the Socratic method, which is asking question after question, “So, what did you do? So, how did that make you feel?”

Now, I’m going to go on record here saying that if I were to be graded as a purist on coaching, I probably would not do very well because I think there is a point at which once you’ve asked the questions and the person has explored, and you can tell they’re really kind of at a loss, then it’s okay to step in with, “Hey, are you open to hearing what I think might help?” or, “Are you open to a suggestion about how to move forward here?” And then it’s perfectly okay to give your suggestions.

I’m not saying don’t do it. I’m just saying don’t start there. Give the person an opportunity, but then it’s perfectly okay to say, including, “Here’s what’s worked for me in the past.” The point I was trying to make before is that we tend to get caught up in the story, and that’s what I mean by, “Oh, that happened to me,” or, “Oh, well, why did you do that?” “Oh, and then what did he say?” because then we start going backwards and we spend too much of our time in the story and not enough time moving forward in the coaching process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the third step, develop an action plan, how is this done?

Sara Canaday
Again, together. More than anything, you encourage the person, once they’ve decided how they’re going to move forward, “Great. Who can be of most help as you do that? Can you think of anybody who can help you with that?” or, “When do you think you’ll want to have this done by? This has been on your individual development plan, I see here, for eight months. If you want to get it done this year, let’s put an aggressive timeline in here. What do you think of that?”

So, again, you’re holding them accountable for their own action process but you’re giving them some nudges, some support, and you’re challenging them at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the fourth step is provide support. What does that look like?

Sara Canaday
Yeah. So, anything you can do, if you can introduce them to somebody who knows a particular skill or can help them get exposure to a project that has more of the type of work that they want to be doing, then make the connection. If you have access to budget that can be given to them to take on a course, if they need to spend more time with you going over some of their decks for presentations because you found out that they go into too much detail, again, not necessarily a performance issue, maybe a career development issue.

Smart as a whip, know their stuff inside and out, but maybe they’re used to delivering presentations to technical-only professionals, and you want to help them present to non-technical. So, maybe it needs more of your time to go over some of their presentations and give them feedback. Any way you can support them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fifth step, follow up?

Sara Canaday
Yes. And this is like anything else, it’s like having an accountability partner. This is why the peer coaching works so well. You are the person that’s going to help to ensure that there’s follow-through but it also shows on your end that this wasn’t a gratuitous conversation, that you actually do care, and you are going to move forward helping the person see that these things happen for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Sara, can we maybe do a demonstration roleplay in which you coach me about a thing?

Sara Canaday
Certainly.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say I find myself procrastinating on processing my email inbox, and I’ve got a backlog that piles up, and I don’t like it and other people don’t like it. So, where shall we begin?

Sara Canaday
Yeah, and not probably an uncommon scenario, especially as people’s projects get, you know, we get more projects and they get exponentially bigger. So, I think I would start by saying helping you be more open with what may be going on, “So, tell me how the projects are going,” and that’s when you can say, “They seem to be fine but I feel like people’s expectations of me maybe are not the typical what I’m used to. I feel like things are falling through the cracks.”

Again, I’m just going to explore, “What do you think might be going on?” And that’s when you can say, “I feel like my inbox is always full. I can’t keep it up.” My question would be, “So, what kind of organizational productivity system do you have? Do you have a certain cadence to how you handle your emails? Tell me about how you organize your work.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. So, I’d say, “I use the Superhuman email app. I do it when I have a free moment in between things and that’s maybe the extent of my organization in the email world.”

Sara Canaday
Great. Well, for most of us that may have worked to a certain point, but when we get under pressure or when the workload is even more heavy, those moments are fewer and far between, and we find ourselves behind. So, what could you do differently? What do you think you could do differently if just reserving for when you’re free to get to those emails? Any other thoughts about what might be helpful for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I suppose real time needs to be allocated for them, and the amount of time that they have been getting has been insufficient to bring it to zero. So, one way or another, I guess more time needs to go there. I guess I’ve just been reluctant to do so because it’s not interesting and I’m not sure it’s going to be value-added relative to the other things I can be doing.

Sara Canaday
Well, I see your point. We get a lot of emails that aren’t necessarily germane to what we’re doing right now, and it can be frustrating. But if you were to do that, what would that look like? Would it look like in the mornings? When are you at your best, most productive, most efficient?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is in the morning, and I guess I’m wondering if email deserves my best or I should give it time that is my worse, or middle ground. We had Carey Nieuwhof on the show talk about either sort of green-zone times, yellow-zone times, and red-zone times in terms of your energy, attention, focus, motivation, oomph going on.

And so, yeah, that gets me thinking maybe I need to figure out, “Hey, email doesn’t deserve my best time but it needs some time, and so here is the time in which I am medium-functioning in terms of I can be motivated enough to answer these emails but not feel like I’m casting my pearls before swine, or wasting the most precious gold of the day on sort of the administrative feeling matters but still reach that inbox zero which feels so freeing, and feels like I’ve got a lot of mental space when there’s not a big load of emails waiting for me.”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, I hear you. I’m with you on that. I am almost too distracted during the day when I know my emails are piling up. There’s this anxiety, this anxiousness that I know it’s there. And so, I’m all for using your most productive time early in the morning.

For example, I know some people do their best writing or their best strategy-thinking, but I like your idea of at least giving it the medium productivity action so that you can get through it, and you can get through it efficiently but that it also leaves what energy you do have left for the day without that that being that sort of taxing feeling that you’ve got this hanging over your head.

And let’s not forget, you’ve got other people who, for whatever reason, may be waiting on your response for their own production. And so, I would just say think of that, too. You may see this low-value administrative but there may be a couple of key emails in there that need your attention and that others are waiting on. And so, from that standpoint, I think it’s important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. So, that makes sense to me in terms of it might not be my number one thing, but other people maybe their number one thing is hearing from me so they could proceed. So, just in terms of being a good citizen and team player, I can sacrificially and generously do that for them in the hopes that, hey, we all reciprocate and it works out for everybody.

Sara Canaday
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, I’m thinking maybe 4:00 p.m. might be a good time to put in half an hour a day on the emails, and that should probably get us close to zero if I’m doing that with consistency.

Sara Canaday
Great. Pete, when do you think you can start that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, probably today.

Sara Canaday
Wonderful. Why don’t we reconnect in a couple of weeks? I’ll be curious to see how that’s working for you, and happy to help you if it doesn’t seem to be moving the needle forward. We can maybe come up with other solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good deal. All right. So, there we have it. We assessed the situation, we generate some ideas, we developed an action, we have some support – thank you – and the follow up. Nifty. So, any reflections on your end on the roleplay?

Sara Canaday
One thing I always say as a primer to coaching is that you have to know your employees, and there has to be some semblance of trust and rapport. You can’t skip that when you’re coaching. In fact, I tell a story of trying to help somebody better connect with their project team, and I did what I tell people not to do, and I jumped to the fix-it mode, and I said, “Well, why don’t you start meeting with them individually?”

And that suggestion failed miserably because, A, I didn’t ask her for more questions, but, B, she didn’t know them very well. And so, when she started asking questions, there was almost a kind of look on their face like they didn’t trust her or they weren’t sure what her…

Pete Mockaitis
“What are you trying to pull here?”

Sara Canaday
Yeah, “What’s your M.O. here?” So, this is just a good place to bring up that we’re just doing an on-the-spot, we’ve known each other through professional as colleagues through the years, but we don’t work together. I don’t know what makes you tick on a daily basis necessarily. And so, I would hope that that conversation was a little more refined based on knowing you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay.

Sara Canaday
I could’ve said something like, “Oh, yeah, Pete, I know how much you like those emails.” It could’ve been funny, but it would be a way to build rapport and get you to see that I’m just not going to be rigid about getting your emails done. I’m going to try to approach this in a way that works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. And then I’m curious, when it comes to coaching, any super favorite questions, words, phrases that often yield goodies on the other side?

Sara Canaday
Most of them are open-ended, for one. If you asked, “How is the project going?” “Good.” You’re just not going to get much, right? But if you’re really conscious of asking, “Okay, so what might make you more comfortable with this solution?” that kind of question, you can ask individually or to a group that you’ve just announced a new project or initiative.

And, to me, that gets the meeting after the meeting out in the open, or it gets your coachee to tell you something that they would’ve walked away saying, “Ugh, easier said than done. I knew she was going to suggest that.” But if you asked that right then and there, then you’re peeling back the onion layers and you’re getting to more efficient information.

Maybe you say, “I don’t necessarily see it that way. Can I tell you why?” That’s very different than saying, “I don’t agree,” because you’re putting the person at the defense. Whereas, in the other case, it’s a little disarming. You just don’t see it that way. It doesn’t mean it’s an indictment against them or their idea. You just don’t see it that way, “And can I tell you why? I want to offer another kind of angle here.” So, those are just some examples of open-ended questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell me, Sara, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Sara Canaday
No, other than the book has several pages of good, powerful phrases or questions. So, they don’t always have to be a question. It could be, “Tell me more,” which is not a question. But if anybody is interested in those types of tools, the book is full of them.

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

Sara Canaday
My favorite quote is “Please be responsible for the energy you bring into this room.”

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

Sara Canaday
Well, this probably has to do with coaching and it has to do with leadership, but it was done by the Journal of Economic Psychology, and there, there were a group of researchers that wanted to study the optimal strategy for goalies, soccer goalies, and blocking penalty kicks.

And what they found, after watching hundreds of videos and speaking to expert coaches and goalies, is that when goalies stay in the middle of the net, they block the ball 33% of the time. When they move to the left or the right, it goes down by half, 14% on the right, 13.3 on the left. Point being is that we, as leaders, as professionals, I think, sometimes mistake motion for meaning, and we have a bias for action.

I get it. I’m a work in progress on that. And that study, to me, sort of highlights this idea that we would really benefit from taking more pauses, more pauses to think strategically, more pauses to coach our employees, more pauses to reflect.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Sara Canaday
Favorite book, it just came out. It’s called The Chrysalis Code: Becoming the Type of Leader Other People Want to Follow by my good friend and colleague Ron J. West.

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

Sara Canaday
We talked about this the last time. I’m going to say it again. LinkedIn, huge tool for me. And then I’m going to throw in a few personal ones that save me time. Amazon, I don’t know what I would do without it, it’s kind of scary, because when I need something, I don’t have to run out to OfficeMax or fill my day with errands on top of work. My fingertips right there. And, similarly, Instacart, which is not everywhere but a lot of places. And I can imagine, with three kids, this would be a boon for you, but getting my groceries delivered is hugely helpful.

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

Sara Canaday
Well, it’s a word that I didn’t know of until, I think, a year or two ago, and I read about it in one of Adam Grant’s posts. And, apparently, I’m a precrastinator. So, it’s the opposite of a procrastinator. I actually do things really far in advance, and that has served me very well because I guess my years in corporate, I knew that fires would always have to be put out. And so, when I have the time, I would get projects done early so that I wouldn’t feel as overwhelmed when things popped up that were not planned.

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

Sara Canaday
I mentioned one earlier that I think resonates with leaders, which is this idea of mistaking motion for meaning, and that’s probably the key one lately. Ever since COVID, I think, I find that people are just…they have no buffer time between any of their meetings, and no time to actually make connections and put things together, and be creative and innovative.

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

Sara Canaday
I’d point them to my website, SaraCanaday.com, and there’s no H in Sara, and Canaday is just like Canada but with a Y at the end. Or, LinkedIn, of course.

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

Sara Canaday
I do. I would say make one final or baby step toward this idea of coaching. It doesn’t have to be, “Okay, I’m going to coach somebody.” Pick a meeting this week where you’re just going to intentionally ask an open-ended question, or you’re going to intentionally paraphrase so that you can actively listen, “So, what I’m hearing you say is…” or, “Let me see if I got this right.” So, those are the things that are really important in coaching. So, just pick one aspect of coaching, and pick a meeting where you’re going to try it on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sara, this has been a treat. I wish you many good coaching sessions in the future.

Sara Canaday
Thank you. It’s been a treat to be here.

Mar 09
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846: How to Elevate and Empower Teams to Reach Their Full Potential with Robert Glazer

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Robert Glazer says: "Organizations should focus on making their people better, help them build their capacity holistically."

Robert Glazer shows how to build your team’s capacity and empower them to reach their full potential.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to cure exhaustion in teams.
  2. The simple trick to making difficult conversations easier.
  3. How to influence company culture without a leadership position.

About Robert

Robert Glazer is the founder and CEO of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards two years in a row.

He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today and international bestselling author of four books: Elevate, How To Thrive In The Virtual Workplace, Friday Forward, and Performance Partnerships.  He is a sought-after speaker by companies and organizations around the world and is the host of The Elevate Podcast. He also shares ideas and insights around these topics via Friday Forward, a weekly inspirational newsletter that reaches over 200,000 individuals and business leaders across 60+ countries.

Resources Mentioned

Robert Glazer Interview Transcript

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

Robert Glazer
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the wisdom of your book Elevate Your Team but, first, I got to hear, it’s been a couple years since we last chatted.

Robert Glazer
It’s been a pandemic.

Pete Mockaitis
That it has. Tell me, any particularly wild adventures, learnings, surprises in your life over the last couple of years?

Robert Glazer
It’s just been such a supply and demand see-saw that it’s been nothing like my career. I’m someone who likes to plan long term, and in the business and think two, three years ahead, and it’s just been three to six months is kind of as far as you can look. I would say the biggest thing was we were a fully virtual team for 12 years coming into COVID, and we hit it at times and it wasn’t something that we were really public with, and then it’s just everyone was like, “Oh, you’ve done this. How do you do this?” I ended up kind of writing a book around it.

So, that was a little bit of a whirlwind going from sort of keeping the fact that we were fully remote a little bit on the downlow to sort of becoming an exemplar and speaker and author around it. And, by the way, I just talked to a large company this morning, I mean, two, three years later, people still haven’t figured out what they’re going to do with this, and it’s pretty interesting to me.

That and figuring out the strategy where they kind of have a strategy but they haven’t supported it. And this company was saying they have all kinds of rules for remote work that no one has actually read or adheres to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And I remember even before the pandemic, there were debates in terms of, “Oh, so and so is moving, and they want to move work remotely,” and they’re like, “Oh, well, we don’t allow that.” Like, even then I was sort of, well, I’d been working self-employed remotely for a long time, and so I thought that was really a head scratcher, like, “If this person is excellent and they want to stay working for you, I think you should accommodate that.” That’s my bias.

Robert Glazer
So, here’s my favorite thing, and I was doing a keynote yesterday morning, and I have this slide that I used for a long time and I wasn’t going to use it, but it was David Solomon of Goldman Sachs in January 2021 saying that, or January 2022 saying that “Work from home is an aberration that they’re going to cure as soon as possible, and it’s like this horrible thing that needs to be fixed.” A week later, Goldman announces the best quarterly earnings in the history of the company with everyone working remote.

So, now they forced people back in the office, Goldman’s earnings come out last week, they’re the worst in, like, 20 years and they missed earnings. They’re down 60%. It’s a disaster. It’s just so funny. It’s like what actually…well, does it matter where and how people…Now, look, I am not a, “Everyone should be remote.” I think if you’re Goldman and you’re pitching an IPO, I think that people should come in for that pitch. But if they’re crunching the spreadsheets for 16 hours getting ready for a thing, like, did they need to come into the office that day for that?

But I do think there are things that you need to be in person, you need to be in the office, so I’m not an absolute on it, but I thought the paradox of those two, like statements and results, were really interesting, telling people the thing that was an aberration was the thing that just made your company the most money in its history.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Robert, that’s what I love, your perspective, you’re juxtaposing things, bringing together connections, distinctions, wisdom so it’s a hoot to be chatting again. And you got another work here, it’s called Elevate Your Team. What’s the big idea here?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, I wrote the book Elevate, it was about this concept of capacity-building and how to use that to make yourself better and help train leaders, really, to be better. And a lot of the stuff that we were doing over the years, I realized was the same framework around, “Well, how do you take that same capacity-building framework to an organization? So, what does it look like for an organization these days?”

And, look, it’s better to be lucky than good, and this book is coming out when the playbook of just burn through people and grow your business is just not going to work anymore. People are too tired around, “How do you grow a business on the backs of your people?” And by growing your people, I’m not saying, “We want to grow this business, and it sort of chews out people.” So, it takes that same spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional framework, and says, “How do you apply these principles to the organization rather than to the individual leaders?”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, for folks who didn’t catch the last interview, I recommend you do. But could you give us a bit of a refresher? We talked about capacity and building, and capacity-building, can you give us definitions of synonyms for what we’re talking about here?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, capacity-building is just a method. I always say that the long definition is the method by which individuals seek, accept, and develop…seek, acquire, and develop the skills and ability to perform at a higher level. Simply, it’s how you get better. I think it’s a process of how to get better and there’s four pieces.

Spiritual capacity, which is understanding who you are, and what you want most, your values and the standards you want to live by. Intellectual capacity, which is about how you improve your ability to think, learn, plan, and execute with discipline. That’s kind of your personal organizational operating system. Physical capacity is health, wellbeing, and physical performance. And emotional capacity is a few different things. It’s how you react to challenging situations, your emotional mindset, and I think the quality of your relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, in order or a team to flourish, well, I won’t steal your thunder, but it sounds like is it fair to say your thesis is you got to be building this capacity, growing in these domains in order to flourish as a team, an organization, a business without…?

Robert Glazer
And a human, yeah. So, the take on this that I have that’s a little different is I think organizations should focus on making their people better, help them build their capacity holistically not to just be good at their job today or the best robot for the assembly line, but how do you make them better at work and better in all aspects? At the same time, better father, mother, spouse, otherwise.

Because I think a lot of the things that people struggle with in work or a lot of their growth areas are the same outside, particularly with people working from home. It’s not like you wake out of bed cranky and tired and exhausted, and jump into work and are a totally different person. You’re going to be the same person. I find people that are organized and disciplined and have routines at work have them at home. They tend to really go hand in hand.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you share with us in terms of what’s the state of team capacity-building these days? How are we doing with these principles, generally speaking?

Robert Glazer
I don’t think well because I think that people are really burnt out, and they’re burnt out from two years of a global pandemic and the bounce back and all the changes, but that one implies that a lot of these things are out of whack. They’re not clear on what they value and what they bring to the organization. I think one of the things that make people stay and interested and growing as an organization, whether it’s intellectual, a lot of learning and feedback, and they’re seeing how they’re growing an opportunity.

We know people’s physical capacity is very diminished right now, so how can the organization help that, not hurt it? Like, how do you get people a break and some rest and get them recharged? And then again, I think that, particularly now, where you’re in an environment, again, where you have some layoffs and otherwise, psychological safety, becomes a big part of that.

Like, I know leaders struggle with, someone said to me yesterday at a keynote I was doing, one of the questions was, “Look, our industry, rough time, bad year, probably some layoffs, otherwise. Like, what do we tell people?” I was like, “Well, tell them the truth. Tell them where your parameters are, where you need their help, what you’re going to do. Communicate with them well because there’s going to be another company that are going to tell every people everything is fine, and it’s not. And they’re really going to lose the trust of those folks.”

So, I think people, when they know the truth and the reality, they’re happy to stay with something. I think it’s when they don’t feel like they’re being told the whole story that you have problems.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you share with us a fun story, a true story, with regard to a team who really saw a cool transformation when they did this capacity-building stuff, they took it seriously, they implemented some goodies, and they saw great results?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I’ll give you some individual examples. So, one of the things that we do with all of our leaders is that we…and I’m going to give you two examples, I think from spiritual and intellectual, to talk about. We help our leaders figure out their personal core values because our belief is there’s no acceleration partners type of leader. The best leader is going to be authentic, and we want to help them figure out what do they value, what are they good at. Like, what are the natural things?

And the first time we did this, and people figured these things out, they actually kind of wrote it up, they went back to their teams, and they said, “Look, I really learned all these things about myself. This is how I kind of show up as a leader. This is what you can expect from me. This is what I need from you.” And three to six months later, we’d measured their performance before that offsite and we did all that and after, and really everyone improved dramatically. I just think their connections to their teams went a lot higher.

Again, example of intellectual capacity, learning feedback, so we will do a training where we model fake conversations between employees and their managers, kind of rip from the headlines. So, we’d sit down and say, “All right, Pete, you’re…” so the crowd knows both sides of the story, the crowd watching this, but we give you a narrative, “Pete, you just started today, you made some mistakes in the first couple months, but you think you’re doing great, and you want to get promoted.”

And then there’s Carly on the other side, and Carly has a card that says, “You meet with your employee Pete, and you just don’t think he’s going to make it. He has not the right attitude. He’s made a bunch of mistakes. He doesn’t seem to be getting it, and you need to sort of, like, let Pete know that this might not be the best place for him.”

And then we watch people have that conversation, and there’s a lot of platitudes, and there’s a lot of dancing around, and now you see why people aren’t on the same page. And we say, “Freeze,” and then we have the team all comment in, and I say, “How many people think that Pete knew his job was on the line?” And 20 people watching will say, “No,” and then I was like, “Okay, what are some different ways you could’ve approached?” and then we’ll have them start the conversation again.

And, again, this is just the thing, “Why do these conversations go so poorly all the time?” Because people don’t know how to do them. And why do they dread? They haven’t practiced them. This is an actual law and order practice, having very common difficult conversations that managers are going to have. It’s not surprising that people aren’t good at something, that they haven’t been trained on, and that they haven’t done before.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s just keep rolling. Physically?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, physically, look, I think you’re putting your money where your mouth is on this in terms of one of the things that we did was we’ve done a couple of fitness contests where… Most companies say they want something and then they incentivize another. They incentivize never leaving the desk, and, “We’ll get you food and we’ll get you your vaccine shot without having to get up,” or all this stuff.

We have said to people on a couple of things, “Hey, we will cover, we will reimburse part of your vacation if you actually take seven days off and don’t communicate with everyone, and actually unplug.” So, we’re again aligning the incentive to that behavior. Similarly, we’ve had fitness challenges where people break into teams during the work day. They have to step aside a half an hour to do anything from walking, to yoga, to meditation, to working out, and the teams get a point and the teams compete, and I think the winners got sort of an Apple watch.

So, again, very different viewpoint when the organization is saying, “Hey, we’re actually compensating you, or paying you, or valuing things that are designed to give you more time, and pay attention to your physical health and make the workplace part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And emotionally?

Robert Glazer
Yeah. So, example, we’ve always had this employee TED Talks at our organization at our AP Annual Summit, and one year, we decided to step it up. There was a gentleman I knew named Philip McKernan, and he had a program called “One Last Talk,” where people get on stage and they basically deliver the, “What is the one talk that you would deliver if this is your last day on earth?” And these were not, like, he doesn’t let anyone escape with, “Oh, three great things to live a great life.” It’s much more personal.

So, we had a bunch of volunteers, we picked four people, they trained for two months, they got up there and gave these speeches, and there wasn’t really a dry eye in the room. These were like deeply emotional speeches talking about aspects of their lives that many people wouldn’t have known. What was interesting though was that over the next day, the level of sharing across the company, like what people were talking to other people about, making connections, “You are I work together for five years, and I never told you that I grew up in a single-parent household, and I find out the same about you.”

It was crazy watching how that opened the floodgates for people to want to connect on a more human level. And I think, again, that level of vulnerability just leads people to better relationships, more sharing, more understanding other people’s perspectives and where they’re coming from. And, yeah, it was a pretty cool experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, it sounds like there is a boatload of approaches, strategies, tools, activities, tactics, interventions, stuff you can do to see some upgrades, some increased capacity in each these domains. I’m curious, are there a few sorts of top do’s and don’ts that you recommend individuals and teams and organizations consider as we’re looking to implement some of this stuff?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I think that, oftentimes, people try to make too many changes at once. I think people are pretty good with change over time. Similar to New Year’s resolutions, I always say, like, I’m a much bigger believer. If I saw a company trying to do everything that was in this book, I would think their success would be very slow.

I think if they picked a couple things, started doing them, getting traction, and then I think that getting that one percent better each day or week, and getting the compounding effect of that, usually works better than rushing into a bunch of things that you don’t have the time or energy or resources to support.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And are there a few starting points that seem just excellent in your experience?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, I guess it depends on the area. I think if we’re talking about kind of a learning culture, some really easy things that you can do to start just getting more discussion or interaction, a book club, a podcast club, or even the CEO says, “You read this book and we get together, and let’s talk about it. Let’s pick a topic, let’s do a book,” that’s super easy.

Reimbursing people for education and learning experiences, I think that’s something that you can do right away. There’s also feedback, like really working with teams on teaching them how to give feedback, what’s good feedback. So many of these things, I think, we just, again, think that people know how to do.

One of the examples I love and I used in the book is that Scribe, which is a book company that does a lot of self-publishing books, so they actually teach their customers on how to give feedback to their team. And they say something like, “Look, saying you hate this cover is not super helpful to our design team. Saying, ‘This cover is off brand for the colors we like and the imagery I want to use, and I prefer imagery that is more X’ is a lot more helpful.”

So, it’s really interesting, like in that context, they’re even teaching that, how to do feedback. So, yeah, there are so many ways for, I think, companies to improve, but I think focusing on opportunities to learn and learn together is usually a pretty easy one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that notion about design feedback because I always feel ridiculous when I’m sharing my feedback on designs, and yet designers seem to really love it. I was like, “This font makes me feel like a child.” They’re like, “Oh, that’s excellent.”

Robert Glazer
That, actually, right. Well, at least they know.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “Really? I feel nutty when I say that out loud.”

Robert Glazer
At least they know what you don’t like about it. That’s fair on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. Well, there’s two things you kind of touched upon that I think are really juicy, and I’d love to hear all the great, your favorite tools for them. First, let’s talk about exhaustion, when folks are just tuckered out.

Robert Glazer
They’re toast, and if you think they’re going to come in and work 80 hours a week, even if they wanted to, I think they’re toast. And I actually think it’s happening more at the leadership level. The leaders carry the water in that first year in COVID, and they have the kids they’re worrying about and the sick parents, and their teams. And then I think, eventually, carrying all that water has really impacted them, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, if you’re good and exhausted, where do you recommend that we start?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, look, it seems counterintuitive when there’s a lot to do but try to give people some real breaks, whether that is the weekend, whether that is their week vacation, whether that is not worrying about emails at 6:00 o’clock after night. One of the tools that I’ve used for years, and, look, France and some places have taken them to the extreme. I think you’d go to jail if you email people after 5:00 o’clock.

But sometimes, like on a Saturday morning, I love to clear out emails from the week, and I learned when I was CEO that if I wrote someone an email on a Saturday, they thought they needed to respond. And I was often doing stuff after hours because that’s when I had time to doing it. I wasn’t looking for a response, that wasn’t the expectation. So, I learned to just use delayed delivery.

And so, anytime I write something outside of kind of normal hours, I delay until 8:00 o’clock the next work day. The side benefit of this is you can look really awesome and be productive at 8:00 o’clock in the morning when…

Pete Mockaitis
“Wow, Robert has given me six emails within…”

Robert Glazer
Yeah, you can do 7:58, 7:59, 8:00, 8:01, now you feel like a slacker in the morning. But I think people really appreciate that, particularly when you are a leader and you’re emailing other people on your team, they don’t know the priority. People tend to assume that everything is important, and not that just you felt like writing the email to them at that time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or I had a cool idea, and I wanted to get it on paper. And while I was there, how about I copy/paste, send?

Robert Glazer
That’s the other thing I do. I keep a notepad for everyone I meet and I take that cool idea and I put it in the part of the OneNote, and, in that way, I sit down and talk about the four ideas as well so they’re not getting bombarded with ADD at different points of night and day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. So, exhaustion, real breaks, whether that’s guidelines on the email timing or expectations, clarity that we’re not doing stuff over the weekend, or that week vacation is true and real.

Robert Glazer
Yeah. And, look, model the behavior. So, I’m a leader, “I’m going on vacation this weekend. If you need to reach me by an emergency, here’s the thing.” Put it on my autoreply, “Don’t email from vacation.” Because people will do what you say. This is the same over parenting. People will do what you say not what you do. Sorry, they will do what you do, not what you say. I got that backwards.

And that’s where I think it’s really important. If you tell people, “Oh, it’s fine to take a vacation,” but then you say you’re going on vacation, you’re out of office, and you’re emailing all week, what they take away from that is that it’s not okay to take a vacation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I remember when I was an intern, like I got the memo in terms of one the one side, the recruiting teams wanted the interns to have a truly fantastic experience so they go back to their university, and say, “Oh, my gosh, you got to work here.” But then there’s your actual work team, and they wanted useful stuff from you that brought things forward and served the client.

And so, I quickly learned, “Oh, in order to do well here, I need to completely ignore the preference of the recruiting team that wants me to not work much, and work as much as necessary to advance the stuff and have things look great for the team I’m working with. Okay, don’t listen to them. Do listen to them. Got it.”

Robert Glazer
And, look, this is the exact point, is that everyone figures this stuff out because the culture values it implicitly or explicitly. And it’s not like anyone told you this, but you very quickly figure out the rules of the road and what you need to do, and that becomes the default point and behavior. Then you think it’s normal and you teach it to the next person.

I literally had a friend, I think in five years, the people he worked for never let him have a vacation without calling him or bothering him. Like, there are just so many reasons why that’s wrong. It’s actually even bad for the company. Like, give the person a break so they actually feel refreshed in coming back. I think you should want people to have a life outside of work. They will do better work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yup, agreed. All right. Now, let’s talk about the folks having difficulty with real conversations, and you say, “Of course, it’s to be expected. They don’t have training or practice very much in that domain.” What are some great first steps to developing that skillset?

Robert Glazer
Practice. I think, I mean, we collect a lot of podcasts that talk about certain topics, “Hey, how do you have this sort of conversation? How do you have a difficult employee conversation?” I remember when I interviewed Patty McCord at Netflix, who’s sort of was part of their whole culture and the culture deck. She talked about when she was training people to do changes in jobs or whatever, she told them to call their own voicemail, say what they were going to say, and listen to it three times.

Just even some basic rep and practice, talk to other people, there are very few things that when you do it for the first time, have never practiced it, it’s going to go well. I think when you think about, in sports, no one does that. In business, we do that all the time. I wrote a Friday Forward about being a speaker at a conference, and I was sort of the general speaker and there was a subject matter expert after me, and I had checked the timing beforehand, I’d met with the AVP people, I had looked at the thing, I had that on my computer.

He came in with three times the amount of slides as the amount of time, didn’t set up AVP, someone had to do his computer. He had great content but he got pulled off stage because he never went through a dry run or practice, or it just doesn’t really work well to do things for the first time, and do them on stage. You should practice anything that you’re going to do.

In fact, someone was saying, our sales team, one thing that we could do better is, when we go into some big pitches, and we did this years ago in front of an important one, it was like we practiced the whole thing an hour beforehand. And what we noticed was we had some awkward transitions, “Oh, no, Pete, you take that. No, I’ll take that.” And we worked those transitions out during the practice, which having not done it, we would’ve made those mistakes in real time.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to the practice of difficult conversations, it’s tricky because, okay, there’s a person, there’s an issue, and we got to talk about it. And, yet, if I want to practice it with them, it’s sort of already the performance…

Robert Glazer
Well, you got to practice it with other people, not with them. But you could practice it with your manager, you could practice it with a peer. Again, you could practice it with yourself. You could sit down there and record it, and be like, “That sounds not good.” Or, again, you can learn some tools that you can use. So, here’s one that I learned, and I learned through all those trainings.

We know the sandwich concept, right? And if you watch it, it’s so awkward. Like, when someone starts a praise, then I’m going to deliver the real thing I want to say, and then wrap it with praise at the end. And you confuse people, and they’re like, “Wait, wait. Am I being reprimanded?” because it’s like two positives and a negative, but negative was the real reason why you were having the conversation.

The last time I had to have one of those really difficult conversations, I actually picked up a cue from someone else, and I started by saying, “Hey, we’re going to have a really difficult conversation, so I just want to let you know that.” That just totally changes the demeanor to me fumbling around for a minute, and being like, “Hey, Pete, what’s going on?”

So, again, but I had to learn that. I learned that from someone else, I learned that that was a best practice. I applied the best practice and it was difficult but I think it went about as good as it could go. And the other benefit is if you know how to do these things, then you don’t lose nights of sleep beforehand on it.

Like, this is the whole point on capacity. Capacity is not more. When you think about intellectual capacity, it’s like if you have a better operating system, if you know how to do it smarter and faster, it should be less energy. If I had 20 of these difficult conversation things, and I walk into one, it will cost me a lot less energy and grief and all the stuff, like, I will know how to do it. That, to me, is the definition of capacity because it’s getting more done with less resources, not more with more resources.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. So, Robert, this is cool stuff, focus on the organization, the team, the leader level. If we find ourselves individual contributors who would like this stuff to be happening in our organizations but isn’t, what do we do?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, look, you can become a leader in the organization with different ways. So, again, a perfect example, just because you’re an individual contributor does not mean you couldn’t start the book club, or the podcast club, or a class, or help start a fitness competition for everyone at the organization. So, yeah, you want to honor individual contributors who don’t want to be leaders.

I think there’s a difference between wanting to be an individual contributor and not have a big team, and wanting to be a loner and not care about other people at the organization. I think, actually, what would make an individual contributor stronger is the more connection they have to the company overall. So, I think they should look at these things as opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, anything else you want to make sure to mention?

Robert Glazer
No, the one other thing I will mention is when we talked about the spiritual capacity and the core values of helping your team understand their core values, in Elevate, I did not have anywhere to point people to do this. And so, we started building it out over the years. We started doing it with our team. I turned it into a course.

There’s some information on that in the book but, also, if you go to CoreValuesCourse.com, if you’re interested for yourself or for your team to figure out, “What are our core values?” there’s an actual process that’ll take you through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds fantastic, and I want to hear more about it. What does the process look like?

Robert Glazer
Yes. So, it goes through a bunch of different behavioral-based questions to figure out, “In different environments in your life, where are you successful or not successful?” And I think when you answer these questions, and you ask to start to pull the answers together, you start to see some pretty consistent themes around where you show up and are highly engaged, and where you are disengaged. And it starts kind of setting the foundation for what your personal core values might look like. And then it gives you kind of a process to suss those out.

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

Robert Glazer
“What the wise man does at the beginning, the fool does at the end.” I’ve always liked that one.

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

Robert Glazer
I was reading about the Dunning-Kruger Effect recently, which was pretty interesting. Dunning-Kruger says that the people who understand something the least often have the greatest overconfidence in their knowledge on the subject. And so, it’s an interesting study in organization or otherwise. Sometimes the loudest voice on something is often the most uninformed.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Robert Glazer
Well, I love Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books. The book I give to a lot of people is a book called Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it.

Robert Glazer
It’s sort of the definitive book. I have it on my desk here on cognitive dissonance. And I interviewed the authors recently. I think cognitive dissonance is so prevalent in everything we do every day, and just understanding that is a huge competitive advantage.

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

Robert Glazer
I don’t think I could live without this tool called SaneBox, which takes your email, filters it out, lets you snooze it to come back. So, it just keeps a lot of email that you don’t need to read out of your peripheral vision. And I remember one time my subscription expired, and like, 300 emails dropped back into my inbox, and I almost had a panic attack. Like, that’s how you know a tool is valuable to you.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Robert Glazer
Well, I like brewing French brew coffee, and it takes five or ten minutes, so I try to time some…I like the concept of habit stacking. So, I try to do something else during those five or ten minutes I wouldn’t do, whether it’s writing in a journal, or stretching, or otherwise, because I can tie it to doing that every day. So, I like the concept of stacking a habit, like something you’re already doing with something that you want to be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that you’re known for, folks are always quoting this Robert Glazer gem?

Robert Glazer
Friday Forward, I think, is the most popular of all time, it’s called the “BS of Busy.” And I think there are some things in there around many of us are busy or just saying that as an answer to everything, and we really need to understand it’s not a great answer to, “How are you busy?” when someone asks. So, I think we need to move away from being busy to being productive and being fulfilled, and so I’ve talked about that a few different times.

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

Robert Glazer
Yeah, so everything of mine, Friday Forward, books, podcasts, everything is at RobertGlazer.com, including the new book. If you want the shortest path to the new book, it’s EYT, like “Elevate Your Team,” EYTBook.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?

Robert Glazer
Yeah, the final challenge I think would be figure out what is most important to your organization today, and then see how you could be helpful to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Robert, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck and elevation.

Robert Glazer
Thank you, Pete.

Feb 16
0

840: The Science Behind Strong, Lasting Friendships with Dr. Marisa G. Franco

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Dr. Marisa G. Franco says: "People like you more than you think, so assume people like you."

Dr. Marisa G. Franco reveals how to harness the science of attachment to foster deeper relationships at work and in life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three types of loneliness we all experience.
  2. Why work friends are critical to your wellbeing.
  3. The six practices that help you make and keep friends.

About Marisa

An enlightening psychologist, international speaker, and New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Marisa G. Franco is known for digesting and communicating science in ways that resonate deeply enough with people to change their lives. She works as a professor at The University of Maryland and authored the New York Times bestseller Platonic: How The Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. She writes about friendship for Psychology Today and has been a featured connection expert for major publications like The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Vice. She speaks on belonging at corporations, government agencies, non-profits, and universities.

For tips on friendship, you can follow her on Instagram (DrMarisaGFranco), or go to her website, www.DrMarisaGFranco.com, where you can take a quiz to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a friend & reach out for speaking engagements.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Marisa G. Franco Interview Transcript

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

Marisa Franco
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marisa, I’m so excited to get into some wisdom about friends but, first, I got to hear, I understand you are a polyglot. Tell us, what languages do you speak and how did you get to learn them?

Marisa Franco
Yeah, I speak Italian because my dad is from Italy, so he sent me to live there for half of fifth grade. I speak Haitian Creole because I taught in a social work school in Haiti for two summers, and that’s where my mom is from. And I speak some Spanish, still working on the Spanish thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, so half of fifth grade was enough for you to learn Italian for life?

Marisa Franco
Well, I then came back and took Italian in middle school for sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, and went back to study in Florence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there you go. That’ll do it. I’ve got a five-year old and a three-year old at home, and so we’re thinking, “Just how much and when is the ticket for language acquisition?” My wife is big on them, knowing French because she studied abroad in France and then knows some. So, yeah, that’s the whole story.

Marisa Franco
That’s awesome, so valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, another thing that’s valuable is friendship. How’s that segue, Marisa?

Marisa Franco
Good job. Good job.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. I’d love it if maybe, first, before we talk about the how of friendship, can you tell us why are friends important? And maybe that question doesn’t even need to be asked but some might say, “Hey, you know what, popularity contests are over. I’ve got my family and my coworkers. We get along well enough. Isn’t that enough, Marisa?” What would you say?

Marisa Franco
Well, I would say that friends actually make your relationship with your relationship-partner better. So, research finds that if I make a friend, not only am I less depressed, my relationship-partner is less depressed. Women who are friends with women are more resilient to issues in their marriage when they have friends. When people are in conflict with their spouse, it basically alters their release of the stress hormone cortisol in problematic ways unless they have quality connection outside the marriage.

So, basically, I think we’ve always needed an entire community to feel whole. And when we put all our eggs in one basket with one person, it harms us and it harms our relationship with that person. There’s even three different dimensions of loneliness which really reveal this. So, there’s a form of loneliness called intimate loneliness, which is the desire for connection with people you feel really close to.

But then there’s also relational loneliness, which is the desire to connect with someone kind of as close to you as a friend. But then there’s collective loneliness, which is this desire to be part of a group of people that’s working toward a common goal. And so, you could experience any of these types of loneliness, which means you could have found your soulmate as a spouse but still feel like you’re lacking that larger community that’s working towards a common goal, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really good. Thank you. Being self-employed and working from home or an office by myself, that’s a nice distinction, for me in particular, because it’s like, “Okay. Well, hey, yeah, my wife is great. That’s cool. And I got friends, and that’s cool.” But, yeah, sometimes it does feel lonely even though I’ve got a great team spread across the world doing their thing. We’re in different spots and, yeah, you can feel that sometimes.

Marisa Franco
Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. And I think the other reason that we feel lonely when we’re not around different types of people is because we have a restricted relationship with ourselves. Like, each person brings out a different part of us. So, when you’re around the same people, the same person all the time, it’s like, “I only experience a certain side of me.”

Like, let’s say I’m really into gardening, and the couple people that I interact with all the time, nobody’s into that. That part of me begins to wither until I find someone to connect with, who has that shared interest, wherein we can talk with depth about that, I can bring out that side of me. And so, the more that we embrace diversity of community, the more that we feel more full and more whole.

And there’s also research that finds that the larger your social network, the more long you will live. And, actually, how large your social network is predicts how long you’ll live, even more so than your diet or how much you’re exercising.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. So, how large do I want to be?

Marisa Franco
Well, there’s a lot of complexities to that question because, obviously, you want very quality connections. Quality is very important. So, if it’s like I’m having this large network and I don’t feel quality connection, or I’m having a network that’s so large that it feels like I can’t invest in one person, then that’s not good. So, there’s a bit of a balancing act.

But the other thing is that our desire for a larger social network tends to change throughout our life. So, around 25 is when most of us have, like, the highest number of friends, and that’s because around that age, a lot of us are expanding our sense of identity. And, again, friends help expose us to new things, new information, help us feel different sides of our own identity.

But as people get older, they tend to want to think about how much time they have left, and spending it very intentionally with people that they feel deep quality connectedness with. So, they tend to kind of prune their friendships and be very selective about who they hang out with. So, I would say it also depends on your stage in life, what you might be drawn to and what a good size in terms of, yeah, the amount of people that you keep in your inner circle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share any research associated with the value of friends for being more awesome at your job, or friends at the workplace?

Marisa Franco
Absolutely. So, interestingly, there’s a study that looked at workplace fulfillment, and the number one factor that predicted how fulfilled people were at work was their sense of relatedness, which is like their sense of connection with the people around them, how much they feel valued by the people around them. And that’s, like, quite striking because it means that you could be doing a job that you really love but if you don’t feel like you have good relationships, your sense of fulfillment will not quite be there.

There’s a factor outside of your work that you’re doing that really is deterministic for your sense of happiness. And I think, often, when we’re choosing careers, we’re so focused on, like, “What exactly am I doing?” and we’re less focused on, like, the culture, and whether people feel valued, and whether people feel connected, even though it’s really, really important.

Other research finds, for example, that lonely employees, they miss work, more work, they report having poor performance, they report thinking about leaving their job more. And so, when I do speaking engagements on connection and belonging at work, I talk about this phenomenon that I call the employee myth, which is the sense that we go to work and we are no longer human, and we don’t have these human needs, and we’re just like clock away at our computer, and our employee identity replace our whole human identity.

And it’s just not true. Like, the same needs that we have outside of the workplace are the same human needs that we have within the workplace. And one of our greatest human needs is to feel connected to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay, so that’s a nice juicy why. I also love to hear, thinking over the course of your career in researching friendship stuff, any particularly shocking, or counterintuitive, or extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made that really left an impression with you?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, in general, everyone has this negativity bias, which means that we tend to remember negative information more than positive information, it registers more with us. And that, when we’re making predictions, we tend to be inaccurate and often cynical because of our ability to remember this negative information.

So, what that means is that, for example, there’s a study that finds that when strangers interact, they underestimate how liked they are by each other. And the more self-critical you are, the more pronounced this liking gap is, the more likely you are to underestimate how much other people like you. And I think sometimes we think our critical thoughts are the truth, when the study finds that they’re really distorting the truth.

And so, one, I think a really helpful note for people when it comes to making friends is to remember that people like you more than you’re assuming. People are probably a lot more open to you and open to your friendship and connection than you might think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is nice. “I’m more charming than I think perhaps, statistically,” if I’m the average and not an egomaniac or a narcissist. Okay. Cool. All right. So, then your book Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends, what’s the big idea or core thesis here?

Marisa Franco
The core thesis is that how we’ve connected has fundamentally shaped who we are. Our personalities are fundamentally a reflection of our experiences of connection or lack thereof, whether you are trusting, open, cynical, aggressive, guarded. Like, all of these things are predicated on your experiences of connection.

Whereas, who you are then affects how you connect. So, it’s not random how you connect with people. These people that have had a history of healthy relationships, they’ve developed a set of assumptions about the world that facilitate them continuing to make healthy relationships. And so, those are what’s called securely attached people, they have this history of healthy relationships, they go into new relationships addressing the relationship in very healthy ways.

Whereas, those people who have relationships that are more difficult or unhealthy in the past, they may have internalized a set of assumptions about the world, like people are always going to abandon you, or you can’t trust anybody, which then inhibit and impede their ability to continue to form relationships with people, so those are the insecurely attached people.

And so, my Platonic is kind of about “How can we all develop more secure attachment in our friendships?” Because, I want to say, sometimes I share this attachment information, and people are like, “Well, good for those people that have healthy relationships. Where does that leave me?” So, I like to make sure I tell people, “You can absolutely change your attachment style.”

The book is actually about how you could change your attachment style in relationships with friends. And all of us can learn to build those secure relationships with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, attachment style, that phrase is bringing me back to college psychology and talking about what went down with babies. Is that what you mean by attachment style? Or, how are you…Could you give us the rundown of the maybe typology of attachment styles?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, the babies are right, the baby thing. So, this idea that in your early relationships, how your parents interact with you, or your caregivers, created this internal sense of assumptions about how everybody interacts with you.

And so, if your parents were sort of like overbearing and not responsive to your needs, like you kind of pulled away and you need alone time, and they would kind of bother you and not really respect your boundaries, you might have become anxiously attached, which means you always feel rejection and abandonment from other people because your parents weren’t necessarily attuned to you and your needs, and might’ve been kind of hot and cold with their ability to give you love.

Whereas, if you are avoidantly attached, that means that you had parents that kind of suppressed all feelings, like encouraged you to be strong, and take care of it on your own, and encouraged you to be hyper-independent. And so, you learned that if you try to be vulnerable with people, they will not be there for you. So, you are someone who goes into your friendships unemotionally, and you tend to not put much effort into friendships because you don’t trust people. So, you put low effort, low reward.

Whereas, the secure attached people, they had the good-enough parent who was responsive to their needs, who tried to show them love, and let them express emotions. And these securely attached kids, which were about 50% of us, but the rates of secure attachment have been going down, they go on to have these assumptions that, “People will love me,” “I’m worthy,” “My needs matter. Other people’s needs matter too,” and so they go on to build healthy relationships.

But it’s kind of more complicated than that, like there’s all of these intervening things that can happen that can alter your attachment style, like your relationships since your parents, whether you had one person outside of your household who made you feel really secure. So, I say that because I’m, like, you don’t necessarily have to go home and blame your parents because it’s quite complex how attachment styles develop.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, those are the three primary flavors there. And so, how do we know which of the three is predominant within us?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. Well, I do have a quiz in Platonic but I could tell you some of the attributes that we tend to see. So, anxiously attached people, they tend to think their friends don’t really like them. They tend to form friendships very quickly because, again, they’re afraid people will abandon them so they want people to show their level of investment very quickly. They tend to overshare almost to test people, “Will you kind of abandon me if you know all these things about me?”

They tend to, yeah, be very comfortable with vulnerability. They tend to be very self-sacrificing in their relationships because they feel like, again, “If I bring up my own needs, you’re going to abandon me,” kind of passive-aggressive because they have that fear of abandonment. Kind of how I describe them is high effort, low reward. Like, they’re putting a lot of time and effort into their relationships, their relationships are important to them, yet they aren’t getting that same reward.

There’s the sense that their relationships are very fragile. And that’s because, anxiously attached people, again, they think people are going to abandon them, so they tend to think they’re being rejected even when they’re not. And so then, they’ll sort of pull away or act out, act aggressively, like not really respect people’s boundaries as a way to kind of sooth their own fears of rejection.

Then you have avoidantly attached people. They are not putting much effort into friendship. They are not initiating as many friendships. They’re more likely to ghost on their friends. You could describe them as, like, loners where they might have a big group of friends but it’s very shallow. The other attachment styles are attracted to vulnerability.

The avoidantly attached person is not, sometimes put off by the vulnerability of other people. They tend to focus a lot on work and less on relationships. So, the avoidantly attached person is low effort, low reward. They’re kind of taking themselves out of the game. You’ll hear them say things like, “I don’t trust people. Like, people can’t be trusted.” That’s their big issue. They think, “If I get too close to people, I’m just going to be harmed and hurt, so let me just keep my distance.”

Then you have securely attached people who I call the super friends. Research finds that secure attachment is related to initiating more friendships, your friendships being more sustainable. Securely attached people tend to address conflict but in very healthy ways where it’s not an attack. It’s, “These are my needs, these are your needs. What do we do, moving forward?”

They are comfortable with vulnerability but they build it more gradually. They’re giving towards their friends, they’re loving towards their friends, but they don’t sacrifice their own sense of self. Like, if it’s like, “This is really depleting me,” they’ll always try to find that balance where, “I want to show up for my friends, but I also want to show up for myself at the same time.”

And so, in some ways, securely attached people really humanize everyone they interact with. They allow everybody to kind of be an individual. Whereas, anxiously attached people, they’re seeing rejection everywhere. They’re kind of imposing that template onto people. Avoidantly attached people, they’re opposing the template that other people are not trustworthy.

So, for example, there are studies that find that if you try to be loving towards an avoidantly attached person, they will assume that it’s because you want something out of them. And so, secure attachment just, like, gives people the flexibility to tell their own stories because they don’t have this wound from the past, that they’re always ready to happen to them again.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s interesting, and as I think about my own experience, we’ve got our own sort of emotional rollercoaster highs and lows, and moments of stress, and sleep deprivation, versus enthusiasm and openness. I think when I’m at my worst, I just don’t…and the thought of going to some event, for example, or joining some people at a social thing, I think, “Yeah, I just don’t expect the people I encounter there to be very interesting or fun.” Does that fit into a category or am I a unique special flower?

Marisa Franco
Well, it could be attachment but that’s also a symptom of loneliness. And I don’t know if this applies to you or not, because, yeah, you could tell me. But I know that when we are lonely, for example, it’s not just the feeling. It alters how we perceive the world, where we perceive social interactions as less enjoyable. Because, basically, what happens when you’re lonely, if you think about this from an evolutionary perspective, when you are lonely, you are isolated from your tribe, which kept you safe from dangers in the African savannah.

So, when we’re lonely, our brain is like hypervigilant for signs of negativity. Like, lonely people think they’re being rejected when they’re not, they report less compassion for humanity, liking their roommate less. And so, when you’re in a state of loneliness, fundamentally, you want to connect but you also are convinced that if you do connect, people might harm you or reject you, like not physically but just, like, reject you. So, there’s this kind of conundrum that we have when we’re lonely, where actually loneliness is also related to wanting to withdraw from people.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with these wounds, it sounds like a lot of them have to do with family, parenting, childhood stuff. Are there other categories of wounds? I’m thinking about being dumped, for example.

Marisa Franco
Ooh, it hurts.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some of the other kinds of big places where these wounds can come from?

Marisa Franco
I think our brains are really good at learning. And what that means is that if we go through any experience of rejection, bullying is a big one, isolation for a temporary period of time, it can really leave an imprint on us because that’s a form of learning. Your brain is like, “Let me prepare for this happening again. I know what to do,” and all of those things.

So, I think sometimes we think we get over things from our past and we just move on from them, but it’s actually more typical for them to kind of stick with us because our brain is trying to kind of learn from them, and for us to continue to face them or to continue to see them in the future as we move forward in our relationships. Again, it doesn’t have to be something huge.

It could be like a breakup that was really hard can shape your experiences of grief moving forward, or an experience of, for example, social anxiety is related to your experiences in adolescence, and then you’re having social anxiety later in life, or your experience of loneliness as a child can predict your experiences of loneliness in adulthood.

And so, there’s this way that it gets…I mean, I don’t want to be bleak about it because I certainly think there’s ways to get off the trajectory, and to heal from these things, and to, instead, experience growth from these things, but, at the same time, I think people that feel like, “Oh, I’m still struggling with this thing from my past,” I just want to say, like, “Oh, that’s also pretty normal because we’re humans and we’re really sensitive to how we’re coming off socially, and it’s a way for us survive.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about some of these things. You’ve got six proven practices for making friends. Can you walk us through them?

Marisa Franco
Of course, yeah. So, these six proven practices, I read all of the research on…not all of it, a lot of it. I can’t say it was completely exhaustive. But, yeah, a ton of research on what predicted who made friends and who didn’t. And I came up with these six practices, these people that embrace these six practices were just more likely to make and keep friends.

And so, they are taking initiative, vulnerability, authenticity, showing affection toward other people, being authentic, and harmonizing with anger, which is learning how to work through conflict well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thinking through these six practices, could you expand on them and share a particular action that is really fruitful within each of the practices?

Marisa Franco
Absolutely, yeah. So, initiative, I think one of the biggest takeaways there is that friendship doesn’t happen organically in adulthood, and people that think it does are lonelier over time. Whereas, people that see it as taking effort are less lonely. And so, the takeaway here is that if you want to make friends, you are going to have to take initiative and not be passive, which just looks like, “Hey, it was so great to meet. I love to connect further. Could we exchange contact information?”

Authenticity. I define it in a kind of complex way, which is like who we are without our defense mechanisms. So, our defense mechanisms can really hurt our relationships. Let me define that further. So, let’s say my friend’s kid got into an Ivy League school, my kid didn’t, I feel jealous but my defense mechanism will defend me against that feeling, feeling that feeling.

So, instead of me noticing or acknowledging that jealousy, I say to my friend, “Well, Cornell isn’t really the best Ivy League anyway.” And so, we use these defense mechanisms to protect ourselves from certain feelings at the cost of our relationships. So, I guess the takeaway in authenticity is that what is raw is not authentic, which means the things that you say automatically are often defense mechanisms, they’re not authentic. They’re actually obscuring your authentic feeling.

And so, it can take a while, a pause, to actually understand what you authentically feel if your brain is so quick to try to protect yourself from that feeling.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, well, I’m curious, with this Cornell example, what’s the best way to engage with that person? You are jealous.

Marisa Franco
Yeah, you are jealous.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the best practice is not to trash Cornell, “Never heard of it.”

Marisa Franco
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
What would be the best move?

Marisa Franco
The goal of authenticity is to be intentional and not reactive. So, intentionality means that you are not letting that feeling control how you act and behave, and you can make a decision as to how you’re acting based off of your values, based off of the needs of the other person, based off of the larger circumstances. It’s like you’re choosing. You’re not being hijacked.

So, for some people, if the jealousy is really strong and they can’t get over it, they can say, “I really want to be happy for your kid, but I’m just struggling because my kid has struggled to get into these schools. So, if I’m not coming off as happy as I would really love to, that’s just what’s going on internally with me.” For other people, they might think, “Well, it’s more important for me to center my friend and her experience of her kid right now, so I’m going to get in touch with the part of me that is happy for them and say, ‘Yeah, I’m really happy for you. Congratulations. That’s really cool.’”

It’s not about a particular response but it’s just about choosing something intentionally that actually reflects you and your values rather than being raw and doing something reactively because there’s a feeling that’s really uncomfortable that you’re trying to escape.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. That’s good. That’s good. And so, authenticity, it’s interesting because the way some people read that word or hear that word, you might be led to, “You must disclose that you feel jealous,” but rather, authenticity can have, it sounds like, many shapes or flavors here.

Marisa Franco
Exactly. Right. Like, people that are authentic are, you think, “Oh, if you’re authentic, you’re only going to think about yourself and your own needs,” but people that are more authentic are actually more likely to consider other people’s needs because inauthenticity is psychologically exhausting so you don’t have the resources to think about other people.

So, when you’re able to just be like, “Oh, this is what I feel. I understand what I feel,” and you kind of clear yourself out psychologically so you can choose and make an intentional choice. Whereas, if you’re always trying to suppress that underlying feeling, it takes a toll on you and you end up relying on some of those defense mechanisms, which is you’re kind of tired so you’re just going into that reactive mode.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how about vulnerability?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, vulnerability, I think the takeaway from that chapter is, as social creatures, we are not strong alone. We are strong through receiving other people’s love and validation, and then internalizing it. So, I interviewed Dr. Michael Slepian who studies secrets, and I found one of his studies that basically looked at who is most resilient regarding the weight of their secrets, they’re least impacted by the secrets.

And he kind of found that it was these people that had told their secrets to someone and received this validating response, who were then best able to cope internally with their secrets. And so his research basically, suggesting that we become strong through being vulnerable with people, and then internalizing their love, and that’s what attachment theory is. These securely attached people who are good at relationships and their mental health is better, so much better, and they’re living longer, they had healthier relationships and they internalize them.

And so, vulnerability is key for our mental health and wellbeing but will also deepen our relationships because we’re social creatures. Whatever we do to better our relationships, often also improves our overall health and wellbeing. So, that’s why we should lean into being vulnerable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then sharing our secrets more often, it sounds like.

Marisa Franco
Yeah, with people that are trustworthy, of course, but, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then anger?

Marisa Franco
So, the takeaway with anger is that often when it comes to friendship, we suppress conflict and we think that that’s a good way to deal with things. And what ends up happening is that we actually just withdraw, we don’t end up dealing with it, we don’t end up getting over it. And so, there’s research that finds that open empathic conflict is actually linked to deeper intimacy. And if you’re avoiding conflict, you also might be avoiding a form of intimacy within your friendships.

So, the takeaway of that chapter is if you have issues within your friendships, like, address them, don’t attack your friends. That chapter really goes into how to address them because it’s not just bringing up the conflict that matters. It’s bringing it up in a loving way. But if you have a problem and it’s causing you to withdraw, it’s a way better option to bring it up with your friends. It might increase your intimacy with that friendship.

And I think sometimes we withdraw because we’re like, “Well, if I bring this up, are they going to abandon me or get mad at me?” But then you end up withdrawing, and it’s kind of guaranteed that the friendship is going to end rather than you at least had a chance if you were able to bring it up with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And so, can we hear the crash course in how to bring things up well?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, it starts with framing, which is this idea that we want to make sure that we are introducing the conversation and grounding it as an act of love and care for the other person. So, like, “Hey, I just wanted to make sure, I just wanted to bring this up because I love you and I don’t want anything to get between us because you’re so important to me.”

It’s using I-statements, “I felt hurt when this happened,” not saying, “You’re a bad friend.” Ask perspective-taking, “I was wondering what might’ve been going on for you at that time.” And asking for what we want in the future, “In the future, if this situation comes up, like, maybe we can handle it like this. What do you think about it?” So, it’s collaborative, it’s an active reconciliation rather than combat.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then offering generosity, what do you recommend here?

Marisa Franco
So, I recommend being generous freely, it does build friendships, until you feel like it’s exhausting you and it’s taking a toll on you. And at that point, you need to practice something called mutuality, which is different from reciprocity. Reciprocity is like, “I called you, now you call me.” But mutuality is, “I think about both of our experiences, and both of our priorities, and both of our capacities to determine the appropriate amount of generosity to give in a certain moment.”

So, what does that mean, practically speaking? It means that, for example, like, if your friend calls you in a time of need, let’s say they find out their kid is self-harming or something, it might feel like, “I’m so tired. I want to set a boundary,” but if you take a look at mutuality and you take a step back, and you’re like, “My friend’s kid is self-harming and I’m tired. What is the bigger priority in this moment?” then you might want to get on the phone even if you’re tired.

And so, it’s kind of a different way to think about boundaries, to think about boundaries as more of a mutual act for the closest relationships in your life rather than boundaries as just an act of self-protection.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And when you say generosity, what are the different ways that can be expressed?

Marisa Franco
Well, I really like when we express generosity that reflects our general strengths and talents because I think it feels even better that way. So, what are you good at? Whether it’s art, you can make art for your friends; cooking, baking, doing that for your friends; planning and organizing. You can organize a special day for your friends. Looking up information.

I did a presentation on finances for my friends because I just was really into finance podcasts for a while. So, think about what you enjoy doing anyway and find a way to give it to the people in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then how about giving affection?

Marisa Franco
Yes. So, affection, there’s this study that looked at friendship pairs for 12 weeks to determine what’s going to predict who stays friends by week 12. And one of the most strongest things was how much affection they shared with one another. There’s this theory called risk-regulation theory, which is basically the idea that we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on our view of how likely we are to get rejected.

So, if you want people to invest in you, you have to basically indicate to them that they won’t be rejected. And so, one of the ways that you do that is that you express affection. You tell people, “I value you.” “I’m so happy to see you.” “It’s great.” You greet them warmly when they arrive. You tell them that, “This was something really meaningful that you said, that I continue to think about.” What affection does is it creates safety so people feel more comfortable investing in a relationship with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s a nice six practices there. I’d love it, Marisa, do you have any fun stories or unique ways that folks have done some of this stuff that really sticks with you?

Marisa Franco
I do. So, in my affection chapter, I interviewed a friendship pair that was very close, like they kind of proposed to each other as best friends, and they would cuddle with each other. And I kind of talked in that chapter about the complexities of romantic love that queer communities, there’s this book Ace about asexuality, have pushed us to differentiate between romantic and sexual attraction, that romance is like, “I’m passionate about you. I’m thrilled by you. I yearn for your company.” It’s a sense of excitement about someone.

But sexual attraction is, “I want to have sex with you.” And those two things are distinct, in that it’s actually pretty normal for us to have romantic attraction to friends, and it’s been normal throughout history because, like, early 1800s and before, like people were getting married to people for practical reasons, “Because you’re going to give my family resources.” And the genders were considered so distinct that the idea was you can only really connect intimately to your friends who are the same gender as you.

So, friends were holding hands and writing their names on trees, and writing these deep love letters to each other, and that was all normal. And I think we need to normalize that people have romantic feelings for their friends, which I’m just defining as being really passionate and thrilled by your friend, and very excited kind of like, I don’t know, a fire, having a fire for your friend, people say, “My friend is my soulmate,” all these different things.

And that that is part of friendship, and that, more generally, I think a lot of what we consider normal in romantic relationships could also apply to friendships. There’s no reason why not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing, the distinction between romance and sexuality, and, yeah, that’s a brain expander. Okay. And so then, cuddling, writing names on trees. What else?

Marisa Franco
Yeah, writing love letters with each other, sharing the same bed, people used to go bring their friends on their honeymoons, going on special dates together, like all these things that we now consider more typical in our romantic relationships. Like, honestly, for me, my goal is to equalize the value I place on a romantic partner and the value I place on my closest friendships.

And because I understand that the ways that I grew up, and probably most of us have grown up, is that romantic love kind of has this monopoly on love, where the most loving acts we consider only appropriate for a romantic partner and don’t do with our friends even though they could really benefit our friendships and make people feel closer to us and loved and cared for.

So, this came up for me when I was I had a friend coming back from the airport, from a trip to the airport at, like, 12:30 a.m. and I hate staying up late. So, I was faced with the question, this was a friend that I’m close to, and I would love to get closer to, but I was faced with the question of, “Should I offer to pick her up from the airport?”

And I literally asked myself, knowing that romantic love has such a monopoly on love, and we almost have to access our concept of romantic love to access what deep love looks like for a person, that I asked myself, “Would I do this for a romantic partner?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Like, I would stay up late and pick up my romantic partner from the airport to make them feel taken care of.”

So, after I realized that, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do this for my friend. Like, I’m going to pick her up at 12:30,” and, yeah, it really benefited our friendship. From then on, she saw how intentional I was about valuing her, and then she, like, bought me a plant after my plants died. And I wasn’t drinking, and she bought non-alcoholic cocktails. It just created this positive upward cycle of closeness and care for each other.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very beautiful. And I guess I’m thinking about, if you watch some, like, History Channel documentaries, it seems like, “Some historians believe that they were gay lovers.” Well, now you got me wondering, it’s like, “Why, are they thinking that because they’re imposing our modern viewpoints associated with sexuality being linked to romance, and really close friendships onto a different century where that was not the case?”

Marisa Franco
Possibly. I don’t want to understate that also that there was this erasure, intentional erasure, happening of LGB relationships at the time, and that was also happening. But I think we can give ourselves room for both things, which is that, yes, these gay relationships were erased from history, but also a lot of these relationships could also have been nonsexual and just very intimate with each other.

Like, for me, there’s this book, there’s this photographer who basically had pictures from around those times when friends were allowed to be more intimate. And I just remember seeing men go to take photographs together with their best friend with their arms around them, or like men of a football team laying in each other’s arms.

And it’s public, it’s like a football team so I don’t think it’s something that’s happening behind closed doors, and people are not ashamed of it either. And so, when you look back at those pictures, you see how, yeah, people were just a lot more comfortable with intimacy within friendships back then.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, Marisa, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Marisa Franco
I guess one of my big tips for people making friends is to assume that people like you. The reason that I share this is because there’s research on something called the acceptance prophecy, which finds that when people are told by researchers that, “Your personality profile indicates that you will go into this group and be accepted,” and that’s a total lie. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because making that assumption makes people warmer, it makes them friendlier.

Whereas, when we assume we’ll be rejected, we actually reject people. We become cold. We become withdrawn. We are giving signals to other people that we’re rejecting them and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where they reject us back. And we also learned about the liking gap, which is people like us more than we think. So, try to remember to assume people like you.

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

Marisa Franco
There’s a bell hooks’ book All About Love, and actually think she quoted this from someone else, but you could find it in the book. And she describes love, and I’m kind of butchering this probably, but, “Love is helping someone express their inner truth or the essence of who they are and the ways that they are living.” That an active love is fundamentally helping people live a more deeply authentic life.

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

Marisa Franco
Research finds that when we predict the impact of expressing affirmation toward other people, we think it’s going to come off as more awkward than it actually does, and we underestimate how good it makes people feel. So, just don’t undervalue the impact of your kindness and your love toward other people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Marisa Franco
There’s this really good book called Attached, which is on attachment theory for romantic relationships.

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

Marisa Franco
I really do use, like, connection skills. I guess, like, as a teacher, I try to say hi to my students. I try to not tell them they’re wrong, but maybe say, “What would someone add to that?” I try to create a safe environment where people feel comfortable engaging, and affirm my students.

Every day, at the end of class, we have an appreciation hat where you share something that stuck out to you that someone else shared, and you give them a little bit of a gift. So, I believe that good learning happens on the backbone of connectedness, and so I try to be intentional about that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Marisa Franco
Oh, exercise. I love exercising, like, five days a week. I started going back to the gym and it just makes me feel so good physically and mentally.

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

Marisa Franco
Friendship doesn’t happen organically. People like you more than you think, so assume people like you.

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

Marisa Franco
I would point them to my Instagram @drmarisagfranco, that’s D-R-M-A-R-I-S-A-G-F-R-A-N-C-O. And my website, DrMarisaGFranco.com has a quiz to assess your strengths and weaknesses as a friend, and gives you some suggestions on how you can improve. And you can also reach out there for any speaking engagements on connection and belonging within the workplace or outside of it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have any key challenges or calls to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Marisa Franco
Yeah. So, one thing that you can do if you want to make friends at work is, and I guess this is if you are hybrid or in-person, is something called reponing, which means varying the settings in which you interact, which tends to deepen your relationships.

So, if you have a work friend that you kind of like, try to invite them to do something outside of work because that’s going to bring up different sides of them and different sides of you, and allow there to be a transition from work-friend to real friends. So, if any of you changes jobs, you have this precedent of hanging out outside of the workplace, and your relationship will be more sustainable.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Marisa, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many good friendships.

Marisa Franco
Thank you so much for having me.

Feb 02
0

836: How to Drive Engagement to Get Your Project Done with Anh Dao Pham

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Anh Dao Pham says: "“What are the next steps?” It’s the most powerful question that you can ask."

Anh Dao Pham shares her battle-tested strategies for leading your team to project success, even without formal authority.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one essential question to get any project moving.
  2. An overlooked skill that boosts project success rates.
  3. The two things you need for people to align with your goals.

About Anh Dao

Anh Dao Pham, VP of Product & Program Management at Edmunds.com, has successfully led technical projects for two decades at start-ups and major corporations. In her book Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, Anh vividly brings compassionate, positive, nimble leadership to life, demonstrating with actionable guidance, the power of caring and connection to inspire outstanding results.

Anh lives with her husband and two children in Los Angeles, California.

Resources Mentioned

Anh Dao Pham Interview Transcript

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

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you so much for having me here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom about project leadership and high-performing teams. But, first, I think we need to hear a little about your history of writing jingles and rhymes associated with team accomplishments. What’s the story here and can you give us some examples, please?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, this is a really silly thing. A few years ago, when I was working at Opower, I was one of the more senior leaders on the engineering team and I was asked to give the quarterly update. And the first time I gave that quarterly update, it was so dry I think everybody fell asleep, including me if I could have. But the reason it was so dry was because when you work in product development and you’re leading an engineering team, the engineering team’s accomplishments are very similar to the product update. So, the product team gives an update and then you give yours, it’s almost the same.

So, the next time I was called upon to do a quarterly update, I decided not to give the general product update and, instead, decided to write, like, a tribute to the team in a jingle format. So, I got some inspiration from The Brady Brunch tune, and then wrote a jingle about our product managers and our engineers and how they had delivered on this website product, and then got folks on the team to actually sing it during the quarterly all-hands, and it was a really big hit.

And from then on, it became kind of a tradition at Opower, so every quarterly update, they look for the jingle. We’d get a bunch of people to sing and we had some great, great things out there. And so, since then, instead of just giving normal praise or an update when I have, like, a big team accomplishment or a big milestone the team has approached, then, oftentimes, I’ll write a jingle and then I’ll recruit people to sing it.

And so, as an example, this last holiday season, instead of having, like, a big party because everybody was remote, I ended up writing 17 limericks for everybody on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, limericks?

Anh Dao Pham
And I read them out like in a toast format, and it was a pretty big hit. There’s something very novel about writing a rhyme or a jingle, and I find that it’s very memorable, people really appreciate it, it shows them that you care in a very special way, and it gives people just that special feeling when being on a team.

And so, I want to tell you, I have a surprise for you, because I decided before I got on the show that I would write you a jingle…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
…just so you can see this in action. It’s actually a limerick, so here it is.

There once was a host named Pete
Whose podcast was rather sweet.
He interviewed people with tips to share
For being awesome at work everywhere.
And on top of that, he gave it all away for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. Thank you. That is a first 830-some episodes, first limerick. So, thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Okay, cool. Well, I’m excited to dig into those kinds of tidbits, your unique flavor and spin on project goodness. You’ve got a book called Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams, which is a great title. We like those sorts of things here. Can you tell us any particularly novel, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this stuff over the course of your career and putting together the book?

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say the most surprising thing is that when I set out to write Glue, I didn’t realize how much of an influence books on social psychology and happiness would be and influence on the actual content in the book. And for a few years prior to writing Glue, I was doing a little bit of soul-searching, I read a number of books on the science of happiness and different social psychologists, like Adam Grant, Angela Duckworth, Sean Achor, just a bunch of very well-known authors in that space.

And it turns out that a lot of the work that supports the science of happiness, around how to make yourself happy ends up being really applicable content for how to motivate teams. And so, in my work and in Glue, I talk a lot about the science of happiness, social psychology, and how to motivate and influence people through those same mechanisms, which I think makes that unique. And, for me, it’s most important, when I’m a leader, to help teams not only deliver but do it in a way that makes them feel fulfilled and happy at work.

And so, I think a lot of that comes through and ends up being somewhat surprising or a novel content for a leadership book you don’t typically find as many studies around the science of happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love those here, so it’s no surprise that we have found each other. So, that’s cool. Well, then I’d love it if we could dig into some particulars. Could you start off with sort of the core message or big idea or thesis behind the book?

Anh Dao Pham
So, Glue, at the end of the day is both a project management leadership book, and the main principle behind it is that I wanted to be able to express to people how you can both manage teams and lead people in a way that makes them productive so that they deliver but also makes them really happy and inspired with their jobs, and that in turn inspires me and makes me feel better about my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, so let’s dig in. Now, one thing that’s intriguing is you draw a distinction between a project manager and a project leader. What is the difference and why does that matter?

Anh Dao Pham
The main distinction between a project manager and a project leader is that you don’t necessarily have to have a title in order to be a project leader. Project leaders rise up through all parts of the organization because there is a need to have somebody lead a particular initiative or a particular team. And what I find is that people often, if they don’t have, like, an ordained title in some way, feel like they don’t have the authority to act in a certain way.

So, I wanted to make the distinction between somebody who has the official title of project manager, which has, like, a specific job description associated with it, versus a person who just may have risen up in the organization and is a leader of sorts but would likely need very similar tools and tactics to be able to make their team successful.

So, at the end of the day, you can be a project leader from any part of the organization. You just have to be a person who has stepped up to lead in some capacity on a particular initiative, and I’m hoping that this book is applicable much more broadly than just anybody with a specific project manager title.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then could you kick us off with a pretty inspiring…let’s see, I’ll do that again. Well, in getting a taste of what could be possible and at stake for us if we internalized some of these best practices, could you share a cool story of a project leader who was able to see a beautiful upgrade in the results they’re able to create by following some of these principles?

Anh Dao Pham
I wanted to start with an analogy from a different industry entirely, which is basketball. And I’m actually not a basketball fan, but one of the things that I realized as I was doing research for the book, was I was talking to one of my best friends who is into basketball about the book and about some of the principles that I was talking about, about being glue, and he said, “Oh, it’s like Draymond Green. He’s a glue guy. He plays basketball.” And I’m like, “Tell me more about this.”

And it turns out that there’s a phenomenon in basketball where there are players called glue guys who are extremely valuable to the teams but they are not the people who score the most points, so it seems counterintuitive. Like, typically, when you think about a star basketball player, you think about somebody like a Michael Jordan who scores the most baskets.

In this case, these players are most valuable not because they actually score the most points, but because they are true team players. And so, when they’re on the court, what happens is the teams have a much higher likelihood to achieve success and win the games than when they’re not on the court even though they don’t actually score.

And the principles around Glue are basically the same. So, it’s not about being a leader, being out in front, getting all the credit for something, or being the star player on a particular team. It’s about looking at a team and trying to figure out what you can do to actually bolster the productivity of the team and make them feel healthier, happier, complete the team where they may have gaps. And that’s what the essence of Glue is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds like something we all love to be here in terms of listeners of How to be Awesome at Your Job. And now let’s dig into some of the particulars. I love your table of contents chapter titles. They’re so enticing and captivating, so I’m just going to go right through my favorites and ask bit by bit. First, how do we build rapport quickly?

Anh Dao Pham
There are a lot of ways to build rapport quickly. And, actually, you’ll notice that my book was endorsed by Robert Cialdini. He wrote a book called Influence, which is immensely popular.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ve had him on the show and we love him. Oh, he’s so good.

Anh Dao Pham
He’s amazing. He’s amazing. There’s all these tactics that you can use that help you understand how to build rapport with people and how to influence people without actually having authority. And so, a lot of the things are very simple. Like, in Robert Cialdini’s book, he talks about just making sure that you, when you speak with a person, you actually provide a reason for what you’re asking to do.

And when you do things like that, where you ask a person to actually complete a task for you, or make a request, and you provide them a reason for the work that they’re doing, it helps them understand why their work is important, and, ultimately, build rapport and helps them trust you more. So, that’s one principle.

Another one comes from Dale Carnegie, which is really simple. It’s just using people’s names. But in a multicultural environment, and, in particular, in a remote environment, it’s even more important that you use people’s names and that you also get their pronunciations correctly and that you know how to spell their names correctly. These are small things but they make a really big difference in building rapport with a particular person.

And then another type is, just make sure that you’re accessible and approachable. So, if you have a team that you’re trying to get know, maybe arrange some sort of social situation where you can get to know them better, take some time at the beginning of your meetings to pause a little bit, have some informal conversation to warm up, talk about their weekend. Make them feel like they’re people not just a person who’s actually completing a task but somebody you genuinely care about and are interested in. Those are the best things that you can do to start building rapport.

And then the final thing, which is something that I get quoted on a lot is I call the candy bowl, the magical candy bowl, and you’ll see this in the book title, or in the chapter title, where I always keep a candy bowl on my desk. And the reason that I do that is because it sort of embodies a bunch of these principles. It makes me approachable in the sense that it gives people a reason to actually come to my desk and talk to me.

Oftentimes, people actually come to my desk and then take candy when I’m not there, but it establishes me as a giver. So, even if I wasn’t there, they remember, “Anh has a candy bowl on her desk and I can come get it whenever I want.” And if I then talk to them later, even if we haven’t had a conversation, it actually creates a certain amount of equity with them, like I’ve deposited something in their virtual piggybank. And if I go talk to them later, they already have a warm feeling associated with me because I’ve given them something whether or not I know it.

And so, that to me is like a very classic trick, and I have always had a candy bowl on my desk since I can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. I’ve got a couple follow-up questions there, Anh. One is what candies are the fan favorites, perennial, time after time?

Anh Dao Pham
Branded chocolate goes the fastest.

Pete Mockaitis
Anytime, like KitKat or Snickers or anything.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, Hershey’s, Snickers, Reese’s Pieces, anything that’s branded. I would try generic chocolate, like Palmers, during the holidays, when you get the Easter eggs and things like that, they don’t go quite as fast. But anything that’s like, yeah, KitKat, Reese’s, M&Ms, chocolate M&Ms, those go really fast. And it’s kind of my own experiment over the years, that’s something you see, what type of snack actually goes the fastest.

And there’s something interesting about the amount of candy that you put in the bowl as well. This is such a random nuance. But if you put too much candy in the bowl, especially if, let’s say, I get a brand-new bag of chocolate, and I dump the whole thing in the bowl, it goes faster. There’s something about the idea that there’s just a lot of candy that people come and take a handful of it, but if I ration it and put it out in smaller segments, then it tends to last a lot longer. People will come and take one or two rather than a handful. So, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
I absolutely noticed this phenomenon with, well, I was thinking, like, just drinking water in terms of if I have a big vessel of water, I will take bigger gulps more frequently versus if I’ve got a bottle of water in my last thirst, “Ooh, we better be sparing,” even though there’s more not too far away. It just gets inside you. That’s good.

Well, Anh, my next follow-up question is, when it comes to using names, how much is too much? Sometimes I feel like I hold myself back more than I need to, Anh. And so, now I’m just going to try a little bit right now, and you tell me when it feels excessive. I’m thinking when you address someone, of course, it just makes sense, or when you’re wrapping something up, like, “Thank you, Anh.” I guess every sentence would be too much. Do you have a sense for how much is too much when it comes to name use?

Anh Dao Pham
There probably is a too much. Like, yeah, I’d say every sentence is probably too much. But if you go back to what Dale Carnegie said, and I reference this in the book, the sound of a person’s name is the sweetest sound to them. So, if you can use it tastefully, in particular, if you can use it to address a person when you’re prompting them for a question, so I think that’s really important.

Addressing a particular person, addressing or acknowledging something that somebody said so that they understand that you actually heard them, those two, I think, are the most critical times to say a person’s name so that they really feel like you’re making a connection with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m thinking about my buddy and mentor, Mawi, episode number one, he will insert my name right in the middle of sentences, and more than most people I know, and I really like it. He’ll say, “You know what we discovered, Pete…” and I’ll be like, “Well, what? What did you discover?” It’s like you have galvanized my attention, and I want to know even more.

And if I happen to be drifting, I really do feel, like, “Oh, I should be paying attention. He’s talking directly to me even though, of course, he was. We are really the only two people at this lunch.” But it has an effect, it’s a good one. Thank you.

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And then I think, in particular, if you’re working in a remote environment, using people’s names is extremely important. A lot of times, people have their cameras off, and if you use their name, they know you’re speaking directly to them even if they can’t see you. So, I think it is an even more important tool to be using now than it has been in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And another table of contents prompt so juicy, what is the essential question to getting any project moving?

Anh Dao Pham
“What are the next steps?” It’s the most powerful question that you can ask. At the end of every meeting, if you leave and you don’t ask that question, you’re going to find that you’re going to be less productive on all of your projects. And so, if there’s no other question that you ask, if you’re silent the whole meeting as a facilitator, in the very end you make sure to ask, “What are the next steps? Who’s going to be doing them?” and then capture that information, you will be able to move your project forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. This reminds me of David Allen, for individuals getting things done, “What is the next action?” And it’s just magic how it gets stuff unstuck. And sometimes it’s so simple, it’s like, “Oh, I guess we got to look at our calendars to see when these three people can get together.” Like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s not so hard. Let’s just go ahead and do that.”

Anh Dao Pham
Exactly. And I think if you’re doing any sort of leadership, in particular, project leadership, your goal really is to always be making progress. So, even if it’s small, as long as you’re moving the project forward with something like, “I know what the very next step is,” it doesn’t have to be the next ten steps, just the very next one, you’re going to continue to move everybody forward and make progress against your goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Now, everybody asks you to teach a particular skill, which I would not have guessed – it’s notetaking. What’s up with that? Why does notetaking matter? And how can you do it in a way that is differentiated-ly excellent that matters?

Anh Dao Pham
I am very passionate about notetaking. This is one of the strange traits about me, and most people, almost everybody who’s encountered me even briefly at work, knows this about me. It’s something that’s actually, to me, a cornerstone of my success in my career. I take avid notes, I type very fast, I take avid notes almost on every call or meeting that I have, even if I’m not going to publish them, because it’s part of my learning process.

And the reason that people ask me about it is because I often publish those notes out. So, as a part of my learning process, when I’m learning more information, I tend to take them. And I don’t just sort of listen to things verbatim. I listen to things and then I rephrase them as I’m typing them, or I try to reorganize them. So, when I was in college, I learned, like, you could take…if you take notes in outline format, your retention of that information is so much higher than if you just sort of listen to something coming in one ear and then typing it out verbatim what people had said.

So, what I started to do was sort of reorganize the information, put it in such a way that it is summarized, and then send all that information out and broadcast it to people so that they know that they’ve been heard, they know whose action is next, what the next steps are, all of the things that were important as a part of those discussion get captured, codified, and then broadcasted.

And it is possible to be significantly better at taking notes than another person in the sense that if you take really good notes, in particular, in today’s environment when you’re managing a lot of projects, some things are moving very fast, a lot of things don’t get documented. So, oftentimes, a good set of notes is the document that explains what happened and ends up being a system of record for any decision-serving needs.

So, if you become that person who takes really good notes and people know that, you start to just have a certain amount of power because you hold this information and people see you as a person who has access to this information very readily. The other thing about it is, like I said before, if I take good notes, then I learn more than almost anybody else in the conversation. It just crystallizes my memory for it so that when people ask me about it later, I have much greater recall ability.

And when it’s summarized in that fashion, I once had a person tell me he went home after my meeting, and told his wife, “These notes were better than the meeting,” because a lot of times, meetings will meander back and forth.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anh Dao Pham
But if you kind of like consolidate the information under certain bullets, you can read this nice summary, it refreshes your memory and you know exactly where to go after that. So, yeah, those to me are the big key traits around taking good notes, is making sure that they’re organized, making sure that they track, capture what’s most important as a part of the conversation, and that you share them out so that people know you have access to them and can refer back to them.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we might have to do a full follow-up episode if you’re down to talking about notetaking, because if it’s your superpower, and no one else has brought that up as their superpower, and it’s yielding value, that’s certainly cool. So, I’ll just restrain myself to a couple follow-ups for this conversation.

Anh Dao Pham
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re not just verbatim writing all the things you hear, but you’re rather trying to get some organization outlined to it. So, when I hear the word outline, I could think of a very strict “Roman numeral one. Indent, capital A. Further indent, Arabic numeral one.” So, that’s like a very formal, like when I’m learning how to write a paper in grade school, outline. Is that what you mean by outline in terms of the transformation that you’re mentally processing stuff as you outline?

Anh Dao Pham
No, actually, it doesn’t have to be. If that’s really comfortable for you, or your word processing application automatically numbers things for you, I think it’s fine, but it’s more important that you sort of categorize information. So, if a topic meanders, as an example, sometimes, let’s say we talk about notetaking now, and then five more minutes, it comes back again.

What I would do is have a topic of notetaking in my notes, and then I would put a couple of bullets from the first part of the conversation, and then in the second part, I would move that up so that it’s in the same section. So, when somebody is skimming it, they can see all of the takeaways all together at the same time.

And it’s not so important that you have, like, a strict way of taking the notes. It’s that you’ve summarized the information. And what’s even more critical is that you summarize the information in your own words. So, don’t try to take notes verbatim as somebody said them. Try to restate them in your own words so that it comes out more naturally and to confirm that you actually understood what it was that was being said.

Because, oftentimes, when people speak, it doesn’t make for eloquent or concise writing, so if you’ve summarized it in a good way, then people can read it, get the takeaways very quickly, rather than trying to skim through all the uhms and ahhs that actually come out in a conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. And to give us a taste, can we find a sample of your notetaking somewhere?

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, in the book, I actually put a few samples, one of the worst notes or no notes at all. So, if you just take basic notes, it’s still better than no notes. The second tier up is, at least, capture the key decisions and action items and who’s responsible for them. So, there’s a sample of what that looks like, then there’s sort of the next layer of fidelity, which is capturing a few key decisions in a little bit more detail. And then there’s sort of a more robust version of those notes.

And the sample I gave is from, like, a home remodeling project, which may have been overkill for a home remodeling project, but at least gives you an idea of the types of things that you would want to capture. Some of the salient points in the conversation that you might want to have for context later, those are the types of things that you might want to capture if you were taking really robust notes.

And, in particular, the why behind decisions. So, if you’re capturing just the decision but not why, if you take those in your notes, it again helps you understand it, and then it also helps you convey that information to other people.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I imagine it might vary a bit, but just to give us a bit of reference, if there’s a 30-minute meeting, which might have a word count of 4,500-ish words – that’s a lot of podcast ads experience talking right there, 150 words per minute – how many words or pages might your notes end up being?

Anh Dao Pham
It really depends on how efficient the conversation was. So, it could be that you had a 30-minute meeting but you swirled around talking about different options and deliberating them and debating them. In the end, your summary may have been as concise as maybe half a page, you said, “We talked about option one, option two, option three. We made this decision and this is why.” It could be that concise. And so, it doesn’t have to be verbose, it just has to capture the most salient points.

Now, sometimes you have a meeting, like I had one with one of my managers this morning, and we covered 15 topics, and it was 30 minutes, and it was, like, “Bullet. Here’s what we discussed. Bullet. Here’s what we discussed.” And that one ended up being more than a page long just for me to sort of capture those points.

So, I think it really depends on how much ground you cover. It’s not so much what your word count is but what were the most important things that you needed to capture and what’s the most concise way to capture them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share with us the three levers to keep your project on time and on track?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. So, this is actually the one thing in the book that does sort of follow classical project management. There are really three things: it’s scope, meaning how much you’re actually trying to achieve in a particular project; time, which is the amount of time it’s going to take; and then resources, which could be either money or the number of people working on a particular project. That’s like the classic triangle of constraints for any project management course you would see.

And when you’re managing a project, it’s really important for you to understand what levers you actually have available to you. And so, if there is something that ends up being a gotcha or surprise, which always happens, no project ever goes as planned, then you can look to see which of these constraints are movable. And the easiest thing typically to do is to increase your timeline but, oftentimes, if you increase your timeline on a project too often or too much, then people fatigue of the project and they feel like it’s not successful, so you want to use that very sparingly.

The next is resources. If you have any resources, you can throw at a project, or if you can clear things off of a plate of a person who’s on the project so that they’re not splintered, then you can get more capacity. That’s always a good way to go about doing things. And then scope is something that people forget is negotiable.

Because even if people say at the very beginning of a project the scope is not negotiable, the closer you get to launching your project, the scope gets much more malleable, and that’s for two reasons. One is that people are more or less willing to actually yield on things that they want very early in the process. And the second is that the closer you get to launching a particular project, the more clear you are about what you’re trying to achieve.

And so, things that seem like they may have been very important at the beginning tend to be more negotiable or more malleable towards the end. So, I like to lean on scope first, then resources, then time if possible.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. I’m familiar with the triangle and the constraints. I learned that in college, and it was an eye-opener, and I love, Anh, those extra layers and considerations and weightings that you put on them. So, handy stuff. I’m just going to keep rolling through your excellent table of contents. Chapter 13, how do we communicate what’s most important?

Anh Dao Pham
Through every medium possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anh Dao Pham
And this sounds funny, this is sort of like your question, “How much is too much when you’re using my name?” How much is too much when you’re articulating a goal? It’s almost never too much. And the reason is because people are very focused on their individual tasks, and it’s very easy for them to lose sight of what’s going on for a bigger picture.

So, if you’re trying to orient somebody against a goal, then what you want to do is, first, make sure that the goal is clear and unambiguous, everybody understands what it is. Then, second, articulate it in writing, verbally. If you want to plaster it on a wall, like, do whatever you can to broadcast the goal and do it in multiple mediums, and to reinforce it almost every chance you get.

I had a very funny example where I was marching towards a big project, and every day at the very beginning of the scrum, which is the meeting that we had for everybody, getting together to check in on status every day, I had a slide at the very beginning before we actually went to scrum that said how many days were left to the goal, till the launch date.

And so, 15, 14, 13, counting down every day. And two times, very close to launch date, I think I remember it was like five days to launch date, somebody pulled me aside, and was like, “Wait, when are we launching again?” And I realized, and so I just very politely said, “We’re launching in five days. This is the date.”

And it’s funny because people learn through different mediums. Some people are audio learners, so if you say it to them, they actually get it. Some people are visual, so if you broadcast it visually in some way, that’s when they get it. Some people need those things reinforced and some people actually need to say it themselves.

So, if you really want to know if somebody has actually ingested and internalized your goal, you can ask them to say it back to you, and only when they’ve actually articulated that you know for sure that they actually understood it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And I guess you have to be careful with that so that it does not seem, I don’t know, patronizing or condescending.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, I think you have to just take the request and respond to them, and know that you’re going to be repeating yourself a lot but that it’s just totally expected. And as long as you’re always tying it back to work that people are doing, they’re not going to feel like it’s too much.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right, Anh, let’s hear Chapter 14. “When is your project done?” It’s not when I think. Do tell.

Anh Dao Pham
This chapter is actually about the principle of taking ownership on a project. And one of the things that I think is a big misconception is people put together a project plan when they start a new project, and there’s typically a launch date at the end, and that’s what you’re marching towards. So, let’s say you’ve got a three-month project, you’re launching towards the launch date.

And then at the end of the launch date, people feel like their project is done but that is not the case because, oftentimes, like I said, maybe you’re marching through that launch date and you looked at all these constraints because there were some sort of crazy surprise that happened, and now you’ve started to cut scope. And I like to call cutting scope very close to the launch date as roadkill. This was like roadkill on the path to getting to my goal. I started pushing things to the side, and saying, “Not critical. Not critical.”

So, once you’ve launched, there typically is, like, a number of things that still need to be happening in order for you to make your project a success. It can’t just be launch and sort of out on the ether. You need to go back and take care of all of the things that you don’t need in this roadkill along the way. Maybe you need to do additional communication to people who were stakeholders but maybe impacted after the fact.

So, a key example here is if you work in product development, or if you’re launching any sort of product or new thing, oftentimes, there are people who have to support that new thing once it’s out. So, it’s not just like making the feature available or the new product available, it’s also about making sure that the people who are going to need to support that are trained and have all the answers that they need to be able to do that in a sustained fashion, or there’s a place to ask later when there’s an issue with whatever that is that you’ve just released.

And so, all these things happen after a project launch date, but the project launch date is most commonly focused on as the end of your project. And so, in the chapter, I talk about this, it’s not so much that there are steps that you can do to say when your project is done. It’s more about an attitude. If you take ownership of a project as a project leader, and you think of yourself almost like the CEO of your project, then you don’t limit yourself to the scope of work that’s already been defined or what’s been defined to you by your title.

So, if you’re a product manager in my world, I might say, like, “Well, my goal is to define the product and get it out there.” But if I want it to be a success, I might have to do things that are beyond the launch date, beyond the scope of my role. And so, if you really think of yourself as an owner, and that you are paramount to this project’s success, then you will look to see what else needs to be done after the launch date. And until those things are completed, you’ll know that your job is not done.

The other thing is, always plan a celebration when you hit a big milestone. Don’t forget the tail end of a big project. It’s not done until you celebrate it with your team.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Anh, tell me, any final thoughts you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Anh Dao Pham
Sure. I’d say, at the end of the day, leading projects and leading people is not cookie cutter, and I think this is probably the biggest thing that’s not fully articulated this way in the book but, hopefully, is a big key takeaway for people. Most of the things that I do are very people-driven. I’m most worried about boosting productivity for the people on my team, and I do whatever it takes to make that happen.

So, every project, every team is custom, and you’re different, the way that you add your perspective to a team is different. And so, I would like to warn people against sort of blindly following checklists, and, instead, to think about ways that you can customize your approach based off the team’s needs and what you’re trying to accomplish, and the personalities on the team. And know that if you do that, you’re going to be a lot more successful than somebody who is just trying to apply some set of rules blindly without thinking them through.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Yes. From one of my favorite books on happiness, What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth, the quote is, “We don’t describe the world we see. We see the world we describe.” And I love this because it’s very telling about human thoughts, in the sense that we often think that things are dictated to us, but, in fact, we actually have a lot of power to transform our worlds based off of what we call ourselves.

So, if you call yourself a project manager versus a project leader, that makes a really big difference in how you actually translate your role and your sense of ownership. And so, I love that quote because every time I feel like I’m being limited by the way that I’m calling myself something or the way that I’m framing a particular scenario, I try to reframe it to see if I can change the way that the world is reacting to me.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. And I don’t know where I borrowed this phrase. I got it from a job description which I thought was funny. I think it said one of the requirements was to “Provide visionary leadership.”

Anh Dao Pham
Like it’s so easy.

Pete Mockaitis
And just like that, and I thought, “All right, what’s on my to-do list today? Okay, provide visionary leadership. Check.” But I found that when I say that to myself, like, “Okay, I’m going to write a bunch of emails to my team and the collaborators, right,” it’s like, okay, so one view is, “Okay, that’s a thing that’s got to get out the door, a bunch of emails. Check, check, check.”

Versus if I say to myself, and I’m kind of joking and I’m kind of being highfalutin for the fun of it, it’s like, “All right, on my to-do list is to provide visionary leadership on these course adaptations.” And then, sure enough, I really do feel more jazzed about it, and really do spend some more time providing useful feedback and direction that is more enriching for folks.

So, yeah, how I describe that to-do list item really does shape how I perform it even though I was kind of joking.

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, there are studies about this. It’s called jobcasting where you take your job, and you try to put it in a bigger context. So, for example, you’re a podcast host, you could say, “My job is to create podcasts,” or you could say your job is to put more information out in the world so that you can help people all over the world be better at their jobs. The second one is going to be so much more inspiring than the first, right?

So, the way that you frame what you’re doing has a very tangible impact on your perspective and how motivated you are going to be to do that job. So, I think that that’s so insightful, and the fact that you actually have the power to change your own perception by describing it differently, I think, is just phenomenal.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Now, this is a hard one because a lot of your prior guests have cited lots of great studies, and so I was trying to find one that I felt was unique. And I ended up landing on a study that Sean Achor, who’s the author of The Happiness Advantage, did to himself, which I think about all the time. And it’s a very novel study about what it takes to adopt new habits versus what it takes to deter yourself from stopping…or to deter yourself from continuing to do old habits that are not so good for you, and he calls it the 20-second rule.

And the experiment goes like this. He wanted to play his guitar more often. And so, he had a guitar that he bought, it was in his closet. And he decided to see if he removed the friction from playing the guitar by just buying a stand and then putting the guitar out in the middle of the room, whether or not he would actually play his guitar more often.

And it turns out, just the additional friction of getting off of the couch, going over to the closet, getting the guitar out reduces the amount of time that he would actually play on the guitar. So, he had a lot of success in just moving it from one location to another. And then he did another experiment which I thought was so funny.

He had a remote control that he typically used to leave on his couch so that when he watched television, it’s there. That’s what everybody does. Their remote control is right on the television, so you plop down on the couch and got it, and then you turn it on. But he wanted to stop watching as much television and, instead, read more books.

So, what he did was he took the batteries out of his remote control, and he put them in a drawer that was a few feet away, and he said he timed himself. It took him about 20 seconds if he were to get up out of the couch, go to the drawer, put the batteries in and close the remote control to start using it. And his goal was to see if he created that little additional friction if he would stop watching television as much.

And so, what he found was he did. He stopped watching television as much because he was sort of inherently lazy in that additional 20 seconds. The friction actually caused him to pick up the book that was, like, right within arms’ reach on the couch rather than watch television. So, I find that to be like a fantastic study. And in my real life, I use it both at home as well as at work when I think about why people are not responding to me or not able to complete a different task that I asked them to do.

I see, “Is there a way that I can make their job easier?” So, for example, if you ask people very open-ended questions, it’s difficult for them to answer because they have to craft a response from scratch. But if you give them statements that they have to react to, that takes a lot less brain power so you can be much more effective at getting responses that way.

Another example is in my home life. My husband is 6’2” and I’m 5’4” and so I love Post-Its, I put them…write things on them all the time as a reminder I want to give him. There’s one trick that I have done more recently and that is very effective. It’s when I have a reminder for him, and not me, I write it on a Post-It and then I put it at his eye level, not mine. And just by writing with it being right in front of him instead of right in front of where I would be, he has a much harder time missing it, and knows it’s for him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And a favorite book?

Anh Dao Pham
A favorite book, this is really hard. I’ve just quoted What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth. That’s one of my all-time favorites in terms of happiness as well as The Happiness Advantage. And then in terms of non-self-help or happiness books, I recently enjoyed a couple of memoirs. I really liked Untamed by Glennon Doyle, and then also Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a particular nugget you’re known for, something that people quote back to you often?

Anh Dao Pham
Outside of notetaking and the candy bowl effect?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s plenty really.

Anh Dao Pham
I’d say, yeah, those are nuggets. The one thing about the book that’s actually been very controversial and has come up quite a bit is I do have a chapter about planning where I state that I believe plans are optional. And this is almost like sacrilege for the project management community, but it’s created a lot of controversy.

And it’s not so much that I’m against planning. It’s that, like I said before, I’m against people following things blindly and doing things for the sake of doing them, rather than doing things with specific intention. And so, I challenge the notion that every single project needs to have, like, a detailed project plan. Instead, if you’re looking for ways to boost team productivity, tailor a process to your team, plan when your team needs a plan, and be thoughtful about it. That, to me, has been like a really insightful takeaway that most people have come back to me and ask me about, and particularly controversial.

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

Anh Dao Pham
I’d love it if folks could find me at my website, it’s www.GlueLeaders.com. Pretty easy to find. You can contact me there, find everything about the book, and also a link to this podcast once it’s available.

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

Anh Dao Pham
Yeah, actually. I was listening to your podcast, and I think it was episode 830 with Dr. Waldinger where he cited a Gallup quote that I also cited in my book about making friends and making best friends at work, and how that increases both productivity as well as enjoyment. And if you take nothing else away from all this, there’s a lot of little tactics and tricks that you can do to build rapport, be more organized, take notes. But, at the end of the day, to me, the most rewarding thing at work is when you make personal connections.

And so, what I would love to advocate people do is don’t just think of your job as a job. Think of it as a way to make meaningful connections with people, and to accomplish great things together, and bring part of yourself to work. And the reason that I started writing jingles is because I like to rhyme, and it’s silly, but it’s very uniquely me. And if you love to cook, maybe organize potlucks. If you love ping-pong, maybe organize a ping-pong tournament.

My husband and I like to play poker, and so now we’re thinking about combining my love of cooking Vietnamese soups and poker with a “pho”ker night. So, those are things that you can do to bring to your workers, and it makes it more rewarding when you actually create genuine friendships, and then accomplish things together. So, what I would say is find ways to connect with people at work, make friends, and in doing so, hopefully, both your job as well as your coworkers’ jobs will be more rewarding.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anh, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and good glue.

Anh Dao Pham
Thank you. So nice to meet you.