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Aug 15
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792: How to Handle Negotiations and Difficult Conversations Like an Expert Hostage Negotiator with Scott Tillema

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Scott Tillema shares powerful wisdom on handling emotional and tense conversations with ease and finesse.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Two powerful skills to help you connect with anyone 
  2. A handy strategy to get people to listen in closely
  3. What people want to hear during emotional conversations 

About Scott

Scott Tillema is a top communication keynote speaker, FBI trained hostage negotiator, and senior associate with The Negotiations Collective.  

He is a nationally recognized leader in the field of crisis and hostage negotiations, training thousands of negotiators across the country. Scott has developed a model for hostage negotiation, which is now being adapted by those in the private sector for use in sales, marketing, communication, and leadership.

Resources Mentioned

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Scott Tillema Interview Transcript

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

Scott Tillema
Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me today.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, my pleasure. I’m so excited to hear some of your negotiation wisdom. But I think, first, we have to hear a thrilling tale of crisis and/or hostage negotiation. Bring it home for us, Scott. No pressure.

Scott Tillema
Yeah, there’s all kinds of thrilling tales. And I think all of us are engaged in difficult conversations. And although not many of us will rise to the level of doing a hostage or crisis negotiations, we’re all having difficult conversations where we want influence. And one of the ones that sticks out in my mind, I was having a conversation with a man, who is holding a gun to his head, and saying that he wanted to kill himself.

And in these moments, you realize how critical this dialogue is going to be, and the words that you say and how you say them really, really are impactful. And I learned a big lesson in this conversation with him because I was trying to persuade him, I was trying to be influential in getting him to do what I wanted him to do, and that is put the gun down so we could have a very safe resolution to this incident.

And, unfortunately, after many hours of conversation, this man chose to pull the trigger, and that was probably one of the most impactful moments in my negotiations career where I really had to reflect upon the outcome of that incident, and say, “What could I have done better so during my conversation with him, he would’ve put that gun down and reached a safe outcome?”

And moments like this really drive me to be excellent at what I do and to be a great negotiator. So, that’s the moment that sticks out, to say, I can do better, I need to do better. And the challenge to everybody I work with and everybody I teach and train, to say, “If this is the level of consequence in my conversations, what’s the hesitation for you? Why not go out and be a great leader and be a courageous person in sales and marketing, and do these things and take these chances, and find the influence and be great at what you do?” because the outcome probably is not going to be as consequential as something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or certainly it’s highly unlikely most of our conversations will be as immediately consequential as in a person dies. Although, I think it’s quite possible that the conversations that we have, and the extent at which we are effectively engaged in them, can, over years or generations, reshape history for thousands, and not necessarily for like super CEOs but just like our children, our children’s children, or our colleagues and those they, in turn, touch. It might be a lower amount of change for one person, but with the ripples and multiplications, it may be quite substantial.

Scott Tillema
Very substantial. And I don’t want to diminish the work that people do in any field because you’re in a leadership role, you need to be having difficult conversations with the people that you work with and the people that you coach and develop. Because if they don’t succeed at their job, they’re going to be without a job.

And think about how impactful that is to that person, and the people that they support and their family. So, we know that the power of influence in conversations is really a life-impacting piece here that all of us, who work in the field of influence, and that’s many of us, I think that everybody out there wants to be more influential.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you reflected on that encounter, and you said, “What could I have done differently?” I’m intrigued, did you have a lot of training and experience? What did you conclude and that you could’ve done differently?

Scott Tillema
That’s a great question. And in 2007, I was trained by the FBI, and one of the cornerstones of FBI crisis negotiation training is active listening, being a great listener, and they teach the eight skills of active listening, and this is foundational. Most people in negotiations know or should know these eight skills, and this isn’t classified stuff. There are books written out there about this. This is stuff that anybody can learn.

But what I kind of took away from this is we have to be a little bit more broad in communication than just being great listeners because the reality is what we see is what we believe, and sometimes we have this side bias that we believe what we see and we can disregard the conversation if we see something to the contrary.

So, in my trainings, we do exercises that show that we believe what we see. So, as communication has evolved, we’re getting away from just this telephone conversation. And now, in 2022, moving forward, it’s very commonplace for us to engage in Zoom conversations or Skype or any type of conversations where we can see each other and experience each other, so it’s more than just being a great listener that we communicate through gestures and facial expressions and body language, and how we’re dressed, and what people can see in the backgrounds of our virtual conversations, and this all matters.

This is all very impactful to what people think and what people believe, and, ultimately, what they choose to move forward on. So, in addition to being a great listener, I really press people that we have to understand body language, we have to understand the expressions, and we’re putting on a show, essentially, to allow people to experience us through the visual in addition to being great listeners and having a great conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share some of the eight skills of listening, some tidbits that can be advantageous to your everyday professional?

Scott Tillema
Sure. The acronym to remember this is MORE PIES, and we could probably go into a five-day class on these eight skills of active listening, but just to touch on a couple that I think are really the most impactful – asking open-ended questions. And this seems so simple and so basic but when I tell people, “I want you to ask questions and engage,” we almost default to closed-ended questions because we’re interested in gathering factual information.

And our goal in these critical conversations needs to be dialogue. And I challenge people, “I want you to do this in three or four sentences, and then pass the baton back to your negotiation partner, and allow them to speak, and allow them to be heard. And we do that by asking great questions. And that’s a great one.

And when you couple that with emotion labeling, which I think is another really, really important step of active listening, now we don’t have to default to saying, “Pete, I understand.” The reality is I don’t understand. I haven’t lived your life, I haven’t done your work, I haven’t had your experiences, so, for me to say to you, “You know what, I understand,” that’s almost dismissive, and I would say it’s a bit disrespectful because how can I possibly understand you when we’ve only been having a conversation for a short period of time?

So, instead, let’s maybe go to an emotional label, and say, “You sound frustrated.” So, we label what I’m hearing with an emotion, “You sound really excited,” and then we couple that with an open-ended question, “Tell me more,” and allow you to continue that conversation so, now, not only am I connecting with the content of what you’re saying but I’m connecting with the emotion of how you’re saying it.

And that’s when people start to sense that, “Hey, I really get you. I really have an appreciation for what you’re saying, and the emotions that are generated by your situation.” So, that’s, I think, two of the most important pieces of active listening, but there are other great ones. Reflecting or mirroring back the actual words that somebody says. Somebody says whatever they say and they get to the end of whatever they’re saying, and we just repeat back the last two or three words, and that’s reflecting.

Pete Mockaitis
The last two or three words.

Scott Tillema
You got it. You’re a pro. Perfect. And what the amateur is going to do is going to say, “Yes, that’s exactly that.” And, if you do it with an upward inflection, we’re asking a question with a downward inflection, we’re affirming that statement, and then we’re going to go to silence, which is another skill of active listening, which I think is probably the hardest for people to master because we’re uncomfortable in silence.

So, I’m just going to let it be silent for a moment, and allow you to take in that moment and keep speaking, and give you the floor because negotiation is not about being right. It’s not about ego. It’s about reaching an agreement. That doesn’t mean I have to like you. It doesn’t mean that I have to trust you. It’s we’re going to reach an agreement that’s satisfactory for both of us, and that’s how we’d go about doing it, by being great listeners and engaging in some excellent dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, there’s some tidbits about listening. And then how do we become more influential? You talked about verbal influence. How do we develop that?

Scott Tillema
Yeah. So, understanding the first step, I see this as having four steps in being a great negotiator. And, for me, I see our goal is to create a bond with somebody. And so often, we have a goal, “I want to sell them this,” “I want them to do this,” “I want them to drop the gun,” and I challenge people, I say, “Your goal needs to be to build a bond with this person. And once you start thinking about connection, now we can start having a mental map of how to get there.”

And I see that through four principles working together in a circle. And some people see negotiations as a stairway that we’re working our way up, and I don’t see it like that. I see it as a circle that we’re going around and around, and these four principles are the influence and the bond that we are creating. And the first one is understanding, and we do that through listening, and we do that through studying body language and gestures, and make sure I have an understanding of what’s going on.

And so often, we get stuck on that, especially as high performers and the work that we do, we say, “Okay, I think I get it so now I’m going to go right into solving the problem.” And I think that’s the step that most people skip, especially if you’re really good at what you do, is, “I skip the understanding piece,” not that you don’t know how to be a good listener. It’s just that, “I think I know what the problem is. I think I know what the issue is, so I’m going to move on quickly.”

So, the second principle that I use is timing, knowing when to deliver your message. And I found this to be the strategy piece in these conversations and these negotiations, to say, “Okay, I have an understanding of what’s going on, but I want to quickly say whatever I need to say and give my pitch,” and sometimes we get this wrong.

And by getting your timing wrong, we can really miss an opportunity or, worse, put ourselves in a more difficult situation if we try to jump the gun and start selling too soon, or try to persuade somebody too soon. So, the second step is having great timing to what it is we’re going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And next?

Scott Tillema
Next is delivery. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Most people should be preparing for their negotiations, for their difficult conversation. And if you’re not preparing, let’s start there. But the people who do prepare, spend a lot of time focusing on the content of what they’re going to say, “So, I’m so worried. Here’s my talking points, bullets A, B, C, D, and I’m going to get through this, and this is what I’m going to say.”

But how often does somebody going into a really consequential conversation take time to practice their delivery, not what they’re going to say but how they are going to say it? And I’m convinced that this is much more important than the words we actually say. Now, I don’t want anyone to listen to this, and say, “Hey, I was just listening to a podcast with Scott Tillema who said I can say anything I want as long as I say it nicely, it’s cool.” And that’s not the case at all because words matter.

Words are how we frame the conversation so I don’t want to dismiss that piece at all. Words are really critical, but how we deliver them, and I’m talking about the rate, the rhythm, the pressure, the volume, the tone, all these different ways that we can manipulate our verbal delivery. This is really, really important on how people experience us. So, that’s a third big piece, is delivery. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, I love the way you listed several key variables there. Can you share with us some demonstrations and the impact of saying the rate, fast versus slow, or different rhythm patterns, and what kind of influence that makes on the listener?

Scott Tillema
Of course. When we get nervous, when we get excited, our rate starts to notch up and we start speaking quickly. And it’s been shown that people who speak really quickly are perceived as less trustworthy than people who slow down that rate. Now, we don’t want to speak too slowly because we’re going to lose people’s attention. And we have found that the attention span has shrunk significantly over many, many years, as we’re surrounded and bombarded with distractions and social media and everything else that we’re attending to.

So, when I do a negotiation in a crisis or a hostage negotiation context, I have a coach that’s working with me in real time, so they can sit here and analyze what I’m saying and tell me, “Hey, let’s slow it down a little bit,” and kind of give me that hand signal, “Let’s slow that down and allow the person some time to process what we’re saying.” And if we can slow down just a little bit, we’re going to be a little bit more trustworthy and maybe even a little bit more likable. So, that’s the rate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. And then, so next step, we talk about rhythm. What are the key rhythm patterns that we can look to and what are the impacts of them?

Scott Tillema
Yeah, everything I say feels the same way. You get into the groove, it’s going to feel really smooth, you don’t have to rhyme, but we want everything to be right here. So, when you are engaging with me, you have an expectation that you’re not going to get yelled at, that I’m not going to be getting excited, and now we’re going really, really…Everything is kind of right in this groove, and it’s not too loud, it’s not too soft, it’s paced just right, so you can feel comfortable opening up to me.

And I think that this is the same reason that there is a couch in the therapist’s office so you get comfortable. We’re creating a bit of psychological safety for you to say, “Let’s really discuss the important issues here,” because sometimes we disguise the important stuff with other nonsense, and we’re willing to talk about the things that are easy to discuss.

But, really, sometimes we need to get into the more difficult conversations, and I’m really not going to open up with somebody if there’s a chance I’m going to get yelled at, or if a chance that they’re going to just quickly dismiss me and move on. Everything is right in this zone here and I want you to get comfortable having this conversation that’s going to open up pieces of information, which goes back to our first principle of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we talked about rhythm and volume, we mentioned not shouting. Any other volume insights?

Scott Tillema
I think that if you’ve listened to Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk, she talks about how we can use the body to influence the mind. So, taking this to the volume of what we say, if I become a little bit more quiet in what I say, it is going to force you to physically work harder to hear me. And it’s not very often that we find ourselves physically working really hard to hear someone. It’s only at the times that we’re listening intently, and those are the times that something is very important.

So, sometimes I’ll take the volume down a little bit, and that doesn’t mean speaking weakly or speaking without power. It’s going to force someone to listen very hard to what you’re saying. And now their brain may be convinced that this is something important, and now we’re getting into influence pieces because now they’re intently listening to what I have to say.

And we think the opposite when we want to be heard. We get loud, we scream, we get the bullhorn and we make sure that everybody can hear us, but this is intimate conversations. We’re one-on-one with people, trying to get them to go in the direction that we want them to go. So, I challenge people in coaching sessions, “Let’s take the volume down. Let’s come a little bit closer and see if we can engage them in a soft, intimate, intense conversation.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked about a few components of delivery and we’ve got that four-part building of a bond with the understanding, the timing, the delivery. And what’s next?

Scott Tillema
The last one is respect, that I think you can do everything right. But if we don’t come in with respect, none of the other pieces work. So, you can’t get an agreement on respect alone. On respect alone, you can learn to be really nice, and you can get walked on. You’re going to lose a lot of negotiations, lose some opportunities. But without this respect piece, you are not going to have this influence and this bond that you need.

And I think that this makes sense to most people, and say, “Yeah, I get that. I was raised to be respectful, the ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, Ma’am,’ ‘Yes, please,’ ‘No, thank you,’” and that’s all really good, and that’s something that I want. But I think that respect is about emotion and connecting with people’s emotion and their emotional triggers.

And we see such the opposite of this. If you check on Twitter or a lot of social media where people are just disrespectful of each other, and that’s emotional triggers for people. So, I talk about, within respect, I talk about pieces like fairness and autonomy. Are we being treated fairly? How do they see this? How do they see this conversation? What is the issue that they see? Because I know that I see it one way, but can I see it the way they see it? Are they being treated fairly? And that’s a huge trigger for people.

And I’ve had a lot of conversations with folks, to say, “You know, I may not be able to get you what you want but I can assure you that you’re going to be treated fairly,” and people really like to hear that. And sometimes there can be a sticking point because how I see fairness might be a little bit different from how you see fairness, and we can have that discussion.

But the second piece of this is the autonomy, “Are you giving me the opportunity to choose the outcome here?” And I think that I could probably pressure people into making the decision I want them to make, but, ultimately, I want them to carry out that commitment. It’s not just getting me to say yes, to get me to say yes. I need you to do whatever happens next.

And I’m going to try to guide them toward making the right conversation, but, ultimately, I want them to choose, “This is what I want, this is the outcome, this is the agreement that I’m going to enter into.” And if we can be respectful of fairness and autonomy, and have sprinkle in some empathy in here, we’re really going to be someone, who this, your negotiation partner, your conversation partner is going to look to, and say, “Yes, this is someone I want to agree with. This is someone I like. This is someone who I believe in. This is someone who I’m going to enter into an agreement with.”

And that’s the piece of negotiation where we find success, to say, “We’re going through understanding, timing, delivery, respect,” and this is how we build the bond. We’re going around the circle. We’re making this connection. We don’t listen to strangers. We don’t care what strangers have to say. But now that we’ve formed this relationship and this connection, maybe I can have a little bit of influence and nudge you in the direction that we need you to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so zooming out across the broad expanse of this topic domain, could you share with us some of your top do’s and don’ts that are particularly applicable for professionals? Are there any key words or phrases? Is there any way we could accidentally threaten someone’s autonomy or trigger them there, even though we didn’t mean to?

Scott Tillema
Of course. And when we do that, if we do that, again, we’re watching for changes in behavior. Are they pulling away? Are we seeing things outside of the baseline? Are we losing that dialogue? And let’s not be afraid to go back to that, to say, “Hey, I’m doing my best here. I sense that there’s a little bit of disengagement here. Is there something I said or didn’t say that maybe doesn’t sit quite right with you?”

And this is an important piece, especially with these high performers, to say, “What if I’m wrong? What if you see it differently from the way I see it?” And I think this is the importance of having diverse teams and diversity and all kinds of different ways because I want a lot of different pieces of input from people who think differently from me, to say, “Hey, maybe we have to take a different approach. Maybe this approach is wrong.”

And to approach someone and say, “If I did something wrong, let me apologize for how I just presented this. I sense that this was really unsettling to you or upsetting to you.” Or just inquire, “Is there something that happened that we need to go back and address?” That’s a great, great piece. And so often, we have this ego that gets in the way, to say, “Well, I’m not going to apologize to anybody,” “Well, I’m not going to be the one who’s wrong here.” That’s not what this conversation is about.

This conversation is about reaching an agreement with somebody, so let’s set the ego aside. It’s not about ego. Be willing to be curious. What another big takeaway, that so often we are so worried about talking about us, “And what I know and what I can do.” People aren’t impressed by that. They just aren’t. People are more happy to tell you about themselves and their work and their product, so be much more willing to listen than being eager to talk. Another important takeaway to be influential and do great things.

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

Scott Tillema
I think that negotiation is probably one of the most important skills that people need to have to be successful in life because negotiation, really, it’s an umbrella for other skills like communication and influence persuasion, and all these things. And we have an inflated sense that we are really good at this because we communicate with people all the time, and we can point to examples in our life where we have found success.

But the people who are really good at this are humble to say, “I need to learn more, I need to be willing to examine myself and do better at this.”

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

Scott Tillema
So, I don’t know if this is a quote verbatim, but one of the professors at Harvard, Michael Wheeler, he’s a long-time negotiation trainer, he talks about flexibility and adaptability. That we can’t say, “This is the way. This is the only way.”

So, be willing to step out of our comfort zone, be willing to take on styles that are uncomfortable to us, and learn things outside of what we already know because you might need that technique, you might need that tactic, so I really find the work of Michael Wheeler to be very impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Tillema
I’ve got a number of books that I like on negotiation and influence. I think one of the older ones, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini outlines six principles of influence, and that is a cornerstone for anybody who’s in the business of influence or persuasion. We need to understand that. But another one is Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate by Dan Shapiro. He talks about five core concerns that trigger our emotions, and that we can use to trigger other people’s emotions.

Beyond Reason is a great book to pick up, cheap, easy read but really foundational for people who are engaging in meaningful conversations with others that really want to take the next step and understand the impact that emotions have in driving our thinking and decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Scott Tillema
Favorite habit is probably practicing my active listening skills. And I’ve been doing this for a long time, and that doesn’t mean that I’m good at it forever. It’s something that we can forget, and something that we can lose. And people ask me all the time in training, “Hey, Scott, how can I practice the eight skills of active listening?”

And the next time that you get a spam call, one of these people that’s trying to get you to do whatever, give them money and steal your credit card, I want you to practice the eight skills of active listening. Write down what these eight skills are, have them handy, and in three or four minutes, you should be able to get through each one.

And if you’re doing it with purpose and true intent, like you aren’t just going through a checklist, this person is going to engage you and you’ll get through the eight skills of active listening, give yourself a pat on the back, and then you can hang up the call and wait for the next spam caller in a few minutes, and do it all over again.

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

Scott Tillema
“It’s not about trying to get somebody to do something. It’s about creating a bond.” And that’s what I hear back from people the most because that’s not what we’ve ever been taught before. We’ve been taught to sell them this thing, or convince them of this thing, or get them to do what I’m telling them to do, and it just reframes the mind. It reshapes the mind to say our goal, our focus is on creating a bond.

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

Scott Tillema
Excellent. If they would like to hear a little bit more on these principles, I invite your listeners to check out my TED Talk, it’s “The Secrets of Hostage Negotiators.” You type in hostage negotiator on YouTube, it’ll be one of the first talks that come up. It’s 18 more minutes of what we’ve been talking about here today, with a few more stories and a few more examples. They can visit my website at ScottTillema.com or my business site at NegotiationsCollective.com to learn about me and what I do and the services that we offer.

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

Scott Tillema
I would say that it’s important for us to realize that this is a difficult time for many people, that all of us have experienced anxiety, and loss, and trauma over the last two years. And I’m not sure that that’s going to change immediately. So, being mindful that there are people around us who are struggling, use these principles, use this approach and try to connect with somebody today.

And it’s not maybe in a professional level where you’re trying to sell something or try to make money. It’s being a thoughtful connecting human being with somebody else, and you’ll be surprised how impactful this approach can be, and that with all the struggles with mental health and suicide in the world, that being a great connector, being a great negotiator, being a great communicator, this can go a long way, and you are going to connect with somebody who will later reflect to you how impactful you were at a really critical moment in their life.

So, let’s be mindful that there are people out there who are struggling and we can use these techniques to connect with them and really lighten up what can be a difficult time in a lot of people’s lives.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, thank you. I wish you much luck in all your negotiations.

Scott Tillema
Thanks, Pete, for having me on. A pleasure chatting with you today.

Aug 11
0

791: Promoting and Sustaining Trust through Honest Leadership with Ron Carucci

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Ron Carucci reveals the four keys to cultivating a culture of trust and honesty in your teams and organizations.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why people don’t trust you even if you think you’re trustworthy 
  2. Two fundamental questions to up your leadership
  3. A powerful exercise to build your honesty muscle

About Ron

Ron has a thirty-year track record helping executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership — from start-ups to Fortune 10s, nonprofits to heads-of-state, turn-arounds to new markets and strategies, overhauling leadership and culture to re-designing for growth. With experience in more than 25 countries on 4 continents, he helps organizations articulate strategies that lead to accelerated growth, and then designs programs to execute those strategies.  

The best-selling author of eight books, including the Amazon #1 Rising to Power and his recently released To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose, Ron is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, where Navalent’s work on leadership was named one of 2016’s management ideas that mattered most. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes, and a two-time TEDx speaker.  

Resources Mentioned

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Ron Carucci Interview Transcript

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

Ron Carucci
Pete, so great to be back with you. I’ve missed you, my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. To Be Honest: Lead with the Power of Truth, Justice and Purpose is the latest book. Last time, we touched on your antique doorknob collection, so I think we need to revisit this.

Ron Carucci
Which, there it is.

Pete Mockaitis
I could behold it though the listeners can’t see it. It’s bigger than I thought it was. So, maybe, for those who didn’t hear you the first time, can you refresh the listeners on what that’s about and tell us if there’s any new developments?

Ron Carucci
So, I began making these jars years ago for other people, and, basically, they were people in my life who I felt were amazing at opening doors for people and helping people move over the threshold of the liminal space of a doorway.

And so, these are doorknobs that are dozens or hundreds of years old, there’s old hardware in there, there’s old hinges, there’s knockers, so all kinds of things to do with doors, that span hundreds of years. And if you think about the countless number of hands that have turned those doors open, that have passed through doorways, for me it’s a wonderful daily reminder that that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to make a way for other people. I’ve helped people in my talks over time. There are 7.2 billion doors in the world through which love, hope, and joy can pass. You’re one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s dig into To Be Honest. What’s perhaps one of the most striking, counterintuitive, surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made while putting this together?

Ron Carucci
So, it’s based on a 15-year longitudinal study of more than 3200 leaders, so we dug in deep, and we learned a lot. Some of it was very surprising. The most exciting part was that you can actually predict what conditions in which people will tell the truth and behave fairly and serve a greater good, and under what conditions they might be more prone to lie, cheat, and serve their own interests first.

One of the biggest findings is that honesty is not a character trait. It’s not some moral imperative. It’s not some sense of do good. Honesty is a muscle. It is a capability. It is something, if you want to be good at, you have to actually work at it, which is like going to the gym and building any other muscle. If you want your moral competence, your honesty competence to be effective, it isn’t something you can just assume that your good intentions will take care of.

In today’s world, we’re in a trust recession, and if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, you have to earn it every day.

Ron Carucci
So, it turns out earning and keeping the trust of others has far less to do with your good intentions of being trustworthy, and far more to do with working at your honesty muscle to ensure you’re giving people evidence and reasons to trust you.

Whenever I ask leaders the question, “Do your people trust you?” the reflexive response is almost always, “Well, why wouldn’t they trust me?” as though my good-hearted intentions to be trustworthy are enough. But the reality is, in today’s world where cynicism reigns supreme, we look around every institution there is and see trust in a freefall.

Today, leaders begin in a deficit of trust. You can go from being somebody’s peer and trusted, and just being elevated to being their boss, you are the same person and yet, in their eye, that you now have power, that you now have disproportionate levels of influence over their future, that you’re not one of them, starts you in the red. And you have to re-earn the trust you had as their peer, and most leaders just take that for granted.

Pete Mockaitis
intriguing. Well, Ron, I don’t want to get too much into the semantic wordplay game, but it’s funny, when you say honest, I think most of us would consider ourselves honest, and I assume that folks are being honest with me, and yet there is something of a gap in terms of whether I trust someone. I guess there’s levels and layers to it where I tend to think, “Well, I, generally, presume the vast majority of people aren’t straight up lying to me and telling me the opposite of what is true.” Is that fair in terms of like the state of honesty in the workplace today?

Ron Carucci
I would that it were that simple, my friend, but here’s a couple of problems. I think we’re in a world today where we have confused speaking the truth with speaking your truth. And so, I may tell you something that I firmly believe, and because I say it with conviction, it is my truth. I’m going to say it as if it’s the truth. I may be repeating heresy to you that I read on the internet somewhere, but if I believe it, I’m going to pass it on as if it’s so.

Pete Mockaitis
InternetHeresy.com

Ron Carucci
Secondly, so what we learned both in our neuroscience, we do a lot of brain science to understand how our brain processes our experience of honesty, and also in the initial research of our interviews, we used a lot of really cool AI technology to do some of the word text mean analysis. Honesty today is more than just not lying.

So, the definition of honesty, as the book title says, is truth, justice, and purpose. What that means is to be labeled as honest, you not only have to say the right thing, you have to do the right thing, and you have to say and do the right thing for the right reason. You may do less than that, and you might be labeled a good person or you might be labeled reliable. But if you want to earn and keep the trust of others, all three are necessary today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And that’s intriguing how, I’m thinking about, yeah, your truth versus the truth, quite a distinction. I have seen people say things with conviction, we’re at a party and someone was saying, “It’s not possible for media companies to be profitable just by the sale of ads. They have to engage in some other activities.” He said this with great conviction, I thought. Well, I own a profitable media company.

And so, he said it, he meant it, he believed it, he wasn’t trying to deceive anyone, and yet, I know that the statement he made was false. And in so doing, I did, I had less trust in subsequent statements he made. And I guess I could be a stickler…

Ron Carucci
But here’s the problem, Pete, the fact that he believed it to be true doesn’t make it true.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I mean, what you say is correct.

Ron Carucci
But he would proffer it as if it were truth. And were you to disagree with him, he would say, “You’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
What’s funny, I did. I actually…it was interesting, like my reaction, I was a little angry at him for having said that even though he had no poor intentions. And I guess it’s just sort of like, I guess the way I operate is, “If I’m uncertain of something, I will put my cards on the table.” Like, I would’ve given him a lot of grace if he said, “Boy, you know what, when I was working for this media company, there was no way we could’ve been profitable. We’re paying the writers and all the stuff, and we’d look at the bandwidth fees, given the small revenue we have, so, thusly, boy, I don’t know how it’s possible for any…”

Okay. All right, so we’re conveying similar sentiments and yet I was like, “All right. Fair enough, dude. That’s your experience. I understand that’s where you’re coming from, and I’ve got a different perspective to share with you.”

Ron Carucci
And would you not have been more drawn to, “I trust him, I’d engage him because he was being thoughtful”?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah.

Ron Carucci
Right? So, there you are. That’s a wonderful example of today in our dogma-proliferated world. We lose trust with chronic certainty when we confuse our truth with the truth.

Pete Mockaitis
Chronic certainty. Well said. And I’m thinking another time, someone was doing a very clever book promotion in which I could get a free copy of a book if I just pay the shipping charge.

Ron Carucci
You see it coming.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there was like an upsell video, in which he said, “Hey, can I send you some more training?” And I was like, “Okay, maybe.” And it’s like, “Well, right in the same box, I can give you my…” it was a CD set at the time, it was like $200 or whatever, and so I thought that was a clever move because you already have my credit card. I was already intrigued in the topic because I got the email and I said, “Sure, I want your free book.”

And then I was like, “Okay, clever move. All right, sure.” And then I remember they were not in the same box because I thought it was going to be…and it was not a pre-release copy of the book, which I thought it was going to be. It was piped through BarnesandNoble.com, and then the training CDs actually came separately earlier.

And it’s interesting because it’s like…and in that instance, I was more angry because it was like, “Okay, you’re not just mistaken. It’s like you knew darn well,” even though I still got the book for the cost of shipping, and I still got the trainings. It’s like, “You knew they weren’t going to be in the same box. This is part of your marketing strategy from day one to goose you and have one week at the New York Times’ bestseller list as you piped all these orders through these places.” And so, well, now I trust nothing this person says.

Ron Carucci
So, your examples are crystal clear, Pete, but those kinds of transactions happen to us all day long. And so, my scrutiny of you, and your scrutiny of those people, and people who are like them, because our brains process those experiences like little traumas so the imprint is thrust in our brains. And so, any time now anybody reminds you of the media guy or the book author…

Pete Mockaitis
The author guy, yeah.

Ron Carucci
..you’re going to hold that screen up and go, first of all, “Is it like them or not? And how much like them is it?” So, now, you have a new bar of what somebody now has to get past to earn your trust. Well, multiplied that by hundreds of transactions every day, they can go in either direction, and you see what it takes today for leaders to actually authentically show up in a way that does attract and keep, because the marketing guy had your trust for 20 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
He did.

Ron Carucci
And then squandered it. He exploited it and squandered it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Ron Carucci
And leaders do that every day with good intentions. They don’t realize the things that which people will withdraw their trust from you from. I had to give a client of mine feedback that he had lost his team’s trust because he got very defensive, saying, “I just try with them. I tell them what way things are. I go to bat for them. I advocate for resources for them. I tell them when they’re not working well. I tell them when they’re great.”

I said, “So, you’ve just listed all for me all the reasons you believe you’ve earned their trust, but trust is a currency. We all trade in different currencies. You believe they’re trading your currency when actually they’re not. So, it turns out that when you’re in meetings with your team, you tend to be a little bit impatient and you tend to let that be known through some sarcastic remarks. And when someone is going on a little bit longer than you wish they would, you cut them off.”

He said, “Well, okay, everybody has a bad day.” I said, “Well, apparently you have a lot of them and what you are telling people in those behaviors is you are not safe for them to be imperfect, that if their thoughts are not fully formed, if their arguments don’t align with yours, they shouldn’t speak. That’s what you tell them with those behaviors. That loses their trust. It doesn’t matter that you never intended for them to interpret those things that way, that’s what your behavior conveyed.”

And he was floored. And this is not a jerk, this is a good guy, a smart guy, a good leader, but here was a set of behaviors that he would’ve never equated with trustworthiness. But there you are, his team deciding that he was not a safe place, was not trustworthy of their candor, of their ideas, of their imperfectly formed views.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good notion. So, to trust someone or for someone to be trustworthy, it’s not so much…it’s not just, “I don’t think that you’re lying to me, but rather, I can trust you with my incomplete idea. I can trust you with a proposal which may or may not work.” So, I get that. The use of the word trust in terms of “What do you trust people with?” or, “What do you entrust to them?” can be minimal or maximal and, thusly, the term currency really plays out nicely, “Would I trust you with a few pennies or would I trust you with my life savings?” But rather than talking about monetary matters, we’re talking about kind of emotional, intellectual contribution matters.

Ron Carucci
And some people hold up the arcs of character, “I’m going to judge by your character to decide whether or not I’m going to trust you.” Some people use competence, “If I think you’re not good at your job, if I don’t think you’re awesome at your job, I may trust you less.” It may be your personality. You may have a different kind of personality than me, and I find if I’m an introvert and you’re charismatic, whatever, I may trust you less. But if you’re like me, I may trust you more.”

There’s all kinds of currencies we trade in. The key is to know what currency the people whose trust you want are trading in, not to assume that they’re trading in yours because you may squander a great deal of effort trying to earn trust you’re not earning.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also think that it can be quite segmented in terms of like, “When you start talking about marketing ideas, I don’t trust you because I think they’re kind of nutty. But when you start talking about financial accounting health things, like, okay, you’re solid, you’re all over that.” So, all right. Well, please, Ron, unpack this for us. If we want to be maximally trustworthy, what’s our path?

Ron Carucci
There’s four doors to go through, using our door metaphor. So, we found four conditions under which you can guarantee whether or not people will earn your trust. These were the conditions we found, both in individuals and organizations, and there’s actual statistical factors that go with each. So, the first one is be who you say you are. Our organizations make promises in their statements – missions, values, visions, purpose statements.

It turns out, those matter to people in terms of whether they’re embodied or not. And if you work in an organization where those things are for cosmetic purposes only, but if you ask people, “Is this your experience of the place?” those are not the words they would use to describe it. You are now three times more likely to have people be dishonest.

Pete Mockaitis
To be dishonest.

Ron Carucci
Yup, but if there is an alignment between the actions and words, and if your organization does embody those words, now you’re three times more likely to have people to be honest. The reason you raise the risk of dishonesty is you’ve now institutionalized duplicity. You’ve now told people, “Around here, we say one thing and do another, and so that’s okay.” So, your people will now go, “Okay, so I’m allowed to say one thing and do another.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Ron, this is hard hitting.

Ron Carucci
The same with leaders. If you’re a leader, you have advertised what you value. You may not have done it intentionally, you should have, and so people will look at you. And if you’re embodying who you say you are, they’re three times more likely to give you their trust and see you as honest, but if your say-do gap is more than one-to-one, you are telling people you’re not trustworthy.

Second was accountability. So, if the way in which you account people’s work, how you talk about their contributions, how you measure their contributions, is seen as fair and just and dignified, meaning, “I feel, when I walk out of my conversations with my boss, that however my work was discussed, including my shortfalls, was dignifying and fair, meaning I have as much of a chance of being successful as anybody else,” you’re four times more likely to have people be honest.

But if I think the game is rigged, if I think I’m being demeaned or a cog in your wheel or a means to your end, or I don’t have as much of a chance at being successful as other of your favorites, now you’re four times more likely to have me be dishonest because, now, for me to get ahead, I have to embellish my accomplishments and hide my mistakes from you.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say be honest, or be dishonest, again, we’re not talking about stating things that are the opposite of the truth, but rather shades, nuances, withholding, embellishing.

Ron Carucci
Any form of truthin purpose, any form of saying the right thing, doing the right thing, or saying and doing the right thing for the right reason. It’s any misuse of those three things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
The third was decision-making. So, if I walk into a room in an organization, virtual or otherwise, commonly referred to as a meeting, and I believe what’s happening in that room to be an honest conversation, that the person who’s presenting something is giving me the full scoop on what data they’re presenting, they’ve given me both sides of an argument, I believe they don’t have some hidden agenda, and I believe that were I to offer a view that’s different than the countering, prevailing views in the room, I’d be welcome to do that. Now, you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be honest because I can trust what’s in the room.

But if I walk into that room and I think it’s nothing but orchestrated fear, and the person presenting the data has spun it, has an agenda of what they want, is clearly guiding the room toward that outcome, and the last thing you want to hear from me is a point of view different than the one that you’re trying to shape, now you’re three and a half times more likely to have me be dishonest because the truth is now underground. And if I want the truth, I have to go get it somewhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
And here being dishonest might mean just keeping your mouth shut.

Ron Carucci
Keep your mouth shut. Go outside the room and collude with somebody about…

Pete Mockaitis
“Can you believe that BS?”

Ron Carucci
“And so, here’s what we’re going to do now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ron Carucci
And the last one was probably one of the most surprising, was cross-functional relationships. What happens at the seams of your organization? If you have prevailing border wars, the classic sales and marketing, supply chain and operation, R&D and innovation, HR and everybody, if those seams are not stitched well, and there’s no way for those complexity, which are usually healthy tensions to be resolved, you are six times more likely to have people be dishonest because when you fragment the organization, you fragment the truth. Now, all we have is dueling truths, “My truth versus your truth. My only interest now is being right, which means I have to go about proving you wrong.”

But if those seams are stitched, if there’s cohesion and coalescence across the organizational story, if people recognize that there’s value we create together that’s bigger than either one of us, and there’s a way for those tensions to be held in a healthy way to solve those conflicts, now you’re six times more likely to have people be honest with you because now we’re all part of a bigger story.

The sobering aspect of those four findings, Pete, is that the models, the statistical models, are cumulative. So, if you’re good at all four of those things, you’re 16 times more likely to have people in your organization, or in your presence, be honest with you. But if you suck at all four of those things, you are now 16 times likely to find yourself on the front page of The New York Times in a story you never imagined being in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Woo, Ron, there’s a lot of goodies here. I think the one that really hit home powerfully was at the beginning when you talked about institutionalizing dishonesty. And I could think of my first workplace was Kmart, and I remember we had these principles, and I thought to myself, “Oh, what a relief,” I’m so naïve, “Oh, what a relief.” I’m like 17 years old, don’t really know what I’m doing, first sort of job, it’s not a paper route, and I’m sure there’s going to be all sorts of ambiguous tenuous things, but I can look to these principles as my guiding light in the midst of this ambiguity.

I think I still remember the customers rule, teams work, change strengthens, diversity enriches, performance drives. It’s over 20 years ago. And yet when I saw, in our store in particular, not to throw shade on Kmart worldwide, when I saw these being violated, it’s like, “Oh, I guess not really. Okay.” Because I loved the idea of, okay, customers rule and I had the power to please, I was told in my training video.

Like, if they don’t have the sale 24 pack of Pepsi in stock, I can give them two 12 packs for the sale 24-pack price. I thought that was pretty cool, it’s like, “Ooh, that’s something I can do. I’ve got some power here,” and that was one of my favorite things to do, is write up the magic ticket, which says, “Hey, this is your new price for this thing.”

But then when they said, “Oh, don’t do that for these,” it’s like she’s got some sort of Pepsi dealer that’s got a special price, “Don’t do that for these things or these exceptions,” and they really added up. And you’re right, institutionalizing dishonesty, I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess we just kind of do whatever is expedient. I guess that’s how things really work here.” And that wasn’t a great feeling, and it made me kind of uneasy in terms of never quite knowing if things were right or appropriate.

And, thus, just sort of doing whatever got the job done without flagrantly, I guess, violating the law or causing risk to someone’s health and safety. But then elsewhere, I’m thinking about Bain where we had our operating principles, and they were real, and that was inspiring, and I was like, “Oh, this is what we do here. It’s like we’re open to the 1% possibility, which is that you’re wrong, and that’s okay. It’s okay for lowly associate consultant to challenge a stately partner and they won’t rip my head off. That’s pretty cool that that’s really how it works here.” So, yeah, the notion of institutionalizing dishonesty is a powerful phrase and really does ring true experientially.

Ron Carucci
when duplicity becomes a welcome norm, the offense of the hypocrisy causes what we now know to be moral injury. So, it’s not just exhaustion, it’s not just even burnout from the constant duplicity, we now know, we can measure it through neuroscience studies that it’s actually what we call moral injury.

Moral injury was first measured in people who were at war, people who were veterans and experienced or observed or were part of atrocities, and then throughout the pandemic, we realized, “Oh, healthcare.” Lots of moral injury there. It’s actually an imprinted trauma response similar to PTSD but not the same.

Well, when you’re in an environment of rampant hypocrisy, and the enraged part of you that feels trapped, that feels complicit, is actually imprinting like a trauma response. It’s called moral injury. People have often misdiagnosed burnout or exhaustion for what really is moral injury. And so, a rampant environment of saying one thing and doing another means that, “I will get my pound of flesh. So, if you’re going to be a hypocrite, watch what I can do. And so, I’ll start giving those price tags two for one, three for one, four for one. When my mother comes in, it’s going to be ten for one.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s good. Well, so this is really intriguing that these kinds of environmental cues have tremendous power in shaping the behavior of folks. So, let’s say that our listener is not at the top of the organization but somewhere in the middle, and they are inspired. They want to be as honest as possible and shape some good cultural vibes within their spheres of influence, what are some immediate actions folks can take?

Ron Carucci
That’s a great question. And I will shamelessly plug the book because I left no stone unturned. Every chapter ends with a long luxurious list of practical things we can all do right away. But, for example, let’s talk about this duplicity thing. Next time you’re together with your team, pull those things off the wall. Pick your favorite set of promises; the values, the principles, the mission, the purpose statement.

Pick one. Put it on the table and ask your team, “How are we doing with this? Is this what your experience is? Maybe the rest of the place isn’t, but I want to make sure that the experience I’m creating for us sounds like this. Where could we do better? If somebody followed our team around with a video camera all day long, could that video tape be used as a training program for these values? Or, would it be like, ‘Here’s how not do this’?” Just open the conversation. Any one of these is an invitation to a conversation.

So, when we finished the research and found the findings. I thought, “I don’t want to tell the failure stories. We’re all a little bit sick of Theranos. We’re all a little bit sick of Wells Fargo. We don’t need to rehash those painful moments anymore. I want to know who the heroes are. I want to tell the stories of people who are doing this and living this out in a way I’d be proud to emulate. I’d want them as my boss.”

And so, the book is nothing but a book of great heroic stories of people who are beautifully and inspiringly embodying these four findings in a way that we can easily emulate, we can easily take a book out of their playbook that they’ve lived a path for us. And so, the border war one, the cross-functional things. If I asked you, “Who is your they? Who is the person in some other department who your team has to coordinate with, or you think of them, you go, ‘Here they come, what do they want?’ and you’ve othered them, you’ve made them other, they’re the enemy, and they make your life miserable and all you do is talk about how incompetent they are?”

It turns out, not as surprisingly, you are probably their they too, and they’re having the same conversations about your team, which, of course, you think are unjustified and your team is just angelic and does everything right, and couldn’t imagine making their life miserable. What if you just reached out to that leader and said, “Here, let’s have coffee,” and said them, “Look, we know our teams are struggling to get along. How can I be a better colleague to you? What could we do differently? How can we create better? What’s one thing we can do to make this better?”

And any time I bring teams together to do what we call seam startups to sort of regenerate a seam, inevitably, as you begin to talk about what value they co-create together that they don’t create on their own, and begin to talk about how they do that, or how they struggle, you start hearing a crescendo of, “Oh, that’s why you do that? Oh, that’s why that drives you crazy. I didn’t know you needed that. Wait, that’s what you guys do? That’s your KPIs? Oh, my gosh, we measure them just to the opposite. No wonder I can’t stand you.”

People discover and re-humanize the other from being the them to now it’s a part of a bigger we. And, suddenly, things change. So, all of us can initiate any one of these things to be better. There are organizational injustices all around you, in your accountability systems, in your budgeting systems, in your resource systems, somebody is getting the short end of a stick, somebody is not valued the way they should.

Just ask yourself, “Who are the roles in your organization that are privileged? If you’re a tech company, are your engineers privileged? If you’re in a brand company, are your marketers privileged? If you’re in a growth company, are your salespeople privileged?” And it’s not that all work is created equal. All work is not equal. Some work is more important than others but not all people should be more important than others.

And if those privileges and those jobs are disadvantaging other people, that means those privileges are a problem and the playing field is not level, and you have the power to right those wrongs. Somehow, some way, who’s the bully in your organization that your team has to put up with, that you turn a blind eye?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Ron, so fundamentally, how do leaders earn and sustain their teams’ trust?

Ron Carucci
If you’re a leader, let me simplify your job. People come to work every single day with two foundational questions that they want to answer, “Do I matter and do I belong? Is my contribution important? Is it valued by you? And can I show up as who I am or do I have to hide part of myself?” Your job is to make sure that, every day, they never wondered if the answer to those questions is yes, because any time they spent doubting whether or not the answer is yes, is capacity they’re investing in hiding, in performing, in manipulating, in resenting, and that’s not capacity they’re putting into producing the results you want them to produce. So, take it off the table for them.

Make sure there is not a shred of doubt in how you care for them, and how you lead them, and how you guide them, and how you coach them, that they never wondered if they matter or do they belong so that the rest of their capacity can be devoted to performing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Okay. Well, now I’m wondering about the shooting the messenger effect. It’s real and it really does make things difficult. And I guess we sort of talked about these four environmental organizational factors at work here with regard to contributing to or detracting from psychological safety. But if we’ve got bad news, and we’re in an environment that isn’t so welcoming of it, how do we even play that game?

Ron Carucci
So, let’s talk about both side of the equation here. Here’s a blanket statement that I can confidently say as my truth is the truth. If you are a leader and you don’t have somebody coming into your office, at least twice a week, telling you something that makes you uncomfortable, you can be 100% confident your leadership sucks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ron Carucci
That’s it. And if you think it’s because there isn’t anything to tell you that makes you uncomfortable, not only does your leadership suck, you’re stupid. But those stories are being told somewhere, and if they’re not telling you, you have to be curious about who they’re telling. You can be very confident that every night at the dinner table of the people you lead, you are being talked about. You are the subject of a story. If you don’t know what stories they’re telling about you, you should want to get in on the conversation.

Let’s start with the other side of the equation. Today, telling the truth has reduced itself to, if I just stood up the posture of a big middle finger, or a whiner, or a rant on social media, that’s literally speaking my choice or being the messenger. You have to deliver the message competently. You can’t just come in ranting, or whining, or complaining, or accusing, or, passively-aggressively, throwing somebody under the bus. You just need to show up with the credibility to say, “Hey, I have a concern. Here’s what it is. Here’s my suggestion for how to resolve it.”

And if you haven’t earned the credibility to do that before that moment, that moment is probably not the moment to do it then. What we know about competent courage, Jim Detert’s research, if you haven’t had him on your podcast, you want to get him. He wrote the book Choosing Courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we had him.

Ron Carucci
And his research shows that the people who do this well are people whose credibility is already established, and there are things they do competently to bring in the bad news, to establish what to do about it, and to be heard. It doesn’t mean people won’t personally get defensive but there is a skill to it. I actually was told last week on social media, I’m still sort of wrestling with this, but someone said, “Ron is so good at what he does, he’s the only person I know that can tell someone to go to hell, and they’ll ask for directions.”

And I’m thinking, “It sounds like that was intended to be a good thing or a compliment.” I’m not so sure but I do work very hard to make sure that when I have to bring somebody uncomfortable news, a disconfirming news about how they see the world, that’s already going to make them uncomfortable, but at least I do it with care. I don’t pull punches, I don’t soft-pedal it, but I do it in a way that they know I’m not judging them, I’m not trying to shame them, and I will help them through this.

But withholding bad news from somebody is never kind. Leaders do it all the time when they withhold hard feedback from people, “I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It was just a one-off thing. They probably didn’t mean it.” Same with our bosses, we let them off the hook. Withholding feedback that could help somebody grow is cruel all the time.

Again, the competence includes timing. Barging into a room when your boss is in a meeting with their boss, and blurting out something they did that was terrible, probably a bad idea. So, timing, delivery, it all matters, but not doing it is never okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ron, anything else you want to make sure to say before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ron Carucci
If your own honest competence, your own muscle is important to you, I would invite you to just try one exercise that I give many leaders to do. The University of Massachusetts’ research says that, on average, we all lie about twice a day, give or take. Assume for a minute that includes embellishing something to your boss, leaving a piece of information out to your spouse, whatever. Think about the last ten days of your life, and think about, let’s say, 15 moments where you were not at your best, where you were not proud of who you were.

You could’ve been curt to a barista. You could’ve blown off your kids. You could’ve taken that slide out of a deck to ensure that you got your budget. You could’ve over-inflated accomplishments to somebody in a presentation about what you were doing when you spoke. Pick it. Little, big, whatever, no one has to see this. But what I guarantee you is if you look over those 15 moments over the last 10 days, you will see a pattern.

The moments that bring us to our dishonesty are not random. We adopt those behaviors because we believe that they serve some need or we wouldn’t do it. You have told yourself that these choices and these moments serve some purpose, “I will engineer a certain response,” “I will look a certain way,” “I will avoid a certain pain,” “I will appear to be a certain way.” And if you want to raise your game on honesty in order to make sure that, in fact, you are trustworthy, you have to, first, be honest about your dishonesty. You cannot be more true to yourself until you’re more true about yourself. And so, start with you.

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

Ron Carucci
As my mentor once told me many, many years ago, “Nothing in life is revocable except death.”

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

Ron Carucci
At the Harvard University, they did this study on cafeteria workers, on looking to see how meaning in work happens, and they put cameras both on the person ordering their food and the people in the kitchen making the food. And when they could both see each other, the way the food got made changed. When, suddenly, people, in the kitchen, went from just frying eggs to, “I’m frying eggs for them,” the care and attention to detail and quality of what they were doing went dramatically up, meaning that no matter what task you’re performing, it can be meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m wondering if this has something to do with why the scrambled eggs at the Waffle House are extra delicious. I could see them; they can see me.

Ron Carucci
Versus a buffet of golden brown.

Pete Mockaitis
Right there. All right. And a favorite book?

Ron Carucci
David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea.

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

Ron Carucci
It’s Outlook. I live for Outlook, and I know how important it was to me because mine went down for two months, and people couldn’t figure out how to use the web version, and I was a neurotic mess.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Any Outlook power tips?

Ron Carucci
Color code your calendar. That’s a cool tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite habit?

Ron Carucci
In the morning, when I have my coffee, I have a collection of mugs that, in my cabinet…

Pete Mockaitis
Doorknobs and mugs. Two collections for Ron.

Ron Carucci
And so, each mug is sort of attached to a person or experience in my life, and so I begin my day thinking about that person or thinking about that experience and those people, and just to sort of begin with a sense of gratitude and reminding myself that it’s bigger than me. My own story is bigger than just me. And so, I begin my day thinking about somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with folks, they tend to repeat it back to you, retweet it, Kindle book highlight it?

Ron Carucci
I think the “Honesty is a muscle” is the one people tend to sort of double-take on.

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

Ron Carucci
Please come visit. So one of the cool things we did was, I knew that when I was interviewing all those heroes, I wouldn’t be able to use everything they said but it was all worth it, so we videoed those interviews, and we did a TV series, and it’s called Moments of Truth. It’s a 15-episode news magazine show, in a news magazine format, and you can binge watch all 15 episodes at ToBeHonest.net or you can find them on Roku.

At ToBeHonest.net, you’ll also find information about the book, the research, there’s a webinar there. If you want to hang out with me, come to my firm’s website Navalent.com. We’ve got really cool free e-books, and videos, and whitepapers, and lots of cool blogs, and you can have us in your inbox every month and get our wisdom about teams and workplace and leadership, and all that kind of stuff. And please do follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter and stay in touch.

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

Ron Carucci
Don’t take trust for granted. Level up and say the right thing, do the right thing, and say and do the right thing for the right reason, and you will live a far more gratifying and purposeful life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ron, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best and much honesty and trustworthiness.

Ron Carucci
Pete, always a pleasure. I was just wearing your shirt, oh my gosh. That could be the accountability chapter, we did identify it. I love it. Always a pleasure, my friend. Thanks for having me.

Jul 25
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786: How to (Really) Strengthen Your Relationships with Eric Barker

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Eric Barker shares science-based wisdom on how to make your relationships flourish.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The two critical elements of trust-building 
  2. The secret to dealing with difficult people
  3. How to navigate difficult conversation

About Eric

Eric Barker is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which has sold over half a million copies and been translated into 19 languages. It was even the subject of a question on “Jeopardy!” Over 500,000 people have subscribed to his weekly newsletter. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and others. Eric is also a sought-after speaker, having given talks at MIT, Yale, Google, the United States Military Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Olympic Training Center. His new book, Plays Well with Others, will be released by HarperCollins in May of 2022. 

Resources Mentioned

Eric Barker Interview Transcript

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

Eric Barker
It’s great to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. And I got a kick out of your dedication page, it is “To the relationships that you’ve screwed up.” Can you tell us a key story there about a screwup and some principles learned?

Eric Barker
It’s never been my specialty at all. One of the five factors that psychologists use to determine someone’s personality, one of them is agreeableness, and out of a possible score of a hundred, I scored a four. So, disagreeable, probably not helping there. One of the things that led me to write the book was that I’m not a specialist with relationships but then, actually, two weeks after I closed the deal to write the book, California lockdown for the pandemic, and I realized, “Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was going to be needing a little relationship-defibrillator after all this was over.”

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. So, low on agreeableness, and so can you tell us a tale of how that got you into some trouble once?

Eric Barker
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a specific time, but, it’s funny, the same trait that has harmed me in my relationships actually helps me in my writing because I tend to always challenge things, debate things, to not easily go with the flow, I want to test things, play myth-busters, and that’s basically how my book is structured. Like, taking the maxims that we all kind of assume are true about relationships, and wanting to say, “Wait a second. Is that really true? Shall I look up the evidence here?” So, there is a silver lining.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, as I’m thinking about my relationships, I’ve got a friend, I’m thinking of my buddy Avon, in particular. He seems to love to take the other view every time, and I don’t even know if he really believes what he’s saying or if he’s just trying to rass me or he finds it fun. And it’s interesting, it’s like some people love that and some people hate that, like, “Oh, what an interesting thing we’re exploring. Hmm, we’ll do a little bit of banter, a little back and forth, volley, exploring.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, like, just can it, Eric.” Is that your experience as well, some love it, some hate it?

Eric Barker
Oh, no, absolutely. That’s the kind of thing where, like I said, after a day of working hard writing the book, I kind of have to tell myself, “Okay, turn it off, turn it off. Don’t need to test and question everything anymore. It works out really well with the writing, not so much as well with other people.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about relationships while you’re researching and writing this book?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing that really blew me away was the research on loneliness. Like, Faye Alberti is a historian at the University of York, and she basically found that before the 19th century, loneliness pretty much didn’t exist. It sounds crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Eric Barker
But basically, we were all embedded in religions, nations, tribes, groups. We always felt like we were connected to other people. And what’s really interesting is that aligns with some of the scientific psychological research on loneliness, which is that lonely people don’t spend any less time with others than non-lonely people do.

Again, it sounds crazy but we’ve all had that feeling of being lonely in a crowd. Just because you’re on the subway or in the middle of Times Square, you can be surrounded by people and that doesn’t mean you feel connected to them. What John Cacioppo, the leading researcher on loneliness, found is that loneliness is how you feel about your relationships.

If you have good relationships, strong connections, and you go on a business trip, you don’t feel desperately lonely. You know that there are people who care about you, they’re just not near you or by you. But if you don’t feel strong connections to people, you can be surrounded by others. You could be at a sporting event and you’re not going to feel that great. Loneliness is, again, how you feel about your relationships.

So, in the past, we had these deep kinds of near-tribal connections to others. We were always part of a group. And these days, we saw, basically post-19th century, the rise of individualism, and so we don’t feel those strong connections. Loneliness is an issue of perception. When we aren’t near others but we feel we have strong connections, that solitude, that’s a positive, that’s me time. It’s like, that feels good. You know that people are there but you get a little time to yourself.

Well, when we don’t feel those strong connections, neuroscience actually shows that our brain scans for threats twice as fast, which, from our ancestral environment, makes sense. If you don’t think help is coming, you need to be on the lookout for danger, but that’s not terribly conducive to happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess we’re getting into it. Tell us, Eric, what is to be done if we are feeling not so great about our relationships and we got some loneliness cooking?

Eric Barker
It’s really an issue of deepening our relationships. The first thing I did when I…in the section of the book on friendships, the first thing I did was look at Dale Carnegie because that’s the book everybody knows, How to Win Friends & Influence People, and that book was written before the advent of social science research, it’s all anecdotal.

But the crazy thing is that the primary pillars of Carnegie’s book all proved true. They’ve all been verified, except for one, and that is he says to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. And research shows we’re actually pretty bad at that. But everything else, finding similarity, paying people compliments, listening, these are all positives. The thing is Carnegie’s book is written mostly for developing business contacts, so it’s kind of at the more shallow end of the pool.

But for deepening relationships, what I found is that the research seems to point towards two things, and that is time and vulnerability. Time is really critical. It is the thing that research shows friends fight about the most. And time is a powerful costly signal. You spend time with people, we only got 24 hours in a day. You keep spending time with somebody, it shows you care.

And vulnerability is opening up. That’s telling people what’s on your mind, your stresses, your challenges. We’re usually afraid to do this but this is what really creates trust. By talking about the things we’re afraid of, we tell the other person that we trust them, otherwise we wouldn’t say it, and that leads people to reciprocate, and that’s how you build trust.

So, it’s really critical for us to go past the small talk, and very often we can feel stuck in the small talk, and it’s time and vulnerability that will deepen relationships, make us feel closer to others, and help us beat loneliness.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I moved about a year ago from Chicago to the Nashville area, and I am more distant from many of my close friends than I used to be. And so, I’ve been thinking a bit about how one forms great friendships, particularly as it’s a little bit of a different ballgame being 38 with two kids and a wife than being 24 and “Woo,” just out and about for many nights in a given week. So, tell me, is there a…I guess it’d be hard to precisely quantify this with all the variability in humanity. But, like, what kind of time are we talking about here, Eric?

Eric Barker
What’s really interesting is Jeff Hall did some research on how much time it takes to go from just meeting someone to being like a good friend or a best friend, and it’s some pretty depressing research. It could take hundreds of hours to get to, like, closer best friend. But on the flipside, it is a matter of how we handle it and what we do.

Arthur Aron did research, and by giving people a series of questions to get them, like, opening up and talking, he managed to get people, in a laboratory setting, to feel like lifelong friends in only 45 minutes. In fact, two of his research assistants who were working on the project with him, actually fell in love and got married because of working on this.

So, it’s really that issue of vulnerability, of opening up. Usually, when we first meet somebody, we’re often tempted to try to impress them but the literature shows that signaling high status, while it might impress people and it might be good in maybe a sales or a business context, on a personal level, it tends to distance people. They don’t feel related to you. They feel like you’re above them or something.

Meanwhile, expressing yourself as a peer or actually showing human-relatable flaws, that’s the thing that makes us understand, relate, connect with people because we all have those insecurities. And when you express them, it’s like we get that, “Whew” feeling where we can relax, where we can relate. So, that’s the thing we really need to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when it comes to vulnerability, that sounds like sharing the stresses, the problems, the worries. To what extent is there also connected value in sharing the joys?

Eric Barker
Sharing joys is really positive, there’s no doubt about that. The literature points to this, something called capitalization, and that is when your friends or your spouse talk about something positive that happened to them, it’s really important to ask questions, it’s really important to be happy for them. In fact, it was Shelly Gable that did research at UCSB, and she found that actually celebrating those positive moments, how you handle the positive moments was actually more predictive of romantic relationship success than how you handle the difficult moments.

It sounds crazy because we’re always so focused on fixing things, on trying to resolve the problems in a romantic relationship but John Gottman found that 69% of the ongoing problems in a romantic relationship never get resolved. It’s like you’re not going to fix all of these things. You’re not going to fix most of these things. It’s about the regulation of conflict, not the resolution of conflict.

But on the flipside, you want to be a supporter, you want to be a cheerleader, you want to share your positives, you want them to feel good for you, to be curious about it, and you want to do the same for them. This is a positive relationship tip you can use anywhere, especially in a romantic relationship, is to really look for those positive things, be supportive, be the cheerleader. This is a huge thing that we often forget about because we’re usually trying to bring the bottom up rather than trying to raise the roof. And it’s really important to celebrate those positive moments.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Any pro tips on how that’s done in practice? I just watched the show Devs, and somebody kept mentioning if they wanted a champagne bath. So, I guess that’s one tactic, is to bring a bottle of champagne with you to splatter people when they’re excited, though they might not receive that so well in real life, like, “I’m all wet now and sticky.” So, any other more practical recommendations for celebrations? I guess what we don’t want to do is say, “Okay, that’s nice,” and just, boom, brush aside. But, yeah, like what that sounds like in practice?

Eric Barker
What some of the advices that they give romantic couples is pretty straightforward. At the end of every day, you say the best thing that happened to you that day, and your spouse says the best thing that happened to them that day. And again, like you said, you don’t want to be dismissive, you don’t want to just nod your head and acknowledge it. It’s, like, you want to be happy for them. You want to ask questions. You want to be just listening and be supportive and be excited. It’s about that emotional back and forth, so it’s just consistently.

It almost sounds weird but even with your friends, it’s like, “Hey, what good things have happened lately?” It’s not something we usually do but it’s not too crazy a question, and I think most people are pretty happy to talk about the positives that are going on. You’re basically letting them brag. That feels good and if they’re somebody you care about, it’s going to feel good for you, too, and it can have very positive effects for the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember a motivational speaker once mentioned that he had someone, I think it was at work, and that was just sort of like their go-to line when they started talking, and say, “Tell me something good,” and everyone liked that person. It’s like, “Oh, that’s what Marty says, and I like Marty,” because, go figure, people are telling him something good all the time, and he’s getting the goods and celebrating with them.

Eric Barker
Well, it’s a funny thing because, like I said, very often, especially in romantic relationships, we’re usually focused on fixing the negative, but it’s like if you feel step back for a second and think about that, if all you’re doing is fixing the negative then, really, ceteris paribus, that means you’re going to get to neutral. Even if everything worked, if the 69% of long-term issues could be resolved, you just get to neutral, and, “I have a not negative relationship with every stranger on this planet.” It’s, like, that’s not love. It’s, like, you don’t want to get to neutral. You want to be beyond that. You want to be supportive.

That’s why one of the other things I talk about, at least specific for romantic relationships, is doing exciting stuff together because the thing is that there’s a psychological principle called emotional contagion. And basically, what that means is we tend to associate the feeling that we’re having in any context, we associate it with the people we’re with.

So, if you’re doing fun stuff, you associate that with your partner, and that keeps the relationship alive. It keeps things exciting. And so, we need to do more of that. Too much Netflix and pizza on the couch, we actually need to get out more and do more exciting fun things so we can keep those positive feelings flowing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, we went deep on loneliness and friendship and forming bonds. Maybe we can zoom out a bit. And could you share with us what’s sort of like the main big idea or thesis behind the book Plays Well with Others?

Eric Barker
Well, one theme that I found throughout all the aspects that I was looking at is that relationships really do come down to stories, stories in your head. The first section of the book, I talk about the issue, like, they say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and I kind of tested that. I went and looked at the research on body language and communication and reading people.

And what happens is, as soon as we meet somebody for the first time, or even if we’re seeing somebody we’ve known for a while, our brains are immediately telling us a story about who this person is, and we kind of can’t help it. We start making assumptions in milliseconds. And it’s an issue of revising that story but that story is going to be there.

And in a romantic relationship, John Gottman, I mentioned earlier, he’s the leading researcher on love and marriage, and his claim to fame is that he can predict whether a couple would be divorced in five years just by talking to them for a few minutes. And he can do this with about 90 plus percent accuracy. And how he does that is simply asking the couple, each member of the couple, “Tell me your story.”

And when he listens to that story, if it’s this story of overcoming challenges and that’s really something, celebrating those difficulties and getting past it, that’s a really positive sign but it’s not about the facts and details because we forget most of the facts and details. We kind of congeal them into this story, and if that story is positive, things are really good.

And past that, the final section, I talk about, I test “No man is an island. Is that true?” And it’s this issue of communities, have a story, a story they tell about who the members are, “’What is important to us? What do we value?” And that story is what draws us together. So, it’s this really critical element of understanding the stories of how we perceive others, how we’re connected to others, the community that we’re a part of. This is kind of the subtext, the element that undergirds everything that goes on between human relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that is you could just change your story about a relationship you have with somebody without interacting with them in any subsequent way. So, you could just choose to reinterpret and reformulate your story about your relationship with them in your head, could you not?

Eric Barker
Oh, absolutely. And that can be a positive thing and that can be a negative thing. We can reflect on it and we can look at different aspects, and we can say, “You know what, I’ve been judging them too harshly. Like, I forgot there were those few times where that person really went out of their way to help me, and I kind of dismissed that.” Or, on the flipside, something that’s common with long-term relationships and marriages is that people sometimes they don’t want to fight, they don’t want to argue, so they don’t raise issues. And when you don’t raise issues, they can’t get resolved.

And so, instead of people having a conversation about their spouse about an issue, they start having conversations with themselves, and that doesn’t always go so well because you start making assumptions about what they believe, where they stand, why they did what they did, and this can be really problematic because now we’re not actually getting insight from them; we’re making it up ourselves and that can quickly turn negative because what a lot of people don’t realize is that, yes, you don’t want to fight but the truth is, yelling and screaming, only 40% of the time does that result in divorce.

What is more likely to result in divorce is when a couple stops talking. You yell and scream because you care. When you stop caring, you stop interacting. And that’s what more often precedes divorce is when couples start living parallel lives where they’re not communicating, they’re not connecting, they’re not arguing, they’re not resolving problems. They’re just going, “It’s not worth it,” and kind of living their own life. That’s what usually precedes divorce.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And if we sort of shift the focus into the workplace and professionals and those looking to be awesome at their job, what are some of the best takeaways for folks looking to have strong relationships with their boss, their peers, their clients, their suppliers, etc.?

Eric Barker
Well, like I said, in terms of friendship, those are some of the really key things, is trying to deepen those relationships. Like I said, time, vulnerability, but another thing we deal with in the workplace is that, with our friendships, the interesting thing about friendships in our personal lives is that you can leave whenever you want.

In the workplace, you’re going to deal with some people that maybe you don’t like so much. That’s the tricky part about it because of the role. And what the research has shown is that the people who cause us the most stress aren’t actually our enemies, because enemies, like we know where we stand, we don’t like them, they don’t like us. The people that drive us most crazy are those ambivalent relationships. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It’s that unpredictability. And Julianne Holt-Lunstad at BYU has found that that’s what drives our blood pressure up, it’s these people who we don’t know how they’re going to behave, whether they’re going to be nice or difficult this time.

So, in terms of dealing with difficult people, what we need to keep in mind is emphasizing three things: emphasizing similarity, emphasizing vulnerability, and emphasizing community, because these are the things that can sort of activate the empathy muscles in someone else. Maybe if they’re a little narcissistic, maybe if they’re difficult, when we express our similarity to them, when we talk about a vulnerability, weaknesses, when we express community, that we’re a part of something, that can trigger those empathy muscles that can help us deal with them a little bit better, help them understand us a little bit better. That’s truly key to dealing with those difficult people in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what does that sound like in practice to convey similarity, like, “Boy, Eric, you and I, we both love a good microphone, don’t we?”

Eric Barker
Again, we take those things for granted but that’s usually how many relationships start, is you’re both into a particular sport, a particular sports team, you’re both Star Wars fans, you’ve got something you relate to. And with those people that we haven’t taken the time to find something that we can both relate to and care about, that kind of acts like a medium for us to work through.

So, finding out a little bit more about somebody and finding that connection, research shows this is really powerful in terms of us feeling like we are connected, we’re part of the same group. In that way, community-wise, again, feeling like we’re a part of something, we’re both working toward similar goals. The research shows that a great way to get people who don’t like each other very much to cooperate and feel connected is to have them work on a project together, it’s when they have to rely on one another.

So, it’s really critical, it sounds a little silly in the abstract, but finding those similar things, asking them enough questions to realize, like, “Hey, we’re both into this,” it can make a surprising difference.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m also thinking about some research. I read about it in Bob Cialdini’s books about moving and/or singing or dancing or marching in unison has a powerful effect there.

Eric Barker
Anything like that, again, builds that kind of similarity, like that’s in the physical realm is that we’re doing the same things, we’re coordinated, we’re working together. That means you’re a part of something. You’re connected. What’s really powerful, I think, from Cialdini’s, he has Influence which is like he’s masterwork, but his other books are excellent as well, Pre-Suasion where he talks about how so much of what helps negotiations and conflict resolution isn’t the tactics that you huse in the middle of it. It’s those things that you set up beforehand.

And that’s where similarity falls in. Once you feel, like, “Hey, we’re connected in this way. We both care about this same thing,” you’re more disposed to want to help someone. It’s like if a stranger asks you for a favor, that’s very different than when a friend asks you for a favor. You have something that connects you beforehand.

One of the researchers at Harvard Business School talked about salary negotiations, and, again, it wasn’t necessarily the specific tactics used during the negotiation. The number one thing that he said was they have to like you, was beforehand making sure that they like you, they appreciate you, they feel connected to you, because, again, it’s one thing dealing with a stranger, to another thing dealing with a friend. You’re much more disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, to say, “Hey, sure, we don’t mind covering that expense. We don’t mind doing this.”

We think about these kinds of like really nuanced tactics in the middle, but if you can think about the beginning ahead of time, and say, “How can I really connect with this person emotionally so that they’re disposed to want to help me?” that’s much more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, with that connection now, those principles then of the similarity, vulnerability and community there?

Eric Barker
Yeah, first and foremost, like I said, that similarity, that’s something that we’ve all had that moment where we’re trying to connect with somebody, trying to go from acquaintance to friend, and similarity can really help. It gives you something to talk about. It gives you something that you connect on. And then that vulnerability aspect, where it’s like we all have our little jerk radar where we don’t want to be dealing with somebody who’s a pain.

And when somebody opens up and says, “Hey, you know what, I actually struggle with this. I’m not that great at it,” or, “Hey, this actually scares me,” that makes…humanizes somebody. They’re not trying to act like they’re above you or better than you. In community, it’s like we’re connected. It’s like, sometimes we don’t always love our in-laws but we still behave, we still do favors for them, we still do things because we recognize that we’re connected, we’re a part of something, and that shifts our perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure does. And I also want to talk a bit about the digital side of things. Social media, how do we use that well such that we don’t create more bitterness, division, self-esteem problems, jealousy? Any pro tips there?

Eric Barker
Absolutely. You see research back and forth that social media is the devil, social media is not the devil, and there are some stuff back and forth, but the key thing we want to be thinking about when it comes to social media is time. And that is that you only have 24 hours in a day. Some of that is going to be sleep, some of that is going to be work. You only have so much of a budget for social time. And if too much of that is being used for social media, then it’s not being used for deeper richer connections, like face to face.

We just want to make sure that social media is not cannibalizing it. You don’t want to be replacing kind of the rich sumptuous meal of face-to-face contact for the junk food of social media. If you’re using social media to reach out to somebody who’s far away, hey, that could be really positive. If you’re using it to communicate with somebody who’s nearby and you’re using it to plan a face-to-face get-together, hey, it’s an alley of positive.

But if we end up, consciously or unconsciously, using it to replace real relationships, that’s when it gets problematic. And when it’s eating up too much of the buddy budget, the social time, just on Instagram, that’s really where it’s quite clear that we’re not treating our relationships as well as we could.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And I’m also thinking about sort of the nature of what you choose to post on social media. And I found, for me, what makes me more favorably disposed to someone is they share something and it seems like it really is a means of spreading delight and goodness and positivity, as oppose to a post which says, “Look how awesome I am,” like, “Oh, just getting some sushi in Tokyo at the top sushi place ever.” It’s like, “Okay. Well, good for you, guy. That’s fun. I guess I’m supposed to think that your life is awesome.”

As opposed to, I’m thinking about my buddy Patrick, he once posted, “When my wife and I are cooking together and sharing instructions or collaborating, we respond to each other by saying, ‘Yes, chef,’ and it makes cooking so much more fun.” And I think of that because that is awesome and I do that now, too, and it really is fun and it spreads joy. And in both contexts, we’re talking about doing some food stuff and yet one post, I think, well, it makes me think more of Patrick, like, “This guy is awesome,” and not because he’s high status but that he’s just putting out joy into the world.

Eric Barker
Absolutely. I totally agree. This is something we’re kind of touching on earlier, where it’s like often when we first meet somebody, people often try to brag, they often try to signal high status, and it’s exactly what you said. When you see social media posts where clearly the person is bragging, and saying, “Look how awesome I am,” that doesn’t make us like them more, that doesn’t make us feel more warmly connected to them, so that’s probably not conducive to positive long-term relationships.

But when somebody posts a funny anecdote or if somebody is kind of like poking fun but it’s at themselves, then we do feel positively disposed to them. If somebody puts a warm positive moment, we react better to that. And these are the kind of things we definitely need to be thinking about because I think we’ve turned a lot of things. I think, by its very nature, social media often tends towards turning things into this kind of social competition because we’ve got quantification of likes.

You have a direct quantification of how much people like this post. That has this kind of almost competitive element to it. And I think, to your point, we need to resist the urge to kind of one-up people in that status competition, and another way is to rely on being a little bit more human.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eric, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts for us looking to improve our relationships?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing from the romantic relationship research, but I think it’s applicable in pretty much any relationship context, is John Gottman, that relationship researcher, he found that just by listening to the first three minutes of a conflict discussion between a couple, he could predict the ending 94% of the time.

And the takeaway from that is if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. If you have to bring up a difficult topic with your spouse, or frankly with anybody, if we go in there firing both barrels, the research is pretty clear, if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. So, if we present it in a more constructive way, we take a deep breath, we step back, we don’t launch into it in this very kind of antagonistic attacking mode, it can be a lot more productive.

Even though we feel like we deserve this, “I’ve been victimized. I need to…” that’s not going to get you the end result you want 94% percent of the time. That’s a very high number, so take a deep breath, think constructively, don’t point fingers, don’t personalize it. Anytime you have to have a conflict discussion, whether it’s at home or in the office, don’t discuss the other person’s character. Talk about the specific issue you had and stick to the facts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, Eric, I’d love to hear some of your favorite things. How about a favorite quote?

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. Well, this is a quote that meant a lot to me when I was writing both my books because I was thinking about, like, testing these maxims and all these issues we have around both success and relationships. It’s from William Gibson, he said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

And that really resonated with me because I looked at the research and there’s a lot of answers to the questions we already have. It’s just tied up in all this ivory tower academic research. And so, my focus was trying to take that and make it accessible to people because the answers are already here, to many of our problems. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s why I love doing interview podcasts, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t have to figure all this out. I’d just get Eric to share the goods.” Cool. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Barker
This isn’t necessarily practical. It might make people feel a little bit better but one of my favorite pieces of research is there was one study done on ethics professors and ethicists, and it found that they weren’t any more moral than the average person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Eric Barker
So, if you feel like, maybe you haven’t been behaving that well, even experts in the field, hey, they’re not necessarily all that better, so don’t beat yourself up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Eric Barker
Favorite book, oh, God, there’s so, so, so many. I have to say one of my favorite books recently is my David Epstein wrote a book called Range, which is not only really useful, really smart. It also made me feel much better because it talks about how generalists can thrive, and how generalists often do very well because I’ve always been a generalist. And anything that helps me rationalize my decisions is amazing and wonderful.

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

Eric Barker
I have got to say that I remember many years ago, my friend Drew got these Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They were pretty pricey, and I was like, “Why?” And I’m not a big music guy. I listen to podcasts, but I got to tell you, noise-cancelling headphones literally changed my life. It’s like when you’re on planes, when you’re trying to block out noise, you got loud neighbors, it’s something silly, I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal, but, man, I can’t live without them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love them and sometimes I will put in earplugs and then put on noise-cancelling headphones. I’m just really into that cone of silence.

Eric Barker
Okay, you’re playing on serious mode now.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. And it does send a message. It’s sort of like a ritual. It’s like, “All right. No messing around. We’re seriously dialing into this.”

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. You’re putting on the Batman costume. Like, “This is it. We’re going to war.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I need a montage I need to play during this.

Eric Barker
Yeah, with some John Williams music. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Eric Barker
Favorite habit is reading. There’s no doubt, my first instinct when I have extra time is to fire up the old Kindle app. And, typically, you think, “That person is going to call me back in five minutes,” or, “Oh, this is only going to take this long,” or, “The internet will fix itself and work,” “My Wi-Fi will be working again.” You know what, sometimes it takes longer than you think. Often, it takes longer than you think. So, I get myself reading and the time flies by.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they highlight it in the Kindle book version of your works, or they re-tweet it a lot?

Eric Barker
I think the key thing was, in the new book as well as with others, there’s the Grant study which has been going on for nearly a century at Harvard. They’ve been following a group of men, basically, their entire lives. I think most of the men are in their 80s or 90s, and so it’s interesting, rather than some two-week study or six-week study to see what happens across a person’s entire life.

And, as you can imagine, multiple people have led this study because it’s taken nearly a century. And when they asked George Vaillant, who was probably the guy who led the study for the longest time, they said, “Look, what have you learned?” and, as you can imagine, the amount of information they’ve collected could fill a warehouse, but he replied with only one sentence. And he said that your relationships to other people are the only thing that matters.

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

Eric Barker
They can go to my blog at EricBarker.org, E-R-I-C-B-A-R-K-E-R.O-R-G. And the best thing to follow the insights and tips that I’m finding from the research is to sign up for my weekly newsletter.

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

Eric Barker
Yeah, the key thing I would say is, and I talked about this in my first book, was sit down with your boss and ask them what you can do to make their life easier. Ask them what you could be doing, point blank, to be better at your job and to be a better contributor. There are two benefits here. Number one, you are basically getting the answers to the test. They are going to tell you what you need to be doing.

And, number two, just in terms of signaling and relationship, how would you feel if you were boss if an employee came to you, and said, “How can I make your life easier? What do I need to be doing to be a better contributor?” That is a very, very positive signal, and it is going to tell you what you need to be focusing on. It’s a simple little thing and it can be a gamechanger.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that absolutely can be. And we had Mary Abbajay on the podcast talking about how to manage your manager, and that was one of her very top tips. And she said that she frequently will ask audiences, like, “Who’s done this?” and it’s generally less than 1% of professionals have done that. But, yeah, it’s powerful on both sides.

Eric Barker
And then for advanced mode, every week, sum up what you’ve been up, what you’ve accomplished, and send a quick bullet point email to your boss, and make sure to be focused on that thing that they told you, that you are making progress towards what they said was most important. This is extremely valuable. Your boss is busy. They’re not watching everything you’re doing.

So, to be telling them, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been up to,” makes them relaxed, makes them like and appreciate you. You’re basically doing a highlight reel. And if things don’t work out at that job, you can go back to every Friday email you’ve sent through all the weeks, and you know how to update your resume because you basically have a long list of all the things you’ve accomplished while you were there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Eric, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. I wish you much luck with the book Plays Well with Others and all your adventures and relationships.

Eric Barker
Thank you so much. It was fantastic to be here.

May 26
0

770: How to Become the Manager that Your Team Wants with Russ Laraway

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Russ Laraway reveals how being a great manager is simpler than you think.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key to sharing feedback that actually works
  2. How to get your manager to manage well
  3. Why you need to “prioritize prioritization” and how to do it

About Russ

Russ has had a diverse 28 year operational management career. He was a Company Commander in the Marine Corps before starting his first company, Pathfinders. From there, Russ went to the Wharton School, and then onto management roles at Google and Twitter. He then co-founded Candor, Inc., along with bestselling author Kim Scott.

Over the last several years, Russ served as the Chief People Officer at Qualtrics, and is now the Chief People Officer for the fast-growing venture capital firm, Goodwater Capital, where he is helping Goodwater and its portfolio companies to empower their people to do great work and be totally psyched while doing it. 

Over his career, Russ has managed 700 person teams and $700M businesses — facing a vast array of leadership challenges along the way. He’s the author of the book When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Russ Laraway Interview Transcript

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

Russ Laraway
Thanks a lot for having me, Pete. How are you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m doing well. How are you?

Russ Laraway
Great. Great. No complaints.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, I’m eager to get into your wisdom. But, first, I think we need to hear a story of a fifth-grade Russ winning a big prize. What’s the story here?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, I was watching cartoons after school one day on one of the UHF channels, which, for those that don’t know, your television, when it didn’t have cable or Roku or Netflix, your television had maybe seven channels. So, I was watching Channel 48 and they said that, “If you could answer the following riddle, you could win a shopping spree at Toys ‘R’ Us.”

And the riddle showed a picture of The Pink Panther. I don’t know if you remember The Pink Panther, and he was ice skating. And the riddle was, “The Pink Panther is skating on a pink blank.” And I was in fifth grade and I figured out that he was skating on a pink rink. I wrote that down, sent it into the TV station. And out of a couple hundred thousand entries, I was one of three kids who won a shopping spree at Toys “R” Us.

Pete Mockaitis
Hundreds of thousands of people got ranked and it didn’t occur to me immediately.

Russ Laraway
Well, I promise you, if you saw the picture, it would’ve been pretty clear, yeah. A couple hundred thousand entries, I don’t know how many of them were correct but there were a couple hundred thousand entries, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, congratulations. And that was, apparently, pretty memorable for you. Anything that you got there that was a really treasured item in your youth?

Russ Laraway
Oh, yeah, Atari 400. Yeah, I’m super dating myself with this story. But an Atari 400, I was able to get a bunch of games. It was a little weird. You couldn’t just run down an aisle. I think people imagine you can run down an aisle, just have your arm out and just scoop things into a cart. So, I won a one-minute shopping spree. There were two one-minutes and a two-minute. I won one of the one-minutes.

And I actually had to go around beforehand and pre-staged the items that I wanted. And so, we sort of identified an Atari 400 and then I just pulled it off the shelf a little bit, and some of the games and different things. So, I just kind of focused. And you had to get an item and then run back to the starting line with each item. So, you’re doing line win sprints.

And so, that’s how they, I guess, managed the cost a little bit because, in the end, the way I left Toys “R” Us that day was they rang us up, and then Channel 48 paid for the bill. It was like 500 bucks. So, you couldn’t just…the instincts everyone has to optimize a shopping spree, they figured them all out and made sure that I had to identify the things I wanted beforehand.

But the Atari 400, I mean, hours and hours of fun with my friends playing all the games, and that’s when the games were first starting to become higher quality at home, and so it was awesome. It was awesome. Atari was a big part. A big part of my youth.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, knowing what you want in advance is going to be one of our themes here on sort of both sides of the management equation with your latest book here When They Win, You Win: Being a Great Manager Is Simpler Than You Think, and we’re going to talk about how that’s handy for more than just managers, so thank you for that. So, lay it on us, for starters, what’s a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about being a great manager?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, it’s actually that managers are systematically failing and, despite the mountains of content, books, podcasts, articles, they’re not getting any better. And I defend this pretty heavily in the book. And, by the way, I’m confident that your listeners aren’t going to have a lot of disagreement with that idea. Most of them are having actually quite a bad experience with their managers, almost guaranteed.

And so, I had this idea, Pete, hopefully, you’ll indulge me. I have a little fantasy. And the fantasy goes like this. Don’t worry, it’s G-rated. The fantasy goes like this. I get to sit down a few of the luminaries who create content designed to help managers be better at their jobs. I get to sit them down each, one on one, and I ask them a simple question, I say, “How does your stuff, whether it’s your book or your podcast, your article, how does your stuff contribute to making each manager in the world great?’

And then the fantasy continues. They’re going to use a bunch of different words but I suspect they’re going to…

Pete Mockaitis
Synergy, engagement, dah, dah, dah.

Russ Laraway
Yeah. Well, engagement is a really big deal. We can talk about that. It has a very strong relationship with business results, not attrition or retention stuff. That’s a symptom. But, actually, like quota attainment, or earnings per share, or operating margin. All these things have a very strong relationship with the psychological measurements, employee engagement but let’s come to that in a sec.

But you’re right, what I think they’ll say is something like this, “It’s akin to going through a buffet-style lunch line, and you’re at a leisurely pace, you have your tray on the rails there, and you’re moving from left to right, let’s say, and you take a little from one section, maybe we’ll call that the Simon section, and then you move to the next section, maybe the Brene section, I don’t know. And then we go to the next section, and maybe it’s the Kim section and kind of off you go. And then you have on your plate, ideally, a nutritious meal that allows you to solve all of your leadership problems.

The problem I think, though, is for the typical manager, it doesn’t feel at all like a leisurely trip through a buffet-style lunch line. Instead, it feels like they’re hogtied in the center of a middle school cafeteria while a multi-thousand-person food fight is transpiring, like broccoli hits them on the head, mashed potato sliding down their cheek. By the way, worse, even if they are going through that lunch line at a leisurely pace, they’re not choosing the chicken breast and broccoli they need. They’re choosing the cheesecake and cream puffs and chicken fried steak that they want. It’s a process heavily fraught with bias.

And so, I think, practically, the proliferation of content about how to be a great manager is actually confusing managers, and what is missing from the entire corpus, in my opinion, is really the willingness to put the leadership standard you are prescribing, whatever author, podcaster, whatever, up to measurable account. Good leadership should measurably and predictably deliver happier employees at work and better business results. And, ultimately, that’s kind of the book that I wrote, what’s exactly the book that I wrote. Does that help, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Got you, yes. Okay, happy employees and better business results. And so, when you say managers are failing, what are the sort of core evidence or proof points that we’re looking to say, “That’s not happening”?

Russ Laraway
Yes. So, I’ll use a little bit of research to make this point. First is that Gallup, this is actually a 2013 study from Gallup. It’s called the State of Global Engagements, and I get to talk to the guy that did this study. His name is Larry Emond. And they found that managers explain 70% of engagement. And what that means is, in very large datasets, when you observe a positive variance from the average in employee engagement, 70% of that variance is explained uniquely by commensurate variance in manager quality.

So, if engagement is higher, managers are better. If engagement is lower, then the average in that spot, managers are worse. And so, even if you want to arbitrarily discount that to 50%, not that we have the credentials to do that, but that still means everything else you’re doing to try to affect employee engagement, this magical measurement from IO psychology that predicts results, everything else is worth less than half of the investments you make in your managers, 70%, less than half is 30%, the remainder.

If we arbitrarily discount it to 50%, I don’t know why, but we just do that, it’s everything else you’re doing is worth half of your investments in your manager. It’s pretty clear, managers are holding the keys. So, in either case, the research finding or our arbitrary discount. But here’s the thing that will kind of blow you away. Global employee engagement is 15%, that’s 15% out of a hundred. In the US, by the way, it’s twice as good and still terrible at 33%.

And so, you just have to put these two data points together. The manager drives employee engagement, and employee engagement is terrible around the world, and it’s pretty obvious that managers are systematically failing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. I hear you. From that data picture, there you have it. So, then what are the primary drivers of the disappointing manager performance?

Russ Laraway
That’s a great question. What, ultimately, we uncovered, and this was sort of a, call it a four-year long project while I was working at a company called Qualtrics. We were able to take a theoretical leadership standard, and really what I mean by that is a set of behaviors, and we were able to determine the degree to which those behaviors affect employee engagement.

And so, how we did that was every quarter, when we measured employee engagement at our company, we also measured something called manager effectiveness. And we did that by asking employees only, not 360, just the employees, the people who do the real work, the people we’re all fighting to attract, develop, and retain, the people who are being led, we asked them if they observed these behaviors from their manager in the last quarter, a specific set of behaviors. It’s about 12 questions we would ask them.

And it turns out, when you ask questions like that in a certain way, you can actually measure, basically, how frequently the managers, and individual managers, are exhibiting the right behaviors. And then once we have that measurement, we can actually just drop it into like a statistical package and correlate it with both engagement and hardcore results, like quota attainment, contract renewal, all these things. So, that’s what we did.

So, a couple of the behaviors that are highly correlated with employee engagement, the mostly highly correlated behavior is actually specific praise for good work. And so, the question might be, “How often does your manager give you specific praise for good work? Very often, often, etc.” And so, we give the manager credit for either one of those top two choices – very often or often – is kind of how you do it.

And so, the reason why that’s a big deal, though, is from a management perspective, it’s not being a cheerleader. A cheerleader is on the sideline, cheerleaders are pompoms, and they say, “Good job.” And I think to people that sounds like praise. It’s actually about coaching. Coaches are on the field or at least on the sidelines. It’s energetic. They’re right there and their entire job is to help people be more successful.

And in the book, I call it continue coaching, which is being very specific and sincere about what people should continue doing so that they have the best chance of repeating the things that are working. So, whether it’s the work products they’re producing, the customer service ticket, or the marketing copy, or the code they’re writing as a software development engineer, that’s the work. And the behaviors, our core values that our companies often define, the behavioral standards. And it turns out, it’s actually really important to be very explicit and clear about what people are doing well because it gives them the best chance to repeat it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that sounds sensible. And then when we say very often or often, are those defined in the eyes of the employee being managed?

Russ Laraway
Yes, eyes of the employee being managed.

Pete Mockaitis
They say, “I say that often, not very often, and that’s what we’re running with.”

Russ Laraway
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the most important perspective. And it’s irrelevant if the manager disagrees with the employee. If the manager is like, “Well, I do this all the time.” If you’re not doing it in a way your employees are hearing, then you’re actually not achieving. That’s why it’s so important to only evaluate the manager along these lines from the perspective of the employee.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and the employees, I assume, are genuinely reasonable, like, “Well, no, I mean, I went four hours without you giving me specific praise for my good work. That’s not very often.” Okay, well, that makes sense. Can you share with us a couple more sort of big drivers here?

Russ Laraway
Yeah. The next biggest one is about soliciting feedback from the team. So, it turns out nobody wants to go to work and not be heard. And the idea here is have you ever heard of the HIPPO?

Pete Mockaitis
The highly paid important person?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, highest paid most important person or what I call the most dangerous person in the room. Good companies are trying very hard to limit the degree to which the HIPPO, the highest paid person in the room, the degree to which their perspective ultimately drives the decision or the outcome that we’re trying to get to because that person is usually actually pretty meaningfully disconnected from the facts on the ground, and they’re not usually in any real sense more likely to come up with the best idea. It’s a very wisdom of the crowd kind of idea here.

And so, it turns out that a couple things become true when the manager regularly asks for input from people on the team. First is people feel heard. A big topic today is inclusion. If you want to talk about everyday inclusion, it’s this one sentence, “Every voice is heard including my own.” So, the first thing we do is we now give…this is their team too. It’s not just your team. It’s their team too. So, the first thing we do is give the folks on the team a voice in where we’re headed, what we’re trying to do.

The second practical outcome is the results are better. The research is crystal clear. Diverse perspectives deliver better outcomes. And diverse has a lot of lenses, one of which is making sure every single employee’s voice on the team is heard before we do something important, every single voice is heard when developing our team’s direction. And this gives people a degree of ownership over what the team is trying to do.

And so, Peter Drucker said, I can’t quote it exactly, but one of his landmark kind of insights was that people are far more likely to pursue a course of action enthusiastically when they have had a say in creating it. And so, that’s the idea here, is managers that do a good job of inviting diverse perspectives, inviting challenges to the current state, challenges to their own perspective, challenges to the leadership standard, challenges to how they’re behaving, those teams thrive and those employees tend to be significantly more engaged than the teams where the managers don’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s good. Can we hear a third key driver here?

Russ Laraway
Yeah. I’m trying to pick the best one. So, another one that has a very strong relationship with engagement is actually the other side of the first one I mentioned – praise – which is actually improvement coaching. So, praise is about coaching people on what to continue. Improvement coaching is about what to change with one simple idea. It’s not to kick you in the shins, it’s to help you be more successful.

Pete, if you’re the guy like me who starts off this conversation talking about this lunch line metaphor as a way to express the complexity being thrown at the average manager, then you have to be the guy who tries to simplify the job. And I’ve kind of done that work and I’ve come up with a job description that I believe fits every manager in the world from the CEO of Google or IBM, all the way down to the frontline manager at Jersey Mike’s for the sandwich line.

And that is your first obligation is to deliver an aligned result. The word aligned does a ton of work there. But aligned result, meaning the results your team delivers are aligned with what the company is trying to get done. And the second is to enable the success of the people on your team. And success is short term and long term. In the short term, your best tool for enabling their success is coaching, both continue coaching so that they know what to repeat, but also improvement coaching so they know where they can be better.

And, again, you coach on work products, “How could this code have been a little tighter?” “How could the copy have been a little clearer?” “How could you have more efficiently or effectively solved that customer’s problem?” That’s the work. And then the behaviors tend to be things like core values, like transparency, or justice, or one team, “How well did you behave in alignment with our standards?”

And people are always running a little bit afoul of our standards, and it’s okay. Like, we’re not perfect. We’re all humans. And the best managers know that they need to not only offer continue coaching but they also need to offer improvement coaching. And these two things together kind of round out our top three drivers of engagement, and it makes sense because they’re your two best tools for enabling people’s success: coaching them to be better and coaching them to continue the things they’re doing well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, within this coaching, I would love to hear what are some best and worst practices on both sides of that conversation? I guess one worst practice is just forgetting and not doing anything, but, additionally, what are some top do’s and don’ts to be on the lookout for there?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, let’s start on the continue side. If it’s okay, I want to tell you a little story. Cool. So, I used to coach little league baseball. By the way, if anybody wants to become a better manager in the span of about four months, go coach youth sports. And before our season kicked off, we were impelled actually to go to a seminar by the Positive Coaching Alliance. This is a nonprofit, really good organization, works at the professional, college, high school youth levels.

And this seminar lasted all day. It turned out to be a great use of a Saturday. The Positive Coaching Alliance prescribed five-to-one praise to criticism. Five to one. Now, it’s important, so that’ll be five-to-one continue to improve. What’s important to realize is they didn’t say infinity to one, which is what a lot of people hear when you say five to one, and they didn’t say five to zero, like everyone gets a trophy. It’s five to one.

And so, practically, what I did with this was I started something called the book. It’s a very clever name because it was literally a book, it was a lab book with graph paper, where I would just write down the things the kids did well. It started with being on time to practice. We all know if kids are late to practice, it wasn’t probably the kids’ fault. They don’t have a driver’s license. It’s their parents’ fault. So, we didn’t get on the kids’ too hard for that but we certainly recognized the kids that were on time. It included counting loudly during stretching.

And, by the way, when that gave way to the kids like not really doing their stretches well, we got clear on the standard for a good hamstring stretch, and we wrote that down. And this carries all the way through to fielding a ground ball correctly, “Move your feet. Center the ball on your stance. Get your glove in the dirt. Cover the ball with your throwing hand. Move both hands the fastest line possible to your shoulder. Step with your back foot. Step with your front foot. Fire over to first base. That’s how you field a ground ball and then throw somebody out.”

And so, what I would do is, halfway through practice, or at the time, if I thought the kids were kind of lagging, or they were losing focus, or they weren’t hustling as much, we’d call them in and we’d read from the book. And I’d hold it up like Simba, and sometimes I’d even sing, like, “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba sithi uhm ingonyama,” and they loved it. They were nine, ten, and 11-year-olds. And I would just start reading off what they did well.

Pete Mockaitis
By name.

Russ Laraway
By name, yeah. On time to practice, and then boom, “Miles, Starks, Caden, Jimmy, Tara,” and we’d just kind of go all the way down. And then we do it again at the end, and sometimes I’d reinforce it with a little article on the team website that night. And what’s most interesting about this, I think, is that it’s tempting to think, “Well, that’s just something that works on kids.” But they’re not. They’re just small people. They’re not some unique other thing. They’re just small people.

And the big insight here is for the workplace, to translate this to the workplace, is in order for us…here’s the mistake people make on continue coaching. They say, “Good job.” That is not helpful. That’s what you say to your dog, that’s not what you say to the people you work with. Being specific about what was good is what really counts. That’s what helps people know what is working. And in order to be specific, Pete, you have to be very clear about what the standards are around here. I couldn’t have been specific about fielding the ground ball correctly if I couldn’t communicate the actual standards for fielding a ground ball.

So, that’s the biggest thing people get wrong, and after a while, people just tune you out. You sound like a cheerleader. You don’t sound like a coach when you just say, “Good job. Well done. Way to go, team.” Enthusiasm is fine. It must be accompanied by specifics about exactly what was done well and why it matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And so then, it’s interesting, you talk about little people. A question I’m having here is what is too small a thing to provide for continue coaching? Like, you showed up to work. I mean, I love praise and enthusiasm but I just want to make sure how small is too small? Or, like when is it veering into insincere or patronizing? Or, like, “Okay, dude, yes. I’m going to show up to work and I’m going to check my email. I feel weird that you are praising me for this.” I don’t know, where’s the line?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, totally. The answer lies in this five-to-one prescription. I think if we were to start offering continue coaching or praise in the way you just described, I think we very quickly get to like 500-to-one. And so, that’s your guideline and it gives you a feel for what’s too big or too small. But here’s a really simple prescription, and, by the way, you don’t even need to be a manager to use this.

There’s a phrase that is perfect for all of this, “Do you know what I love about…?” That’s the phrase. So, what does that sound like? “Do you know what I love about the way you ran that team meeting?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Do tell, Russ. I’m all ears.”

Russ Laraway
Or, “Do you know what I love about the way you showed up in that team meeting?” “Do you know what I love about the way you created that analysis? I loved the way you put in sensitivity in all the key variables because we don’t know what the future will look like, and that allows us to have an understanding of what the boundaries might be.”

“Do you know what I love about the way you ran that customer meeting today? It was carefully how you listened to their needs and made sure to tailor our message to it.” These are the kinds of things that reinforce for people what they should be doing.

Showing up for work, like things that are table stakes like you described, the kinds of things that if you don’t do, you just sort of get canned. Yeah, let’s stir clear of those. You’re exactly right. They become patronizing. But the thing you have to remember is the people on your teams are doing a lot more well than they’re doing poorly. And my evidence is you’re not walking around firing everybody.

And so, start calling those things out. And if you do things in general terms or unthoughtfully, you’ll run into the risk you just described. If you do things carefully and thoughtfully, you not only help people reinforce what they’re supposed to be doing, but you actually demonstrate that you recognize what they’re doing.

Like, how many times have you heard people say that their boss has no idea what they do? It’s like it’s an illness. But if you are regularly feeding back to people that you saw what they did, liked what they did, and why it matters, they can never hold the perspective that their manager doesn’t know what they do. So, it’s more of those kinds of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so you’re a buffoon but you know what they’re doing.

Russ Laraway
Yeah, you can still be a buffoon, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so now you got me thinking about I like how that five-to-one grounds us there in terms of the goods. And I’m sure this is going to vary quite a lot based upon the nature of your relationship with the employees and the work and various spans and layers. But if I’m thinking five-to-one, do you have a sense of the range of like, I don’t know, the daily or weekly volume or monthly volume of coaching? Like, is there an amount that’s too little or too much?

Russ Laraway
Yes, probably the both. And too little is easy. Here comes your sixth month review and you’ve received no coaching at all. That’s too little. I actually think I get this question about too much a lot, and I think it’s actually a phantom problem. I think almost nobody’s at risk of over-praising. I really don’t. I know that in theory or conceptually or before they get into it, like as they listen to this prescription, because I get this question all the time, they believe there’s this big risk of over-praising, and it’s just very unlikely.

But the mental model I’d use, Pete, is so I mentioned six months, it’s perfect. Sixth month reviews happen. How often do you get your teeth cleaned, out of curiosity?

Pete Mockaitis
Not quite every six months but my wife once tweeted, “Getting my husband to go to the dentist is like pulling teeth.”

Russ Laraway
That’s a great tweet.

Pete Mockaitis
So, once or twice a year-ish.

Russ Laraway
Okay. It should be, I think, ideally, it should be four times a year.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that true?

Russ Laraway
That’s how often I go, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, the insurance only covers two in the US.

Russ Laraway
Oh, then maybe I’ve got that wrong. Let’s just call it two since that seems to be what we’re both settling in on.

Pete Mockaitis
Gee, Russ.

Russ Laraway
Well, I’m a hyper…I create plaque very, very well. I’m talented at making plaques so I got to go a little more often. But besides the point, it’s a long period of time. How often do you brush and floss, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, every day. Well, flossing is not every day but brushing definitely is, and flossing happens…I don’t actually have a good number for you.

Russ Laraway
It’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
More than I go to the dentist. I floss more than I go to the dentist but not every day, yeah.

Russ Laraway
Yeah, all good. And so, let’s see what happens. That trip that you hate making to the dentist, does it go better or worse if you haven’t brushed and flossed the previous time period?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s definitely better when you do it. You get less disappointment, judgment, time scraping.

Russ Laraway
Time scraping, which is, we agree, the worst. So, this is the mental model for coaching. You want to be way more on the brushing and flossing cadence, which might be a few times a week. Sometimes if the situation calls for it, we could be in for a couple of days but you’re on the field. Just imagine an athletic coach, if you can. If you watch sports, or if you’ve played sports, or if you’re at least a little familiar with sports, hopefully that covers everybody. The coach, it’s energetic and it’s constant, and it’s both things. It’s how you can be better, what you should continue, that was well done, here’s why.

So, it’s more like brushing and flossing and less like going to get a root canal, which, by the way, the root canal is a practical…it’s on the same evolutionary path if you don’t coach every day. If you don’t brush or floss a day, a root canal…

Pete Mockaitis
It’s coming your way.

Russ Laraway
It’s coming your way. That’s right. PIPS is coming your way.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you. Thank you. So, I like that. So, there is a wide range but this is the ballpark we’re talking about. And I don’t know if you know, it sounds like you do from Qualtrics and your research, like do we know roughly what proportion of managers fall into the camp of near-zero coaching or don’t know what their employees are doing?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, I think at Qualtrics, our managers were very good because, first, we selected them for their leadership disposition not because of their tenure or because they were good individual contributors. So, we had a really positive selection bias that they were at least mentally aligned, if not skillfully aligned, with how we wanted them to lead.

Then we explicitly taught them the leadership standard. So, select, teach. Then we assess them from the perspective of their employees, and then we coach them. So, that’s STAC, select, teach, assess, coach, so we could stack up a bunch of great managers. Our managers actually got measurably better over the four years I was there and we added 500 managers.

So, our managers were, because of a very intentional approach, we knew that they were holding the keys. And we knew as a group of humans at the company, they were holding the keys. And we knew that if they led our people better, they would be more likely to create the circumstances under which people could do great work rather than destroy them.

And so, our data is heavily biased towards strong management, and the company’s engagement was always high 80s, like extremely high. And the company is now, by the way, sixth straight beaten Rays, as a publicly held company. Our managers are creating the circumstances under which people do incredible work that shows up in the company’s results. So, that was Qualtrics and it’s biased in a very positive direction.

Yeah, if global engagement is 15% and in the US it’s 33, still really, really bad, this strongly suggests that the overwhelming majority of managers out there, they’re not actively coaching their teams, they’re not giving praise for good work, they’re not engaged in people’s long-term career aspirations, they’re not crystal clear on exactly what is expected of the people on their team.

They don’t co-develop the team’s direction with the team members. Remember, it’s their team too. And so, I don’t have a number for you, Pete, but I can tell you that the evidence, the engagement evidence strongly suggests most managers aren’t even doing the basics.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I guess if listeners who are managers, you start doing that, that’d be great. And those who are not yet managers, and they say, “Hey, you’re right, Russ. My manager doesn’t know what I’m doing. I’d like for that to start.” Any pro tips or how to broach that conversation or what could be done for the individual contributor who’s in that spot?

Russ Laraway
Yeah. So, I have a little, a couple prescriptions in the book that I think would work well here. The first one I have is called…I call it coaching the boss. And so, for managers that, for example, don’t proactively ask for input from their teams, recognizing this isn’t really sustainable for anyone, most people don’t like to be in a team where their manager won’t hear them, I created a little prescription for how to proactively surface some feedback to the boss. And, again, usually more.

It’s not hard to tell the boss when they’re doing well. It’s much harder to tell the boss when something on the team, or the boss themselves, is doing poorly. And so, that four-step process is, first is manage your risk. And what I mean by that is if you work for a retaliator, just end of process. You’re done. Like, if they don’t like to hear, if they tend to behave poorly after someone tells them, “Things could be better around here,” just polish up your resume, find a new boss. Life is too short.

But most managers actually aren’t retaliators. And so, the first thing to do is what I call gather your boss’ unique contexts. So, a lot of times an employee is really sure they’re right; and they’re not. They have a valuable perspective that’s actually likely closer to the facts on the ground but being right, possessing truth in the workplace is like a really high bar. Like, my truth is not the truth. It’s the sort of the idea.

And so, instead of going in being sure you’re right, the first step is actually to gather your boss’ unique contexts, which means don’t assume your boss doesn’t know anything about the topic at hand. Instead, assume they know something and then try to pull that out of them. And what you might learn is your boss is not paying attention to this for really good reasons. You might learn that your boss is like really blind to the problem and their sort of lack of attention is unintentional.

And you might learn that they know exactly the nature of the problem and they’re just specifically deprioritizing it for following reasons. You could learn any of those things. But before you go in there, guns a-blazing, sure you’re right, actually go in and find out what your manager knows and how important they think this thing is.

And so, that’s kind of the first step. Well, first step was manage your risk, second is gather your boss’ unique contexts. Now, with their contexts, if you still think it makes sense to share what you see, which is a reasonable thing to conclude, that’s the evaluation you have to make. And so, now you have to make a decision, “Okay, I think I want to share this.”

And I think the third step is ask permission, which might sound like this, “Okay, boss, I think I see things a little bit differently than you do. Are you open to hearing that?” A very large percentage of the time, when presented that way, they will say yes. If they say no, go back to the polish-up-your-resume step and go find another boss because who wants to work for that person? That person is an ass-clown manager, for sure, and our mission here is to rid the world of ass-clown managers. But most managers will say yes and actually mean it.

And now that they’ve said yes, I believe step four is it’s Nike, you just do it. You got to do it. Now, you’ve got an obligation. The team will be better, the manager will be more successful, you are likely to be more successful, and so now you have, I think at this point, you’ve gone through the steps carefully. Now, you have an obligation, I think, to deliver the hard feedback to the manager. But you’ve gone about it in a very high-quality way. You haven’t assumed you’re right, you asked permission, and now it’s time to give the feedback.

So, that’s a way to start a positive cycle with the boss, where maybe your voice will get heard more often. Do that once or twice, maybe the manager starts to come ask you because they know you’ll shoot them straight. Maybe they start to ask other people on the team. You could actually jumpstart a culture of a manager listening to their people by running this process a few times with your manager.

Pete Mockaitis
Inspiring. Thank you. You’ve got a turn-of-a-phrase I must dig into, that’s a bit of a swift transition here, “Ruthless prioritization.” Where does this fit in to being a great contributor and manager? And how do we do it well?

Russ Laraway
Yeah. So, I’m going to guess that a lot of your listeners are kind of high-performing types. And if I may, I’m going to say your listeners are a bunch of Lisa Simpsons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah, plays saxophone.

Russ Laraway
Do you know who that is?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, The Simpsons. She’s a high achiever in school and her activities.

Russ Laraway
Boom. Lisa Simpson, as you correctly indicated, is bright. She’s polymathic. She’s got a lot of interests. Plays saxophone, like you mentioned, and she’s ambitious. And so, I’m guessing you know your listeners well. You allowed me to know them well before I interviewed. I walked away saying, “That’s a bunch of Lisa Simpsons.” So, that’s one part of this prioritization problem. And I’ll get to the problem in a moment.

The second part is the environments we find ourselves in. I’ve been at large companies and small companies, hyper growth, not that, and what is common in almost every workplace I’ve been in is there’s some chaos. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing all the time, things are moving very quickly.

Pete, it turns out, when you put Lisa Simpsons into those environments, it creates a prioritization problem. And what I mean by that is you have the kind of people who are interested and capable of doing a lot of things, and an environment that has ostensibly a lot of things to do, and then those Lisa Simpsons might just try to do it all.

And that is a very, very…that’s a fast-track to mediocrity. So, prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition. It is about learning how to say no politely, which I offer a prescription for in the book. You have to say no politely, that’s the key. And I have this little inequality that I offer, which is three is greater than two is greater than four. Now, does that sound right to you?

Pete Mockaitis
Not from a strictly mathematical perspective, but I’m hearing you when it comes to prioritization. Keep going.

Russ Laraway
If you have more than three priorities, you have none, and that’s how I can say three is greater than two is greater than four, and that’s for a day. And for a week, it might be five. I’ll allow five. And so, here’s what this looks like, practically. On Monday, the first thing you should do, before you look at email, before you get involved in any projects, write down the five most important things you need to get done that week given the goals that your OKRs or the goals you have for yourself that quarter.

And then each day, ideally, including Monday, write down the three things you’ve got to get done that day. Three things you’ve got to get done that day. and these things can adjust a little bit. But, again, given the goals you have for yourself that quarter, try to be specific and use that to hold yourself accountable. Your priority list is not a task list. Those are really different ideas. Task lists are not prioritized nearly exclusively.

Constrain to the three most important things you’ve got to get done that day. And it’s okay to check those, “Hey, boss, these are the things I think are most important for me to get done this week. Do you agree?” And then even give your boss maybe a chance to affect that list. Sometimes it’s things, because they’ll change it quite a bit, and maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but you can negotiate. It’s better to have their buy-in than not.

But that’s what ruthless prioritization is. It’s remembering that if you have more than three, you have none. Prioritization is an exercise in subtraction, not addition. And, ultimately, it’s about learning how to say no politely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And these three things, it’s so funny, I can bundle…I’m a master of bundling things big and small, so if I don’t want to do the hard decision-making of ruthless prioritization, I’d be like, “Oh, podcast stuff is one of my three important things today,” but that’s actually six things underneath there. So, any guidelines in terms of what constitutes a thing or how big or small a thing can or should be in a day?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, actually a really good insight. So, what you just talked about is something that I cover a bit in the book but I pull from another source. A guy named Dr. David Rock who wrote a book called Your Brain at Work. And this guy has got a PhD but what he does is he consumes a lot of research about the brain, and then he smartly applies it to the workplace.

And so, he has a funny phrase called “prioritize prioritizing,” and that sounds silly but it’s actually quite useful. And the reason is because, as you suggested, prioritization is a very prefrontal cortex intensive process, meaning it is very hard work. And if you don’t know, your brain consists of obviously a number of parts, but two main ones. It’s your sort of hindbrain, which is literally in the back. It’s your brain stem, your amygdala, the part that controls emotion and fight-or-flight type responses. It’s strong, it’s old, and it’s efficient at processing glucose and oxygen.

Your prefrontal cortex, really what makes us human, that’s your problem-solving, logic, reason. It’s really small, sadly, for us. It’s weak and it’s relatively new. And it’s weak in terms of processing glucose and oxygen. By the way, they don’t work together. So, if you’ve ever said, “I was so scared I couldn’t think,” that’s a true statement. That’s your hindbrain overwhelming your prefrontal cortex. But, nonetheless, we only have so many repetitions for our prefrontal cortex in a day.

People like Mark Zuckerberg, for example, wears literally the same outfit every day because he takes one decision off the table, and he knows he’s only got so many good decisions, which come from your prefrontal cortex, available to him. Kim Scott who wrote Radical Candor does the same thing. She wears these coral-colored sweaters and blue jeans every single day, with a white T-shirt, to take one decision off the table.

And so, people are inclined to avoid the hard work of thinking about their priorities for a day. And so, David Rocks says, “You actually have to prioritize prioritizing.” So, the first thing to do, before we get into what’s good or what’s bad, is you have to carve…like, I used to carve out time, do not schedule time. I’m an early bird, so I would carve out from 7:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. every day to make sure I did this well, and on Mondays for the week and each day.

And, in fact, when we hit the pandemic, my team and I, we set up a process in the Slack bot where at midnight, whatever time zone you’re in, the Slack bot prompted you for your top three priorities for that day. And we would each add them in so we could observe each other’s priorities.

These are meaningful chunks of work. So, podcast stuff, you’re right, would be a bad one but a better example would be maybe last week, on Monday, maybe one of the things you needed to get done was, at least, skim my book in preparation for the interview. That’s a very tangible example. By the way, you know the interview is coming next week, “Russ is going to be on next Thursday, and so I’ve got to, at least, get through this book conceptually, if not in detail.” I’m letting you off the hook because I’m the slowest reader on the planet and I know I couldn’t pull it out in a week.

So, that might be a very specific example. You know you’ve got to interview me. You know you’ve got to prepare. And your number one sort of tool to prepare would be the book. And so, that’s a very specific example, contemplates sort of what you’re trying to get done in the future, and that’s much more tangible. And, by the way, it answers two really important questions, “What?” and “By when?” The “Who?” is implied. An action item in life always answers those three questions, “Who will do what by when?”

If you’re writing your own priorities down, or thinking about your own priorities, the who is implied because it’s you. But what and when should be very clearly implied. And so, this can be a catchall, like podcast stuff is not particularly useful but the specific stuff you got to get done, given the interviews you got coming up the following week or the following month, whatever it is, those specific items, those are the things that you have to prioritize, and don’t do another thing until you’ve knocked those most important things out.

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

Russ Laraway
Yeah, I think we covered it. That was a really good interview, Pete. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, “Success comes when opportunity meets preparation.” And the reason I like this quote is because you’ve heard people that are a little too self-assured, a little too “I’m self-made,” and not really accounting for the advantages they might’ve had in life. On the flipside, you hear people that are excessively humble, like, “Oh, I just got lucky.”

Neither of those people is accurate, I think. I think that, for all of us, it’s important to be aware that our success is really a function of a little bit of luck and a little bit of skill. And you put in the work, you try to develop your skills, you try to be ready, and when those lucky opportunities emerge, you’re a little more ready to seize them. And I think it presents a virtuous cycle.

But this sort of what I hammer with my kids, actually. It’s not your innate smarts. Calvin Coolidge has an incredible long quote on this, “It’s not your innate smarts, it’s not just your talent, it’s not your station in life; it’s your grit, your resilience, and your willingness to put in the work.” And then, in turns out, the more work you put in, sometimes the luckier you get but, still, there’s a lot of luck involved. So, success comes when opportunity meets preparation.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Russ Laraway
Yeah, my favorite book for a long time has been A Separate Peace by Jonathan Knowles. I had to read it in high school, and it really moved me. It’s a dark story set at a private school, and the characters are really phenomenally well-developed archetypes. But, for me, the book, I can’t give it away, but the book shows very clearly consequences for small actions. There’s a moment in the book where there’s a very small action. It’s well-known in literature, it’s when character A jounces the limb, that’s the phrase used, and everything that happens from that point after is really dark and bad.

And I always loved that book because I think it’s important for many reasons. It’s taught in many high schools for a reason. But this notion of the kinds of consequences and accountability that can be huge for even some of the smallest actions, I think, is an important thing to take away. So, yeah, I’ve loved that book for a lot of years. And, I guess, now that I think about it, it’s still my favorite.

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

Russ Laraway
Yeah, pretty easy, Pete, www.WhenTheyWinYouWin.com, probably the easiest way to get in touch.

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

Russ Laraway
So, when I was at Google back in 2005, I noticed pretty quickly that we had a lot of really new, really young managers who were, nearly by definition, unskilled because they were new, there wasn’t really a training program, and they were young. We were growing so fast and giving people huge amounts of responsibilities.

And I noticed that even when the managers would fail to exhibit some of the most basic behaviors, that their teams still often delivered. And it occurred to me that the reason for that was that our average talent level at the company was so incredibly strong that they would actually often cover up for the inadequacies of many of the managers.

And I wondered, “Is that replicable? How valuable is it to know what to expect from a manager, or what is expected of your manager, by their manager, and to drive your behaviors even when the manager is not giving you everything you need or want, can you, nonetheless, figure out what is probably expected and deliver in alignment with those things, and almost cover up for your manager’s own inadequacies?”

I think it’s a really interesting framing and there’s lots of places you could go to learn what the kinds of things that might be expected of a manager, like, for example, When They Win, You Win, is a great place I recommend to start. But I think you’re not a victim; you’re a player. Victims are powerless; players are powerful.

And if you’re not getting everything you need from your manager, and you’re feeling like they’re not invested in your success, you can actually kind of take the bull by the horns and change your trajectory with that manager. So, that’s my last call to action.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Russ, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and many wins.

Russ Laraway
Thanks. I really appreciate it, Pete. Back at you.

May 16
0

768: How to Embrace Generational Differences and Resolve Conflict with Chris De Santis

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Chris De Santis shares helpful insights about each generation and how to work more effectively across ages.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to turn generational friction into an opportunity 
  2. How to give feedback that works for every generation
  3. How to motivate people from every generation 

About Chris

Chris De Santis is a speaker, author, consultant, and most recently podcaster specializing in Management and Organizational Development issues and interventions. He specializes in assisting individuals or groups in identifying and overcoming obstacles to effectiveness. He brings with him thirty-eight years of experience in training and development. He has an undergraduate degree in business from the University of Notre Dame, a graduate degree in Organizational Development from Loyola University in Chicago, an MBA from the University of Denver, and previous work experience in manufacturing, professional services, and not-for-profit environments.  

His book, Why I Find you Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work, will be available in May 2022 but until then you can listen to his advice podcast, “Cubicle Confidential” along with his co-host, Mary Abbajay. He resides in a quiet corner of Lincoln Park in Chicago. 

Resources Mentioned

Chris De Santis Interview Transcript

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

Chris De Santis
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, first, I think we need to understand you and your history with improv classes. What’s the story here?

Chris De Santis
Yes, yes, yes. I moved to Chicago probably…I live in Chicago, if anybody’s interested, and I moved into an area called Old Town about, oh, 30 some years ago, and I had some friends in the city. And Old Town is the heartland of Second City, and so I was told, actually, a good way to make friends was to take improv classes.

And the other reason was I’m a little bit of a…I have a bit of stage fright issue, and so I was told this might help me with that. I ended up taking improv classes from Paul Sills. And if anybody’s listening, Paul Sills is the son of Viola Spolin. And if anybody knows who that is, Viola Spolin wrote improv in the theater, and that’s sort of the basis for Second City.

So, I had access to one of the gurus of the time, although I never quite leveraged it to the degree he did, but I ended up teaching a while at a local theater here, too, so it was a very fun experience. I recommend it to anyone who’s introverted.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. I did a Second City five-day intensive improv class once, and it was a lot of fun. And I remember saying, telling my friends, “Oh, it’s nice. I feel like it loosened me up.” And my friends said, “Did you need to be loosened?” Well, compared to my…

Chris De Santis
Did you do a show? Did you do a show afterwards?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, well, not like with a big old audience but it was just sort of I think, the dozen of us doing our thing.

Chris De Santis
The games.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Chris De Santis
I love the games. Really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s fun. Well, now, I want to hear a bit about your book Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work. What’s the big idea here?

Chris De Santis
Well, the whole point of this book is really to understand the differences between us. And so, in that sense, in fact, the title’s curious because I had submitted 37 titles to the publisher.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow. I love it. That’s what we do.

Chris De Santis
And this is the one they liked.

Pete Mockaitis
We get tons of title options and they choose the best one every time. Thank you.

Chris De Santis
And so, they liked this because I think it really makes the point that we are, in some way, irritated with others across one difference that we recognize, this is one of those difference that we readily recognize, and we ascribe it to them as if they’re at fault and we, of course, are not, meaning that we’re the objective view of reality. And so, what my book goes on to talk about where this comes from and the repercussions of this, and then what to do about it in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Well, so we’re talking about generational friction, and this is always a delicate matter because I think, Chris, there’s probably no way around it. We’re going to be making some generalizations here. Is that fair to say?

Chris De Santis
Yes. Well, that’s part of what I talk about in the book, but humans do that, humans generalize.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess, first of all, how do we define the generations? And are we coming at it from a US-centric base here or is it kind of global in applicability?

Chris De Santis
Now, you’re making some very good points because when I speak to this topic, I have to go through a whole series of caveats, to your point. The first one being you generalize or I generalize, and I’m not describing humanity. I’m describing some actions of a normative group in the middle class in the United States of America who conform to certain experiences at certain times that sort of shape a perception.

So, in that sense, it is a smaller subset. It is not global even though, it’s interesting, I’ve spoken around the world on this, oddly enough. I’m always amazed I’m invited anywhere but I had talked about it. And so, when you talk about it globally, you have to say some of these things but, still, even having done that, they still see differences that correspond to the American experience, which I think is interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Chris, so we’re going to do some generalizing. First, we need to define some terms. Generations, how do we name them these days and what is roughly the median age of a person representing each generation, say, in summer 2022 as we record this?

Chris De Santis
Yes. So, if we go with Boomers, you know where that came from “baby boom,” so everyone knows that one. There was a great number of us born in that window of time after the war, and that would be that 65 or 67-year-old today in the median group, and we’re retiring out, about half of us are retired. Gen X got its name from the book. There was simply just one book written about them. They fly below the radar quite a bit, and, of course, their median age, according to what we’re playing here, is around 45 to 47.

Then the next crowd, Millennials, had a different name. They were originally in the literature for a while. They were Gen Y because Gen X, Gen Y but that never caught on. And I think that they responded much better to, or it was foisted upon them, the idea of a Millennial simply because of the turning of the century, the millennium.

And now, we have Gen Z, which were called Zoomers or the Zoom generation, but I think that fizzled as well by virtue of the fact of Zoom. And so now they’ve gotten the Gen Z moniker, again, because they’re going in sequence. And the next generation, interestingly, these new kids, they’re calling Gen Alpha because they’re starting it again, but I don’t think they’ll have a name until they define who they are, and then we’ll lay a label on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, Gen Z would be about 18-ish to 22.

Chris De Santis
18-ish, right.

Pete Mockaitis
Your fresh recruits.

Chris De Santis
Exactly right. They are in the workplace right now. They’ve just entered.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, there we go, four generations. And so, you say…well, I guess, we’ll go into particulars in terms of frictions but maybe just to cue us up with some intrigue, is there a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made as you dug into all this stuff associated with generational friction?

Chris De Santis
Well, what I came to, not necessarily conclusion, but one of the things I did notice that I thought was really a shaping aspect of this is, it’s not just the flashbulb memories that you have that sort of shape you, it’s also the parenting model. It’s how you were parented affects how you interact with others. So, I’m a product, as a Boomer, I’m a product of sort of a permissive authoritarian parent so I sort of had to get in line with things.

And so, if we think about of a Gen Xer, these are those latchkey kids. And so, they had more of a permissive sort of a sensibility about how they interacted because they basically are far more independent on their own. Millennials are part of what would be concerted cultivation in terms of how they were raised, and I will call that an engaged-discuss model. They’re always engaged in discussions as to what they should or need to do.

Gen Z has a variation of that model called co-piloting. The point being here is that those needs or the expectation of dialogue is what they bring into the office. Yet, in the office, they are not necessarily expected to engage in dialogue but, rather, to be subject to the authority of the people that are in charge. And the people in charge often view this as a challenge when they say, “Well, what about this?” and you’re going, “Whoa, I just told you what to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, there we go, we’re getting into the meat of it – an expectation of dialogue. Sometimes the younger generations may expect some more and the older generations think that’s not necessary, “I’ve already told you that,” and so that can create some friction on both sides.

Chris De Santis
That’s exactly right because the other thing about the young is interesting, to a great degree, and if you’re around parents, and I try to observe parents sort of surreptitiously when I’m with people, is that they negotiate more with their children as opposed to demand they do something. So, there’s a discussion, of course, that’s inherent in the negotiation.

And I think the young now are excellent negotiators and they bring that to any conversation they have, and we, in management, or if you’re in a management position, you’re not open to a negotiation when you’re telling somebody to do something but it comes off very strangely in terms of my expectation. If I’m a young person, my expectation, “Why wouldn’t I have this dialogue?” Conversely, “Why are we having a dialogue?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that’s so funny, I think, because I’ve got a three-year-old and a four-year-old right now…

Chris De Santis
You have young children, yes?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I really go…I guess I go both ways in terms of like I don’t like to yell.

Chris De Santis
No, and you won’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Because they get sensitive and really sad really fast, I was like, “Oh, I was just trying to make myself heard because you seem to be sort of in your own world over there. Now, I feel like I’ve overdone it because you’re getting all sniffly.” So, yeah, but at the time it’s sort of like, “There’s no need for us to be discussing. You do what I say.” And other times, at the same time, I want them to be kind of creative and free and expressive.

So, it’s funny, here I am, I guess a Millennial, in this schema, and I am in the midst of it right there in terms of when I say, “Get in the car right now, Johnny,” versus like, “Well, hey, it’s getting to be about that time, you know.”

Chris De Santis
Yes, you are biased towards suggestion than demand. And I’ll tell you another thing that you probably do quite a bit, Pete, that you may not notice that you do is you explain why you do what you do. You explain why you’re doing this. You don’t assume that they’re going to understand that this is a command but rather, “This is why I have to say this to you to do this.” And that’s part and parcel to the expectation that they have in the workplace, too, this whole idea of, what’s his name, Sinek’s book, Start with Why. That’s really what they’re asking, to a great degree, is why.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chris De Santis
You did this, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, that’s one point of friction is expectation of dialogue. How about another one?

Chris De Santis
Well, again, a lot of this just depends on with whom we are talking about. For instance, this notion of loyalty, which is very interesting. The accusation that we, a Boomer, is far more loyal in our disposition than those who follow. That, of course, I outline in the book, is really about the movement from the company-man experience to a transactional workplace.

And the company-man experience was really one of the assumptions that, “You will work here for the duration. And as a consequence, I will reward you, deferred reward, and that will be rewarded as a pension to some degree.” So, the inference is, “You have this job for life if you do what I want and the way I need it.” Now, what we have done is we’ve moved transactionally, and now it’s a negotiation a minute.

For instance, one of the things that most annoys some Boomers is that when they interview, the young will ask, “Well, what are the benefits? What’s the vacation time here? So, what do I get for this?” And, in my day, that would’ve been seen as “What? Why? I’m offering you a job and you deign to ask me all of these things about the benefits? You’re getting a job.” But they’re saying, “This is a transaction. I’m going to be doing something for you. I expect something in return.” So, it becomes more marketplace-driven.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny because, in some ways, I resist being generalized.

Chris De Santis
No, no, I understand.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet I completely…I, 100%, am down with the transactional vibe. It’s just like, “No, the wealth structures and pensions do not exist, and it is a competitive marketplace, and it’s just economic fact that I have many opportunities available to me, and you have many opportunities of people you can hire. And so, we’re going to see if we have something that works for both of us in terms of this is a role that I think is swell and meaningful and a compensation package that works, and you think I’ve got the skills and knowledge, skills, abilities to deliver the value that you need delivered, and either one of us will walk.”

And so, it’s sort of like, “I don’t think you owe me anything and you don’t seem to…” you being the employer here in this dialogue. I think it’s just a reality we know that an employer will cut us loose at any moment that they feel that it would be more profitable for them to do so and, thusly, I have no…I’ve been self-employed for a long time but I guess that’s sort of…

Chris De Santis
By the way, that’s interesting. I can talk to that as well in a moment, but you’ve said the key here is that this is the new reality. It wasn’t the old reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Chris De Santis
Exactly right. So, the new reality has shifted in terms of what you expect in this transaction.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess, so my thought is like, I don’t know, when people talk about what’s right or wrong, or sometimes they say, “Oh, we know nothing is right or wrong. It’s just different expectations and generations and how we were brought up.” And I’m thinking, “Well, no, it would be foolish, it would be unwise to operate in a false reality. It’s like one thing doesn’t exists to you so don’t make decisions as though it does or you may get the rug pulled out from under you.”

And I guess I’m a little paranoid about this, Chris, I don’t know. That’s why I went into strategy consulting, I was like, “Develop an amazing skillset so that you can do anything.” And then How to be Awesome at Your Job, it’s like, “Okay, all the listeners, develop an incredible universal skillset so that you’re fine. No matter what the robots do, no matter what your jerk boss does, you are bulletproof because you’re like Liam Neeson with a particular set of skills that make you extremely valuable in any work environment.” You got me on a hot soapbox, Chris.

Chris De Santis
Well, this is the point, one of the points you’re making, the new reality, to your point, Pete, supports this idea of employability, “Look, I have to be employable.” The key. And in defense of the notion of loyalty in the young, they are more likely to be loyal to you, “If you treat me in a way that recognizes how I make the contributions I make, and what I do on your behalf,” and they’re less loyal to the organization which is an abstraction.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay, cool. So, there’s expectation of dialogue, loyalty. Maybe give us one more thing where people differ significantly.

Chris De Santis
Another. Oh, well, I think, actually, as a consequence of the pandemic, one obvious thing where we are differing or we’re furthering apart is where senior management believes everyone should come back, and everyone else believes, “I think I like it at home,” and so we have a huge rift. It’s almost the opposites of each other. When you have senior management, 77% say, “We want them all back,” and the people, basically, young employees in particular who have now experienced this freedom, want to stay free relative to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Chris De Santis
You also had said something interesting, Pete, because it’s been bubbling up in each generation, it’s doing a little bit more of this, is that each one is more entrepreneurial than the generation that preceded it. You are creating in your own children the desire to have an independent life. And part of the messaging, you will never say that out loud, you don’t have to say that, but you behave in a way that says, “You can create your own destiny.” And we are really pushing the envelope on individualism and the creation of these independent people. I think we’ll, eventually, all be freelancers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so here we are, we’ve got some points of friction and that show up across generations. What do we do? What’s the best way to navigate them and work peacefully and effectively across generations then?

Chris De Santis
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting, part of it has to do is be very clear on your expectations. I think that’s one of the things we don’t do. You see, I’m used to a world of ambiguity. I was raised with guessing right. And if you guess right, you move forward. Nobody actually told me the whys and the whats of things, but rather I’ll know it when I see it, which was a common refrain in management at one point in time.

And so, the young, to a great degree, want to know, really, what the rules are to achieve, “How do I navigate this environment?” I think I kind of use the analogy of video games. They want to know how to get to the next level, “How do you get to next level? How do you do this? How do you play the game?” So, I think it’s very important to share the expectations of how you operate with the people who are making you successful.

So, if I’m a manager, I should be telling you, “This is how I manage. This is what I would expect from you. What do you need from me to achieve here? How do we stay in touch?” those kinds of things. If I may give you a point of contention that’s very trivial but it’s one that comes up is that, “How do we stay in touch?”

I have a person I work with who I’ve used to make videos, and he will only contact me through a text. He will never pick up his phone, and I like it when people talk to me. In fact, I like it when they sort of see me. But, in this case, his mode of connection is a text. It’s not that he’s not willing to talk to me. It’s just how he’s more comfortable connecting with me. So, I think part of this is we have to get aligned who we are to each other, and how do we stay connected.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say we’ve got a younger person, say a Millennial, who is the manager of a Boomer. So, that happens. Any pro tips when it’s sort of moving in a direction which might be different than what we’re imagining?

Chris De Santis
I think one of the challenges with that is it’s not just the Millennial-Boomer difference, it’s a stage of life difference, meaning that, “Look, I have 35 years of experience under my belt,” let’s say. “You, young whipper-snapper, have only been doing this for three years, and you’re managing me.” I think there’s an ego that steps in here that says, “Oh, my gosh, is this affecting my ego?” through the lens of the Boomer.

I think it’s prudent for the Millennial to draw from the more experienced person’s experiences as much as they can to say, “Here’s what I’d like to do. What do you think on how to do that?” It doesn’t mean that they’re foregoing the decision that they own, but rather they’re drawing from the other person some level of commitment by allowing them to tell them what they do know about this area that could be useful, and then I will fold that in. You see, it’s almost being some kind of combination between deferential and respectful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, gotcha. Okay. Well, bring it on some more, Chris. Any more tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts in this new generational world? Yeah, we’re collaborating, like watchouts and best practices, I dig it, being clear on expectations. What else?

Chris De Santis
Well, this idea of how we connect. Our methodology of connection, I think, is interesting. One of those is, I’m a Boomer so my methodology of connection is I like seeing you, I’d like to meet you, we’ll meet. This is our idea of networking. Let’s go meet people. Let’s join things. Now, we know that from bowling alone that people aren’t joining anymore. So, in that sense, the methodology of connection for a Gen Xer is not so much that I know you as the person, but I know that you are competent in what you do.

You see, when you’re dealing with somebody in that category, who is I will call a little more private in their revealing of who they are, they reveal more slowly over time. They’re sort of like unfold over time, and they will reveal themselves as the competency of the relationship becomes more solidified, meaning that, “You show me you’re good at something, I’ll show who I am.”

And so, as it relates to that, the young are more open again. The Millennial is, you’ve heard this expression, they share too much?

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-huh, I’ve heard this.

Chris De Santis
Well, I don’t know if they do share too much. I think what we often hear from them is that…or, actually, so there’s commenting about them, saying they share too much. When, in fact, they’re not oversharing; they’re just in the habit of sharing who they are with others, and their methodology of connection is to self-reveal. For instance, you talk to your kids on a daily basis, I would imagine, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, yeah.

Chris De Santis
Right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Chris De Santis
So, if you do, when you talk to your kids on a daily basis, you probably ask them each day, “What did you do today? What did you today?” Do they share that?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s hit or miss.

Chris De Santis
Well, that’s interesting because, normally, and a lot of times, because I overhear…again, remember I talked about I observe these parents, is that they’ll tell what they did today. And I think that gets in the habit of how they reveal who they are to others, and so they’re not necessarily oversharing. They’re finding a way to connect with another, and then their expectation is implicit reciprocity, “I’ve told you who I am. Tell me a little bit about more of you.” So, they’re open to the discourse between us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Cool. What else in terms of do’s and don’ts here?

Chris De Santis
Okay. I was thinking, “Should I go uphill or downhill with this?” It’s so interesting. I do think that, again, going back to some of this, how we are different, I think one of the things that’s going to be very important going forward is how we decide to mentor. The young want to be mentored in a more deliberate capacity where it used to be more of an organic experience, meaning that I just discover you, and I say, “Oh, you seem to be a young version of me.”

And if we’re going to live in a world that embraces greater diversity, we have to be more deliberate in how we mentor people. But my problem with that is, and here’s where the friction lies, when you use a term like, “I’m assigning you to be my mentee,” Pete, it infers intimacy that we don’t have. And so, in that sense, we should start more from the backend here, just have an advisor to each other that allows us to open up more slowly because I think intimacy is something that is earned as opposed to assumed.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. I hear you. That checks out, like, “This is your protégé, this is your mentor.” It’s like, “Oh, really?” They do tend to, in my experience….

Chris De Santis
And then, again, the other problem I have with that is that they tend to assume that, “Now that you’re my mentor, you are also my sponsor.” And, again, we don’t define these things very well. And a sponsor is different than a mentor. A sponsor, of course, is somebody who’s going to look out for you and get you promoted. A mentor is really someone who’s going to give you advice on what they’ve learned in certain areas where you might seem to have some issues that you want to share in terms of solving problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. And, tell me, if we do find ourselves in maybe a heated exchange, like we got some real tension, intergenerationally, do you have some tips on how we might navigate that smoothly or cool things down a bit?

Chris De Santis
Yeah, because I think a heated exchange is typically in the area, in my view, because one of the myths about the young is, in general, that they’re very sensitive to feedback. I think that people will say, “I’m not convinced that they are sensitive to feedback. I’m convinced that all people are sensitive to feedback.” And so, in that sense, I think sometimes we give feedback as a conclusion as opposed to the behaviors.

And so, I have no problem with somebody saying, “Okay, Pete, hey, you’re not really doing a great job being a team player.” That’s the headline but you can’t stop there. You can’t just expect the young person say, “Okay, I’ll be a better team player.” Well, what does that mean? So, I think what we have to do is we have to be more explanatory. We have to say what are the behaviors.

And then, because, again, these are children of dialogue, as it were, we should be willing to have a discussion about, “Well, what does that look like? And what are the ways to shape that behavior, or change that behavior? And how do I support that effort? And how do I know it happened?” So, again, we have to move away from just a pure tell model to more of a dialogue model because that’s an expectation, and, quite frankly, it has greater stickiness when you’re in dialogue with somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’d also like to get your view when it comes to just sort of motivation, in terms of we hear listeners say, “Oh, you know what, my peers,” or direct reports, or others, “are just not motivated. They’re kind of phoning it in.” Do you have any pro tips, in terms of are there different carrots and/or sticks or drivers that tend to be more compelling for each of the generations?

Chris De Santis
Well, I think part of the key here is that this is where we’re moving beyond the generational differences into more the stage of life, “Where are you in your life? And what might you want then?” And so, for instance, the young are still probably, to some degree, deciding, “Who I will become?” And so, what motivates me is, “What do I want to develop in terms of my skillsets? So, where are my skills? And where do I want to hone those skills?”

So, part of the motivation is, again, this goes back to engaging people, is to find out, well, what they’re interested in doing better, or more of, and trying to find circumstances that you can supply that. That becomes the carrot, as it were. So, I think that works very well. Now, some people want promotions, which I am not convinced everyone wants promotions anymore.

I think, going to your point, Pete, they want to be employable, and they want to develop their skills. The only problem with that is, “When I make you more employable and develop your skills,” people fear that, “Oh, then I’ll lose them to the marketplace.” Well, wasn’t that Ford who said, “Well, the only thing worse than not training your people,” or, “training your people and they leave, is not training your people and they stay”? So, I think we have an obligation.

Now, the other thing interesting about in my generation, motivating us, is to say, to some degree, is, “What experiences do we want to have?” because I don’t know if promotions are part of the package anymore at this stage, but rather also I think we’re in a legacy phase, “What can we give back to others?” We should create circumstances where we can teach those who follow.

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

Chris De Santis
At this point, no. I think we’ve covered this. I like what you’re asking about some of these, the differences between us, and I like your point earlier that, look, you cannot generalize about a whole group. You have to say what group we are alluding to. And this notion of, “What are the norms within that group?” What are the norms we observed?

I think part of the trouble with being young is that the headlines about Millennials are negative. They are the Florida Man of generations because anytime you see Florida Man in a headline, it’s some tragedy that, you know, “Florida Man found starving to death in his own refrigerator.” So, you have these tragedies, and then we start to see these Millennial headlines, and we start to associate that with them, and that becomes self-fulfilling in our perception of them, which is not an accurate reflection of who they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that resonates in that, I guess, I don’t even like being called a Millennial.

Chris De Santis
No, it’s unfair.

Pete Mockaitis
Even though I guess, technically, that’s where I’d land, and that’s like I don’t care for that.

Chris De Santis
Well, because, again, how they have labeled you. This is interesting, too, because one of the things about each generation, we’re all a disappointment. We’re not just a disappointment at the same time. Gen Xers were slackers, we were hippies, so in that sense, everyone is a disappointment, and then we outgrow it. The only problem that Millennials have is Gen Z hasn’t stepped in to be a disappointment yet so that you can get some space.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yeah, got that to look forward to.

Chris De Santis
Exactly.

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

Chris De Santis
Yeah, one of my favorites is “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are,” and that’s why this is such a perceptual issue. This was, I think, I can’t think of…how do you pronounce her name? Anais Nin, she wrote the Delta of Venus. Lovely book, by the way.

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

Chris De Santis
My favorite bit of research is a book by a man named Hofstede, and he wrote Cultures and Organizations. And what he did, it was from an IBM study, I think, originally in the ‘70s, and he extrapolated that or expanded that into the different dimensions across national cultures. That was super enlightening because now I see why the French are the French, or Mexico is Mexico, and US is US. Very enlightening.

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

Chris De Santis
I like it when I get free notebooks, you know, those ones you can write in, like that swag. They give you a gift. Because I use those, sort of, to take notes and then I just have a stack of these things.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. And a favorite habit?

Chris De Santis
Habit is reading. I’m a reader. I would have to believe you are as well, to some degree, to do so many of these episodes, but I do try to read a book a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And how do you manage that volume? Do you listen? Do you read while doing other things, like exercise? Or how do you…?

Chris De Santis
Well, exercising, actually, I do that while I’m on the bike, but, typically, though I dedicate at least two to three hours a day to read something.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Chris De Santis
I’m okay with that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Chris De Santis
You have little kids. You can’t do that.

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

Chris De Santis
Yeah. When I talk about this, because you said it right at the beginning, is, look, when you generalize, the only real truth in what I say, and in my book, is that what is true about…you said it yourself. The thing that is true about you, personally, is what’s true. Everything else I say is really fodder for the conversation or the discussion or the discovery you can make in an exchange with another.

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

Chris De Santis
They can get in touch with me at my website at CPDeSantis.com.

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

Chris De Santis
Yeah, I think I would say this, that, look, next time you see somebody acting strangely, in a way that you will judge them, imagine for a moment that this person is as rational as you are, and what might they be doing that is rational to them. And so, I would just simply say give people the benefit of the doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and peace as you’re navigating generational frictions.

Chris De Santis
Thank you, Pete. And good luck with the kids there.