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Mar 17
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751: How to Decrease Loneliness and Increase Belonging with Ryan Jenkins

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Ryan Jenkins tackles the overlooked problem of loneliness in the workplace and shares expert tips for fostering connection and belonging for both yourself and your team.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you can still feel lonely around other people 
  2. Just how loneliness is harming our health and productivity
  3. The simplest thing you can do now to feel less lonely 

About Ryan

Ryan Jenkins CSP® is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker and three-time published author. He speaks all over the world to companies such as State Farm, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, FedEx, Liberty Mutual, and John Deere. 

For a decade, he has been helping organizations create engaged, inclusive, and high-performing teams by lessening worker loneliness and closing generational gaps. Ryan’s top-ranked insights have been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. 

He is also co-founder of LessLonely.com, the world’s first resource fully dedicated to reducing worker isolation and strengthening team connections. Ryan lives in Atlanta, GA, with his wife, three children, and yellow Labrador. 

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Ryan Jenkins Interview Transcript

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

Ryan Jenkins
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom. But, first, I need to know, since you visited all 50 states in the United States here, is there one that you think is underrated or overrated that you want to share your hot take with?

Ryan Jenkins
I like them all, to be honest, and I feel so…

Pete Mockaitis
Even New Jersey? No offense. Just kidding.

Ryan Jenkins
The most underrated? I guess I’d say Alaska and New York because, I think, personally, every time I go to New York, I’m always taken back by just how specifically large New York City is. It always takes my breath away. And then Alaska is just…it’s my favorite state. It’s so beautiful and it takes my breath away for a completely different reason. So, those are two standouts in my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. You’ve got quite the stretch. And we’re talking about loneliness. I imagine, I don’t know, you can be lonely in Alaska or New York City. Tell us, maybe before we get into all the particulars, is there a specific discovery you’ve made in your loneliness research that’s really surprising or counterintuitive to you?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, you mentioned you could be lonely in New York, you could also be lonely in Alaska, and that’s true. And that correlates to one of the…probably the thing that most rings true or stands out to folks the most, which is the definition of loneliness. And loneliness isn’t the absence of people; it’s the absence of connection. So, I could be in a busy city like New York City and be surrounded by people constantly, but still feel isolated and alone.

Vice versa, you could be in Alaska surrounded by nobody but not feel isolated and feel very connected to other things. So, again, it’s not the absence of people; it’s the absence of connection. And so, that always kind of gets people to start thinking. That’s true and that’s probably why there are certain times of your life or certain areas of your life or your day that you feel more connected and less lonely, and then other times you feel very alone. And so, that’s probably what stands out the most, in my mind, and what gets people pondering the deepest.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say connected, I guess I’m thinking connected to people. Are there other flavors of connection that you’re thinking here?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, great question. And the reason I wanted to attack work with loneliness and specifically address workplace loneliness, is I thought the workplace was the best place to eradicate or help to lessen loneliness amongst individuals. And so, if you think about work, there’s a lot of connection points. There’s connection to one’s self, there’s connection to your team members, there’s connection to a leader, there’s connection to your work, there’s connection to a purpose or the organizational cultures. There’s all kinds of different flavors, and in your words, of connections.

And so, if we start thinking about it from that standpoint, we really start to get a better understanding of all these different points that we have to nurture in order to feel less isolated in today’s very isolating world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I’m curious, can you sort of give us the state of affairs with regard to the research? So, how widespread is the state of loneliness? I guess, probably, everybody feels lonely at some point, so maybe I don’t know if it’s monthly, weekly, or however you’ve got it sliced and diced. Like, how widespread is loneliness? How deep is loneliness amongst those who are feeling it? And just how big of a deal is that? Is it just sort of like, “Well, yeah, everyone feels lonely sometimes, you know. That’s part of being human”? Versus, is it really bad news?

Ryan Jenkins
All of the above, really. And loneliness is a universal human condition. We all experience it. And the reason why it’s stuck with us for so long is because loneliness was helpful and it continues. It is a useful emotion. That’s why we still carry it throughout humanity. Think about our ancestors who roam the planes.

When you were excluded, when you’re isolated from a group, your survival rate plummeted. There was literally strength in numbers. We could pool our resources, we could watch each other’s backs, we could strategize and socialize to take down wooly mammoths to create some warm fuzzy slippers. There was strength in numbers and there was safety in numbers.

And so, when we get excluded from a group, our body goes into fight-or-flight mode. And that’s why that’s such an important conversation, especially, as we think about how to be awesome at our job, is we have to understand how to fill our cup up and how to boost our connections and nurture these connections because, if not, we’re in flight-or-fight mode and we’re not able to fully show up at work.

So, back to your question. It’s a universal human condition and, according to our research, we surveyed over 2,000 global workers, and 72% of them say that they experience loneliness at least monthly with 55% saying they experience it at least weekly, and that’s all across the organization, individual contributors to executives. Loneliness is no respecter of person. It’s a universal human condition.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I’m curious, in your survey, did you…I don’t know if you can recall any particular word choices, but did you say, “Hey, did you feel lonely or lack of connection?” Or, how are we wording that, I wonder?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, we asked folks, “How often do you experience loneliness?” And we did our best to give them a little bit of context on how we defined loneliness, but it’s a tricky emotion. We experience a lot of emotions. It’s hard to pinpoint. And even today, the science around loneliness is really, really new. It’s pretty extraordinary. It’s only in the last five to six years that we really kind of really start to unpack it and figure out where it shows up in the brain.

I think part of the reason is loneliness has just been shrouded in shame, so even the neuroscientists and psychologists don’t want to touch it. but that’s changing, which is really exciting because, again, it can be useful. It’s literally our biological cue that we belong together and we’re better together.

So, we tried to give them the best idea of kind of what connection was so that they could, effectively, evaluate when and where they were experiencing feelings of isolation but it’s hard to pinpoint if “Does loneliness come first and then does that lead to depression? Or, does depression come first and that leads to isolation and loneliness? Do we get burnt out that leads to loneliness?”

It’s really hard to say which comes first. And, hopefully, as humanity becomes more open to talk about loneliness, we all become a little bit more aware and start being a little bit more in tuned with ourselves and how we assess it and when and where we feel lonely, and then also being able to identify it in others so that we can draw people in because the tricky thing about loneliness is that when we feel lonely, we do the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

We turn inward instead of turning outward, and we just start to go more inward and begin distrusting more folks, and we become less and less approachable. So, it’s a vicious cycle that creates a downward spiral. And so, that’s why it’s really important that all of us come together and really start to pull each other in and identify where folks may be feeling disconnected.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that part really resonates because I moved from Chicago to just outside the Nashville area, and I do miss a lot of my great friends there, and have felt some more loneliness here. So, when in the area, you can contact me pete@awesomeatyourjob.com. But to that point, it does resonate. Like, sometimes if I feel lonely, I feel, for me, it’s like I’m not quite at my best because I’m also not feeling like, it’s not really dramatic in terms of depression. But it’s sort of like, “You know what, I don’t really feel all that funny, witty, fun, interesting, engaging. I don’t really know if I want to show up to a thing in this condition.”

I want to put my best foot forward, making first impressions and connections, and have people think, like, “Oh, this Pete guy is awesome. I want to hang out with him again,” as opposed to, “Oh, yeah, he was sort of lame. I don’t really care to spend any more time with him.” And so, that’s kind of where my brain goes.

And so, that point really does resonate in terms of when we’re feeling lonely, we can look inward and that’s problematic. And I think Shawn Achor discussed some of this exact phenomenon in The Happiness Advantage. And so, you reminded me of awesome stuff. So, I want to make sure we don’t move too quickly past the notion of the dangers of loneliness.

So, we have links or associations or correlations to depression, to more, I guess, you said kind of limbic, amygdala, fight-or-flight type stuff, stress things. Any cool experiments that come to mind in terms of, “Oh, hey, we subjected lonely and non-lonely people to a stress, and here’s what went down”?

Ryan Jenkins
There’s a number of studies that we put a lot of them in the book, and it’s all so fascinating. I’ll share a few of them. One is they took…there was this one experiment happening where they were actually trying to figure out how mice were reacting to cocaine.

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds like a good time.

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s exactly where they found out kind of how the brain processes loneliness. And so, they began experimenting and isolating mice, and they found that the more that we isolate mice, the more that they crave connection. And not surprising, that’s the same with humans as well. Another really interesting research, I’m sure many of your listeners are familiar with, is the Harvard University study around adult development. It’s the longest study ever, continuous study of adult development.

It’s gone for 80 years, it’s still going on, which is incredible that there’s enough funds and enough staff who stuck around to keep this study going. But now they’ve studied over 2,000 people, and according to the director, the definitive answer to a long and healthy life, after this longest study ever done in adult development, is quality relationships, so it’s essentially our connections. And study after study after study just reveals how detrimental it is to the human body.

And I think we’re just now starting to realize that we need this more and more. And silver lining, and the pandemic really pulled the curtain back, we all experienced it. We, perhaps, couldn’t put our finger on it, and now we’re ready to talk about this, and I think we’re all in a good position to start absorbing some more of this new research and insights on how to better establish and nourish our connections.

Ryan Jenkins
One other study, I think, that could be helpful for your listeners, Pete, and it is recently they did an experiment where they excluded people and they put them through an experience of exclusion, and the monitored their brain, and their brain lit up, of course, not surprising, but where their brain lit up was super fascinating and insightful.

And they actually discovered that the same part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part of the brain that registers exclusion. So, that’s what’s really important and that’s really the research that really got me super interested in this because so many of the audiences that I talk to in organizations I serve, trying to get them to understand some of these concepts so that they can create more engaged, healthier and high-performing organizations.

We talk about loneliness, seems like a very soft topic but, in reality, if we don’t address this, that means we’ve got folks showing up to work that, literally, the pain part of their brain is lighting up, and they’re not able to fully show up so that they can deliver exceptional work and show up for their teammates and deliver for clients and customers.

So, that’s why it’s important for all of us, whether you’re an individual contributor or you’re a leader, a manager, is we’ve got to understand this so that we can lessen loneliness and get people to show up more fully at work, and that creates healthier individuals, and, ultimately, higher-performing organizations.

You could probably tell in my voice I’m excited about this conversation, and it’s no longer a soft one. it’s really a dire one. And it’s not that difficult to overcome. We’ve just got to be aware of it and then equip ourselves with some intentional tools to pick away at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s basically what your book Connectable is trying to do here. Or, how would you articulate the core message or thesis?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s three parts. The first part, we talk about loneliness. We give our readers a better understanding of the science of it and how it’s impacting work specifically. Part two is we unpack belonging and how that’s the nemesis of loneliness and how that’s the antidote to loneliness. We talk about why humans need belonging, and then how we can start thinking about that in the context of work.

And then the third and final part is all actionable strategies. So, we created a four-step framework that folks can use to help lessen loneliness in themselves or the team around them, whether they’re involved in that team or they’re leading that team.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, I’m curious, when you mentioned earlier that loneliness being a complicated sort of a thing in terms of the human experience of emotions is broad and multifaceted and so many layers, are there any maybe clues or indicators or signs that you might highlight for us to tune into in terms of, “Oh, wait a minute, maybe you’re lonely”?

For example, I remember once I got dumped, it was a bummer. And then it was just before I went to San Diego for an event with Pat Flynn, and it was really cool, the 1-Day Business Breakthrough. And I remember Pat was so cool as to serve Chipotle burritos for the lunch at the event and I was chowing down, I had a big old burrito, and then had a bunch of chips and queso. And I thought I was still hungry, and I was like, “That’s really weird. Usually, this is plenty of food for lunch for me to not feel hungry,” and yet I’m still hungry. I was like, “Oh, wait, I’m not hungry. I just feel empty inside.” Sad face.

And then they proceeded to give me brutal feedback about my business, which needed to be shut down. It was fine. It was helpful. Thank you, guys. So, anyway, I guess I shared that story, not to make everyone feel sad and feel sorry for me, but to share that sometimes it can fly under the radar, it’s like, “We don’t even know that we’re lonely.” So, are there any things you might sort of highlight for us, like, “Oh, if these are the kinds of things that are going on, you may, in fact, be lonely”?

Ryan Jenkins
Yes, and not to be promotional, this is just a free tool that you can use, that we created. If you go to LessLonely.com, you scroll all the way to the bottom, we have a free assessment. It takes two minutes. It’s ten questions that’s been statistically validated, critically validated, to actually assess how connected you are to those around you. So, that can be step one, where you can actually test yourself and get a score as to, “Are you feeling lonely?” or, “How connected really are you?” So, that would be step one.

Step two is, specifically in the book, we looked at ten identifiers that show up in the workplace. So, you can think about these for yourself or you can start thinking about these as folks in your organization or on your team because, again, if we’re lonely, we tend to retreat. And so, it’s up to all of us, we’re only as unified as our loneliest team member, so it’s up to all of us to kind of be aware of some of these cues.

I won’t go through all ten of them but I’ll give you a few here, Pete. One is the idea of lack of learning and development. If your curiosity is waning, or your growth mindset, you don’t have that growth mindset like you had, that’s kind of a good indicator. If you have limited participation in training, disdain for extracurricular activities, you’re not asking questions, that could be a subtle indicator. If you skip or resent meetings, that’s a pretty good indicator as well because lonely people avoid others.

So, if you find yourself not apologizing for being late, or you keep your camera off all the time during virtual meetings, or if you’re just generally being disgruntled during meetings, that could be a subtle signifier. And then I think the one that perhaps is the most shocking to folks or perhaps the most unexpected, and the last one I’ll give you, is excessive working.

Someone that’s spending too much time working as a way to avoid personal responsibilities can certainly point to an imbalance in social relationships. So, if you’re volunteering for too many projects, you’re piling up your vacation days, you’re returning emails late at night, these are all subtle indicators that you might be intentionally going into overdrive to avoid other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we find ourselves in such a spot, what do we do? How do we get more of this belonging antidote going on?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think what the first step and we highlight in the book is to look at loneliness. And so, being involved in a conversation like this, listening to this, you could check that box. It’s really kind of being aware that this is a growing epidemic and we need to better understand it if we’re going to get our arms around it. If you were a psychologist, you probably heard the statement “Awareness is curative.“ So we, first, got to be aware of this problem.

And then second step, I’m not sure we’ll go through all four here, but the second step is, clearly, just to invest in connections. And one of the ways that we encourage in the book is to create safe spaces, to pursue psychological safety, because the number one burning question in all of us, in all of humanity, that research tells us our brain is asking it five times per second, and that core question of humanity is, “Am I safe?” Our bodies are constantly asking that, “Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?”

So, most of the time, it’s unconscious, but our body is aware of our surroundings and if we’re safe or not, and we’ve got to start creating those spaces at work if, again, we want people to fully show up. Because if we want to quiet that voice in our head that’s constantly saying, “Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?” We’ve got to create these safe spaces. And one way to do that is to create proportional conversations.

So, if you find yourself talking too much and stepping over the conversation of other people, dial it back. If you find yourself not talking at all, it’s time to start speaking up a little bit. And, specifically for leaders, this is for leaders, they can really start to help kind of orchestrate this. But, according to research, Google did Project Aristotle a few years ago, and they studied all these teams to figure out “What was the core element that makes up successful teams?” And they found that it was psychological safety, and the basis of that was having proportional conversations.

And it draws right back to loneliness. If you’re on a team and you don’t feel like your voice is heard, and you don’t feel seen on that team, then, of course, you’re going to retreat and you’re not going to put your best foot forward. So, it’s up to all of us to start creating these spaces, but, specifically for leaders, too, they have a great responsibility to start creating space where these proportional conversations can be had.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s interesting. When you think about proportional conversations, I’m visualizing, “It’s Pete’s turn now.” Like, if there are six of us at a meeting or something, I guess, is that the hope, is that each person would speak roughly six or sixteen-ish percent of the time, and that is associated with there being psychological safety because folks don’t feel the need to either retreat or dominate, and are aware and care about what’s going on here?

Ryan Jenkins
Exactly. Yeah, you want to speak equal amounts, and certainly there’s going to be more introverted folks that aren’t going to want to do that, but it’s up to the team and, specifically, again, the leader, to create other opportunities for those introverts can still feel like their voices being heard or they had equal opportunity to express their thoughts, ideas, etc. So, yeah, that’s it, exactly.

And the other thing that’s important if you’re a leader inside of an organization is to be speaking last. Too often, the clients that we work with and the leaders that we come in conversation with, they get excited about their ideas, they come to the table and they want to post the vision, and then ask questions at the end, or get the ideas from the team at the end.

And that’s too late because you’ve already projected what you’re thinking and the rest of the team is going to fall in line, and you’ve wasted that opportunity for those proportional conversations to be had and for other people to bring their bright ideas to the table. So, speak last is really important for leaders, again, to create that space for proportional conversations to occur.

Pete Mockaitis
We’re talking about leaders, and you mentioned orchestrating. I sort of literally imagined a conductor of an orchestra. I imagine I want to hear some, maybe, scripts or verbiage from you because I imagine you don’t want to say, “Okay, we’ve heard enough from you, Ryan.” Like, “Oh, okay, that doesn’t feel good at all.” So, any key suggestions to try to get that proportionality if you are orchestrating or leading that meeting?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think at times it’s you never want to shut down an idea because someone might have something similar but it could lead to the next big thing or the breakthrough that you’re looking for. So, keeping your responses neutral as a leader, like, “That’s an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.” You don’t have to tilt your hand as far as…

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s certainly an idea.”

Ryan Jenkins
“That is something.” Or, spending time on the frontend creating that agenda and kind of creating the timeslots for folks to speak, kind of assigning it, essentially. Or, the other thing, too, if you have a hybrid team, it’s assigning different folks to run the meeting. That’s another opportunity to where folks that might not be as likely to participate, they can be the ones that actually kind of orchestrate the meeting. And then there’s another tactic that’s used in negotiations. If you say the last three words of someone’s statement…

Pete Mockaitis
The last three words of someone’s statement?

Ryan Jenkins
Exactly. There you go. Then the other person is likely to keep expanding on their thought.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep expanding?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, keep talking more and more, like what’s happening just right here. And so, for someone, that’s a little bit more reserved or quiet, that might be a good tactic to draw a little bit more out of those folks as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Draw more out of those folks as well. That is a fun one. I think Chriss Voss mentioned that on the show, who’s awesome, and it really does work. It’s like, if you’re not too overt, it’s like, “Okay, you’re being weird. Cut it out,” like within reason and normal conversationally. Okay. Well, that’s great. So, now we got a four-step less lonely framework, we’ve gotten into it a little bit. I want to make sure we get a little bit of an outline overview of it.

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, so we’ve covered those first two. Third is this idea of narrowing the focus, so it’s really trying to put your attention on really what matters and, for that section, we studied astronauts because those are the folks that operate in the most secluded parts of the universe. And so, it was really fascinating to figure out, “How does someone, 250 miles away, that only interacts with 11 people for an entire year, how do they keep loneliness at bay? And how do they make sure that they sustain healthy mental health?” And so, they do some really interesting things. A lot of it is around focus and clarity.

And then the fourth and final step in the framework is a circle. So, the fourth and final step is to kindle, it’s a momentum. You get some traction going and you got to keep it going, and we relate human wellbeing to a battery, in the book. We don’t charge up once and we’re fully charged forever. Same thing with our connections. We don’t connect once with someone or a team member and then are fully charged and don’t need to connect ever again. It’s a constant thing that we have to maintain and stick with.

And we all know that to be true. We can’t just make a friend in an hour and then call on them two years from now. If we want healthy relationships, we have to attend to them and we have to be consistent about it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I must ask more about these astronauts. What are they doing with regard to combating loneliness?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, we looked at Christina Koch. So, she’s the female astronaut that spent the most continuous time in space, and for her, it’s all about regimentation. So, she has a very detailed outline of her day, and so she knows exactly what she’s doing on a daily basis. Astronauts, they have their days incremented down to the five-minute increments, so it’s pretty extraordinary.

But the other thing is big picture. They know the big picture and they’re doing important work. They feel very connected to that, and so that’s really important for folks as well. And one of the strategies that we share is this idea of, and this is specifically for leaders but I think there’s a lot of parallels for non-leaders, and that is to lead with context not control. So, how do you start painting the bigger picture for folks?

Because so much of what can drive loneliness is this absence of purpose, we don’t feel connected to something bigger than ourselves. So, how do we start connecting ourselves to this bigger meaning? And, of course, that seems pretty easy for astronauts because they’re doing some really extraordinary work and they feel connected to humanity in a much different way when they’re up there. They’ve always said that they can see the globe and it just gives them different perspective.

But for us down here on Earth, we have to work at this. And if you’re a leader, it’s really on you to start creating more of that context and that bigger picture, and constantly being the chief reminding officer of your team of what you’re doing and how each person’s role and their activities are connected to that bigger picture. So, giving them that context for them to then act with autonomy and not so micromanaged with just control.

Pete Mockaitis
And how does the regimenting of the day help with loneliness exactly? I got you on the connection and the purpose, and the mission vision, and what you’re doing and how that’s serving a bigger thing. And so, I guess I’m thinking back to the workaholism piece that we discussed. Like, in a way, that could be a warning sign, like, “Ooh, you’re doing too much, you’re like avoiding things.” So, how does the regimentation help exactly?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s really around clarity, I would say. Think about clarity from the standpoint of clarity and direction. If you don’t have clarity and direction where you’re going somewhere, you’ll end up being lost. And what happens when you’re lost? You end up becoming alone and it’s frightening. So, this idea of having clarity and direction, so you can put your mind to it and you know exactly what needs to be done that day.

And, you’re right, you can totally plan or overwork yourself, but astronauts also have a really good balance of knowing, planning in their exercise and their sleep. They also have psychologists that they connect with on a routine basis, too, to make sure that they’re maintaining their mental health.

One other thing that I think might be helpful, Pete, is this idea around learning as well. Chris Hadfield is another astronaut, a Canadian astronaut, and he’s famous for doing the Space Oddity. Have you seen that YouTube video?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t remember.

Ryan Jenkins
He had a guitar and he lip-synched to Space Oddity in different environments that he did. Look it up on YouTube, it got tons of views, and it’s really well-done. It’s really cool. But one of the ways he lessened loneliness in extreme isolation was through learning. So, learning starves loneliness. And so, he was one that would always try to keep his mind active and to try things. It’s kind of the same idea of you can’t be angry and grateful at the same time. We can’t experience those two emotions.

So, the other idea is if you’re fully involved and interested in learning something, you’re not thinking about, “Woe is me. I’m so isolated up here in space.” And so, Chris would go around, and he called the International Space Station this old attic. And so, he actually found this old Japanese bell, and he became fascinated with how the sound would travel through the International Space Station. And then, of course, he was doing all kinds of other videos, like the Space Oddity on YouTube, just to keep himself occupied and learning as he was up there to kind of keep feelings of loneliness at bay.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it if you could give us just one or two or three immediate tactics or some do’s and don’ts. Like, what are some things we can do right now to decrease loneliness? And what are some things we should not do right now if we want to keep this fostering belonging going on?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think what you don’t want to do is beat yourself up. Loneliness isn’t shameful; it’s a signal. We all experience it and it’s useful. It’s a signifier and it’s our biological cue that we belong together, so don’t beat yourself up. Or, use it as a reminder that, “Yes, I need to go build a connection, or I need to start turning my attention outside myself.”

Something to do would be one of my favorite activities for individuals is to identify the beneficiaries of your labor. That kind of connects with purpose. So, they’ve done study after study after study, and they find that no matter what industry or line of work you’re in, if you can connect with the person that benefits from your work, for example,   actually perform better when they can actually see the people that they’re cooking for.

So, if we can get a better picture of the people that our work, that people are benefiting from our work. Straight of the line, we can draw from our work to those people and connect those two, we’ll see greater purpose and we’ll start to see loneliness lessen as well because, again, we’ve established those connections. So, that would be one don’t and do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I do that as well, which is why I have some cool software that will just sort of turn on the smartphone cameras on my podcast listeners so I can just sort of watch them and spy on them in the middle of their day, and it really helps keep me feel connected and motivated. Just kidding. Just kidding.

Ryan Jenkins
I’m sure. I’m sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I hope that’s impossible, and even if it is, I haven’t done it. Okay, so do’s and don’ts. Beautiful. Any final thoughts when it comes to loneliness before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ryan Jenkins
One of my favorite quotes when it comes to loneliness is by the late Robin Williams, the comedian and actor, and he said this, I think it’s really powerful. He said, “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.” So, whether ourselves are experiencing loneliness, or we know people around us who are experiencing loneliness, I think a universal relationship law for all of us is to never make someone feel alone, especially when they’re with us, or they’re with you.

And so, the research is clear that loneliness was growing before the pandemic. The pandemic put a spotlight on it and accelerated it, but because it’s increasing, it also means it’s malleable so it can decrease. And so, it’s up to all of us to start engaging with this. So, again, never make someone feel alone, especially when you’re with them.

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

Ryan Jenkins
One of my favorite quotes is by Dorothy Parker, who, she said, “I hate writing, I love having written.” And, of course, that’s been on my brain ever since I learned about that quote. And as a writer, I have three books, I can relate. The process is grueling but the end result is fueling, and I always am so excited to have written even though the process of writing can be so challenging. And I’m sure many people can relate. The process, whatever process might be, really tough and aggravating, that end result can often make it all worthwhile.

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

Ryan Jenkins
There was some really interesting research, a social psychology research done that proved that people who have time constraints are severely less likely to engage with others by a big, big percentage. And that really stood out to me because all of us tend to be busier and busier than ever before. We constantly keep putting more and more on our to-do list and plates are overflowing, and we got to be cognizant about it because the more busy we are, the less margin we have, the less likely we’re going to show up and connect with others. And so, a subtle reminder there, even for myself, to really be thinking about that margin is where we create some meaningful connections. So, make sure that we’re prioritizing margin.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And I’ve felt it even in myself, it’s just like, “Oh, I should give so-and-so a call but I only have eight minutes. That might be kind of lame.” Like, “Hey, I have some time. How about you entertain me on my schedule, and then I’m going to peace out?” So, I guess to some degree, how that might feel to someone. But, at the same time, it’s like, “Well, maybe schedule some time when you have some time.”

And sometimes, my buddy Connor and I, we just have an understanding that we might do a quick check-in call, and that’s just what’s happening. Like, that’s the normative, a six-minute call might be like, “Okay, cool. And now I know what’s going on. This was fun. Thank you. Good day.”

Ryan Jenkins
Those are great examples, Pete. I’m right there with you. Thomas Friedman wrote a book. It’s been years now, but he titled his book Thank You for Being Late. And the reason he came up with that title for the book is because he was at an important meeting at one point in a busy coffee shop, and the person was late. But when the person showed up, they’re like, “I’m so sorry I’m late.” He actually said, “Thank you for being late because, since you were late, I got to eavesdrop on that couple’s conversation. I got to connect with a couple of thoughts that I had and just kind of take in my surroundings.”

And so, one way for us to connect with others, even though we might be busier than ever before, is show up early for things, and just kind of be there and open the kind of whatever connections might come your way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ryan Jenkins
I’m a big Seth Godin fan, and so anything he writes, I just eat up. I just love how simple he is yet profound at the same time. And so, I’ll say anything by Seth Godin.

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

Ryan Jenkins
I use Evernote consistently to dump any ideas I have for books and ideas, and so that’s probably the one I’m using the most. I also use Asana to track all of my to-do list and to make sure I’m nothing is going through the cracks.

And then the third tool I’ll give folks, this is probably the most groundbreaking tool and the one I think I cannot live without, and that’s Boomerang, which is a Gmail plugin that allows you to boomerang emails back to your inbox that folks haven’t responded to so that way you can make sure you keep track of folks that you’re trying to connect with.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks; they Kindle book highlight it, they tweet it back at you a lot, a Ryan Jenkins original quotable gem?

Ryan Jenkins
They say that authors write the books that they need to read themselves. I’m an introvert. My co-author is an extrovert. We’ve had some good perspectives in there. But the thing that I learned the most throughout this process is this. Meaningful connections don’t have to be lasting, and that’s something I always fell prey to, that, “If this person is not going to be an integral part of my life, I’m not going to take the time to invest in this relationship or this connection.” And that’s just false.

And so, now, whether it’s my barista, or someone in the elevator that I share, or someone that’s walking by, like I try to do my best to connect and simply just ask folks how their day is going or something else because it only takes about 40 seconds to actually lessen loneliness. And, again, meaningful connections don’t have to be lasting. They’re all around us and we should invest wherever we can.

Pete Mockaitis
Forty seconds. Good to know. I love a number. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point us?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, go to LessLonely.com. That’s kind of the one-stop shop for the book and all. We’ve got assessments and a digital course, so that would be the best stop. Check us out on social. We’re very active, even on TikTok @ryanandsteven. And then, finally, we also have a podcast called The Case for Connection wherever you listen to podcasts. And that’s where we unpack the research even further, and we have a lot of fun doing it. So, my co-author and I just having some deep conversations around connection. So, LessLonely.com, @ryanandsteven, or The Case for Connection podcast.

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

Ryan Jenkins
If you want to be awesome at your job, take connections seriously. Do not underestimate the power of human connection.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ryan, this has been a treat. I wish you much good belonging and connection.

Ryan Jenkins
Thank you, Pete. Thanks, everyone.

Mar 14
0

750: How to Inspire Growth Amidst Discomfort with Bill Eckstrom

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Bill Eckstrom discusses how top coaches inspire and challenge their teams to grow.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The six things effective coaches do differently 
  2. The wrong and right way to challenge your team to grow
  3. Three morning habits to make every day a great day 

About Bill

Bill Eckstrom is the CEO and founder of Ecsell Institute. Bill’s robust professional career path has encompassed sales, sales leadership, executive leadership with both private and publicly traded companies, as a founder of start-ups, and even as an athletic coach. In 2008, he established Ecsell Institute to fill a void he witnessed and personally experienced in the coaching and leadership profession within businesses. Since then, EcSell’s research and improvement programming has been utilized in the athletic and academic worlds, spawning his new start-ups Ecsell Sports and Ecsell Education in 2019.  

Resources Mentioned

 

Thank you Sponsors!

  • Athletic Greens. Support your health with my favorite greens supplement. Free 1-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 travel packs when you purchase from athleticgreens.com/awesome.
  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow

Bill Eckstrom Interview Transcript

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

Bill Eckstrom
Thanks, Pete. It’s fun to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear your wisdom. You’ve done a lot of coaching when it comes to leaders and sales folks and athletes, and even some training of your own therapy dog named Aspen. What’s the story here?

Bill Eckstrom
Oh, Aspen is, as I say her name, she’s about two feet from me. We’ve always had a lot of dogs, and, specifically, Labradors, and when she came along, which was my daughter’s, youngest daughter’s choice to keep her because we had a litter of puppies, her behaviors were just unique. She could turn things on and off just without any training.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, a light switch or…?

Bill Eckstrom
You pull out a training dummy for throw and she turns it off. She just is aggressive. And then you bring her inside and all she wants to do is put her head on your lap. So, she’s very compliant, very well-mannered, and so my youngest daughter and I said, “Well, let’s start training for therapy dog work.” So, we did the training ourselves, got her certified with a couple different therapy dog agencies in Nebraska, and about the time my daughter headed off to school is when I started to do then a lot of work with her. So, we’ve worked in hospitals and nursing homes and, actually, some athletic teams. She’s done a lot of therapy work with young student athletes.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard a little bit about therapy dogs, but what does a typical engagement with a therapy dog look, sound, feel like in practice?

Bill Eckstrom
That’s a good question, actually. So, if we use a hospital setting as a backdrop, we were allowed to work in two areas: geriatric and pediatric. And the geriatric, so you walk down a hall, let the nurses know you’re there, they all want to come out and say hi first, and then you just kind of go room to room, and you stick your head in, and a lot of times the nurses will say, “Hey, don’t go into room four, but, man, rooms eight and nine, I think they like dogs.”

And so, you just walk down the hall, and you stick your head in without even showing your dog, and you say, “My name is Bill. Would you like a visit from a therapy dog?” Most of the time, nine out of ten times, they say, “Yes, that would be nice,” and you just walk in, and then Aspen would either sit next to their bed or, if they’re in a chair, she’ll sit next to them in the chair, and they, literally, just run their hands through her head and her chest.

This kind of same was done on a pediatric ward where this time, there’s usually parents. But there’s one particular time, Pete, that was forever memorable, and, as a matter of fact, there’s a clip of this in my TED Talk. But when we walked in there, the nurses were giddy, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve got to go to room three. Her whole bed is stuffed with toy dogs.”

So, we walked to room three, and I stuck my head around the corner, and I said, “Hey, my name is Bill. Would you like a visit from a therapy dog?” And the little four-year old girl is in bed, very conscious and alert, and her mother was just almost is like, “Oh, my gosh, are you kidding me? Yes, please come in.” So, we walked in, and you could hear the little girl in bed gasp audibly, so I knew it was a hit right away.

But here’s what was really cool and, keep in mind, Aspen is not allowed on furniture. She doesn’t sleep in bed with us. She’s not allowed on sofas or chairs at our home. She has her own beds and rugs and everything. But, anyway, we walk in the room, and the little girl is now frantically trying to sit up, and I reached up and I put my hand on her bed, kind of to just say, “Hey, I’ll get Aspen in a position to…” And the second I touched her bed with my hand, Aspen jumped on her bed, laid down next to her in bed.

And I was just aghast as her mom was, I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’ll get her down.” Her mom is like, “No, please, please let her stay. Let her stay.” And that’s where the photograph of that was in my TED Talk came from. So, Aspen and the little girl forever bonded.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Cool. Cool. Well, I don’t have a great segue.

Bill Eckstrom
I’m not sure there’s one for that.

Pete Mockaitis
But maybe you do when it comes to coaching and performance, the metaphorical therapy dog.

Bill Eckstrom
Well, I think the segue I used in the TED Talk is, “If I didn’t make Aspen’s life uncomfortable at times, she wouldn’t have grown into that,” because her preference would be to sit around and lay around, play fetch all day, not learn new things, not to learn how to not pick up a pill if it falls on the floor, how to not get alarmed when somebody drops a bed pan behind you. So, it’s that discomfort, and it’s the same discomfort that coaches and leaders have to create in business to create growth in people and teams. How’s that for a segue?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s well done. Thank you, Bill. Well, I want to hear all about your book The Coaching Effect: What Great Leaders Do to Increase Sales, Enhance Performance, and Sustain Growth. But maybe before we get into the particulars of the book, could you maybe, just reflecting back on your own career, share kind of what’s one of the most kind of noteworthy, counterintuitive, surprising discoveries you’ve made when it comes to people and performance over your long career of coaching folks?

Bill Eckstrom
Two things, and they kind of blend into each other. One is getting an event, and, again, I’d mentioned this in our book and I’m very open with it in my TED Talk, which is getting fired. That happened in 2008. What goes then alongside of that is the vulnerability that comes with telling people you got fired. That’s how I started my TED Talk is with that story, but the only reason I started my talk with that story is because some people, very close colleagues at work, talked me into that. That’s not a fun story to relive. It’s humiliating but yet I did it, and the impact of having the vulnerability to share a story like that has been profound.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, yeah. And so, you think there’s a takeaway for folks in terms of their own vulnerability and sharing with others and the impact that has.

Bill Eckstrom
Yeah, clearly, there is and it just makes you a better leader. You become human. So, the idea of doing a TED Talk or writing a book for whatever reason, and I understand it, and please don’t take this the wrong way, Pete, but people might put you a little higher on a pedestal than what we see ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Bill Eckstrom
And what helped get there is that vulnerability, is the idea that when you start off just the idea of being able to do a TED Talk is great. But when you start off a TED Talk saying, “Hey, I was on a roll, baby. I had things going in my favor and then I get called into a conference room by the president of the company, and next thing I know I’m jobless. I got one kid starting college. I got two more at home ready not far off. I don’t have a job.”

And then, all of a sudden, everybody is like, “Oh, my gosh, I’d been there. I can empathize with that guy.” It just makes us more effective as coaches and leaders when they look at your life, and say, “His life wasn’t perfect either.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then, tell us, when it comes to the book itself The Coaching Effect, what’s sort of the main idea here?

Bill Eckstrom
The main idea is that leaders need to behave more like an athletic coach to truly maximize their ability to help teams grow and become…or really hit peak performance. And the little subplot to that is that, as a coach, all the things that we used to think were perhaps soft skills, like my ability to create connections based on trust, my ability to create psychologically safe environments, that items like that are no longer a soft skill because we can measure them and correlate your ability to create trust.

How about this? Your ability to create strong relationships has a straight and direct tie to growth and performance. So, we talk through in the book what the most effective leaders, or I will refer to as coaches, what do they do, what are their activities, and how do they do them well. So, it’s kind of like a quantity of a coaching and the quality of the coaching. And so, we have quantified all that and we put it in within the chapters of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Okay. Well, then, tell us how do you recommend we get better at creating relationships and making them great?

Bill Eckstrom
Well, we don’t have enough time to go through all of them, but if we use this one, and you picked a good example, Pete, because in the world of sports, of the six things we measure, relationships, specifically how coaches connect with student athletes, and we see the same in the business, too, how a manager connects with their employees, is not good. Of the six themes we measured, it’s the second lowest.

How they do it well is going to be so commonsensical to some people but, yet, it may not be to others. And even the people for whom it’s common sense, they have to question whether or not they’re doing it. So, for example, we know that the highest performing coaches, they do consistent one-on-one meetings. They have career discussions with people on their team. They hold regular team meetings. They provide written…consistent written feedback, not just oral feedback but written feedback.

So, in terms of activities, those are the things that they’re doing. And, while I’m sure nobody who’s listening to this podcast, Pete, is going, “Hey, Bill, let me take notes on that because, man, I’ve never heard of those things before.” That obviously is not the case. At most, people will do one-on-one meetings with people on their team. But how often and how long? And what are they talking about in those one-on-one meetings?

Because to do them well, now we’re back to quality, to do them well, you and I, Pete, when you’re my coach, my boss, my mentor, whatever you want to call me, my manager, if we have a one-on-one meeting and you don’t start off just asking me about me, you might come into the meeting, which is what people complain most about, and say, “Hey, we got a lot to do. God, we’re sitting down here in an hour. Give me some metrics on your goal today.”

Now, all of a sudden, you just care about the numbers. You don’t care about me as a person. I want you to ask me about my new puppy. I want you to ask me about what I did over the weekend. I want you to ask me about my kid’s soccer game. And if you’re not doing that, I don’t perceive that we have a connection. I don’t trust you because you’re not asking me about me. All you’re asking is about the business which benefits you, and maybe, to some degree, might not even benefit me. So, that’s an example of how we connect with people in the workplace or whether it’s on an athletic field.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that clear distinction there. Could you maybe walk us through the six things you measure and share real clear contrast in terms of “Hey, this is common practice which isn’t so great, and here’s a best practice”?

Bill Eckstrom
Wow, let me see here. So, in connection, I gave you an example. The other component of relationship, one being connection, the other being psychological safety, which is really a hot topic in the workplace today. And one of the most simplistic methods for creating psychological safety as a leader, as a coach, is to ask questions. We think our ability as a leader, as a coach, correlates to my ability to come up with a great idea, or a great suggestion, or an answer to a great question. When the reality is my value is based not just on my ability to ask questions of the people around me, but also to get them to ask questions. So, that’s one.

Structure is another theme that we measure, and that you set up the processes and the disciplines to create a predictable outcome, or are there no expectations? Do I not understand what my goals are, is there a method to set goals and detract goals? Communication is another thing, well, common sense communication but it comes back to things like, “Do you communicate vision, not just you communicate in the way that I find effective?” In other words, “Do you know if I’d rather have you text me versus email me versus, say, Slack me within my company?” So, it’s customizing communication that’s best for the person.

Then when we get into what we call the complexity themes, and the first one that we measure is called skill development, which kind of speaks for itself. But as my leader, as my coach, “Pete, can you help me,” if I’m in sales as an example, “can you help me improve my skillset as a salesperson?” If I’m a programmer, “Can you help me be a better programmer?” So, developing the skills that are critical for success in my role.

And then the final theme that we measure is challenge, and this is where kind of what my TED Talk was themed around. It’s really what made the book so successful is… while we have all these soft skills that are so important, if you don’t challenge in a healthy way, you’re not creating growth. So, your ability as a leader to make people uncomfortable is something we measure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s dig into this. How, generally speaking, do we make people uncomfortable in the best possible way?

Bill Eckstrom
Well, if I may, Pete, I’ll, first of all, talk about the worst possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Bill Eckstrom
And that is through fear. All these things, when you take all these things together, they create what we call discretionary effort, if they’re done well. That means, Pete, if I’m on your team, and you really show a lot of acumen within all these themes, man, I’m giving you more effort. I am going to work an extra hour. I’m going to be more engaged. When that recruiter calls me, I’m not taking that call, Pete, because I like being on your team, and I love what we do. I love everything about this team.

And if you’re a fear-based leader, you can still get my discretionary effort, Pete, but you’re not going to get it for long because I’m probably going to leave you, which is timely, we can segue down the road here of the great…all the turnover that’s happening in the world today. And we have some research on that too.

So, to create challenge in unhealthy ways is through fear, and that eventually turns into chaos. To do it in a good way is to question, “So, tell me about this goal, Pete, that you gave me. Tell me how you came about to the conclusion of that end objective. Tell me what’s going on in your mind. Okay, great. Tell me if I wasn’t here right now, would you have provided the same goal to someone else? Okay, what would it take, Pete, if you were to add 10% on top of that? Is that something that you could do?” So, that’s an example.

It could be, “Hey, you know what, Pete, I’ve been watching your work, and here’s what I see you do well, A, B, and C. Because you do that so well, I’m going to add D to your plate just to see how you might respond to this added thing.” So, it’s understanding you to where once you have something kind of mastered, think of the world of sports. We’re going to do a drill over and over and over again. But if we just never elevate that drill, eventually, people will plateau, they’ll peak. And the same applies to the business.

And when that happens, how do we amp it up a little bit more? What is one more thing I can put on your plate, one more thing I can challenge you, in a way that I know is specific to you? That’s healthy challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That sounds good. And so then, when you talk about those challenges, like I’m imagining myself being on the receiving end of each of those questions, and it’s a good vibe in terms of it’s not like kick off your shoes and put on pajamas and chill out but it’s also not terrifying or threatening. It’s just like, “Oh, okay, I kind of got to be a little bit on my toes here, and then share how I did come up with that goal, and why I do or don’t think that an extra 10% is feasible.”

And, in a way, it makes me think, I guess if we interacted this way repeatedly, it would make me realize that it’s not acceptable for me to go in halfway prepared when I chat with Bill about my goals and what I’m up to. That won’t quite work.

Bill Eckstrom
Right. And you bring up an interesting point, and this ties back to one-on-one meetings, for example. So, one-on-one meeting is an activity, but what do I do within that activity to make it a growth event? So, let’s say, a real example, a young woman in our office, and we’re talking about entering the collegiate marketplace. And I happen to mention this because of her background and everything, I thought she might be a good fit. So, I mentioned, “Well, have you ever thought about the collegiate marketplace, college coaches?” And she’s like, “Wow, yeah, that would be pretty cool.” And so, we talked about that a little bit.

And then if I don’t follow up with that in our one-on-one meetings, if I say something, like, “Okay, tell you what, why don’t you create a plan around how you would approach that market if you took on that market?” and then I don’t bring that up at our next one-on-one meeting, then, all of a sudden, the challenge isn’t worth anything, the fact that I challenged her to do something different.

If I go to the one-on-one meeting, “So, why don’t you share with me where you’re at now on that plan so far? Tell me what you’ve been thinking about and talk to me, or show me if you’ve got something written down.” And then she’s got to think, to your point, “Oh, my gosh, Bill, now he’s following up with it. Yeah, okay, I’ve got to be prepared. I got to bring my A-game.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. All right. Well, then it seems like each of those questions I liked. I imagine, even if you have good intentions, you’re not trying to rule out of fear, it could be possible to challenge people in ways that don’t go according to your hopes and plans. Could you give us some examples of “Hey, your heart is in the right place, but your word choice is working against you, so fix it”?

Bill Eckstrom
Well, it makes me, right away, think of an interview, the little documentary I saw done with Doc Rivers where he says “Every team, every year in basketball in the NBA, I walk in the locker room, I say the same thing every year. It doesn’t matter if it played for me, before or not, my name is Doc Rivers and I’m human, and I’m going to make mistakes.”

And I think that’s part of what we have to do as leaders in business, is, “Hey, my name is Bill Eckstrom, and I’ve been doing this a long time. And you know what? I’m still going to screw it up.” So, back to your question, “How do we screw it up?” Well, first of all, we could screw anything up, but usually screwups are the result of not knowing somebody.

If I ever crawled into your life, Pete, and I’m your manager, I’m your leader at work, and I don’t know all the things about you, if I don’t know what your goals are, I don’t know what your objectives are, and then I come up with some random challenge, you’re going to be looking at me like, “How does this tie into what I do, who I want to be, here at work?” It just won’t ever click.

But if I can sit down with you and say, “Hey, based on your strengths, which are A and B, based on what you’ve been doing here, based on the direction the company wants to go, I’m wondering if you’d be at all curious into looking at this marketplace?” So, I showed you an example of how to get it right, not screw up, but it could be the opposite of that.

I don’t mention your strengths, I don’t talk about direction, and, all of a sudden, I bring up, “Hey, we’re always thinking about checking out this marketplace.” You’d be, “Okay, why? Why would I take time away from what I do, put me on this task, it’s going to take hours and time away from my successes here because you see I tied it together for you?” So, that’s how we do it ineffectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, thank you. You’ve got another concept which is intriguing in terms of the growth rings. Can you expand upon this?

Bill Eckstrom
So, the six themes I mentioned, those are what we call subthemes, and they roll up in a larger theme. So, there are three primary themes that have to do with the way one leads or coaches that lead to growth or no growth. And the themes are: my ability to develop relationships; my ability to create order, which are systems and processes and tools; and my ability to create an environment, a complex environment which is an environment of challenge.

So, the growth rings depict living environments that either promote or hinder growth. There’s four environments total, two I haven’t talked about. One is chaos and the one is stagnation but we don’t need to spend time on those because those aren’t good places. Just by the words themselves, you don’t want to be there because one creates negative growth, the other can create negative growth or no growth.

So, that leaves us with an ordered environment and a complex environment. And a complex environment is an environment, the only environment where growth occurs because that means I’m being challenged, that means inputs have changed, that means I’m going to be uncomfortable, and growth only occurs in a state of discomfort.

Tying that back to the themes, challenge and skill development are themes that are part of complex environments. Now, I know this is getting pretty heady stuff, but in an order, those themes are structure and communication, providing me predictable outcomes, and that creates comfort. It’s the opposite of discomfort. Predictability correlates to comfort. Unpredictability correlates to discomfort.

The challenge, then, Pete, is that people don’t want to be in discomfort. That’s who we are as humans. But unfortunately, it’s the only environment where growth occurs, so it’s quite a quandary that, “Bill, you’re saying I, as a leader, have to get people in a state of discomfort to grow, but that’s not a place they want to be.” Yes, that is correct, so we better be really good at it.

Relationship comes into play because that allows me to know what makes you comfortable and uncomfortable, when is it a good time for you to be in a state of order or comfort, and when do I know you, and what do I know about you to know when it’s a good time to push you into a state of discomfort.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And so, we’ve covered a number of pointers. Any other sort of top do’s and don’ts in that zone?

Bill Eckstrom
Make your mood predictable if you’re in a leadership role. Don’t ever make your people guess what kind of mood you’re in when you come to work. You don’t want your team, when you walk into the office or wherever it may be, kind of murmur, murmur, “Oh, my gosh, what kind of mood is Pete in today? Oh, gee, I hope he’s in a good mood,” eliminate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Just by being in a good mood always or how do you bring that?

Bill Eckstrom
Well, yeah, being consistent, “I know when Bill comes to work, I know what to expect from Bill. He’s in a consistent mood all the time. He’s never down. He’s never pissed off when he walks in. He comes into the office, he’s always in a positive mode. That’s predictability. That makes me comfortable.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Bill, tell us, how does one be always in a positive mood? That seems nice.

Bill Eckstrom
I wasn’t always this way, Pete. I worked hard. I’m very intentional about trying to be in a positive mood. And I was just having a conversation about this this morning with a gentleman. I follow three things very habitually every morning. I have a very strong order that leads to a very predictable outcome.

The first thing I do every single morning is journal, and that clears the mind. It clears the brain. It clears space. I get any challenging things that are mushy in my head, I’d put it down on my computer, on just a Word document. I just shut my eyes and I just begin to, what my coach would call, brain download is what I do. So, every Monday through Friday, I do that. I follow that up with gratitude. So, I open a new document, and that right now is 165 pages long.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful.

Bill Eckstrom
And every day, I write a minimum of three things I am grateful for or that make me smile. One of those two things, that’s filling one of those two boxes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And it could just be totally random, like La Croix, or like that happened to you in the last 24 hours.

Bill Eckstrom
Right. Exactly. Here’s an example. The taste of my first sip of coffee in the morning. I’m thankful for that. Grateful for that. When I walked out this morning, the moon and the clouds. Ooh, for how the moon looks in the early morning with partial cloud cover. The smell of a pine tree. Boom. Done. So, that’s part of the equation.

So, I list three gratitudes or things I’m thankful or grateful for or that make me smile every day. Then I go back, say, a hundred pages ago, and I just randomly scroll up the Word document, and I open a page that say, could’ve been 18 months ago, and I read what I wrote then, and here’s what happens. Inevitably, I’ll come across a gratitude or something that made me smile that hits me again.

So, hatching a baby finch is one of the things I wrote 18 months ago that I happen to look at this morning, and I had a memory of they had this little nest outside of our kitchen window, these little finches, and then they had eggs, and then the eggs hatched. They had these baby finches for like 30 days one summer. And just thinking back to that made me smile.

Now, all of a sudden, I’ve done my brain download, I’ve listed three gratitudes, I roll back and look and have other things I’ve been thankful for in the past, and, man, I’m in a good mood. I am ready to get to work. So, then work begins, I get about an hour and a half, two hours work in, and then I go straight to meditation, and this is all before I’ve seen a single person. So, those three things combined – the journaling, the gratitudes, and the meditation – I can’t say never but I could tell you, with 90% accuracy, I start every day on the same level.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. All right. So, not only do your folks have some predictability but you’re feeling good, so that’s awesome. Beautiful. And we had Hal Elrod on talking about some of these habits, and here you are, living them out and it’s rocking for you. That’s cool.

Bill Eckstrom
It’s been life changing.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, then I guess I’m curious, any final thoughts in terms of when it comes to coaching, growth, leadership, making sure folks are continuing to go up and up and up, before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Bill Eckstrom
Don’t ever dismiss the power of connecting with people in your leadership role. I know that may sound cliché and easy but we tell people that all the time, and you’d be surprised. Even people that think they’ve got great connections with the people on their team, assume you don’t. Go crawl into the lives of the people on your team.

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

Bill Eckstrom
One I shared in my TED Talk and continually, I can’t ever get rid of it, and it’s not my quote. It is Dr. Serene Jones is who wrote this. And my oldest daughter brought this to my attention and it ties right into the growth rings concept you mentioned. It is, “The constant façade of order hides the wilderness that is craving to seep out and teach us that life wasn’t created to be what we think it is. Beyond words, we must experience the wilderness to be taught what cannot be otherwise known.” So, I have that memorized.

And the other quote that is part of my life today is from Dr. Viktor Frankl. Are you familiar with him, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yup.

Bill Eckstrom
So, the Austrian psychiatrist that survived two years in a concentration camp. Anyway, a favorite quote from him is, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response. And in our response, lies our growth and our freedom.” Those hang with me every day.

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

Bill Eckstrom
What we’re doing now on the Great Resignation. Really interesting work. Too long to get into, we don’t have enough time. But, yeah, some really fascinating work on the Great Resignation right now, and a manager’s, leader’s role in that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you give me one startling insight?

Bill Eckstrom
Yeah, those powerful insights I shared in terms of what great leaders are doing to create high-performing teams, they’re doing a lot less of them post-pandemic. The one-on-one meetings which great leaders, the number of them holding, the frequency has dropped about like 20%. The career development discussions have dropped. Team meetings have dropped. So, all the things that created these high-performing teams, they’re doing much less of them, and they wonder why people leave.

Pete Mockaitis
Huh, interesting. And a favorite book?

Bill Eckstrom
Man’s Search for Meaning, Dr. Viktor Frankl.

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

Bill Eckstrom
Mindfulness.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people tend to quote back to you often?

Bill Eckstrom
Growth only occurs in a state of discomfort. My kids say they’re going to put that on my tombstone.

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

Bill Eckstrom
BillEckstrom.com. EcSellInstitute.com. Our book is The Coaching Effect and that’s the only promotional thing I’ll do is to go get that at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, all the great bookstores. And the TED Talk is just…I get nothing from that. Of course, TED owns it but it went viral and it’s a fun talk. It’s called “Why comfort will ruin your life.”

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

Bill Eckstrom
If you want a better performing team, start by looking in the mirror. Because how your teams perform, if you’re in a leadership role, how your teams perform is simply a reflection of you. So, if you want to a higher-performing team, it all starts with you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bill, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much joy and keep up the happy mood.

Bill Eckstrom
Thanks, Pete. I do my best. Sometimes it’s hard to do all day long but I always start the day the same way.

Mar 03
0

747: How to Build your Career with Extraordinary Mentors with Patrick Kilner

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Patrick Kilner reveals why traditional networking methods no longer work—and shares his simple process for expanding influence.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why everyone needs to find six key relationships
  2. The simple secret to winning anyone over
  3. One question you should never ask—and another you should always ask

About Patrick

Pat Kilner has created and led three companies: two in the real estate space and one in the training world. He’s currently the CEO of the Kilner Companies which includes The Kilner & Kirk Group, The Indispensable Agent, and Tower Hill Enterprises. Pat is also the co-founder of the DC Accelerator, a young professional development non-profit. Pat serves on the boards of primary education initiatives and donates time to develop strategic plans for inner-city non-profits at the service of youth in the DC metro area. His companies support the special needs community in the DC areas as well as in Jamaica. He studied business and philosophy at The Catholic University of America and taught and studied economics at the Universidad de Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, where he achieved a Master’s degree. Pat lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC with his wife, Elena, and their children.

Resources Mentioned

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Patrick Kilner Interview Transcript

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

Patrick Kilner
Pete, it’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Pat, I’m so excited to get into your wisdom of Find Your Six: Stop Lead Generating & Start Building Influence, which has plenty of applicability, not just for sales-type folks but anyone looking to build influence and have mentorship and good things flowing. But, first, we have to hear about your semi-pro athletic experience in Spain. What’s the story here?

Patrick Kilner
I played soccer undergrad, and I ended up having the opportunity to go and study in Pamplona, Spain, so running the bulls, which only happens, that’s a 10-day sort of event. That’s not what little Pamplona looks like all the time. But I was there, and the great news is there’s no NCAA in Spain but the university had a futsal team, which was just starting to make its way into the US at the time, futsal, but was really big in Brazil and Spain, and I’m looking for a way to get some exercise in, go try out for the team, and make the team.

And because there’s no NCAA, everything is semi-pro. There are just gradations of semi-pro, and this university team was a pretty high-level semi-pro team, and I didn’t even know what I was getting myself into, but that’s how I stumbled into it, is just through the extension of my academic career and being on a really cool campus, and friendships that led me to try out for this team. Total blast and learned some great new skills and meet some awesome friends in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Well, we’re going to talk about building friends and allies and networking. Maybe to kick us off, could you share one of the most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way when it comes to what we might call networking, what we might call relationship-building? What do you want to call it?

Patrick Kilner
Yeah. So, well, I want to talk about it as business development. So, every business needs to generate revenue, and what I want to propose to anybody who’s listening, regardless of whether you feel like you’re in the business development realm or not, is that you are contributing to that. You’re contributing to a business and its functioning, and so, in some ways, shape, or form, we’re all business developers.

And as I began researching this book, and frankly, actually before that, maybe I’ll tell a quick story about how I sort of stumbled upon this. I was teaching a class of entrepreneurs, business owners, business leaders, in the DC metro area, which is where I’m from, of about 40 people, and we’re doing a mid-year check in on their businesses.

And I said to them, “Okay, so you all had revenue goals. What are those goals? Six months ago, what did you set those goals at? Write that down.” Okay, they write that down. “Now, how are you trending towards those? We’re about six months in, how are you trending towards those goals? Write that number down. Now, you may have been a little bit overly optimistic at the beginning of the year, so that’s okay. We still have six months to catch up. Given that, what is the lead-generation tactic that you have in your back pocket that you can pull out and make that revenue come in the door.

I spoke about it specifically through the lens of lead generation at the time. And they all wrote that down. And I was treating this as sort of a mastermind. So, I said, “Okay, great. We’re going to get a few really good things here out of 40 people.” I said, “Okay. So, given that lead generation, I’m just curious, how many of you are really excited to do that lead generation, not just for the next six months but for the next three years every day, two hours a day, just go get it? Because I know that if you’re excited about what you’re doing, you’re going to continue to do it. It’s not just going to be a solution for this year but for future years.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if I may, so for examples of these lead generation tactics might be, “I’m going to get up in the Facebook ads, or the Google ads, or start calling people, or asking for referrals.” So, any number of those things might’ve been on the table.

Patrick Kilner
Smile and dial, pound on the phones, write scripts, dialogues, objections, handlers, all the stuff that you learn in that lead-generation sort of paradigm, knocking doors, whatever it is, speed networking, “How many networking events? How many cards can I hand out?” Those types of things. And when I asked that question in that way, and it wasn’t a scripted question, it was a live question, nobody raised their hand, nobody said, “I can’t wait to do this for the next three years plus.”

And so, now I didn’t have any content with which to sort of have the mastermind. And so, I said, “I’m just curious, how many of you who have kids would be excited to take that lead generation tactic that you wrote down and teach it to your kids so they will have more flourishing, more exciting careers and lives?” Not a hand.

And this began the process for me of thinking, “Well, if we’re not excited about how we’re going to make business come in the door,” and, by the way, these people, most of them had most of the skin in the game for their organization. They were the leaders of their organization. And if the leaders of the organization aren’t excited about that, they can’t transfer that skill to other people. It’s just something they’re trying to retire from as quickly as possible, and that’s not a sustainable reality.

So, there’s something broken about just how we think about business development. And it shifted my thought process. Business development is sort of the broader thing. Lead generation is really just a blip on the radar screen of the history of business development. So, to answer your question now, what was sort of the aha moment or that piece of evidence that really struck me, is after this, I went and I got on Google Ngram, which is really a cool tool if you played around with it.

And what you’re able to do is figure out when the first times we actually used certain language around certain ideas. So, it categorized all of the…Google has sort of categorized everything that’s ever been written. So, you can use this tool, and academics use it a lot, and what I found is that we didn’t actually use the word lead generation, the phrase lead generation, until around 1976.

If you’ve been in sales since the ‘80s, you think that lead generation is synonymous with business development. It’s actually just there’s been a turn of phrase. Things like smile and dial, things like scripts and dialogues around telephone, hitting the phones, all of those ideas, call centers. You can actually look at how these spiked in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, and then how they get taken over by technology and re-used. So, who does lead generation better than any human being now?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking Facebook or Google.

Patrick Kilner
Right. Exactly. The really critical thing, and what I’ve begun to discover in my research is that if you are doing lead generation, eventually you get beat out by cheaper options that do it 24/7 and actually, ultimately, better than you because AI is just eating your lunch when it comes to lead generation, which actually makes us feel like cogs in a big wheel of our business instead of the indispensable drivers of our business.

And so, to get back to the story, that’s why nobody really wanted to continue doing this long term because, whether they realize it or not, they realize, “I am fighting a losing battle.” So, take travel agents, for example. How many travel agents do you know are in your phone?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know any.

Patrick Kilner
Right. So, if you know some one or two, there used to be travel agents all over the place. What happened? Lead generation was the thing, and they got disrupted radically by tech. So, Travelocity, whoever, has just cut out the middleman because they’ve, ultimately, really quickly done better lead generation than a human being could do.

So, what I talk about in the book is that if you’re doing lead generation, not only is it stripping you of your joy of working, but you’re also more disruption-prone. And so, let’s look at our relationships and where the relationships were…our relationships are really commoditized. Commodities are easily exchanged for anything else or versus the few relationships that are indispensably fundamental to our success that, regardless of what happens, they’re still going to be there for you, and we all have those in every aspect of our lives.

So, that’s the premise of the book. The question then is, “How do I go find those fundamental relationships, that are not commoditized, faster so that I can accelerate my career?” And the surprising thing to me is that people have applied this to mentorship, they’ve applied it to their sales, they’ve applied it to finding major accounts, to building boards of trustees because they realized, “Wow, in order to really accelerate my growth, I just need a handful of really amazing people.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And this reminds me of Keith Ferrazzi’s book Who’s Got Your Back and some stuff I’ve done back in the day with accountability groups and folks who really support and challenge me in terms of making things happen. And so, yeah, it is broad and vast, whether you’re deliberately trying to get folks who you can sell stuff to, or rather you’re seeking out mentorship or other kinds of relationship goodies.

So, tell us, if that’s something we want, like, “Yeah, I would love that in my world,” how do we go about doing it? And maybe I start with you say “Find your six…” What’s up with the six? And why is six people the magic number?

Patrick Kilner
So, I went and started researching “Exactly how many people do you need?” If the lead generation paradigm tells us you need thousands in order to get a small percentage. That’s basically, “You need to make these many calls in order to have this sale or this conversion rate,” “You have to have these many likes in order to get…” whatever, that dopamine hit.

If that’s what it’s telling us, that volume is the key, how many actually do we need in your six? And so, the shift, just to sort of reveal it is you really need a shift to thinking about being in the talent game, that if you’re in business or just in life, you’re actually not in the lead generation game anymore; you’re in the talent-searching game. So, how do you go find that talent? How to do that?

Now, where did six come from? I’m very fortunate to have built a business around great relationships, great professional relationships, and I found the 60 most impactful people who had had really long term and illustrious careers. So, these are folks typically 60 plus in all sorts of different careers, and I took them out and I interviewed all of them because really, really interested in “What are the keys to long-term success? And who are the people that made that happen for them?”

So, I was really curious in finding out the characteristic of these people. But, in so doing that, what I found is that the average number of people that had made really impactful contributions to really high performers in their careers was just six people. It wasn’t 600 people, it wasn’t thousands of people, it was just six people, and that kept happening as I’d have these interviews one after another.

And so, not only did I find the characteristics of the talent that they had saddled up next to, or who had invested into them, but I also found that you actually just need six of them. And they sort of accidentally found their six over the course of an entire career. So, my question was, “How could we go find those six in six months or a year? If you knew how to crack that code, what would that look like for you?” And so, that’s why six is from some of the ground research, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you talk about those six, can we paint a little bit of a picture in terms of “If someone is in someone’s six, it kind of looks like this. These are the sorts of things they do for them; they share with them; they talk about.” What does that look, sound, feel like in practice?

Patrick Kilner
Yeah. And you can apply this to, again, anybody in any career. I’ll give you sort of the principles that you can apply to anything, but then we can certainly drill into what that might look like for specific people depending on their career. But the first thing you’re looking for in terms of a character trait is longevity. So, I began looking for people who had clocked a lot of hours with others by virtue of their position.

So, why longevity versus sort of very transactional relationships? So, if somebody is in the habit of just having transactional relationships, they’re not typically going to be in the connection game, in the wisdom distribution game, that I’m looking for, for later on. So, that’s the first thing, is look for longevity. So, people who are spending more time than usual in relationship with folks. And we can drill into that a little more. So, longevity.

The second thing was implicit trust. So, for me, I was looking for people who, and this is what I found with others, people who worked in really big organizations, and they found people who were implicitly trusted, not just by them, but by the entire organization. Everybody that ran across them, these people actually, in many ways, their career and their income depended on the fact that everybody who encountered them was deeply implicitly trusting of them.

And then the final thing is finding people who have an ownership mindset to their work. So, these are the people that if the company is going down, they’re holding onto the rudder the whole time. They’re trying to make this thing go. Their DNA is part and parcel of the company. I had a great encounter with somebody who was in legal document storage, and he said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about,” and I’m thinking, “Okay, he’s going to talk about one of his clients. He’s a partner at a law firm.”

And he said, “It was the woman who greeted me at the front desk of the law firm. Her DNA was all over this place. She knew when the partners were having issues, if they were staying late, how the cases were going, if their professional relationships were good, or if she could angle me in to go help sell whatever I was bringing to the table.” And so, that type of person who, maybe isn’t actually on paper the owner, but also, but really is they own their job.

So, if you find people who have that type of longevity, that implicit deep trust, and an ownership mindset, you’ve basically found the right person. So, if I’m hiring for an organization, or when we’re hiring for…I own a real estate company. When we’re hiring people, we’re looking for people who, when we’re interviewing them, have established implicit trust with others around them, and how they do that, and how they think through those relationships.

We’re looking for people that have a true ownership mindset versus, say, what in the book I call a run-it mindset, or a work-it mindset, sort of that Fred Flintstone end-of-the-day, like the dinosaur gets pulled by the tail and he’s like, “Okay, I’m done. I’m washing my hands of this thing.” And that’s a commoditized relationship with the employer. That’s sort of working for the weekend.

So, those are the people that we’re looking for both internally as well as externally to advise us, to make connections to major accounts, to refer us business. And so, in the book, I go deep into how to apply those principles, but that’s sort of your talent profile, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, I’m thinking about it from two lenses. One in terms of like the sales business development, and another one in terms of sort of mentorship and growth and development. So, if we’re thinking about it on the mentorship side, so much time means much time in the career or the domain that we would like their wisdom in. Is that fair or how are you thinking about that?

Patrick Kilner
Yes. So, it could be, I would say, in general. And so, longevity really is the first indicator of whether somebody is trusted. You can’t be trusted unless you’ve spent time with folks. So, it’s a really quick filter. If you look at your list of everybody. Let’s say you work for a big consulting firm, and you’re up and coming, or you just got there, and somebody says, “You know what you should do is go find your mentors here.”

Look for the people who have the longest-standing client relationships and relationships within their teams, and who have clocked the most hours with those people. These may be managers but it could also be people in the regular mix of the organization. So, I’m looking for those people. That will limit your list pretty substantially. One of the things that I realized is I was getting frustrated in my business that depended a lot on referrals that people who have known me for a long time just weren’t giving me a lot of business. I was so frustrated.

And then I realized, actually, they don’t spend enough time with most people on a daily basis to build enough trust in order to send me business. And the same is true if you’re looking for mentors. These folks have to be in the practice of investing time into folks so that when they decide, “Hey, you know what, you should go talk to this person.” What do mentors do really, really well? They connect you to other wisdom through other great people. And so, that’s why longevity is really important. That then indicates the type of trust you’re looking for.

So, when you’re, let’s say, you’re looking for that mentor, you’ll know that you have somebody who’s implicitly trusted by asking them the right questions when you sit down with them. Maybe asking them who their mentors are. What kind of relationships do they still have in those mentor relationships? Or, they may be in peer mentor relationships. What kind of organizations are they involved in? What kind of board activities should I get involved in that you found really great?

People who sit on boards, oftentimes, they have to be implicitly trusted. They have a fiducia allegation. So, those are some of the indicators that I’m looking for when I’m looking for a mentor, is people who are really generous and who kind of know that this is going to come back around. All this stuff comes back around whether in the form of business or the right connections when it comes to sort of this game of life that we’re all playing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe tie it all together in terms of perhaps a story? So, there’s a person who was looking to turbocharge their advancement, ascent, wisdom, and they set about identifying six folks who could be of great assistance, and maybe we don’t need the 20-minute saga, but just the general broad strokes of what happened, how they went about it, and what results came from it.

Patrick Kilner
Right. So, I’ll give maybe a personal one here. So, the first business I started was in real estate, residential real estate business, and I got into it prior to the 2008 bust. But then 2008-2009 happened, and there was blood in the streets. National Association Realtors went from 1.5 million people to 750,000 people in less than two years, so experienced people taking early retirement really quickly. And I’d been in the business for three years at the time.

And I remember thinking, “Okay, all the stuff that all of these people who have taught me, who are now getting out of the business and it was all lead generation stuff, I need to figure out how to do this better.” And so, I called somebody who I knew had weathered storms in his own career, and he was, at the time in his 60s, and I called him up, and I said, “Jerry, I’m trying to juggle all this. I’m looking for any wisdom that you have.” I was not pitching business. I just needed his advice.

And, unknowingly, and by going to him and saying, “Listen, I just…I’m coming hat in hand here. As you know, I got a young family, you’ve done exceptionally well, and I’m sure have weathered some storms. Would you be up for a cup of coffee or breakfast?” And he said, “No problem.” Two days later, on his calendar, one of the busiest people I know.

And 45 minutes of me taking copious notes, and I remember he turned to me at the end, and he said, “You know, Pat, these are great questions. I listened the entire time,” and he said, “You’re going to do really well in real estate.” And what was interesting was I hadn’t talked about myself the entire time. I just asked the questions.

And here I am, I feel like a total pseudo-professional, total impostor, that I should be getting kicked out of this industry as well. I’m holding on. And he said to me, “You’re going to do really well. Listen, I’m really good at this attorney thing,” he was an attorney, “but I don’t know anything about real estate. I like how you think. If you run across any investments, let me know. That would be good for me.”

I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s…” I wasn’t selling. I can’t believe that this person just did this. But then he said something even more interesting, he said, “When I get back to the office, I got to get to court here in a second, when I get back to the office, I’m going to make an introduction to three different people for you.” And he put his name, his professional name to me, a young professional who was just struggling. He knew that I was trying to figure this whole thing out, and made connections to other professionals who respected him enough to say, “Yeah, I’ll have a conversation with you.”

And from that, what I found is that the right people, so Jerry for me was my first, the first one of my six ever. And great people in his shoes, great mentors, these people who sit at your table, if you will, that I talk about in the book, they are great connectors, they’re great wisdom distributors. I got more wisdom in one breakfast than I could ever imagine, but then he connected me to others who could help me. And those others also put their name to me because he had shown them that he was going to do that as well.

And it was my job to research what I wanted to talk to them about, how I could help them, and to stop worrying about not knowing everything, and just get out there and have these conversations. But Jerry taught me that the right people will be amazing connectors and, what I call in the book, wisdom distributors for you as well. And so, that set me on a course to build a really big organization that has provided for my family ever since through a serious recession. And I never did lead generation again after that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And so, alternatively, you just kept talking to great people who introduced you to other people, and then away you went.

Patrick Kilner
Yeah, I thought to myself, “Gosh, if I could have one of those conversations every day, what would my business look like? So, how do I go about doing that?” And so, I spend the last half of my book talking about how to have those conversations. What’s the art of that meeting? How do you land the meeting? How do you prepare for the meeting? How do you artfully have the meeting? What do you do to follow up? How do you add value? Can you even add value? I’m just starting out here.

Or maybe I feel like an impostor because I just shifted careers, but what I realized is, gosh, for the time that I spent those 45 minutes to an hour that I spent there was the most fruitful time, and I could imagine doing that for three, five, 15, 25 years every day of my career.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so let’s hear it then. So, let’s say we got a professional, they want to meet some of these people, have some of these conversations, get it going, what’s sort of the step one, two, three of making it happen?

Patrick Kilner
Yeah. So, the first thing, and it sounds really simple, is make your list. Who do you know currently? And look at that list and ask yourself, “Okay, of the people who I know currently,” you can say, “Hey, I just arrived in a new town. I don’t know that many people. Who do you know, because you know some folks, somebody helped you moved, somebody recommended that you use this company for X, Y, and Z, so you know some folks?” And so, make that list. It can be short. It can be long.

Then ask yourself, “Of those people, what would I be if I could ask them one question? What would I be most interested to ask that person about?” Some people, you won’t be able to come up with anything. Others, you’re going to have three or four questions that you can’t wait to ask them. So, like a good podcast host, now you have really pointed questions specific to that person. And so, that’s the first step, is finding just a handful of folks who you want to go sit down with and have a cup of coffee with. That’s step one.

You can build that list in a number of ways. Chamber of commerce, directories, you can look up people. It’s so easy to find lots of lists of people to go sit down with, and to be interested and have these conversations with. It’s obviously better if you have connections to them prior, but if you don’t, okay, you can start somewhere and we’re really, really fortunate to have all sorts of networking opportunities online as well. These can turn into much deeper relationships.

So, second step is now you’ve got to get the meeting. So, ask for advice. The easiest way to do this is to ask for advice, and ask for advice authentically. So, here’s how not to ask for advice. Don’t call somebody – Pete, I’m sure this happens to you all the time, “Hey, Pete, you’ve got this successful podcast. Could I pick your brain?” And you’re like, “Gosh, if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me to pick my brain, I’d be super wealthy.”

Here’s the problem with that. There’s a certain laziness to just saying, “Hey, Pete, can I pick your brain?” They haven’t actually dignified Pete with a little bit of research about “What specifically does Pete do really, really well that I know about, that I’ve really thought about so that he knows I’m not going to waste his time, and that he also knows where the direction of this thing is going to go? We’re not just going to sit down for a cup of coffee and this is going to turn into a two-hour long conversation, and we’re going to get nowhere. But I’ve got somebody who’s actually interested specifically about something that I’m an expert in.”

So, that’s the next step is research the person well enough to know why you’re asking them for advice. Then go have the meeting. Now, what does that do? That comes off very authentic because now it’s not a script. This is not lead generation. I’m not lead-generating this conversation with you. I’m being very specific. I’m authentically curious. And authenticity is really, really powerful in relationships, especially at the beginning.

And with that authenticity, now you frame the conversation that you’re going to have. Now, you’re going to go meet with the person. The conversation is framed. They know that you’re going to honor their time. They could be the busiest person you could possibly find. If you show them that you’re going to honor their time, and you’re authentically curious, they’ll have the conversation with you.

You go have that conversation, and if you ask the right questions, three, four really, really good questions, make sure that they know that you know about them. Again, you’ve given them the dignity of saying, “Listen, you’re really busy and I saw this and that, and I’d really like to know how you made manager. How did you go from here in your career to here in your career? That seems like almost an impossibility to me but I’m sure that you’ve got some insights in this.”

Or, “How was it that you landed that major account when you were pretty early in your career? How did you do that? Who were the people that made those connections for you?”

So, asking that, or you might be really…I remember going through a phase where I really wanted to know what made high performers tick and what their daily routine looked like because I really wanted to hone in my daily routine, and I was coming authentically to that in asking that question as well. So, those are some of the things, and now those are the bedrock for a much deeper conversation.

Here’s what I found with Jerry, is that because my conversation and my questions were specific and authentic, he liked how I thought, and he said it. He said, “Pat, I like how you think. You’re going to do really well in business.” We don’t work with people because of what they know. We work with people and we hire people and we want to continue relationships with people because of how they think.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Patrick Kilner
Think about your best relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that resonates. And I guess I’m thinking of what not to do. I received a LinkedIn message, like, “Oh, hey, I see that you’re a podcaster. Could you send me a link to your podcast?” This is on LinkedIn. And I’m thinking, “My LinkedIn profile literally says, ‘Pete Mockaitis, podcast host and trainer and chief at AwesomeAtYourJob.com.’”

And so, I guess it’s like, “Okay, you’re not a real human. You are a piece of software that is automating outreach because a real human wouldn’t do that.” And so, what you said is like when you do that bit of research upfront, it helps distinguish you from the vast majority of inbound requests that are just like, “Meh,” as opposed to, “Oh, okay, you’re a human being. You’ve spent some time looking at my stuff. Therefore, I have an inkling that if I were to invest some time in you, it’s going to be well spent.”

And I think Tim Ferriss has some good tips about how you show just that, like, “Hey, your time was well spent. You mentioned a book, I read the book, and here’s my key takeaways from the book you mentioned that I’ve already read two days after you told me about it.” It’s like, “Oh, this guy. Okay, you’re serious. Intriguing.”

Patrick Kilner
And be an active listener. Carry one of these things around and actually take notes because, again, you’re endearing yourself to this person who is honoring you by giving you their time. But flip this on the other side, when asked correctly for your wisdom, have you ever been offended?

Pete Mockaitis
No, I guess that correctly is the key word. But, no, I haven’t. It’s flattering. I guess the worst-case scenario is I feel guilty that I don’t have the availability to give them a little something. That’s like the worst but it’s always pleasant and uplifting because, most of the time, most compliments that come my way immediately precede a pitch to be a guest on my podcast, which makes them feel very insincere.

Of course, there are plenty of genuine compliments as well. They’re just outnumbered. But givers versus takers, right? So, yeah, that totally resonates. And so, if there’s any…I guess that’s sort of a good takeaway there. If there’s any fear, like, “Oh, I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to bother them. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience them. I’m little ole me. I couldn’t possibly….” Point well taken. It’s like if you do it well, they appreciate it.

Any other do’s and don’ts for that reach-out message? You do your research. You convey you’ve done your research. You don’t use the phrase ‘pick your brain.’ Anything else?

Patrick Kilner
Yeah, I think stop thinking that you don’t have anything to offer. So, you’re giving two gifts. One is the gift of actually having done your research and asking this person about what they’ve dedicated their life to most likely, “You’re awesome at this. If you have the time, I will inconvenience myself to make sure that you and I can sit down. I’ll meet you at the airport if you’re traveling all the time during your layover.”

So, that’s the first gift, really is that’s what gets me out of bed. Somebody says to me, “Hey, so and so told me that I should be in touch with you because you’re really, really awesome at this,” specific thing. “Would you have any time for me? Not next week maybe, but any time in the next month or quarter. Could I just find 45 minutes on your calendar? I’d love to take you out for a cup of coffee or whatever works best for you.”

And so, again, so that type of idea, and I go through a bunch of different ways to do that and endear yourself. So, that’s maybe going to look different within depending on your organization, depending on your career track, but really mastering that language, and that art of preparing, and the art of having a meeting is actually, frankly, a lost art because we hide behind screens so long that we’re actually not in this habit of connecting deeply with people and allowing them to have that in return, really, in an authentic way.

Now, that’s the first gift. The second gift is the gift that you give them afterwards. So, if you’re doing this, and I said if I could have this conversation every day, so if you said, “Part of my business plan or my career plan is to have one cup of coffee every single day with somebody who could be,” what I call in the book, “an influencer candidate, somebody who could be a candidate for my six. And those are just people who I have an authentic curiosity about what they do.”

So, because you’re doing this, you have a network, maybe not of people who are at the top of your list, your six. That’s sort of a sacred spot, but you have a lot of people who are at different places in what I like to call the influencer pyramid. So, they may be not as influential for you but really great folks. You can find a lot of those. And now you can be a connector of great talent. Again, you’re in the talent game. You’re looking for just a handful up here, but you will have…you do this for a quarter, you do this for half a year, you’ve got 50-100 people who know your name and who you can connect others to.

And so, even if you’re not somebody who’s old and wise and can give that wisdom, like Jerry did to me, you can certainly be what Jerry also was, which was a connector to other great minds and other great influencers, potentially. So, that’s the next gift. And so, those two gifts really are super impactful. And what it does is it reframes who you are in the mind of the potential influencer. They now see you in a totally different light. So, those are some of the hacks, if you will, of that conversation.

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

Patrick Kilner
Yeah. So, I’d say this, never leave a meeting without asking this simple question, “Knowing what you know about me, Pete, who else do you think I should talk to? If you were in my shoes, who else would you go talk to?” because not everybody is going to be your Jerry who’s just going to think to do that to make the connection. But if you prompted that, what I found is I had maybe a list of 25 people when I started out, who I was just desperate to learn from. That turned into a list of thousands over the years because I prompted that question.

And so, if you’re in these great conversations, again, you’re looking for a mentor, “Knowing what you know about me, who am I looking for?” What I found is also, just mathematically, you’re looking for, basically, a one in 20 talent. So, Pete, I’m sure you’ve hired folks before, and you go, “Gosh.” When you’re hiring out of desperation, you’ll take the first person who sends you a resume, when you’re looking for talent.

The same is true for mentors, the same is true for almost any person you’re looking for, external talent or internal talent to your team. But if you’ve talked to 20 people, gosh, you know what the landscape looks like and you can now choose who you’re going to go invest your time in, or time with, and who you want to forge that relationship with. You can talk to 20 people over the course of a month. Over the course of six months, you’ve found your six.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I see how that math works there. Monday through Friday, hmm-mm. Thank you.

Patrick Kilner
Take off a weekend.

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

Patrick Kilner
This one is from Dostoevsky, so great Russian novelist. And he said…and this is really comforting too, a guy who got straight Bs through college. He said, “It’s not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them – the character, the heart, and generous qualities.” I love that. As a dad, that’s what I want to teach my kids. So, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Patrick Kilner
So, that Google Ngram, I thought was I kind of nerd out on using that. I think it’s really interesting to understand how we use language and why we use it at certain times and how it impacts us. So, as a tool, I thought that was really, really interesting, and something that I think that I use quite a bit still.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Patrick Kilner
Okay. So, I’ve got two here. One is my favorite book of the year. I probably recommended this book more than any other, and it just came out this summer, a book called Wanting by Luke Burgis. It’s on the reason why we want what we want, and how people influence, how the people around us deeply influence why we desire, not just why we want things but why we actually form certain desires for things.

Totally made me shift how I see the people around me, and I’d wrote a book about the people around me. Fascinating book. He studies a guy named Rene Girard, who many people know was a mentor to the likes of Peter Thiel and others at Stanford. So, awesome book, a must read. And then David McCullough’s The Wright Brothers. One of the coolest stories about entrepreneurship around, and I’m an entrepreneur, and this is like these guys totally bootstrapped it and figured it out after having a bike shop. So, really, really cool story.

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

Patrick Kilner
OptimalWork.com. These guys have been a total gamechanger. I would not have been able to crank out a book without OptimalWork. The thesis here is that I particularly like a tool that they have on their site called The Golden Hour. And what it allows you to do is to get into the state of flow. So, block out distraction, get into a state of flow on command. So, a pretty amazing tool. Highly recommend it. I’m having my high school kids doing this already and it’s changing their grades already.

Pete Mockaitis
Flow on command, that’s enticing.

Patrick Kilner
Yeah, and that’s the key. And they do this at Harvard, so they take kids who are already high performers, and they teach them to actually perform at an even higher level and actually enjoy what they do a whole lot more. So, Dr. Kevin Majeres is behind this. He’s a clinical psychologist and just a tremendous mind. So, OptimalWork.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

Patrick Kilner
For me, it is waking up earlier than my competition. I think it has to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a key nugget you share, something that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you a lot?

Patrick Kilner
Yeah. So, I’ve got two from the book. One is simply trust is transferable. We can trust-transfer, and that’s a big part of the book is this idea that you’re really in the talent game and the trust-transferring game. And then the other is I didn’t actually expect as much resonance with folks, but folks who are trying to balance your family life and professional life.

This struck me that this idea that save your professional time, effort, and money for the most influential people so that you can save your personal time, effort, and money for the most vulnerable. So, whatever you’re in, like in my case, those are kids running around in diapers at a certain point of my life. But that’s why I work so that I can provide and really spend my time, effort, and money with them.

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

Patrick Kilner
So, really easy, FindYourSix.com or PatrickKilner.com will lead you to me, yeah. And it’s pretty easy. There’s forms on there. You can probably find my email on there as well.

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

Patrick Kilner
So, I’d ask, really, what’s, first, a reflective question, “What is the cost of commoditization in your business of your relationships?” So, if you’re in sales, lead gen, but fill in the blank. What’s the cost of that compounded over time for your career? I’d encourage you to take the Find Your Six challenge. I lay out a challenge at the back of the book, and it just says, “Here’s how to go about the challenge. Here’s how to find your six in six months or at least get to that point.”

If you want to totally reframe your business development and understand that, regardless of what your position is, you’re in the talent game. So, that would be the challenge. It’s really just built into what I have here. And here’s the idea, the business grows and your career grows and sustains and becomes disruption-proof only through the right talent. So, you’re in any position, “How do I disruption-proof my talent for my career so that I’m indispensably important?” It’s through the right relationships, and not just, “Hey, you scratch my back, I scratch yours,” but real investment into them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your six.

Patrick Kilner
Pete, thank you.

Feb 28
0

746: How to Foster Deep Connection and Influence with Zoe Chance

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Zoe Chance shares heartwarming, powerful, and practical advice for building relationships and getting people to say yes to you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one thing that motivates people more than money 
  2. How to exude more warmth and likability
  3. The one question that helps you get along with anyone 

About Zoe

Zoe Chance is a writer, teacher, researcher, and climate philanthropist. She’s obsessed with the topic of interpersonal influence and her science-based book is called Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen. It is being published in more than 20 languages. Zoe earned her doctorate from Harvard and now teaches the most popular course at Yale School of Management (Mastering Influence and Persuasion). Her research is published in top academic journals and covered in global media outlets. She speaks on television and around the world, and her framework for behavior change is the foundation for Google’s global food policy. Before joining academia, Zoe managed a $200 million segment of the Barbie brand, helped out with political campaigns, and worked in jobs like door-to-door sales and telemarketing. She lives with her family in New Haven, CT.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors!

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Zoe Chance Interview Transcript

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

Zoe Chance
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to meet you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you, too. You, too. I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about influence and how we can be all more awesome at our job doing that. I want to hear about one of your first jobs, cleaning audiobook covers with a toothbrush. What is the whole story here?

Zoe Chance
This was my very first job out of college. I had a degree from one of the top liberal art schools in the country, Harverford College, and I was so excited to set the world on fire but it’s actually really hard to find a job when you don’t have experience, and the job I could get hired for was working in a factory, cleaning the covers of audiobooks with a toothbrush. And the benefit of that job, the upside was that you get to listen to audiobooks, which I enjoyed, but this was one day, Pete.

And then at the end of the day, my boss says, “You know, Zoe, you did a really great job, and I bet it won’t take longer than three months or so before I can promote you up to the mailroom.” And I just left with my spirit crushed and I’m so embarrassed I ghosted them and I just never went back.

Pete Mockaitis
So, like this is one day?

Zoe Chance
Yeah. It was such an ego blow as a new college grad to be like, “Only three more months and then you can make it the lowest rung on the totem pole of the mailroom.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m curious to know if they’re fresh off the factory line, why are they dirty enough to need a toothbrush cleaning?

Zoe Chance
You know what, Pete, you don’t want to know. They’re not fresh. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, they’re not fresh off the line. These were rented audiobooks. So, especially people who were doing long drives, like truckers and stuff would rent and return audiobooks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you like ketchup from the fries.

Zoe Chance
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Zoe Chance
Hard jobs are so much harder than like… all blue-collar jobs, and I’ve had multiple, many of them are just so much harder than all white-collar jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear that. Well, thank you for sharing. And you have gone up a few ranks since the mailroom so you’re now a top writer, teacher, researcher when it comes to influence. So, I’m curious to hear what’s one of the most surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to influence over the course of your career?

Zoe Chance
I’ve had a lot of surprises. One of the most surprising is that by reading these secret journals that students keep for my class, I’ve been teaching at Yale for a decade, and I teach the most popular class, and I’ve had hundreds of students share these journals with me in which they reflect on their insights and apprehensions and experiences with influence. What I’ve learned is it doesn’t matter how successful you are, almost everyone is uncomfortable with influence.

And this is also from conversations with executives and activists and politicians, almost all of us feel uncomfortable having to advocate for ourselves, to ask for what we want, and especially in some domains more than others, and this is even some of the wealthiest people on earth, sort of the first big thing is interpersonal influence is deeply uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating. Well, I was just talking to a master salesperson yesterday, Shane from a Kwame Christian’s podcast organization – shoutout – another guest on the show, and it’s so funny because I sure get the impression, he loves…he just eats up the interpersonal influence, and I don’t know maybe he’s the exception, you said almost everyone. Or, is it that those who love it are also uncomfortable with it, kind of like the nerves of public speaking and the thrill of the chase at the same time?

Zoe Chance
What I found is that most people, even if their whole job is influence, interpersonal influence, maybe they work in sales or lobbying or fundraising and are very successful at it and they love their job, but maybe it’s their daughter that they’re having conflict with and they feel really uncomfortable asking her to do her homework, clean the dishes, something like that. Or, it might be they’re uncomfortable…

I was talking to someone who is so wealthy, that he’s on lists of wealthy people, just last week, who was saying that in business it’s easy for him to ask, but when he goes to a restaurant, he would never send his food back because that makes him uncomfortable to create extra work for the people who are working at the restaurant. Many of us have comfort in work-type of domains but we’re uncomfortable in romantic situations. It’s hard for us to make a pass at someone or request something from our partner, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is intriguing. And, in some ways, I could think about if this wealthy person happened to be like a CEO-ish type role being a steward of the shareholders’ money, basically, is kind of like what you’re doing there, you can sort of feel emboldened. I’m just totally projecting into the role of a CEO, I don’t know.

Zoe Chance
I love it. Keep going. Keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll just speculate away. You can feel emboldened, like, “Well, hey, this is kind of like my duty. I’ll do the best I can for my shareholders and for my team whose bonuses are all tied into the share price, but sending my food back, I mean, that’s just for me. Like, I’m going to make their job harder just so that I can eat something a little tastier. Like, who do I think I am? Come on.”

Zoe Chance
Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right, and I didn’t mean to be weird or secretive. So, the guy is Ed Mylett, who’s a motivational speaker and an entrepreneur. And I’m absolutely certain that what you’re saying about CEOs applies to most people where it’s easier for us to advocate for ourselves when what we’re doing is benefiting others. That’s what you’re saying overall, right? Yeah, absolutely.

And what he was saying, Ed was saying that he was uncomfortable in a situation where there’s no reciprocity and he can’t repay someone. So, in a business context, often we can say, like, “Hey, could you do this thing for me and I can do this thing for you?” But he’s saying, “What could I possibly do for the waiter? Or, definitely maybe I can tip them. What can I possibly do for the chef that has to remake the meal? Nothing, so I’m uncomfortable asking for that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Okay.

Zoe Chance
Well, can I ask you, Pete, if there’s some…and, obviously, you don’t have to tell us, but is there some area of your life that’s uncomfortable to advocate for yourself in?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. You know, it’s so funny, I feel…I hope none of my landlords are listening to this. We’re temporarily renting as we moved to Tennessee less than a year ago and we’re getting our bearings, and I also have an office space that I’m renting. And I’ve been on both sides of the equation in terms of as a tenant and a landlord, and I know, as a landlord, not that I lash out viciously at anybody, but as a landlord, I think of my investment in the property the same way as I think of my investment in like mutual funds or other things that are completely passive.

And so, as a result, every time a tenant has a request, which is totally fair and normal and reasonable and should be dealt with, I’m kind of irritated. And it’s not their fault, it’s my fault for, I guess, being selfish or just looking at it a little differently, like, “Hey, Pete, real estate is a little bit different than a mutual fund, so re-align your expectations or get your property manager to do more of the heavier lifting instead of bouncing these things to me.”

So, anyway, given that, when I’m a tenant and there’s something that’s a little off, like, “Oh, there are some ants here,” and it’s sort of like, “Well, I don’t want to inconvenience them about the ants.” And maybe it’s my fault because I should’ve done a better job of cleaning up my crumbs. There weren’t very many crumbs but there’s more than zero, and so I guess I’m at least partially to blame for these ants so I really don’t want to be like, “Hey, so take care of the ants.”

And I don’t know what I fear. Is it that they’ll be like, “Well, hey, stop being a slob with your food then we wouldn’t have an ant problem,” or, “Are you seriously inconveniencing me with your ant business? Like, don’t be a whiny little baby and smash the ants like a man”? I don’t know. But I am uncomfortable advocating for myself as a tenant to a landlord unless it’s really like, “Hey, straight up, your pipe is frozen and you need to know about that, so that’s what’s going on.”

Zoe Chance
That’s an amazing example. And just about anybody listening can relate to that on at least one side of the equation. And, yeah, it’s just so deeply human that we just don’t want to inconvenience each other, and also, frankly, we don’t want to be inconvenienced. But the frame of, “I think of my investment in rental property as like an investment in a mutual fund even though I am not a landlord” just makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Well, now you got me curious, how about yourself?

Zoe Chance
Oh, gosh, I was so uncomfortable asking for blurbs for this book that I’ve just written, and the person I was most scared to ask, I was scared to ask everyone because you are asking these incredibly successful people you admire to not just write something down for you and give you their super valuable social capital, but you’re implying that they should read this book that will take like 10 hours of their life for free. And, oh, my God, the person I was most scared to ask was Mark Hamill, Luke Skywalker.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “That’s Luke Skywalker, yeah.”

Zoe Chance
Luke Skywalker, and it was so hard to get the opportunity to ask him, and I got to have a half-hour Zoom call with Mark Hamill. And on this Zoom call, he doesn’t know why we’re having a Zoom call and he’s telling these amazing stories, and I’m so scared to ask that it gets to the half an hour and I literally haven’t said anything. He’s just been telling incredible stories and doing voices of like, oh, my gosh, he did Han Solo and The Joker. He’s a voice artist. And I was so scared, I haven’t said anything.

He was nice enough to stay on. I finally did ask him, and he very gently didn’t say yes, so I don’t have a blurb from Mark Hamill. But I think there was this just deep shame in asking for the most valuable thing from the people I most admire in the world, to ask them for so much time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so cool. Well, now I’m so curious, how did you get Mark Hamill to agree to spend a half hour with you?

Zoe Chance
So, I used every single social tie that I had, and the best thing that I had come up with so far was a friend who was the therapy client of Mark Hamill’s brother, but I was very uncomfortable using that. And then, actually, Mark Hamill posted a tweet. He’s an amazing tweeter and everyone should follow him even if you don’t like Star Wars. He posted a tweet saying that he was doing a charity auction for a Zoom call and it happened to be for my alma mater, USC, where I went to school, and they had given me a scholarship.

And I hadn’t actually ever donated money to USC so I ended up making sure that I won the charity auction and I gave $4,000 to USC for their scholarship fund so that I could have the Zoom meeting with Mark Hamill. And can I just share something that’s unrelated to this but my book?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it, yeah.

Zoe Chance
So, in my book, one of the messages that I talk about in the negotiation chapter is the idea of value-creation through three specific questions. And I know your listeners want to have tactical advice so this is a mindset of “How can I create value and long-term, lasting relationships that are fruitful on all sides?” So, a negotiation is just a conversation that leads to something more than whatever was on the table. It’s not just yes or no. There’s nothing complicated about a negotiation but most people don’t think of opportunities for negotiating because it’s just, “Do you want to do this thing, yes or no?”

So, the three value-creation questions, listeners, are, number one, “How could the situation be even better for me?” Number two, “How could it be even better for them?” And, number three, “Who else could benefit?” So, I have this opportunity to get to speak with Mark Hamill, and, already, so he’s one of my heroes. I’ve idolized him since I was three years old, and the movie came out, and it was my first movie. He’s been my hero. So, just getting to have this time is just beyond a dream come true. I’m going to ask him for a book blurb. We’ll see if that works.

I also want to see, “How could this be even better for Mark than me just showing up, random person, that he gets to talk to?” That’s not so exciting. So, I reached out on Twitter and to my Facebook friends, and said, “Hey, I have this opportunity to meet with Mark Hamill. I’m going to bring one person with me and, also, I want to bring him a video love letter. So, anyone who wants to send a 10-second clip of your message to Mark Hamill. He doesn’t respond to DMs, he’s very hard to reach, but we can send him a collective love letter.”

So, I curated this video of a whole bunch of short clips of people from all over the world sending love to Mark Hamill, just to have this be a more fun experience for him. And his wife was on the call, and she came and she watched it. It was so sweet. They loved it. And it was very hard to choose someone to bring with me but I ended up deciding, like kind of almost at the last minute, to bring a hero of mine, named Cass Sunstein who’s a behavioral researcher, who’s written a book called The World According to Star Wars.

I had never met Cass, and he posted on Twitter a link about his book and he tagged Mark Hamill. And I just reached out and I was, “Hey, Cass, I’m Zoe. I’m a big fan of your work. Have you ever met Mark Hamill?” He says no but he’s met George Lucas. And I said, “Would you like to?” So, I brought Cass Sunstein on this call with me, and he was working in the White House at the time on the Homeland Security team and another team doing creating awesomeness for Joe Biden.

So, Mark Hamill will be excited to get to meet Cass who’s written a whole book about him, and he’s coming in from the White House. Cass is excited to get to meet Mark Hamill. A whole bunch of us are excited to get to share our love with Mark Hamill, and his wife gets to come and see this beautiful montage that I’ve created. This didn’t come to the sort of tactically successful conclusion that I was dreaming of, of Mark saying yes to blurbing my book, although he said, “Send it to me and I’ll think about it,” and then he just politely ghosted me. It’s okay, Mark, I totally forgive you.

But it was such a win-win situation for everybody. It was fun, it was an honor, I got to actually now make friends with Cass Sunstein and we’re doing two events together next month, and it’s just great. So, I set up the situation so that it couldn’t fail. Whether Mark said yes or no, there was no possibility of failure. And I also had a lot of fun.

So, the value-creation question is to reinforce, “How could it be better for me?” I got to meet Cass. “How could it be better for them?” Mark gets to meet Cass and get this love letter. And, “How could it benefit other people?” It benefits Cass and the rest of everyone who contributed. So, that’s just one example of how we can create collaborative deals rather than trying to claim all of this value, and just use each other to tactically get what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And the notion of “How can it be better for others?” is cool in that it just makes it more fun and feel good both for you and for them in terms of, “Okay, yeah, and your customers are going to like this even more,” or, “And the readers of the blog or the podcast or whatever will dig it.” And so that just feels good in terms of not only are third parties being enriched, and, hey, that’s cool for them. It’s also, I think, really does good for your relationship there. It’s like, “Hey, we have partnered and collaborated to do something good for people,” and that just releases all kinds of feel-good, I don’t know, neurotransmitters, hormones in the body.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, those are really important. And the sociological thing that we’ve done is we’re moving away from transactional norms to communal norms where it’s really important in this that you’re not saying, “I will do this great thing for you if you do this great thing for me.” That’s another thing that’s fine. We can do that in deal-making, and we do, but to shift to the dopamine, oxytocin, great neurotransmitter situation where you have a relationship with this person where we’re not beam counting and horse trading is to just say, “Hey, how could I make this better for you?”

And there are some things that I could easily do, it’s something that you do, Pete, is posting all of these links for each of the podcast interviews that you have, and there’s no reason for you to do that but you’re just saying, “Hey, listeners can benefit from the links that I share. And all of the people who I’m linking to, they can benefit too. So, why would I not do that?” But a lot of people don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s true. It does take more work but I guess I just always think about myself in the listener’s shoes, like, “I want that thing but I don’t know where to find that thing.” And I’ve had multiple experiences of hearing something on a podcast, like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And so, I Google it for 20 minutes, and it’s like, “I got nothing. I want to know more about that thing but it’s nowhere to be found so I guess I’m done.” It’s rare that I’d have the gumption to be like, “Hey, podcaster, you said this thing and I need it.” Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Zoe Chance
And you’re making it easy for them to get that. And I have a whole chapter, well, half chapter, in my book about ease, because ease is the most powerful force of influence. If there’s only one thing that you take away, listeners, to this episode that you might do differently in your life is make it as easy as possible for the other person to follow through on whatever it is that you’re requesting or inviting them to do. Ease is more influential than motivation or price or quality or satisfaction.

And for nerds, there’s a metric that you can look up and maybe, Pete, you’ll link it here, there are Harvard cases and stuff that you can look at. Actually, for the link, there’s a book called The Effortless Experience, which is for real nerds.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice name.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, it’s great. And the metric is called the customer effort score. It’s basically a question that says, “How easy was it for you to do that thing that you wanted to do?” that one metric explains 30% of word of mouth and 30% of willingness to continue to do business with the company.

For customers who say it was very difficult to do the thing they wanted to do, there’s an 80% chance they’ll spread negative word of mouth. For customers who say it was very easy to do what they wanted to do, there is only a 1% chance that they will spread negative word of mouth, and that’s independent of the actual outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
That really resonates because I was refinancing a mortgage and I found a really great rate and I was excited about it. But then, oh, my gosh, this took maybe three months to get done and I kind of prompted him a few times and that really got him off there off their butts it seems, I said, “Hey, you know what, I just met a dude, Justin, like him a lot, he does mortgages. I think he’s hustling, I think he’s actually going to get this done, so I’m going to kind of switch over.” Like, “No, no, don’t, please. No.” So, that kind of got him into gear.

And so, even though I got my great rate and it’s working, I don’t feel great about them, and I have said bad things, it’s like, “Hey, man, I got a great price but they were really obnoxious, so I guess it was worth it, time, money, swap, but it wasn’t fun.”

Zoe Chance
You know what, Pete, so I just moved last year and my refinance was so difficult that I finally just took money out of my retirement account and bought the house in cash.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Zoe Chance
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Zoe Chance
That’s how deeply I feel your pain.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that is potent and you get to that point, and I got to that point a few times, just like, “Just forget it.” And I always say, “Okay, Pete, let’s take a look. It’s been frustrating but just how many hours have you spent and how many more hours could you possibly have to spend, okay? And how many dollars are we saving? That’s a great ratio, Pete. That’s better than just about anything else you do in your business so, like, take another step forward and keep it going.” But I had to like coax myself multiple times to not just throw my hands in the air.

Zoe Chance
Right. You did the right thing. I did the stupid thing where I was just so angry, I couldn’t spend any more time on the refinance, and I’ve no idea how many thousands of dollars that ended up costing me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I appreciate your humility and your willingness to share. Well, so, ease, that’s a huge takeaway. Your book, it’s called Influence Is Your Superpower, we’ve already gotten a couple delightful nuggets. Is there sort of a core theme or big idea associated with the book you want to make sure to put out there?

Zoe Chance
The big idea of the book is that, in addition to make it as easy as possible, so if you just had one takeaway, it’s that. The big idea of the book is that what our goal should be in influencing other human beings is that they want to say yes to us. Our goal should not be that we get the thing that we’re asking for, that’s a short-term win, and the long-term win is that they want to say yes to us. They may not be able to, it might not happen, we might not get that thing in this moment that we want, but we’re building long-term relationships that are much more valuable over time. And I tell loads of stories about that.

The fear that we have about asking is that we will be making people uncomfortable and they won’t want to say yes to us, but when you have a good relationship with somebody, they want to say yes to you even if you’re asking them to come and deal with the ants or whatever that is. And you know that from the people that you have relationships with.

So, to make this practical, something that you can put into action, just focus, keenly, keenly, keenly on expressing warmth before you focus on anything else. The way our brains are designed, we have judgments of each other on two dimensions, which are warmth and competence. The warmth judgments happen first, they’re more powerful, and they’re stickier. This is especially important for us right now because we don’t get to spend as much time in face-to-face interactions when it’s easier to be expressing and perceiving warmth.

It’s actually hard not to like somebody that we’re spending time with if they’re being friendly to us, but, say, when we’re writing messages to each other, people tend to read less warmth than we intended into our written messages and they read more aggression or rank or insults than we intend. So, when we’re writing, especially we need to be very, very intentional about expressing warmth in our messages. It’s a good idea on all of our communications though.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, these are some big ideas that are hugely doable. And, Zoe, you do a great job of expressing warmth, and it’s interesting, because we were chatting just a few minutes before I pushed record. And it’s funny, I just thought, “Oh, well, she’s just so wonderful, wonderfully delightfully warm person.” That’s just who you are in your personality.

Zoe Chance
I am.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you got that going for sure, so you got that going for you. But, now, you got me wondering, like, “Hmm, so is this something that you’ve studied and practiced and mastered?” So, this is learnable. How do we do that?

Zoe Chance
Yeah, so it is absolutely sincere and it absolutely didn’t come naturally.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Zoe Chance
I was so shy and nerdy as a child. I couldn’t communicate with anybody and that’s why I got interested in our whole field of communication. I had a theory that my voice was the same timbre as the ambient sounds of the universe, and that’s why people spoke over me and couldn’t hear me when I talked. That’s how nerdy I was.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I was thinking the totally opposite, “Thus, you have tremendous power.”

Zoe Chance
Oh, no. People literally couldn’t hear it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ambient like you’re just ignorable because it blends into everything else. Okay.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, exactly, just background noise. And so, I liked people but I didn’t know that you actually need to express your liking to people. I thought it was enough to just feel my liking of people. And it was through acting training and learning to emote and to express emotions that I was able to train myself to express the warm feelings that I do have in my heart.

Also, though, I’ve trained myself to like people more than I used to just naturally because I wasn’t thinking of it. You’re not always…just there are lots of things you’re doing in the world besides liking people. But when I was a teenager, my mom’s friend, Eileen, was married to a diplomat, and I wanted to be Eileen because she was so cool, and she threw great parties, she went to all these parties, she had cool clothes and jewelry, and her husband, the diplomat, knew how to drive like James Bond because, I guess, they train you to do that if you’re an ambassador.

Pete Mockaitis
Just in case you need it.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, you have to. So, they were the coolest people in our life. And, Eileen, I think I was like 13, and she said, “Zoe, all you need to do to succeed in life is learn how to find one thing to like about each person that you talk to.” And she had to deal with some very difficult, difficult to like people, and she said, “The way you do it is by asking them questions. And then if you can’t find something to like by asking them questions, you just look at them, and even if it’s just their earrings, you like that.”

So, what happens when you’re looking around in a world at the people that you’re interacting with, and you’re looking for things to like, is that you become very curious about them, you get to know them more deeply, and it’s this incredibly fun and pleasurable way to live where you’re just noticing and appreciating all these wonderful things about people.

So, again, it’s absolutely sincere. I’m not conscious of…actually, I’m really not very conscious of expressing warmth now, and I’m really not conscious unless it’s a difficult situation of trying to find something to like. I just get to do these things habitually, and that’s really important about all these things that I’m teaching in my book about influence, that it’s work to practice new skills but any new skill, through practice, becomes habitual, and then it becomes effortless.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so much there. So, we’re looking for something to like, and then, as sort of a mindset and an ongoing process, okay.

Zoe Chance
And then expressing warmth so that they know that you like them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, for looking for something to like, are there any key…? Well, one thing, it’s nice when you have a goal, “Okay, I’m looking for one thing,” so it’s not overwhelming. It’s like, “Oh, I can’t.” It’s like, “You can find one thing, okay.” And then you can default to a surface-level appearance-y thing if you have to, like earrings. Tell me, are there particular super questions that tend to surface stuff that you like? Or, I guess, does this often follow any predictable patterns?

Zoe Chance
There’s a really deep question that you can ask and if they will have the conversation with you, almost guaranteed that you’ll like them no matter what. And this is from my close friend, Lalin Anik’s TED Talk, and the question is, “What’s in your heart?” It’s impossible not to like someone who answers that question for you.

That’s not the first question, usually, that you ask people, but she, actually, in her TED Talk, shows a video where she just went on a street and she just asked strangers, “What’s in your heart?” and they shared it with her. So, it really is a question that you can ask of a stranger on the airplane if you’re actually flying these days. It’s a question that you can ask in a difficult conversation or an argument that can shift the course of the argument. This is my favorite question.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And I guess that can…that really has a lot of different flavors based on the context in terms of like “What’s in your heart?” As we’re talking now, what’s in my heart is I just want people to have the thrill of discovering some powerful knowledge they can use to make their experience of life and work all the more enjoyable, both from results that they’re creating, like, “Ooh, yeah, look at that thing I did,” as well as from just the pure fun and pleasure of doing so over the limited hours we have on this planet.

Zoe Chance
Pete, I felt that so deeply that I got actually tears in my eyes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, I’ve never met anyone that I didn’t like even more, even if I already like them if you asked them that question. So, anyone listening, what if you’re at the dinner table next time or a meeting with your team, and you just ask that question, “What’s in your heart?” It’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Zoe, if I may, what’s in your heart?

Zoe Chance
I’m feeling so surprised and so grateful to be having such a deep conversation with you right now. I was imagining that we’d be mostly focusing on very specific practical stuff that I’m happy to talk about always, but this is…yeah, it’s next level and I’m full of gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, shucks. Well, thank you. This feels very happy. And I think, though, those principles associated with expressing warmth, finding what’s something that you like, and then making things easy, are specifically and hugely valuable. And then there’s also very many different ways they can manifest and particulars.
Well, let’s dig into the ease a little bit. Can you tell us either do you have a specific checklist or series of tactics on how to make things easier or a cool story that illustrates a number of ways we can boost ease?

Zoe Chance
I have just a really simple example to give everybody the idea that you don’t have to make these things complicated, although what you’re focusing on is making it easy for the other person. And now that we’re talking about all these, I’m focusing on the lowest-hanging fruit here, and if you end up reading the book, you’ll see tons of strategies for more complicated things, like developing charisma, and negotiating, and stuff like that.

But for ease, I had a guy named Conor, who was in a workshop that I taught, who runs a speaker series, it’s a speaking business in Ireland, and he heard me say, “Make it as easy as possible.” Do you know someone named Conor who does…?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve met a Conor who’s from Ireland who has a speaking business.

Zoe Chance
Do you remember his last name?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve seen him speak like twice. He talked about, “Give it some gab, goals, attitudes, and behaviors, and beliefs.” I don’t know if that’s the same guy.

Zoe Chance
So, this Conor’s group, I think it’s called The Executive Institute but I have to look all of this up. So, anyway, Conor – love you – he went back to his team, and he said, “Listen, the way that our business makes a profit is to have attendees become repeat attendees, and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to come back. And what we’re doing so far is email outreach, just like everyone does, and we make the announcement and everything, we give them flyers, and then follow up by email.”

But he said, “How about this? Let’s put a flyer in everyone’s chair that just has checkboxes where you can check which talks you would like to come back to, and then we follow up by email to say, ‘Hey, you said you wanted to do this talk.’” And so, making that first step of expressing interest as easy as, “Just check the box and then drop the paper off,” they increased their profits that year from this one intervention by 11% for their company.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, with dropping some papers on seats, I mean, that’s huge. And I’m thinking about church, there’s this in Catholic churches in the US, there’s something called the Annual Diocesan Appeal in which the diocese, the grouping in a city or wherever, appeals to all the individual churches, saying, “Hey, support this stuff that helps the multiple churches and programs across the whole region.”

And so, it’s interesting, like I’ve seen it done so many different ways, where you say, “Hey, you’re asking for money, to make a commitment,” and I found, I don’t have the data at hand, but it’s just massively different in terms of if you just say, “Hey, you know, there are some envelopes over there, you can grab them on your way out or on the sides of the chairs and pews, and fill them out,” versus there’s one in every row, and, “I’m now going to walk you through what’s on the envelope.”

And, of course, it’s annoying for all of us and we don’t want to spend our time doing that, but effective in terms of it is unignorable, like, “Oh, yeah, maybe I’ll remember and I’ll get to that.” It’s like, “No, no, I’m making a decision now. I choose to give money or I choose not to give money now, and there’s no kind of, ‘Yeah, maybe later-ish.’” It’s forcing that, and I’ve heard that it’s striking, the results, in terms of what that does.

And now I’m thinking about apps and how I really love it, and it’s, frankly, maybe just laziness and toddlers and distractions, I really love it when I don’t have to enter an email address or a password to get going on an app versus it just goes. I like that a lot.

Zoe Chance
Yeah, and absolutely you use those apps more. Duolingo did studies to understand what’s the perfect level of effort to keep people engaged in learning the languages that they want to learn, and they published something that, essentially, said, the least effort possible. So, make it as easy as possible, and then people will come back. They thought that people wanted a challenge because we’re trying to learn something, and they found out, “Nope, just make it as easy as possible, the best thing you can do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I would imagine, once again me speculating on their behalf, you want it as easy as possible, but you also want to feel some progress. Like, if you made it super easy, like, “Oh, I tapped ‘Oui’ and ‘Bonjour’ 30 times. Okay, I haven’t actually learned anything but that was super easy.”

Zoe Chance
Yeah, they give you that sense of progress, they also make it fun. There are some little unexpected things that pop up. Yeah, they do a lot really, really well. So, something super weird that has nothing to do with our conversation except that it’s about Duolingo is that I just learned that when the Squid Game came out and got super popular on Netflix, Netflix was having such a big cultural impact with this one show that Duolingo’s request for Korean went up by 40%.

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog.

Zoe Chance
Isn’t that so cool?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s wild.

Zoe Chance
And because it’s so easy to learn a language on Duolingo, that’s where everybody went.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. I feel like I should take a second look at Duolingo. It’s great stuff. Well, Zoe, this is so much fun, but tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear quickly about a few of your favorite things?

Zoe Chance
Yeah, one of the things that I encourage you to do, especially because you’re – this is to listeners – someone who listens to shows like this, as I do, trying to better yourself and improve yourself and succeed, you create so much work and so much burdens in your self-improvement that I challenge you, if you’re up for it, to do 24 hours of no.

The 24-hour no challenge is to say no to every single person who asks you for something for the next 24 hours. And it could be small, it could be big, professional, personal, maybe you want to say yes, maybe you don’t. The caveat is don’t ruin your life. So, if you’ve got a dream job offer, or your sweetie proposes to you, don’t be like, “No!”

And you can change your mind. You have the right to change your mind always, just like everyone does, but experience what it feels like to say no, and experience what it feels like to see how they react. And then if you want to then or later, next day, a year from now, you can change your mind. This simple challenge can be life changing and thousands of people that I’ve taught have found it life changing. And I don’t even want to give the takeaways because it’s something that you have to experience for yourself. So, whatever you think it will be like, I predict that you’ll have some surprises.

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

Zoe Chance
My favorite, favorite quote is from Pauli Murray. She’s an American feminist, black, lawyer, legal scholar, she wrote arguments for Brown versus the Board of Education, and yet, she faced such racism that even after doing that, she couldn’t get a legal job, and she worked as a typist for a white feminist Betty Friedan.

Pauli Murray said, “When my brothers draw a line to keep me out, I just draw a bigger circle to keep them in.” To me, this is the perfect description of what inclusivity means and how hard it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Zoe Chance
My favorite study, I really hope is true. We’ve talked about replications and this was just published in a book not in an academic journal, but it’s a study by Richard Wiseman who’s a psychologist in the UK who wrote a great book called The Luck Factor. What he did was recruit people who said they were really, really lucky, and people who said they were really, really unlucky, but it was in a long survey, and I had no idea why he was recruiting them.

He brings them to the lab, and he’s trying to study how does luck happen. When they come to the lab, he gives them a section of a newspaper, and says, “Count the photographs and then tell me how many there are.” So, the unlucky people look through the section of the newspaper, they count the photographs, and they come back and they say, “There are 16 photographs.” “Okay, great” and they move onto the next part of the study.

The lucky people who told him they were really lucky noticed the half-page ad in the section of the newspaper that says, “Mention this ad to the experimenter for a chance to win £500.” They were luckier. They were right when they said that they were luckier people. But my interpretation, at least, it’s not that God was making them luckier, but they were more open to opportunities around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is so good. Thank you. And a favorite book?

Zoe Chance
My favorite book is called Love Does, it’s by Bob Goff. This is a Christian book, but when I first read it, I was not religious at all. And so, if you’re not Christian, I don’t think you’ll find it annoying. Bob Goff is the most audacious and inspiring asker I’ve ever come across. And for anyone who reads that book, go to the chapter called “The Interviews” and it will blow your mind.

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

Zoe Chance
I love my reMarkable tablet that I’ve been taking notes in during this conversation. I’m an absent-minded professor, and I use all these notebooks and papers, and lose my stuff, but I don’t lose it anymore, and I feel lost without it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do to become awesome at your job?

Zoe Chance
When I’m writing, I need to clear my mind before writing, and I’ve developed a technique that I call “My Nietzsche Journal.” Nietzsche, the philosopher, said that the purpose of being human is to become someone who does not deny, so to rid ourselves of self-deception. And when I’m sitting down to clear my mind, I just write a whole page of one-line prompts that start, “I do not deny. I do not deny. I do not deny,” and I just get all the stuff, all the junk, out of my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget that you share that people quote you on often?

Zoe Chance
Probably the ease one, that the bedrock principle of influence is that people tend to follow the path of least resistance.

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

Zoe Chance
Please come on over to my website www.ZoeChance.com. That’s Z-O-E-C-H-A-N-C-E.com. And there’s book, newsletter, other fun stuff, and silly stories and things like that. I would love to be friends.

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

Zoe Chance
I think I’ll just double-down on the 24 hours of no challenge but I gave them already because I don’t want to be heaping up more homework on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Zoe, this has been a delight. Thank you. I wish you much luck with your book Influence Is Your Superpower and all of your adventures.

Zoe Chance
Thank you so much. And I look forward to following your podcast so I can be more awesome at my job.

Feb 24
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745: How to Handle Bad Bosses and Toxic Coworkers with Tessa West

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Tessa West addresses the seven common types of jerks at work–and how to deal with them effectively.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to tell if someone is being an intentional jerk at work 
  2. How to identify your particular type of work jerk 
  3. How to tell if you’re the jerk at work

About Tessa

Tessa West is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University, where she is a leading expert on interpersonal interaction and communication. She has published over 60 articles in the field of psychology’s most prestigious journals, and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. She writes regularly about her research in the Wall Street Journal. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors!

  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow 

Tessa West Interview Transcript

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

Tessa West
Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into your wisdom. It’s a frequently-requested topic, difficult bosses and jerks and, “What do we do with them?” So, maybe we can kick it off by you sharing one of the most ludicrous, hilarious, ridiculous examples you’ve encountered, either directly or through people who want to tell you their story, about a jerk at work?

Tessa West
Oh, yeah, I hear a lot of stories. I actually probably hear more, lately, stories of people who really humiliated themselves in an effort to confront a jerk, you know, crying publicly, that kind of thing. So, probably one of the craziest things I’ve encountered, I’ve encountered lots of jerks, and I’ll tell one of those stories in a moment.

But the craziest thing I’ve ever encountered was I was actually giving a talk, I was giving a keynote somewhere, and it was a whole bunch of powerful people in the room, C-suite for a huge Fortune 500 company, and we’re all going around the room and talking about our goals and listening and all this kind of stuff.

And, all of a sudden, one of the women at the table, one of the roundtables, just started bawling, and she stood up and she grabbed the mic, and she had this whole like speaker truth moment in front of all of her coworkers where she just lambasted them for ignoring her, disrespecting her, stealing credit, basically taking over her, talking over her in meetings, cutting her out of email chains, and stood up there like snot dripping down her face, tears coming out, holding the mic, and just went off on this crazy speech.

And, at some point, the president of the company just stood up and said, “For God’s sake, can someone grab her a box of Kleenex?” and it really destroyed the mood and made it really uncomfortable. And I thought to myself, “This is what happens when we let our jerks at work take over for so long and we don’t confront, and then we just explode on them in these really inopportune awkward situations.”

So, that was kind of one setting where I was just surprised at what happens when people feel like they’re targets of jerks and they don’t actually do anything about it. It just kind of happens like that. Terrible, terrible moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Whoa. Well, did you ever get to find out how things unfolded in the weeks and months afterwards?

Tessa West
Well, I talked to her in the bathroom afterwards. It was very high school. It felt like high school. I went up to her, and I ran into her in the bathroom, and the problem was she couldn’t show her face like in the intermission. She felt so uncomfortable. But, yeah, I did follow up with her and she felt like it sort of helped break the ice to have these conversations.

But, at that point, things had gone so far that she didn’t feel like they could really be remedied. She felt like she had to leave her job, which was crazy because she held this really high-up position in the company, and she just felt like, at that point, no one respected her. Now, they thought she was super histrionic and dramatic so there’s no kind of saving the moment for her.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that is a dramatic story and I think it really is a nice cautionary tale in terms of, this is what can happen if you let things get out of control, even though you may very well, legitimately, be the victim and not at all to blame. If you sort of continue taking it long enough, this might be in your future or other negative outcomes.

Tessa West
Definitely, you don’t want this in your future but it’s possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. All right. Well, that’s a powerful story to tee this up. Thank you. So, yeah, we’re going to talk about jerks at work. Maybe, could you share perhaps one of the most surprising or most counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made when it comes to your research on the area?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think when most people think about jerks at work, the first question they have is, “How do I confront a jerk at work?” And I actually find in our research that, probably 50% of the time, confronting that person is not a good idea or at least it’s not a good first step, that you need to do lots of other things before you’re ready to confront someone, like collecting data, and finding how why it’s part of the problem, and whether you’re the only victim, and all these kinds of things.

But I also think people are always surprised when I tell them that when you confront someone, you have to think about it like you would confronting your spouse or your child about something they’re doing that they dislike, and kind of use those same strategies – backing into the problem, opening with a compliment or things you want to see them do more of, before you actually talk about the problem behavior.

And people are surprised at that because they think to themselves, “It doesn’t feel like my job to tell someone ‘You’re great’ when they’re terrible.” And I kind of have to remind them that it kind of de-fangs the conversation a little and reduces the threat. But, also, to remind them that no one likes having their flaws spelled out to them in detail. It’s an uncomfortable experience, even people who you think deserve it.

And so, I think we have this instinct to confront, to lay out people’s flaws, to tell them how they make us feel, and I actually don’t think any of those things are good ideas when it comes to confronting jerks at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s intriguing. So, you said half of the time, we shouldn’t do it at all. How do we make that determination and what should we do instead?

Tessa West
That’s a great question. I think it really depends on the kind of jerk you’re dealing with. But often, it’s the case that you might want to talk to someone about your jerk but it’s not the jerk themselves. So, one example of that would be dealing with a kiss-up-kick-downer. So, these are those people that if you work in a competitive workplace, they’re mean to everyone who works with them in the same level or beneath them, but the boss loves them because they bring some kind of talent to the team.

So, this kind of instinct to go and tell them, “Stop bullying me. I know what you’re doing,” kind of what we learned growing up in school to stand up to the bully, so to speak, often backfires because they just get more conniving and more clever in their strategies. And so, confronting them doesn’t really get you where you need to be. You need to talk to your boss about the person, and kind of there are some strategies behind that. But, actually, confronting an intentional jerk often backfires.

Another example of that is a gaslighter. So, if you’re being gaslit by a boss who’s cutting you off socially and building an alternative reality, and they’re doing it for some reason or something they’re trying to hide, going to them and saying, “I know what you’re up to. You’re gaslighting me,” is just going to make them more strategic as well, and so you really have to back out of that relationship, kind of build some protection, build a little bit of a barrier up, find allies and so forth, and get the help of other powerful people to exit that relationship but you never actually want to confront that person.

Of course, that’s not the case for all jerks. Lots of them, you actually do need to talk to. But the ones that are intentionally trying to sabotage you, confronting them and telling them that you know what they’re up to and they should stop bullying you, almost never works.

Pete Mockaitis
And then, yeah, how do we discern whether you’re dealing with an intentional jerk or an accidental jerk, like, “Oh, oops, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize I did that, and I didn’t realize you hated that. Oh, geez. Excuse me. My apologies”?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think that there’s degrees of sensitivity that people have and what they express, but if you really try to understand why someone’s doing what they’re doing, that often kind of provides insight into whether they’re intentionally being a jerk. So, for example, if someone is stealing credit, you can tell if you work in a team or in an organization where everyone is just throwing ideas in the air, it’s really disorganized, and then in the end you try to grant credit.

Credit-granting and mis-granting kind of often happens in these teams. And, usually, when we’re the target of that, we feel like someone stole our credit but, often, that’s not really the case. It’s kind of part of the process of us being disorganized and people not keeping track of who said what. So, in situations where’s there’s ambiguity around behaviors, there’s lack of role clarity, we don’t really know who’s suppose to be doing what, who’s in charge of what, that’s where you often get things like free-riding and credit-stealing that might not be necessarily motivated to torture people or ruin people’s lives, but more kind of a product of the situation.

Kind of the most classic example of this is micromanagers. We often think they’re trying to torture us and they don’t trust us, but more often than not, they’re micromanaging because they’re not being managed properly because they were promoted, because they were good at your job not managing, and there’s a lack of clarity from above on what they should be doing.

So, if you kind of look at the origins of their behavior in combination with the context in which you’re working, you often get insight into just how intentional this behavior actually is and how much of it is just we work in a place where there’s such, this kind of lack of clarity about what’s going on that this kind of accidental jerkery can happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s handy. And I’m sure it varies so much but I’ll try to put you on the spot nonetheless. Do you have a sense of roughly what percentage of the time when we perceive jerkery? Is it intentional versus misunderstanding, disorganization, some other factor?

Tessa West
So, is your question, “How often do we think that someone is being a jerk because of intention?”

Pete Mockaitis
I guess when we perceive, when we suspect someone is a jerk, what proportion of the time is that actually the case versus “I’m misunderstanding”?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think I’m going to answer your question in two ways. First, almost no one admits to being a jerk so no one thinks they’re being a jerk. Second, almost everyone thinks if someone is being a jerk, they’re doing it on purpose. So, we have this bias to attribute people’s terrible behaviors to their individual personalities, so we almost always think that someone is doing it intentionally. I’d say probably 50% of the time they’re not.

And, in fact, I talk about some extreme cases in my book, like the gaslighter, but those are actually fairly rare. What we usually get is kind of low-level stuff that occurs under ambiguous situations where we actually don’t know the root cause of the behavior but we assume it’s because they’re a jerk, and they’re intentionally trying to be a jerk. So, I think most of us believe that but, probably half the time, there’s not really much intention behind it. If anything, people are just completely misguided in what they think is a good idea often at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned a few of the types of jerks at work, and, in fact, you’ve got a listing of seven. So, maybe for completeness’ sake, could you give us the quick definition of each of the seven, like the name, the definition, and perhaps a quick do and don’t for each of them?

Tessa West
Sure. So, the first is the kiss-up-kick-downer, so I mentioned this one before. This person is horrible to everyone at the same level as them or beneath them but the boss loves them. And so, a do for dealing with these folks is do try to find an ally who’s a little bit outside of your immediate social network who can connect you to other victims so you can learn how widespread the problem is.

Then once you have that information, you can go to your boss to talk to them about it but we can much more convince them they should do something if they think there’s other victims. Don’t try to confront this person and tell them that you know what they’re up to and you’re going to tell on them. They know that they already have the approval of the boss and that they have the upper hand, so doing that is just going to make them even tricks-ier than they already are.

The next one is the credit stealer. So, these tend to be our friends, our confidants, sometimes even our bosses or managers, and what they do is steal credit for your ideas and for your hard work. And I think these folks are often really difficult to deal with because sometimes it’s intentional and sometimes it’s not. So, do pre-processes to help make it really clear from the onset who’s done what work so that it really kind of nips credit-stealing in the bud. Credit-stealing is borne out of bad processes. It’s not usually the product of a person who’s trying to steal credit. These people have to thrive in these situations.

Don’t accuse a credit-stealer of stealing credit. So, this is one of those examples where the minute you accuse them of credit-stealing, probably 80% of the time, they’re going to come back and say that they did more work than you realize they did because we all have a bias to think we contributed more than we actually did, so you’re just kind of in a conflict with these people if you do that.

The next is the bulldozer. So, these people tend to hold power and status at work. They talk over everyone, they’re loud, in the age of Zoom, they’re the ones whose camera takes up the whole screen, the rest of us kind of zone out when they talk, but they also go behind the scenes to kind of pull levers of power. So, if they don’t like a decision the group is making, they’ll go to the boss or the boss’ boss and kind of talk them out of siding with the group.

So, one thing that you don’t want to do is just try to trample down or stomp down on a bulldozer. What you want to do instead is redirect them. So, use that attention that they have, that loud-mouthiness, to actually echo contributions of younger people. And when you do this, it actually makes them kind of feel a little bit more included. You also have to go behind the scenes a little bit and talk to that boss and talk to the boss’ boss as a group to kind of even out the different perspectives that they’re hearing.

The next one is the free-rider. So, this is the most common type of colleague that we have. These people have charisma for days, they tend to be really well-liked, they take advantage of their social skills to get away with doing nothing on teams. And so, our tendencies to want to confront them and accuse them of free-riding and doing nothing, but like some of the other jerks at work, when you do this, what ends up happening is they’re already disengaged, now they feel shamed so they’re going to disengage even more. They’re going to pull back even more.

And I could tell you an interesting story of a free-rider I know who did this exact same thing. What you want to do instead is to re-engage them, is remind them of why you wanted them on the team in the first place. What about them did you like? Were they creative? Did they help sort of provide socially groove, whatever it is? And then get on a really clear schedule of how you’re going to get them re-engaged back in the team. So, don’t listen to things like vague platitudes, “Oh, I’ll make it up to you, I promise.” You need like a week-by-week exact strategy of how they’re going to do it and what they’re going to do.

And then the next three chapters are about managers. So, micromanagers who are really common at work, these folks tend to have top-down control over everything you do no matter how small or big, and they do it equally to everybody. And so, our tendency with these people is to go to them and tell them how they make us feel, “You’re smothering me,” or that we don’t trust them. But the reality is, these usually aren’t the issues behind micromanagement.

So, instead of doing that, do have a conversation about higher-level goals, what are your goals and what are theirs, and you can kind of back into the micromanagement, but the problem is that you’re misaligned on what you should be doing at work. You want to come up with a plan of how to actually become aligned. The best way to do that is to have specific goals and then weekly check-in meetings or that 15 minutes to stay on task. A lot of us don’t want to engage more with a micromanager but that’s the best thing to do because it gives the relationship structure.

Then we have the neglectful boss. They’re kind of the opposite of the micromanagement coin. So, these folks tend to do this disappearing act for weeks, sometimes months at a time, but then they freak out and they panic that they’re out of the loop, so they show up at the last minute and then they micromanage you at the worst time. They create massive amounts of uncertainty because you don’t know when they’re going to show up.

So, our tendency for these folks is to tell them that they need to meet with us, that’s it’s an emergency, write these emails that say in all caps and bold, “URGENT. CALL. I NEED TO MEET NOW.” But, instead, what you need to do is two things. Offer to offload some of their work to kind of re-engage them. Some of the work that they’re doing you could do more efficiently. And then the other thing that you want to do with these guys is actually give them a longer period of time in which they can set up meetings with you. So, instead of 24 hours, give them two weeks because they’ll be less stressed out, they’ll be more likely to engage.

And then the gaslighter. So, these are the kind of really sinister sociopathic jerks at work who lure you in either with the promise of being a part of something special, a little bit like a cult leader, or the threat that if you don’t what they say, you’re going to get fired. And then they isolate you from everyone at work and they create an alternative reality.

So, what you don’t want to do is tell them you caught them lying, that you know what they’re up to, and what you do want to do is document everything they do, don’t have any meetings that don’t end with kind of minutes taken at the end that you send to them. You want to make sure you do those things. And then you need to build up your relationship brick by brick. The thing that they actually intentionally destroy, you have to recreate.

And then you’re going to go to your allies and actually get them to help you form connections with other people in power who can help you exit out of this relationship, but you can’t do this one alone. You absolutely have to rely on your social network at work to escape a relationship with a gaslighter.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say create an alternate reality, I imagine there’s many ways you could accomplish that. Could you give us a rich story that brings it all together?

Tessa West
Yes. So, a couple of the stories that I talk about in my book are related to idea theft. So, sometimes what happens at work is you have someone who used to be really special, who used to be kind of at the top of their game and really creative, and everything was going well for them, but then just one day, things dry up.

And so, I’ve heard this story, I’ve heard it in marketing, I’ve heard it in academia, I heard it in business, industries that require creativity, one day the boss just doesn’t have it anymore, and they panic and they don’t know what to do. And so, what they end up doing, or at least in the examples I talk about, is they start stealing ideas from other people.

They start downloading documents on shared Google Drives. The idea theft kind of starts out small with maybe a little suggestion of what to do that they haven’t thought of, and over time, they have completely built this reality of coming up with something new and novel that they really just stole from another person.

And, in the example I talk about in the book, the person who’s on the receiving end of this gaslighting believes that their manager or their boss has put together this new creative project, this kind of groundbreaking marketing plan and, in reality, it was all stolen. But the gaslighter had to create a whole bunch of lies so that person wouldn’t detect the stealing. They wouldn’t know that Google accounts were hacked and that kind of thing. And the way they do that is they make sure they don’t talk with these other people who are actually coming up with these ideas. They’re totally isolated from kind of the creative energy of the team and then they’re able to get away with it.

In academia, this has happened a bunch, and in science where people make up data. A couple professors have gone down pretty hard for not just making up data but making up staff that ran the data…

Pete Mockaitis
Like, whole persons. Like, inventing names and…

Tessa West
…fake people who collect these, all this crazy stuff. But you had to be gaslit to really even believe any of these crazy kinds of alternative lab world with fake employees and fake data, and the only way that they accomplish this, down to like fake names, fake interviews, fake pictures, is because they never actually interacted with anyone at work that would tell them, “That’s not a real person. No one has ever seen them around.” So, it takes quite a lot to have fake employees and fake ideas and all of this kind of stuff. It takes really having no interaction with other people who could ever fact-check that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, yeah, that’s intriguing. And so, that’s an alternative reality alright with all sorts of details and inventions. Okay. And you said you had a free-rider story as well. Do tell.

Tessa West
Yes, so kind of the one lesson I’ve learned about calling out free-riders is these individuals tend to be very socially sensitive. They get away with free-riding because they’re well-liked and they can make good dinner reservations and they know all the gossip. So, what happened in my situation was we called out a free-rider, told this person we knew they weren’t doing anything, thought because they were socially motivated and cared what we thought that would get them to re-engage, but it was just the opposite.

And he felt so uncomfortable in meetings that what he did was he set his cell phone to ring, to pretend ring, at the last 10 minutes of the meeting so that he could exit the room before everybody else did so he didn’t have to talk to anyone. But it was the sound on an Apple iPhone of the alarm so we all knew it wasn’t a real ring. It was just the alarm going off, but he would pick up his phone when the ring went off, and say, “Hello? Oh, I’m sorry, everyone. I have to leave a few minutes early,” and leave so that he didn’t have to interact with us.

And I kind of realized later that that was kind of motivated by this extreme discomfort with hanging around too long with team members that had kind of shamed him for doing nothing, and it backfired. It was really hard to re-engage him once we had done that. He had pretend phone rings going off so he didn’t have to talk to us.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. And so then, the better plan is to get a very specific gameplan in terms of, “These are your tasks over the next few weeks that you’re going to be owning,” and then it’s kind of like black and white there.

Tessa West
I think it’s black and white. I think the first step is to re-engage them by saying, “We miss you so much. These were all the great things that you brought to the team,” even if it pains you in your role and your rolling your eyes the whole time, kind of reminding them why you liked them, really helps kind of get over that hump, and it helps them with that shame feeling of being called out.

There’s this great research on free-riders showing that even if you show them evidence of their free-riding, they almost never admit it. And so, this is something that just people don’t ‘fess up to. So, actually, you don’t want to end up in this debate with them over whether they did it or not, how bad of a person they are or a team member. You really just want to talk about, “What we’re going to do moving forward, but also what we want to see more of out of you, what we really like, and wish that we had more. We miss that kind of thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I’m thinking about some free-riding experiences, and it was kind of odd that it’s sort of like there is incontrovertible evidence, like, “So, in your timesheet, you marked this amount of time, and, yet, here we see in the Skype notes how long this meeting actually took with me, and yours is much longer.” It was really weird actually.

Tessa West
Yeah, it’s really disconcerting when someone won’t admit to something that’s so obvious. It’s like they’re five years old and their face is covered in like brownie batter, and they’re like, “I didn’t eat the brownies.”

Pete Mockaitis
And let’s talk about just that concept. I’ve got a buddy, and we’ve talked about this a few times in terms of, I don’t know what the construct is. Is it humility, self-confidence, something? But in terms of like I have enough humility to know that I’m wrong. I make mistakes. I misperceive things. And I often realize that there are multiple sides to each story, etc.

And, yet, so if someone comes out confidently saying something that doesn’t seem quite right to me, I can be like, “Well, that doesn’t quite seem to check out but, boy, they seem so confident about that.” Like, I tend to just almost fall for it. And then, I remember once I was having a steak dinner, and I thought, “This is weird. This doesn’t taste very good.” And I love steak and the restaurant seemed expensive enough such that it should be good. And I thought, “Huh, so there must be something wrong with my sense of taste or smell. Maybe I’ve got COVID again.”

Tessa West
Again.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I thought, “Well.” And I said, “Well, that’s interesting, Pete.” Like, I’m here talking to myself internally, like you question your very ability to perceive things rather than…I guess I just give people the benefit of the doubt, like so aggressively until it’s like I’ve got multiple incontrovertible points of data, and it was like, “Nope, you’re dead to me.”

And so, I don’t know. Help us out, Tessa. If we’re just too nice, forgiving, proactive benefit of the doubting, humble, easily swayed by a very confident talker with something that doesn’t quite seem right, how do we recalibrate?

Tessa West
Seem Pollyannish. So, first off, you’d make a great gaslighter victim. They would love you because they’ll make you feel really special, and that’s kind of the first move of the gaslighter, and you’ll buy it and think, “This person is so positive and encouraging. They give me so much attention,” all of these wonderful things make you susceptible.

But I would like to kind of walk up to you and whisper in your ear this one fact that you’ve got to keep in mind, which is ability to read people, an emphatic ability, and confidence in that ability are correlated almost zero in the real world. So, if you encounter someone who comes across as super confident and knows what they’re talking about and has really strong opinions, that’s probably completely uncorrelated with their actual abilities.

In fact, some people are great and think they’re terrible, and some people are terrible and think they’re great. There are very few things in social psychology with such a weak correlation as ability, actual ability to perceive and read people, and your confidence in doing so. But we still think that confidence means competence. We mix them up all the time. It’s a really common thing people do, but those two things are also completely unrelated. In fact, there are some stats that are showing they’re negatively correlated. The louder you are, the less competent you actually are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, appreciate that whisper and that’s handy in terms of gathering that. And so then, if we find ourselves in that situation, is there a great next step in terms of getting, I don’t know, is it just like gathering some evidence, or doing a test, or talking to somebody? It seems like a little extra dose of information could be very handy.

Tessa West
A dose of information and don’t kind of follow the temptation of talking to your best friend at work who you see as your kind of shared-reality person. So, most of us have, if we’re lucky, one person at work that we’re always on the same wavelength with that we can talk to them after a meeting, and say, “That felt really weird, right? Like, that interaction between Bob and Jen was strange.” So, our temptation is to always go with this kind of good friends and confidants.

But what you actually want to do is go to people you don’t know that well, those who have a lot of connections with others that are outside of your network because they can give you a real reality check of how widespread the problem is. And for people who are targeted by jerks, the best thing to do is to talk to others who used to work with that jerk and have since left for whatever reason because they’re just more likely…they have less to lose, so they’re more likely to open up, so in so far as you can form any of those kinds of connections.

Sometimes I talk about, a little bit in my book, the surprising connected people. So, when I worked in retail, it was the person who worked at the coffee shop because everybody went there. But now that I’m in academia, it’s actually the IT people who fix people’s computers because they really know what’s up, like they know who’s actually rude and nice and all the juicy stuff on their computers, which isn’t relevant to me but they tend to actually know everybody more than other professors do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s true, if they’re rude or nice in terms of like, “Hey, fix this, jerk,” versus, “Oh, thank you so much.”

Tessa West
Some people are really kiss-up-kickdowners. Yeah, they’re so nice to other professors but they treat the IT people like trash. And I actually learned a lot about those folks and what I wouldn’t trust them with just based on that information.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell me, we talked about the last three categories, those are bosses, do we play the game any differently when it’s our boss versus just another colleague?

Tessa West
I think so. Some of the basic communication points I’ve made of opening with a compliment or strength and focusing on the behavior, those are really true for everybody. I would say that people almost never give upward feedback to a boss, so people are incredibly uncomfortable having these conversations with bosses, and your tendency is to confront people who are at the same level as you and to just never do it with a boss even if in an exit interview on your way out.

So, I would say that I think it’s not so much that we need to approach this differently because of the status difference, that matters, but it’s more that we have to learn how to confront people who are higher status than us, and we almost never do. So, we have a lay theory that you’re allowed to do certain things with people who are the same level as you or below you, but you’re not allowed to do them if they’re higher status than you.

And I actually think that’s a bigger problem that we need to break, is that we need to learn how to ask for and give feedback to everybody kind of regardless of the level because if we kind of operate with this lay theory of, “It’s cool to have radical candor with your teammate but not your boss,” that’s not going to solve most of our difficult problems at work. And even when you talk to a boss, you’re usually complaining about someone at the same level so you’re still kind of doing it. So, I do think that that matters a lot.

I would say, though, that when it comes to complaining about powerful people, it really helps to have other powerful people on your side who aren’t emotionally invested in the problem. So, in so far as you can connect with other leaders to get their advice, other managers, it really helps to form that kind of network at the top even if it’s just a quick feedback conversation you have with them so they know where you’re coming from, can give you some advice on what works and what doesn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then, if things are really nasty, what do we think about in terms of talking to HR, quitting? How do we think about those decisions?

Tessa West
I try to avoid the real egregious stuff in my book, the HR-related stuff, because I think, for the most part, if it’s really terrible in an objective law-breaking way, so Title IX, MeToo, like harassment, those are more straightforward to deal with because people are actually violating their contracts, but HR does not care about the low-level stuff.

In fact, I have dealt with HR a lot as a leader in my department at NYU, and they just like tell us to deal with it ourselves, and then call us complainers if this stuff comes up. So, their bar is really, really high for stuff to care about, and you got to keep that in mind if you want to complain to HR, that nine times out of ten they’re going to say, “This is a little low-level for us. They’re not violating anything. It sounds like you just have some conflict,” but obviously they’re actually abusing you and violating rules, that’s different, but most of the time people aren’t, and that’s kind of an interesting phenomenon where people often claim, “I’m going to report you to HR.”

I had this happen to me because I told him, I told someone not to send an email and he did, and then he told me I was going to report him to HR for complaining about the email. It was so stupid but it’s kind of an empty threat nine times out of ten because HR is busy with the real stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good to know. And then, in terms of leaving, like when do you think it’s severe enough, like, “You know what, this environment is ugh”?

Tessa West
It’s kind about, yeah, breaking up at work is hard, and I think this is something we don’t actually talk enough about, how do we decide when to leave. I think there’s a couple clues. So, the first is figuring out whether your jerk is intentional or not. Are they even aware of the problem? And some jerks that we talked about, like micromanagers and sometimes even bulldozers, aren’t totally aware of just how destructive they are. So, are they aware? So, you go to find that out.

And then you’d have to find out if they have the goal of actually engaging in change. So, are they motivated to change? We know from the close relationships that are, for instance, that if you have conflict in a marriage and one person is motivated to change and the other isn’t, you’re headed for a divorce. There’s really nothing you can do about it unless that person has that motivation. So, you need to find out whether they’re actually motivated to change or they’re just defensive and think there’s nothing wrong.

And then the third thing is what’s the environment you’re working in? Is it a breeding ground for jerks? Not all environments are sort of equally fertile for jerks at work. Some really encourage it, or at the very least don’t do anything about it, and others are really strategic and systematic about making rules and policies that make it hard for jerks to thrive.

So, ideally, you want to work in a place where it’s not super fertile ground, you don’t have this sort of dog-eats-dog hyper competitive culture that encourages things like kiss-up-kickdowners, you don’t have absentee bosses at the top who don’t care what happens. You want a place that’s like a barren desert that these jerks can’t thrive in. So, if you have kind of the ideal environment, plus accountability, plus willingness to admit, or at least understand the problem, then you’re in a much better place. But if those things are missing, then I think it’s actually really hard to stay in that job.

That said, I do worry a little bit about people leaving jobs because of jerks, especially right now. We’re seeing this with the Great Resignation because just because you leave the job doesn’t mean you’re going to find it any better in another place, and you haven’t really developed skills of dealing with this stuff. So, at least, try some of these things first before you’re ready to move on.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s actually a really great place to be, well, it’s very unpleasant to be. But in terms of if you feel like you’ve got nothing to lose, and you’re ready to leave, or rather than leave right away, try some things, and if they didn’t work, it’s like, “Well, hey, nothing lost. I was ready to be out the door anyway.”

Tessa West
“Nothing lost. I learned what works and what doesn’t.” I’m all about at least you could put forth the effort and you learned something along the way. You learned what strategies might help you in the future. Jerks at work aren’t going anywhere and we can’t control who we work with. And so, this idea that you’re going to go to like a grass-is-greener job, I think, just doesn’t really exist. I think it’s an illusion that a lot of us have. Just wait two weeks, you’ll meet a new jerk eventually, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And how might we come to conclude that we are, in fact, the jerk at work?

Tessa West
Yeah, no one thinks that they’re a jerk. I have this survey on my website, it’s my book, called “Are you a jerk at work?” And you can take my quiz and get feedback. And I had about, the first hundred people that did it online, 90% of people thought they were the ideal coworker. That can’t possibly be true. I think most of us see ourselves in a pretty glowing light but there’s a couple things you can do.

I think if you’re a leader, you can really look out for your Achilles’ heel at work. What are your weaknesses? What’s the version of you that happens when you’re the most stressed out, getting the least support, and the most sleep-deprived that you are? And all of us have kind of these emotional tendencies that can lead to jerk behavior.

So, if some of us are really anxious, we micromanage. It makes us feel in control. Others of us when we get anxious, we really disengage, we free-ride, or we’re a neglectful boss. So, you got to know what those little triggers are and then you have to put steps in place of what you’re going to do when you experience those triggers. It’s a lot like having a behavioral therapy.

You can’t control the triggers but you can control how you respond to them, and I think it’s really important to learn those and then replace them with healthier behaviors. Don’t just tell yourself, “Don’t do that thing.” Actually, replace it with something else. But they key here is if you hold even just a little bit of power, no one is going to tell you you’re a jerk. It’s rare.

I give people these strategies because no one feels comfortable confronting. Nine times out of ten, you’re never going to find that out in a direct way. You’re going to have to play detective by figuring out who seems disengaged from you, who used to show up and doesn’t anymore, so these kinds of things so you have to really look out for those subtle behaviors in other people.

And then, certainly, if you ask them if you’re problematic, they’re also going to tell you no, so you have to ask them about your specific behaviors. But I really think a lot of this has to do with knowing your own triggers and being honest with yourself about what the worst version of you looks like, and we all have that version.

We probably all saw that version during the pandemic come out at some point, and then just admitting to yourself, “These are my triggers, this is what I do, this is the worst version of me. Here’s how I act. Let’s figure out what I’m going to do instead the next time that trigger comes along and makes me feel that way.”

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

Tessa West
I’d say that if you feel like you’ve been a jerk, it’s okay. You’re in good company. We all have the potential to sort of be both on the receiving end as well as the giving end of these things. And I really want to kind of normalize people talking about and thinking about these jerky behaviors because I think they’re super common, and don’t feel like you are the only one who’s ever been targeted, or the only one who’s ever acted this way. We all have the potential to do these things, and I think it’s just all about learning smart, short, simple strategies on what to do about it.

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

Tessa West
You know, I had a really hard time with this one. You’re not going to like this quote, so, “Every body on Mt. Everest was once a very motivated person.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it is provocative, so.

Tessa West
My friend Annie Duke is writing a new book on how to know when to give up. You would think with trying to promote a book where it’s all about showing initiative to deal with jerks at work, I wouldn’t be pro giving up but I do actually think it’s a really provocative topic of knowing when you’ve tried all the things and it’s time to throw in the towel.

And I think, especially, and you brought this up, when we’re dealing with conflict at work, when is it time to move on? When have you done everything you can on being able to read the situation enough? So, like this little meme pops up in my social feed, and it just reminded me of this kind of important point that there is such a thing as a sunk cost when it comes to dealing with these things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, we’ve had Annie Duke on the show twice, so I’m totally looking at the release date, October 4th. Okay, hopefully, we’ll have her around then for her three-peat.

Tessa West
She’s fantastic, yeah. Nice.

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

Tessa West
My favorite study was one done by Wendy Mendes, who’s a social psychophysiologist at UCSF. But what she did was she had minorities and whites, I think they’re African-American and whites interact with each other, and she found this really interesting effect where white people engaged in these over-the-top friendly overtures, and they do this the most when they’re the most stressed out physiologically.

So, she identified this phenomenon called brittle smiles, which is the harder you try to be nice and overly smile and overly ask someone how they’re doing, the more stressed out you are physiologically. And it’s a great mismatch between body and mind and face, but I love it because I study communication. It just shows what a hot mess we often are and why it’s so confusing to interact with people.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s so hilarious on so many levels. Alright, first of all, is it only white people?

Tessa West
It’s whites and African-Americans, so we don’t know if everybody does this but I’m assuming they do. It’s a pretty general phenomenon.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, when you said white people, that reminded me of this episode of “Community” in which the character Elroy Patashnik, this like VR scientist says, “I’m addicted to encouraging white people.” And so, he’s just like, “This man knows what he’s doing.” So, he just says these like throwaway phrases that just make people feel good.

And it’s funny, I do the same thing with my kids when I’m feeling stressed, and I was just like, “Oh, my sweet angel, would you like some macaroni and cheese?” And it’s almost like I’m trying to soothe myself or it’s like I’m…

Tessa West
You’re self-soothing.

Pete Mockaitis
Or it’s like I’m unleashing my anger in a way that I hope they can’t perceive quite yet because they’re two and four and they don’t pick up.

Tessa West
They totally can, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-oh. All right.

Tessa West
A second favorite study of mine. And we stressed out parents, dads and moms, and we put them through the three-year test, which was super stressful. And then we reunited them with their kids and had them play, and the kids picked up the stress from the parents, and they showed physiological synchrony with the stressed parents, and they act more avoidant with like a new person, they were more withdrawn. And this was as young as six months old, kids start to show this, so we do actually leak all that stuff out.

And, here’s a little tidbit for you, the more you try to suppress it, the worst it gets. So, just like go home and be an a-hole to your kids. That’s better. I have an eight-year-old, I get it. You’re stressed, you’re like, “Hey, want a cookie?” and they’re like, “Mom, why are you acting so strange?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Dada is feeling frustrated because it’s 3:00 a.m. and still dark outside, and he’d like for you to go back to bed. Okay? Thank you.” All right. And a favorite book?

Tessa West
Ooh, that’s a hard one. Children of Time it’s a sci-fi book by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I probably butchered that. I almost exclusively read sci-fi. So, this book is about spiders on a new planet that have evolved to be super intelligent. And it’s really all about status and power and mind-reading other species and what they’re going to do. It’s the best social psychological book I’ve read on power and status about spiders.

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

Tessa West
My Google Calendar Excel spreadsheet that allows anyone who’s close to me to just write down when they want to meet in a 30-minute window, and it has saved me tons of time, and it’s also made it possible for people who are less comfortable bugging me to just go on and reserve their time. So, what I found is the people who are the most comfortable kind of nagging me for time tend to come from like really high social-class families where they learn to just push their way through things.

Whereas, the first-gen students don’t do that. They feel rude. And it just creates this kind of mismatch between who has access to me and who doesn’t. But if you get the Google link and you can just sign up, it’s kind of this great equalizer among all my students.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

Tessa West
When I have feedback conversations, I always end them with, “Do you have any feedback for me?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Tessa West
And then they look shocked and they don’t know what to say but they get used to it after about the third time.

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

Tessa West
One thing that resonates with people is power and status is established within the first minute of a team and often very subtly. So, it doesn’t take much to establish yourself as a leader. Something as simple as having everyone go around the room and say their names will often work. And people find this to be surprising but really effective if they want to actually assert themselves in a team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that feels like a whole another podcast conversation. But while we’re on the subject, okay, what are the top things I can do to appear powerful and high status in my minute? So, is it just like introducing myself powerfully or by being the guy or gal who says, “Hey, how about we all introduce ourselves?”

Tessa West
Yes, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I should ask for the intros and that makes me powerful.

Tessa West
It does because here’s what happens, especially if you don’t know each other well, the person who asserts himself as the organizer of the group, not the person with the loudest opinions, the strongest voice. The person who says, “Let’s go all around the room and say what our names are. Okay, everyone, let’s get together and organize these applications. I’ll take A through D.” That person, all of a sudden, everything else they do is seen through the lens of leadership, all their other future behaviors, because they’ve established themselves as a non-self-interested leader from the get-go. They’re actually interested in the wellbeing of the group.

The next piece of advice I would give you is don’t try to convince people by talking for a really long time. My favorite rule is what Marty Nemko calls the stoplight rule. So, you have 30 seconds to make a point when your light is green. In 30 seconds, it turns yellow and people are hoping you wrap it up. At the minute mark, you’re still talking, they’ve minimized you and they’ve gone to shopping online. They’re not even going to listen to you anymore, so less is more.

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

Tessa West
TessaWestAuthor.com.

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

Tessa West
Yeah, I’d say normalize talking about jerks at work. If you have power, open up these conversations with a tale of your own jerkery and what you did to realize that you were off-kilter at your job, and that will really help other people feel much more comfortable in admitting their own mistakes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tessa, this has been fun. Thank you and keep on being not a jerk.

Tessa West
Thank you. You, too.