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Mar 23

1139: How to Become the Manager that People Want to Work For with Ashley Herd

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | No Comments

Ashley Herd illuminates under-taught manager skills required of leaders.

You’ll Learn

How build trust with your employees from day one
Simple ways to make meetings more effective
The key question that helps accelerate your career

About Ashley

Ashley Herd is the founder of Manager Method, a leadership training organization that helps managers drive performance without driving people out the door. A former General Counsel and Head of HR with experience at organizations including McKinsey and Yum! Brands, she’s also a LinkedIn Learning instructor and co-host of the “HR Besties” podcast. Ashley is the author of The Manager Method, and is known for giving practical tools that make leadership feel human and doable.

Book: The Manager Method: A Practical Framework to Lead, Support, and Get Results
Website: ManagerMethod.com

Resources Mentioned

Book: A Separate Piece by John Knowles

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Ashley Herd Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ashley, welcome.

Ashley Herd
Thank you, Pete. I love listening to your podcast, so it’s a treat to be on here.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. You, too. It’s funny, I had to check. Wait, we haven’t met in person before, have we, right? No, I don’t think we have. Okay, well.

Ashley Herd
No, no, although it feels like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, I’m stoked to be talking about managers and methods therein. You said something intriguing, and I had heard that, “Oh, many managers don’t receive any training.” You went ahead and quantified that, depending on what segment we’re talking about. It’s a whopping 40-60% of managers have had no training whatsoever. Can you talk to us about this concept?

Ashley Herd
Well, what often happens, I’ve seen, is this idea of when managers are selected. And I say that intentionally because often it is this selection process that, when you get picked or told you’re going to become a manager or interview to become a manager, there’s this idea of, you know, “This person is great at their job, so we’ll take them. We’ll make them a manager. They’ll teach everybody else how to do it and magic. It’s awesome.”

And despite the fact that most people making that decision are actually managers, people-leaders themselves, that know the realities of doing a job and leading a team are very different, you just kind of forget that it’s a very different skill set.

And so people are put into this position, really focusing on the work without ever giving that consideration or actual training on how to do it with this idea of like, “Oh, they’ll figure it out as they went along.” Sometimes that’s what people did and it works out for you.

Sometimes leaders think that it’s worked out for them, but it has not, actually, and data shows that it does not tend to work out to just magically learn leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
So you just mentioned data, one my favorite words. What are the indicators? What are the numbers telling us about things not working out so much here?

Ashley Herd
Well, you can look at things the boards of directors and leadership levels are going to be looking at of retention, engagement, so people are going or staying. Engagement, sometimes that can be a little trickier to monitor. You often may have employee engagement surveys.

I, personally, now that I do manager training, frequently people come to me and say, “We did an employee engagement survey. It shows that we need manager training.” And the answer to that, “It’s okay.” Well, what does that say? Because generally it’s not going to be quite specific as our managers need training. It’s a lot of run on comments sections about the realities of what it’s like to have a manager or what they’re doing.

But then sometimes with manager training, I say, “Okay, well then employees, managers get training, but then employees want it themselves.” So I do think the reality is people are looking for tips on how to work. And so when you do look at factors like retention, engagement, performance, there’s great quantifiable data.

I personally have no affiliation, but I love Harvard Business Review, HBR.org. It’s great because the things that may seem very common sense to you and I, Pete, and those listening, that if you don’t train managers, you’re probably going to see negative effects from them.

HBR has done a really nice job of having examples of what that looks like. But all of those check-the-boxes that are ticked, that boards of directors and others care about, those do really, really trickle down to the idea of, “My manager isn’t the type of manager I want to work for. I’m either not going to care about my job or I’m going to go find a job where they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, engagement numbers aren’t great, retention numbers aren’t great. Is there anything dastardly or shocking that you’ve uncovered about the state of manager effectiveness in the workplace nowadays?

Ashley Herd
Well, one thing that I’ve really been interested in seeing, including in the world of AI and whether you’re managing people or AI agents, and they are not one and the same, the thing, but some of the data has really continued. Like, I actually, before, like I was a lawyer, but before I even went to law school, I worked for a company called Corporate Executive Board. They were acquired by Gartner.

And they partnered with Gallup to do research on employee engagement. And I, like a lot of people, including maybe like a lot of people listening, didn’t really understand, one, what that means or what goes into it other than pay me more.

And I do very scientific studies all the time on social media when I post videos, and I see comments that say, “It’s simple. Pay people.” I say, “Okay, but I’ve had some of the higher-paying jobs that I’ve had, I actually would trade that and have actually in my life traded for a lower salary to have a quality of life and autonomy and a manager.”

There are other things that go into your experience. And the data that stood behind that, that Gallup had done on employee engagement, that we did with the company I mentioned that’s now Gartner, is the number one driver of employee engagement, meaning how much you care about your job and the work you put into it, it isn’t pay.

Like, pay will keep you in seat or not often, but it’s whether your direct manager helps you understand if you’re good at your job, how that impacts the organization’s goals. Like, really the human equivalent of, “Do I matter?”

And that research has been redone sometimes identically, but sometimes in other ways, and that still continues. I mean, that’s over 20 years later since that was originally done. And so I think one aspect is how continuous this idea of people really wanting to feel like they matter as a human at work, that that stood still, including as technology has evolved.

Pete Mockaitis
To feel like they matter. Yes, and I’ve seen a number of studies which say, you know, “Appreciation is the top thing.” And that’s in that zone of feeling like we matter. And what are the top drivers that contribute to feeling like you matter or don’t matter in so far as stuff your manager is doing or not doing?

Ashley Herd
Well, I’d say Gallup, and, again, like while there’s no affiliation, there are some organizations I really like and trust the research, and Gallup continuously is one of them. And so they’d have this idea of, “Okay, let’s look at regrettable attrition.”

What that means is it’s like the people that they leave, and the manager says like, “Oh, shoot. I really wish they hadn’t left.” Gallup did a whole study around that of like, “Okay, let’s take out times when someone is not a fit for the job or times when the employer is making the decision, lay off, things like that.”

“But when people quit and the manager or organization wishes they hadn’t, what would have changed their mind?” And they went through the factors on this. And it was incredible because, as I mentioned, compensation can keep people in seat. And about a third was compensation, “Compensation would have kept me here.” But also about equal to that, about a third was two things.

One, if they had more positive interactions with their manager, and, two, if they’d had less negative interactions with their manager. And so what that can look like isn’t some, you know, big question of, “Did my manager put me up for this promotion? Did they give me this strategic guidance?”

Sometimes it’s literally thinking about that of, “Okay, I have a manager. We’re in person. I’m sitting in my cube, and I sit there every day and watch my manager stop by this person across from me, and never stops by me. Like, I just literally feel like I don’t matter.”

Or, on the flip side, “Okay, I have a manager that they have a kid that’s in Little League. Okay, their team.” Sometimes team members will say, “I know more about my boss’s kid’s batting average than I know of my own. I can’t go to a single one of my games while my boss is somehow leading this team and coaching their team because they can take the time off, but I’m not allowed to.”

And so that type of environment versus, “Okay, my manager has a kid that’s in Little League. I don’t have children. I don’t really have nothing to relate to them on. But if I have a manager that says, ‘Oh, but I’m personally into fly fishing,’” meaning me, the team member, “That has nothing to do with my manager, but they stop and ask me about that…?”

Conversations like that and moments like that, I mean, those don’t pay the bills. But when you’re coming down to your decision of, “Do I apply for another job? Do I want to stay here?” When you have a workplace that you show up to and you do feel like you have those interactions, that can truly influence people choosing to stay even when they have opportunities elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love it. And it’s funny that that comes up in terms of it seems so simple, yeah, more positive experiences and fewer negative experiences, like, “All right, let’s turn that into a tremendous prize for a research insight.”

Ashley Herd
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But, nonetheless, it’s not a super common practice, apparently, as is showing in the data associated with people’s experience of their engagement and their retention. I’d love it if you’re familiar with any of the super simple behaviors – you just mentioned one, you ask about their life and the things that they’re interested in – super simple behaviors that are pervasively neglected would just make a world of difference for folks.

Ashley Herd
I’ll give you three because, from my time at McKinsey, I learned the power of three, and so I say sometimes I’ll give you four to go above and beyond, but we’ll stick with three, the magic number.

One is if you’re hiring somebody, so let’s say you’re a manager and you’re hiring somebody on your team. Great. They go through, maybe you call and let them know, “Hey, you’re going to get the offer. You’re going to hear from HR on the paperwork. Congratulations!” And, in a way, you almost treat it like a lottery prize, like, “Congratulations! You’re on our team. HR does the paperwork. They take care of things.” And so the next you see them is on their first day, virtually or in person.

But there’s a step that can often be missed. If you’re a manager, have you ever had a conversation with a new hire and told them why they got the job? Or, on the flip side, if you’re listening to this and you’re not a manager, how often have you gotten a new job and the person that’s going to be your boss tells you, “Hey, this is why you stood out in the hiring process, and this is why we’re uniquely excited to have you join our team”?

It doesn’t cost anything. It doesn’t really take much time. But that kind of conversation helps tremendously with things like engagement, because you’re starting and you feel like you matter, that it really is that two-way street. And so that’s something I often recommend, especially as a hiring manager, because I’ve been in legal and HR.

Those are not two of the most popular departments in any organizations. HR is more popular when you’re giving people new hire paperwork, but to keep present and tell people that really sets it up as a two-way street. And so I say that’s neglected just because it doesn’t, most managers don’t pause to think about how impactful that can be.

The other, I’ll say, is during employment. So let’s say delegation. You listen to all sorts of podcasts, of course, including Pete’s here, and you hear, “Okay, I should delegate. Give opportunities to my team member. It’s going to help them grow. It’s going to help me not feel like I do everything.”

But one thing that happens is you have a conversation and you tell your team member what they’re going to do and you feel great about it. But that team member, they hear it and they’re not so excited. They think to themselves, “Okay, well, now my boss is just trying to pawn work off on me, and I already have a full plate. So I guess I’ll just have to work more hours to figure this out.”

And so what’s neglected is having a conversation to, again, one is get their interest in working on this, “Sometimes you’re going to be able to work on things you’re interested in, sometimes you’re not,” but also explaining why you picked this person out for this opportunity and how it connects to actual development opportunities.

But then also to have the conversation of, “I don’t want to assume. I think I have a pretty good idea of what’s on your plate, but I don’t want to make assumptions. Let’s talk about this and how it can fit in with other things. And if there’s anything that can and should move off your plate to work on this.”

Again, that’s something that’s often neglected, it’s that step of between telling you what you’re going to do and how it gets done. The last thing I’ll say, and then I’ll flip back is, sometimes what gets neglected is when people quit. So we’ll go back to that regrettable attrition.

I’m meeting with Pete. Pete sets up time with me. I kind of have a sense of what’s coming because Pete is on my team and he tells me, “Hey, I need a quick minute.” Pete tells me, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving to go to another company.” I’m pissed because I take it very personally, because I see all the time on the internet. I’m like, “People don’t leave people. Pete is leaving me. This is super personal.”

Well, sometimes that happens. Sometimes Pete wants and needs to make more money. Sometimes Pete is moving. All sorts of other reasons aside from just the manager. But what gets neglected is pausing by managers to think about how it matters of, “How I talk to you, Pete, in that situation and understanding that you may have been incredibly stressed before telling me that and felt super guilty.”

But people make professional decisions all the time. And as a manager, projecting calm and not taking it, you know, back personally or getting frustrated back at Pete, and also then how I talk about you, Pete, to the rest of the team.

So sometimes what happens is managers bash and say, “You know, Pete is leaving us, so we’ll figure it all out.” But in those three moments, each of those is often just a pause to think about sometimes what you can do or how you can react that make such a difference in leadership beyond those moments.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that seems to be just a theme throughout is pretty much like and you’re going to share with us a framework. But you are, you just have a pause and think about the other, the human being in front of you, and where they’re coming from, and what they’re thinking about, and how they’re feeling, and then providing a little something-something, in terms of, “Hey, here’s why we picked you. Here’s why I think you’d be great at this.”

Or, “Hey, well, it’s going to be a bummer to see you go and we’d love to hear some more about what might’ve caused you to stay,” or whatever, you know, in terms of, in some ways, it doesn’t seem that hard, and yet it’s often not done. Why do you suppose that is?

Ashley Herd
Probably, some of the biggest doubts I’ve had about what I do is, like, “Am I going to write my book?” or, “When I put things out, is it just common sense?” But common sense really isn’t that common. And why I think it happens, and why a lot of research does back it up is that people do just get busy.

And some of it’s research, some of it’s just common sense, is we all have intentions about what we’re going to do and say. I mean, look at it. If you made a to do list this morning, Pete, hopefully it was have a fun podcast conversation with Ashley.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, it is.

Ashley Herd
And anything else, I mean, we do this all the time though. We make these to-do lists for ourselves. Sometimes, morning me has this idea of, afternoon or evening me, and it’s two different people. I have no idea what I thought was going to happen, but the reality is we get busy and you’re just trying to get through things.

And no matter what your role or title is, how many years you have experience at work, you get busy. And so you do not pause. I mean, that just happens. And so you’re just reacting in the moment, and you’re trying to get through things, and you’re making assumptions just like you wouldn’t want someone on the other side to do but you’re doing that yourself. And I really do think a lot of it is because we just get busy and we don’t think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense. Well, I want to dig into your framework, but maybe we could just zoom out. Tell us, The Manager Method, your book, what’s sort of the big picture message here?

Ashley Herd
So the big picture is to meet managers where they are. So whether you are a brand new or aspiring manager, or an experienced senior executive, I have found that people in leadership have so much in common. And so I’ve taken from my experiences working at, including in the corporate departments, from KFC to McKinsey, and seeing that often managers don’t take time to pause.

And so what this is, is a framework that you can use in any situation as a people leader, and then all sorts of examples of how to bring it to life, whether you’re hiring, or whether you’re delegating, or whether it comes to taking time off for yourself and as well as your team. And so all of those different aspects of work. So it’s designed to be, hopefully, an easy read, but also one that sticks with you, that helps people actually lead better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share with us a story of someone who dug into some of these principles and saw a cool transformation?

Ashley Herd
So one is, and I think I actually saw this, this is somewhat spurred it on, but I once had a boss, a future boss that was going to interview me. As I mentioned, I’ve taken a pay cut once in my life from higher pay to lower for quality of life. That happened when I was a lawyer. I moved from law firm to in-house counsel.

And I was interviewing with a client, which has all sorts of aspects to it. It was a general counsel of a publicly traded company. At the time, I had a toddler. I worked 24/7. I traveled all over the country on employment litigation cases with the law firm. All I did was work. I didn’t really like the person I was, honestly, for myself or my family.

But this client I interviewed, and I had all these questions in my head because you hear like it’s kind of being a consultant, going to industry, like, “Oh, is it better? Hope it is.” But this general counsel, who was a man, had two teenage sons, but also stay-at-home wife and a nanny, had no idea or no reason to understand fully what I was going through.

But he said, proactively, “I want to be clear that moving in-house, in this role in particular, is a pay cut, about 20-25% pay cut,” which is true. But he said, “Part of your compensation package is a more predictable schedule. You will work eight to five, you will not be expected to work out of those hours. We have a lot of fun. We take our jobs seriously, but we do really enjoy each other.”

And these are conversations, I don’t know if any lawyer has ever heard in a job interview, certainly not proactively from a general counsel or senior leader since, but I saw this, in proactively having that. So what that did for me was communicate information about what I was going to be paid very transparently, but also for me, I was willing to take that for transforming what my life was like.

And so I’ve taken that, and now had conversations with managers, and included in the book, about things to proactively tell candidates when hiring. And I’ve had so many managers that have said, you know, things like, “What kind of decisions can you make? What are the actual hours that you have? What are the things that may drive candidates away because they’re so bad? And then can you rethink those so you’re not having people quit and you’re constantly doing the turning wheel of hiring?”

But I’ve had so many managers that say, “You know, there’s things about this,” or, “If I had a candidate that brought up to me work-life balance, I wrote them off. Maybe in the moment I didn’t, but I thought it was that showed me that’s what they care about. And I need someone that’s going to focus on work. We can figure out the work-life balance.”

But it’s when I thought about it and understood, “Okay, but it’s not a game. And it’s important to me to have people that start and understand the realities of the world, for better or for worse, in proactively providing that. Because people often aren’t going to ask that question, because for that exact same reason.”

And so that’s what I’ve heard is the feedback of whether it’s things from interviewing or otherwise, how helpful it can be for managers to have those conversations, but ultimately, how you can bring people on that are a fit for the realities of what your role is. And doing that can help everyone’s lives be a lot more effective at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s great. And I’ve had that experience and when I’m hiring people, and I’ll say, “Hey, here’s my personal opinion of why I think this role is really cool. And here’s my personal opinion of how this role, in some ways, will really suck. And you know you the best in terms of if that seems like appealing and a fit or like a, ‘Uh-oh, maybe we should just stop talking right now.”

And I think that that’s great for everybody, in terms of there’s no surprises, because that’s super costly, it’s like, “Oh, shoot, I thought this was that, but apparently it’s something completely different.”

Ashley Herd
Yeah. I mean, you see the cost of hiring and you can see the ranges from 50 to 200% of salary, again, depending on whether someone started their role, all of those things. But we know it is expensive by money. It’s expensive at time.

And then there’s the whole morale of you have someone that starts on Monday, and by Wednesday they’ve ghosted you and they are not coming back to work, and what that means to the rest of the team. And that just creates a lot of grumbles. But I love that you do that, Pete. What are the reactions that you get when you say things like that? Or, like what are the aspects of roles that may suck or not suck?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, terms of it’s like, “Hey, you know, this is kind of repetitive. I mean, we’re going to be doing another episode, then another episode, then another episode, then another episode. And you might have perhaps eight key things that you’re trying to accomplish with them again and again and again and again.

And so that might feel great, like, “Oh, I can get into the groove. I can master this craft.” Or, it might feel not great, “Oh, I’m bored out of my mind.” And so, hopefully, the variety of the topics and exchanges will be of interest and supporting.

And so I think, as I’m recalling those times, it’s just like, “Oh, good. Understood.” I think it’s just a little bit – relief might be a strong word – but it creates a little bit more calm and peace on a couple of fronts. One is like, “Okay, I could see what I’m getting into,” as well as, “Oh, okay, this person I’m talking to is real in terms of it’s not all rosy, okay? And that’s to be understood and expected.”

And then I think it creates a bit more freedom in the conversation to express what’s really on everyone’s mind, because we don’t have to kind of play a game in which these are…And I’ve seen YouTube videos on this, like, when the interviewer asks this, “This is really what they want. And so what you’re thinking is this, but you don’t really say that.” I mean, just this whole layer of obfuscation, it’s like, “Oh, we can let go of some of that. That’s nice.”

Ashley Herd
It is. And it sounds like common sense because you think, like, “Okay, well, this is work and I’m the leader. If people don’t like that, then they should look elsewhere.” And they can, but you’ll also tend to have consequences of that.

If you create, whether it’s a hiring process or a workplace, that your attitude is people can go work elsewhere, then probably the people that you want to work with you will be looking elsewhere sooner rather than later. And you and I both, if people wanted to work on our teams, that they have a lot of data they could look at.

Namely, they can listen to and watch your podcast, have and say, “Okay, I wonder what Pete is like in real life.” But you get a glimpse into what someone is like. Oftentimes, someone is interviewing and, aside from your LinkedIn, maybe it’s a profile picture from 20 years ago or all those things, but people are, they are, they’re just trying to find out the realities just like you are of them.

And I’ve just seen so many managers that they forget, not that they don’t care, you’re just not thinking about the fact of this is a real human on the other side. And so if we have 10 rounds of interviews, that can mean 10 times of them trying to figure out how to lie to their boss about exactly where they are at that moment. And so we may be making this process a lot harder than it should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that’s a great point, it’s like, for most, the vast majority of humans have a very tiny public profiles, like, “Okay, you got a LinkedIn profile, but you haven’t posted anything for years, and maybe you haven’t updated some of the positions either. So I don’t know if you’re the guy who just screams, ‘You can’t deposit excuses, you know, every week’ or what you’re like at all.”

Ashley Herd
Yeah, and so they may look, it’s like, but I hear all the time, like, Glassdoor, and HR leaders will say, “Oh, you can’t trust Glassdoor.” And I say, “Well, sure, I know. I know from very real experience.” Sometimes you look at a Glassdoor of you, and you think to yourself, “I know who that person is.” And there’s some more context to that that could probably even it out a bit.

But when you do see themes like that, or if you’re a manager that has a reputation that people have identified you by name or by function, that’s what people are building their information on. And so knowing that the candidates you’re talking to, these are real humans with real lives. And those are people that, ideally, you want to have come join your team and want to be there and grow, and so providing as real of information as you can.

I totally love the way you put it. I think the value of having peace and calm and just feeling this is somebody you can have a communication with and trust what they’re saying, that is such an underrated skill in management, meaning underrated by managers thinking about how important that is for them to establish.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear about your pause, act, consider framework. Walk us through it.

Ashley Herd
Okay. So, again, three steps, all revolutionary. And I’ve mentioned the pause a bit. And this is a step that I do see people miss, whether you work in an organization that all your job descriptions say fast-paced, or you work in an organization where that’s not written down, but it always feels like it’s respond immediately, reply to emails, always be available.

Technology has made it often that despite the word asynchronous, you often feel like there’s this expectation that your value is in being fast in responding. And so you are, you’re getting things out. Sometimes you’re frustrated. You immediately respond with that.

The third word is act, so it doesn’t mean to stop or not do things at work, but it’s to take a breath, take a beat, sometimes take longer if it’s really something you need to think through, but it really is to give yourself an opportunity to consider other things, which is the second step because the pause is not just, “Okay, be quiet for a moment. Look strategic, like some YouTube trick of look strategic and then do exactly what you were just going to do. Just make it think and think that you’ve been thinking about it.”

But, yeah, this space. So it’s to consider, and you can consider things. The one thing I say to people, if you’re just going to remember one thing, is consider what you’d want to have happen if you were in that person’s position.

So, talking about job interview, for example. Like, if something is crazy, like my first job that I took, the title was marketing associate. This was not a marketing role. It was sales and it was cold-calling and it was called marketing associate, but, really, it was sales.

And so, whether it’s the titling of something or how you describe it or anything that’s going on at work, thinking about how you’d want to have the conversation on the other side because managers I really see, even if you’re not a manager at work, just thinking about the person on the other side of that, because we’re not thinking about that person from the receiving end.

So, okay, if something’s, this job is absolutely crazy, wouldn’t you want to know? And again, the way Pete phrases it, the things that might suck, the things that are great, but describing it, at least giving people the truth, and letting them decide.

Sometimes you’ll be disappointed because you really like someone and it’s not for them. Or, if you’re giving performance feedback and, “Well, I don’t want to do that. It feels mean.” Okay, well, what if I was on the other side and I knew my manager had feedback for me? I wasn’t doing something right. But they weren’t saying anything because they didn’t want to hurt my feelings.

But I’d probably say, “Well, let’s have the conversation. But maybe ask for my perspective or say it in a way that’s not going to hurt my feelings, or that doesn’t feel so harsh.” And so that consider is, really, I think the most helpful step to think about how you’d want to be treated.

Think about any other factors. Okay, they knew or they experienced. What are the what are the options? But then act is to actually do something about it. Like I mentioned, morning me often has a lot of expectations about how I’m going to act throughout the day. Sometimes I don’t feel like doing something. I say I’ll do it tomorrow. But making sure that you actually do the thing.

And so having the conversation, making the decision. If Pete and I are having a conversation, I give him an idea. And Pete says, “Let me think on that. Okay, I’ll get back to you.” Well, if you, Pete, never get back to me and I never hear anything about it, I assume that you’ve thought a lot about it. Maybe you’ve talked to people about it and you think I’m a complete idiot.

But reality, what’s happened is you probably forgot about it like a human being. And so the act is whether it’s making the decision, or if you are thinking about something, having a note for yourself, having a reminder so that you are getting back to people. And it’s really, again, not revolutionary, but three steps that, whether you’re in management or in any role, that can really help you be awesome at your job, no matter what that job is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good, the pause, consider, and act, because, I guess, I’m thinking about, I’ve had a number of occasions in which I am in a meeting with my business partner and we’re talking to someone, maybe it’s a sales context, maybe it’s operational thing. And he keeps saying things, like, “Oh, I should have said that,” “Oh, I should have said that.”

And it’s usually because of exactly this. It’s the pausing and considering of that other person, where they’re coming from, what might they want to hear in this situation, as opposed to, you know, whatever, getting on to the next thing. Or, my hang up, I think, is more so that I get very excited and very curious.

So it’s like if someone sends me just an amazing piece of work, and so it sparks all kinds of new questions and ideas and possibilities. And so I say, “Oh, what about this? Well, what about this? Have you thought about that? And how about that?”

But what would be ideal is, before going down that, would be to talk about more positive interactions and fewer negative interactions to say, “Wow, this is a very impressive piece of work. Thank you so much. It must’ve taken a lot to pull all of this together. Wow, this opens up all kinds of exciting new opportunities and possibilities.”

Like, that took maybe 20 seconds. And then they say, “Well, yes, thank you. It was a lot of work and it feels good to be acknowledged.” And I’m not nowhere in my heart am I thinking, “I wish to punish this person,” or, “I take them for granted. And, of course, you just did your job. You don’t need a cookie or praise for…” you know? Like, that’s nowhere in my psyche, and yet I can blow right past it.

Ashley Herd
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d also want to get your pro tip when it comes to great meetings.

Ashley Herd
Well, I’d say two pro tips. One is for one-on-one meetings and one is for team meetings. My biggest pro tip for one-on-one meetings is to show up for them and show up on time and be focused. So that was kind of three things at once, but those are going to be things that sound very basic.

But it is wild when I do a scientific study of a video about one-on-ones with your boss, for example, and I make a video about you have a 30-minute one-on-one with your boss. The comment sections are much more than not comments of, “One-on-ones haven’t had those. They’ve been on the calendar, but I haven’t had one in about two years.”

Or, I’ll make a video about, “Okay, but you’re a boss that shows up 25 minutes into a 30-minute one-on-one, and says like, ‘Okay. Oh, I was meeting with SVP of XXYZ,’” but that happens constantly. And how you as a manager are probably thinking, “I’m giving an explanation of where I was,” but the team member is thinking, “Okay, well, wherever you are, you’re with people that are more important than me, but I have 47 things I really need to get through with you. So how are we going to make this happen?”

And so it is a step that, again, in the book, I have tips about things on agendas and how to make the shared agenda and how to make them more actionable. But it is amazing when you give people focus time where they know they’re going to be able to run through things, and you’re going to be looking at them, not at your cell phone, not at your second and third screens, all over the place.

But when you can have that time, it helps tremendously. It helps your team members, but it also often helps you avoid the people trying to reach you. Because you’ve told them, “Oh, I just have an open door policy. I don’t do one-on-ones. Come find me if you need me.”

And then everyone’s trying to find you, and it can feel crushingly stressful. And it’s, obviously, not effective. And so that’s my biggest tip for one-on-one meetings is to just consider how impactful that could be for both you and them.

For team meetings, I’ll just say one thing that’s a pro tip is in those, taking an opportunity to give opportunities to team members, including those that don’t speak up as much, but just to take a few minutes and you can rotate it, to talk about something that they do that feels super easy to them.

So maybe that’s a process they do. Look up, some people are going to be much more comfortable just talking about work and focus on a work thing that they know how to do. Other people, this may be the opportunity for them to say, “Oh, this is how I make this banana bread that I bring to every potluck. But these are my tips of how I do that.”

But why that can help is to give people an opportunity to explain something that choose whatever they want that really feels genuine. Or sometimes they’ve done something well and the manager say, “Okay, come and talk to the team about how you did that and some of the challenges you went through.’ But it also then can build that communication and confidence skills.

Again, it doesn’t have to happen every meeting necessarily, but it can absolutely be a way to give people who just show up to every meeting, otherwise, don’t feel like they have anything to say, but it can give them the opportunity to really have communication, learn from each other.

And I’ve sat through some of those meetings. And some of the things I can tell you, years later that I learned that stuck with me, even those non work-related topics, much more so than just any work-related thing. But it also changed the way that we work together because I saw those people as real humans rather than just super transactional.

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

Ashley Herd
Well, the one thing I’ll say is, because if you’ve been listening to this and you’re not a manager and you think, “Okay. After listening to this episode, now I really want to become a manager. So I want to be good at my job,” one tip I have is, is to think about if someone gives you something, like if your boss asks you something, finding out why they’re having it, why they’re working on it.

And also explaining why you want to ask. So, “Okay, I’m meeting with Pete.” Pete says, “Okay, can you give me three bullets on this status that you’re working on?” “Okay, I can do that.” I may have no idea what Pete is doing that for.

But so if I add and say, “Okay, let me know what that’s for. And I ask because, if it’s for an email, I’m happy to format that in an email to the audience, or if it’s for a slide, I’m happy to put that together to require less work for you and make sure I know the audience and I’m creating less work for you. Not more.” It takes about seven and a half seconds to say more.

But when you become known for thinking just a step ahead in doing that, whether it’s putting something in a format that’s helpful for someone, or asking those questions, it helps you to become the person that’s trusted. And, again, we always have to be careful about then not being the go-to person that just takes on everything.

We all could use someone that we work with that helps think that step ahead. And so when you start doing that, not only can it help your own career, but sometimes it’s the ripple effect of how other people start doing that as well. So it can even come back and benefit you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, those follow-up questions can change everything in terms of, “Oh, well, I would have done this in a completely different way,” or, “Oh, well, if that’s what you’re after, I don’t think what you actually need is three bullets, but perhaps instead is this other thing.” And it’s like, “Oh, fantastic. Thank you. You’re amazing.”

Ashley Herd
Totally, because you may even say at the bottom, one thing I did for managers constantly was say, “Okay, here’s what to say, and you don’t need to say this, but if someone asks this, this is what you can say. Just have some of that below this of the FAQs in case someone asks. And some of that information, again, can just help that person tremendously, but also also help in your career.

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

Ashley Herd
I do love the quote from Maya Angelou, that people forget what you said, but they never forget how you made them feel. And I know that’s one that is said quite a lot, but I see it. The more and more I live, the more years I have, which I wish I were Benjamin Button and reversing, but that hasn’t happened yet. But I think back to how true that is.

I first heard that years ago and I didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now. But so I think bringing that into the workplaces, it’s not just what you’re working on, but especially as a manager, you think about how you work with people. You can transform people’s work and also their lives outside of it.

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

Ashley Herd
There was recently research in Gallup, this was in, I think, January of 2026, that’s about how people are selected for management. And it really quantified this aspect of what percentage. I think it was 60. I may be misquoting that, but you can Google. But it’s how people are picked to be a manager and then what to do about it.

And so as organizations think about management, because I’m a huge proponent of not just selecting people for management, but exposing them, having a real two-way street considerations and career paths that don’t require you to be a manager. But it’s a really nice piece of research that just shows the reality that so many organizations have, which is how we started the episode.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ashley Herd
I love A Separate Piece by John Knowles. I never went to boarding school, and it’s all about boys at a boarding school. But I read that when I was a sophomore in high school and it has stuck with me for some reason for decades.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool.

Ashley Herd
I’d say a calculator because when I was in elementary school, I was told I needed to learn math and so I worked really hard at it, and that I couldn’t talk for a living. And I do tend to talk for a living and I also relied much more heavily on a calculator than I’d like to admit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ashley Herd
I’d say a favorite habit is gratitude, both with yourself or with telling others. And sometimes it can feel super corny. And so if you have gratitude to express and it’s not something you normally say, and so, Pete, if you were to say, if I started telling people, I’m thankful for this because then people would call 911 because they think that you are being held for ransom and that’s your help signal.

You can say, “I was listening to Pete’s How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast, and the speaker, Ashley Heard at Manager Method, said to think about somebody that you’re grateful for and why you’re grateful for them, and text someone and tell them that, and tell them what you’re grateful for them for.

And any discomfort you feel for seconds will go away because they will likely feel delighted and they won’t think of it as, “Okay, you’re only doing this because you heard it on a podcast.” They hear this and think, “Well, of all the people that you know, you thought of me.” And so you can make someone’s whole day and far longer by expressing that gratitude.

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

Ashley Herd
So in the book, I talk about how to not be a tight jeans manager, and also not be an oversized sweatpants manager, but to instead be a cozy joggers manager. So you can read in the book about what that means.

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

Ashley Herd
You can go to ManagerMethod.com, which is my website. You can kind of find me anywhere from there. If you go to @managermethod on different social media platforms, you can see some of my 59-second plays that I write and act most days.

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

Ashley Herd
It’s to try that. Try to do pause, consider, act. Like, if you find yourself immediately going to react to something, just pause and think about some of the different options and what you can do differently. You may do the same thing, but at least think it through, and I bet you may tweak something a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ashley, thank you.

Ashley Herd
Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me and thanks to all for listening.

Mar 19

1138: Breaking Free from the Invisible Norms that Limit Our Best Work with Nilofer Merchant

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | No Comments

Nilofer Merchant debunks some of the pervasive beliefs and practices that keep us from succeeding at work.

You’ll Learn

Striking examples of how hidden norms limit us
Why you owe it to yourself to play office politics
The mindset that creates more win-win solutions

About Nilofer

Nilofer Merchant spent over 25 years leading technology companies (Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe) and personally launched over 100 products and services, netting $18 billion in revenues. She is ranked among the top 50 influential management thinkers in the world (one of her TED Talks has been referenced 300 million times). Our Best Work is her 4th book.

Resources Mentioned

Book: Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver

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Nilofer Merchant Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nilofer, welcome.

Nilofer Merchant
Glad to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m glad to be here as well. I’m excited to talk about your book, Our Best Work. And could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made about humans and work while putting this one together?

Nilofer Merchant
You know, I think right now we’re in this AI age where we’re thinking a lot about what is the role of technology in our work. And I think I’ve kind of come back to the basics, which is if we don’t understand how to actually create that connection between us humans, we’re never going to be able to take advantage of the technology. And it was not so much a surprise, but sort of like this deepest reminder that it’s all about people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is an intriguing assertion. Tell me more.

Nilofer Merchant
Well, so one of things I wanted to just share is most of us are in a position where we think we don’t have power, especially now when people are cutting back. A couple days ago in tech, one of the companies, Block, ended up firing 40% of their staff.

And they’re having this conversation about, “Am I allowed to push my own agenda right now? Because it might be time to hunker down and crawl underneath a desk and just do whatever I’m asked to do.”

And I’m like, “Actually that will not lead to goodness, not for ourselves, not for companies, not for the industry, nothing.” And yet, I can see how much fear is in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is well said because, emotionally, that’s natural in terms of, “Because there is fear and because there is risk, I am less inclined to put forward my stuff. It might be kind of out there. It might be rock the boat, disrupt things or it feels emotionally, like, not a great time.”

And yet, in some ways, it is the absolute best time because, one, you might not have that much to lose. And, two, I think when folks get jolted with something that wasn’t even on their radar, it’s like, we don’t know what we don’t know. And then someone’s like bringing these things up. I am personally inclined to think, “Oh, you are very valuable and I want you around. Thank you.”

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, you know, one of the things about the Block news was really fascinating. Jack basically fired 40% of the organization, and people were asking me what I thought about it. And I said, “Well, I mean, if your only goal is revenue optimization and sort of profitability, I understand why you would do that because AI does lend itself to efficiency.” But that is really appropriating more value and values to capital.

If it were me, I would have sat there and thought, “Okay, if I can do twice as much with the tools, and I’ve already hired this exceptionally talented group of people, and they’re onboarded and running, why wouldn’t I figure out how to grow the business?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and not to go down an AI rabbit hole, although a reasonable proportion of my conversations are doing that these days. But that’s exactly the vibes that I feel when I read this news. It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I imagine because of developments, you’re able to do the stuff.” Like, I mean, in Block’s world in particular, “We’re making software features, additions, and we’re doing customer service-y things.”

So I can hear like, yeah, in that zone, yeah, that makes sense that you can pull off that amount of features and that amount of customer service requests with fewer humans handling it. Like, I buy that. That makes sense to me.

But what I find tricky is exactly what you’re saying there, it’s like, “Well, is that what we’re trying to do in this organization, is just to maintain the status quo more cost effectively?” And maybe there’s a time and a place where that is the right strategic business move, but I’m with you. I’d say, “Ooh, this is exciting. We have all this capacity to go create, invent, and push forward into new territories. So let’s have some fun with it.”

Nilofer Merchant
And if I was a listener to this conversation, one of the things I’d really be thinking about is, “How do I use this stuff for my own gain?” So whether it’s, “I do my job better at my own desk by using some of the tools and technologies,” it could also be as a team, we get together and say, “Hey, listen, we can reimagine who we are.”

And go, “Oh, if we can do more and we can do things better just using tools, then, okay, what else could we imagine for ourselves that we’ve not been able to do because we were so busy doing what we’ve already been doing?”

And there’s, I think, an upside there that any of us can kind of take on and go, “Oh, what is the thing?” In fact, a friend of mine just sent out a thing where he redesigned his website and did a whole series of things using tools, migration, etc., that he could have hired a designer for, but he could do it all himself.

And so he said, “I saved so much money. I’ve also taught myself new things.” And I was like, “Yes, isn’t that what we want to do?” It’s, “How do we take advantage of this stuff instead of it happening to us?”

It reminds me of the early days of the web, which I was lucky to partake in. And everyone was like, “Oh, the web will put designers out of business.” And actually, the designers who won were the ones who figured out how to use the web for their own gain. And I feel like we’re in a similar place, maybe at a little higher speed trajectory.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us what’s the big idea or core thesis behind your book Our Best Work?

Nilofer Merchant
I started with this question, “Our best work changes based on how you define those three words.” So if you define “our” as a small group, you know, the people maybe who are capitalizing the business, or you define it as “our” as the entire organization and team.

If you define best as, “Oh, it’s about making money and capital optimization of revenue,” or, if you define best as solving really meaningful problems. If you define work as the contract, right, “I scope this job for this person to do,” or we define it as a calling and a way for each of us to express ourselves and be a part of the world, those aren’t just linguistic choices. Those are like forks in the road.

And one grows, you know, if you go towards a couple people benefit and it’s about how fast we can make money and it’s about we scope out jobs and ask people to do those jobs, that creates one type of economy and one type of workplace.

And then you go towards the definition of inclusive and meaning and really doing things that call to us, and you end up in a completely different place. And I feel like if we could explore those questions, if we could just even examine, “What are we doing today that might hold us down to the sort of existing model?” instead of going, “Oh, what could we possibly create?” that was, I don’t know, motivating for me to explore.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay. And can you tell us a cool story of a professional who zeroed in? You identified 24 invisible norms that limit us. Can you share with us a fun story of someone who identified, “Oh, wait a sec, here’s a norm that’s been limiting me,” and what they identified and how they busted it and what cool stuff happened on the other side?

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, so one of my really good friends came to me after her boss said to her, “If you have good ideas, they’ll get stolen. Just get used to it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the boss said this?

Nilofer Merchant
The boss said that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Nilofer Merchant
“Just get used to it and make your next set of ideas.” And she was basically asking me this question about, “Is it me? Like, is it me that I’m not accepting that as true and I should just get on with it and be an adult and go on and come up with the next idea? Or is it him? Like, is he being an ass by not protecting the interests of my team and the work we’ve been doing for a while?”

And I said, “Actually, it’s neither of you. It’s that the organization has accepted that idea theft is a good thing. That as long as we get the flower from the field of wildflowers, as long as the organization benefits from it, it doesn’t matter who came up with the idea.” And I was actually saying, “What it does is it kills the entire field of wildflowers.”

And so that norm of saying, “Ideas get stolen,” which almost all of us have heard in our careers. We’ve been told, “Oh, don’t worry about it if your idea gets stolen. It’s actually a compliment. Just move on.”

And she was basically saying, “Is that a norm I should accept?” And I was like, “No, it’s not a norm we should accept, because it says that the genesis of an idea, that original source, that point of view, that creativity is not to be valued enough. And that’s actually on the organizational norm that we allow bad behavior to happen.”

And then we say, “Whatever happens, happens.” And I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s whatever we allow to happen, happens.” And so that’s a big shift in how we can think about accountability at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly, whatever happens happens, I mean, that’s true only in so far as it’s completely outside your control and influence. But inside an organization, it’s like, “Well, hey, actually, you know, we’re the humans kind of who make the rules and the norms, and the incentives, and the carrots and the sticks associated with what sorts of behaviors we think are fine and not so much fine, as opposed to just victims of the economy or the climate, you know, that, are sort of beyond us.”

Nilofer Merchant
Or the culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Nilofer Merchant
And one of the things that people often think is that, “If a management norm has been here for a long time, it must be like working for a reason.” And I’m basically saying, “Listen, just because it exists does not mean it’s persuasive, right? It’s just persistent.”

Pete Mockaitis
Or helpful, useful, beneficial in any way, yeah.

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, right. So we get a chance to examine that water that we swim in and go, “Hmm, is this helping or hurting?” And I think the book is really doing that sort of, “Is this helping or hurting?” examination. And then, more importantly, “What else could we do?” And holding open that space for, “What else could we imagine that we could create as a norm at work?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, in that story, we had some concern about idea theft. What became of it?

Nilofer Merchant
Well, so she had actually been working on a plan with her team for six months, had conceived the plan, had gotten the plan funded, had done all the vendor management, in addition to their day job. So it’s not like they got relief.

And so they were really pushing for a brand new thing that they thought the team would benefit from. And somebody else came along and basically presented that idea to the CEO and CMO as if it was theirs, not so explicitly, but enough where it kind of gave that appearance.

And when this friend came to me and said, “What should I do?” I said, “Well, if your boss is unwilling to protect your team, then what’s going to happen is the idea might be executed, but it won’t link back to the original genesis, right?”

Like, all of us, when we come up with an idea, have a rootedness and a fullness of an idea that we want to see manifest. And so if they sort of take credit and we do the skimmed version of the idea, it will never actually be what it needs to be.

So that idea ended up becoming an ad for a Super Bowl. And then by the time they kind of came around to, “Oh, gosh, we need the next new idea,” my friend had already left because she wasn’t going to stay in an organization that didn’t respect her and her ideas.

And so the organization lost the ability to do the next big success because they lost the person who was that great idea generator. And so I always define success as not the ability to do one thing well, but the ability to do things well over time. Like, that’s what causes real growth.

And so they lost the ability to do things well over time. And my friend was disillusioned and disheartened, but she also knew that talent doesn’t beg. And she was able to go on and find another place that really respected her.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And just to close the loop here, when it comes to idea theft, call me naive, idealistic, a softy. But so, my understanding of idea theft is just that folks want the credit and the status and the advancement and the associations of it, “There’s a clever, smart, creative professional right there.” And that’s why they do it.

But, I mean, in my world, I just think, “Wow, like, that’s so easy just to say, ‘Oh, yeah, Nilofer has been working on this and it’s brilliant. Why don’t we loop her in and see how far we can take this thing?” I mean, that takes like a sentence.

And I’m thinking like, if I witnessed that behavior, I think more of that person. I think more of the person who’s sharing credit and including other folks. I think that person’s more awesome than the person who I’m misled to believe has had the idea.

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, it’s a difference between scarcity and abundance. Like, if I believe, “Hey, man, I’m talented and you’re talented, then I’m going to give credit to a whole bunch. I’m going to figure out how to get all of our talents on the table.”

But if I believe that the world is a scarce world, and only so many of us can get credit, and only so many of us can win, and I have to out compete you, then I’m going to nudge you aside from the table. I’m going to use all my elbows doing it, and in order to “win.”

And so it’s also the cultural norm that that CEO and CMO didn’t ask, “Hey, who all has been working on this? And tell me more about what the genesis of the story was?” and so on and so on. They could have just asked in a couple questions and been able to go, “Oh, let’s bring those people in,” so they could have also been the fix. So that’s where it becomes more than the people involved. It becomes, “What do we accept as valid behavior within an organization?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to dig into your chapter four, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” I think that there’s a lot of wisdom there. Can you unpack a little bit about what’s the norm you’re zeroing in on and what is to be done about it?

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, so the norm in that chapter is the fact that a lot of people inside organizations have been taught that politics is icky. And it is that person elbowing at the table and getting credit and getting advancement because they play politics well.

And so one of the things I was doing there was saying, “Okay, politics is about the icky behavior of shoving other people aside in order to win, and it’s been labeled as icky,” none of us really want to be icky. And so we’ll go, “Oh, we’ll leave politics to those self-serving people, and we’ll do what’s right for the business.” So we kind of, like, distance ourselves from it.

And I’m actually arguing that we ought to think about the definition of politics a little here, and understand why we need to play. And I basically define politics as the way we decide what we’re going to do. And so if it’s about the way we decide what we’re going to do, then you’re really hurting yourself, your team, the work, if you’re not sitting in there advocating for what you need.

It’s the people who say, “Well, so-and-so is going to get credit anyway, and so-and-so is going to do it, then I will just pass.” And I’m like, “The minute you stop showing up for yourself, you’ve actually given up on yourself.” And so at least you owe it to yourself to be able to say, “Hey, this is what I think we need and this is what I think we want.”

And in this idea’s economy, original ideas come from that place, only one stance. And so we actually need to put ourselves back on the table and go, “Yeah, I owe it to myself and to the business to show up and advocate for what I want.” And it’s hard, right? It’s really hard to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really like that definition. Let’s hear it again. Politics is…?

Nilofer Merchant
The way we decide what it is we’re going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I like a lot about that definition is it’s neutral as opposed to, “Aargh, politics are just the worst.” Or, maybe if you’re one those rare birds, like, “Ooh, I love politics. Let’s play the game,” you know? But it’s neutral. like, that’s what it is.

And then it also inspires you a bit, I’d say, to not accept as an explanation for something. “Oh, politics.” It’s like, “That goes without saying, it’s politics. That’s because, definitionally, according to this definition. So let’s specifically say, what does that mean?”

“Oh, well, the SVP of operation was concerned about this and how that impacted that. And so he said, ‘Let’s not do that this quarter.’” It’s like, “Oh, well, now that’s something we can get our arms around and deal with.”

Nilofer Merchant
Exactly. And so the more transparent we are with that, it could be, you know, we actually think marketing is a bigger feature set in our team success than product, right, because we’re a plus one product or something. Then all of a sudden you kind of know where you are.

And so when we start saying what the actual thing is, it gives everyone more context to go, “Oh, this is what’s going on.” And that’s what we really want to do. We want to engage so that we have transparency. One of the stories I told in the book was when I was working with a big company who was really good at doing trade-offs.

It’s REI. So in America, one of the best sports retailer kind of organizations, one of my favorite places to go hang out. And I was working with the team, and they started to say, “Well, we can’t do that because so-and-so won’t like it.” And I go, “Have you asked if so-and-so won’t like it or do you just think so-and-so won’t like it?”

And they were like, “Well, the team in Tennessee always gets what they want. We never get resource, so we think that’s a no-go.” And I go, “You know, it’s totally cool if that turns out to be a no-go. Like, I get it. But if you haven’t asked, then you haven’t gotten clarity on what really matters here.”

And I’m always like, “Deny me, turn me down. That’s your job. If you’re in a leadership role and you have to make those kinds of resource allocation decisions, that’s your job to figure out what to say yes to and no to. But you owe me an explanation so I can understand how that fits in with priorities so I can make better decisions myself.”

“But I owe myself the full proposal. Like, let me bake it, let me complete an idea, let me pitch it to you, let me tell you it in context with other things, all of that. I owe it to my own belief system to show up and advocate for it.” And then if I get shut down, I get shut down and we can go, “Gosh, it’s just not a priority.” But you owe it to yourself.

And I always think the times I’ve regretted in my own career not showing up to myself are like the times when I feel crappiest about my career. And I feel the same way about every team I’ve ever worked with when they say, “Oh, so-and-so won’t care.” I’m like, “Well, give them a chance. Give them a chance to care.”

And, first, you start that by you caring about your own ideas and your own principles. And then you get to advocate for that, show up with your best work, and then people can decide if that’s also our best work.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like your perspective there that we start learning something and we illuminate what’s going on in terms of the priorities or the people or the power structures that are behind things, as opposed to if we just say, “Oh, well, they wouldn’t like that.” You’re just quiet and just do nothing with it. Well, then you’re completely stuck.

Nilofer Merchant
Exactly. And it’s like The Wizard of Oz. You know, we all think there’s a man behind the curtain who is managing everything and making everything happen. And then we pull back the curtain and we realize no one’s really there.

If we can pull back the curtain and realize most of the reasons why decisions are being made the way they are is because no one’s made a better argument. No one has shown us what the trade-offs are. No one has shown us what the downstream effects are.

And so if we can go upstream in our own thinking and say, “Let me at least show up to it,” then we get transparency and visibility and understanding. We’ve shown up for our own agency and we’ve revealed that, quite often, we don’t know why we’re making the decisions we’re making. It’s just what we’ve done. And so we get a chance to help the business grow, right, and show up.

I guess that part I feel like we all stand a little taller when we can show up and be our fullest self. Because work is a place where the self can meet the world, it’s not just what we do for money. It is also the way we become who we are. And so this is a way to practice becoming who you are and showing what you care about, even if we’re scared.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we also have to hear this Marie golf story.

Nilofer Merchant
So I was working at Apple in my 20s, and one day, one of the people that I worked with said, “Do you know, doesn’t it feel to you like the meetings are perfunctory, like the decision has already been made?” And I said, “You know, that’s funny, I was thinking that too. Like, every single thing I say, I feel like it’s just, you know, hitting a wall and kind of sliding down. And I keep thinking it’s me, like it’s a communication issue, I need to learn how to pitch this better or whatever.”

And she goes, “No, I have this other feeling that something else is going on.” And so we took that conversation to a couple other people down the hall, and everyone was like, “Yeah, actually, that’s it. That’s exactly what it feels like as the decisions are being made somewhere else.”

So we ended up thinking, “Well, how would we suss that out?” And a couple of us knew the admin. So we said, “Are they having a pre-meeting like the morning of or something that’s causing us to kind of go into meetings that are already decided?” And they said, “No, there’s no pre meeting, but they are playing golf the day before. They have an offsite every Thursday before the Friday meeting.”

So we said, “Oh, who’s invited?” Just like out of curiosity, right, like, “Oh, who’s coming?” And it was basically every decision-maker in the room was going to the golf game. And we thought, “You know, this is not Machiavellian. This is just opportunistic.”

They know there’s a bunch of decisions to be made. It’s on their minds. They’re probably just talking about it together to be like, “Hey, what do you know? And what do you know?” and blah, blah, blah. And they’re making some pre-decisions. So by the time they come into the room, they’re not probably listening very much.

So one of us decided that we weren’t game for that, but we didn’t know quite how to say anything or do anything without sort of it seeming like we were calling them out. We wanted to call them in. And we wanted to figure out how to participate in this conversation.

So one of the people, a really tall woman named Marie, Marie Schmidt, six-foot tall woman had played volleyball in college, like had played a bunch of sports. She’s really athletic. And that was the point of that story.

And she goes, “You know what? I’m going to learn to play golf. I’ve never learned, but I could do it.” And she went and took lessons. She played every single weekend. She got really good. I remember she even bought custom clubs so that it would suit her body type, which I thought, “Wow, that is a big investment.”

And then after her scores got good enough, she actually emailed the group and said, “Hey, I hear you guys play golf. I’ve actually come to recently love golf. And here’s my scores. And I wonder if I can join in on the team.” And, right away, the golf game went away.

Because what was being called out was, “Listen, you’re doing something that’s actually excluding a bunch of us. And maybe you meant to, maybe you didn’t.” But as soon as it became visible and got called in to that conversation, they ended the golf game. And they showed up to the meeting not predisposed to certain answers so that we could actually have the conversation in the room with all the people who needed to be in the room.

And that, to me, shows the power of showing up for yourself and just advocating for what you believe is right. Because it’s not like she made some overt like, “Oh, you guys suck,” kind of thing. She just did this beautiful, “Decisions need to be made in the room. Let’s make them in the room.” And have that changed to happen.

And I love that it also shows, like, you can play the long game quite literally and not do it as, you know, “Oh, tomorrow we got to fix this.” It can take a little bit to be like, “Hmm, how do I maneuver the chess pieces on the board so I can actually play the game really well?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like the story a lot for the similar reasons, in terms of that proactivity. Because, in some ways, it just feels natural emotional response to say, “Oh, that’s not fair. That’s dumb. I don’t like that.” And it takes quite a lot of effort, you know, to learn a new sport and get custom clubs and all the things. And then there could be an interior reaction of, “I shouldn’t have to do that and, therefore, I won’t,” and then it’s over and done.

But it’s also a choice of what we are free to engage, it’s like, “Well, you know what? If that’s where it’s happening and this is important to me, even though it’s pretty dumb and I shouldn’t have to, I’m going to go ahead and make the sacrifice and then see what unfolds.” And what might happen is you’re included, “Hey, great to have you.”

Or, what might happen is they say, “Oh, I guess, actually, this is not appropriate. That didn’t occur to me before you brought this up.” And either way, you’re making some advancement. Of course, it’s entirely possible they might just say, “No, you can’t play golf,” and they keep doing their thing.

And then, again, that is illuminating. You have additional information from which to decide, “Should I find another workplace? Should I challenge this in a fresh way?”

Nilofer Merchant
That’s right. It’s making progress. And making progress is how we actually, all of us, really can measure success. And one of the beautiful things about what you just, you know, we’re chatting about Pete, was that in that story, there are no villains and there are no victims.

And I love it when we move past this architecture of bad guy, good guy, right? Or the person who says, “Oh, I don’t want to go and, therefore, I’m the victim in this situation.” I’m like, “Well, we all have choice. We all have choice.”

And the question is, “Do we understand our choices? And can we create more choices for them, for us, for all of us?” And as soon as we’re working from a place of choice, we have an ability to actually influence a lot of things. And so it’s more how we hold the mindset, how we invite people into conversation. And then as we move on in our careers, we get a chance to go, “Okay, what are the cultural norms I want to help create?”

And so if we create a culture where we say, “Listen, we’re going to call people in when things aren’t working. We’re going to be able to say, ‘Dude, do you realize that you monologue a lot? And when you monologue a lot, it takes up all the oxygen in the room. And it’s probably not the kind of behavior you really want to do. And do you want to change?”

And that person could go, “Oh, yeah, I was kind of taught that behavior, right? And the only way I ever got things amongst my siblings was to just talk it out with them. And so I need to change my ways.” Like, that kind of conversation can now start to happen instead of saying, “You’re an asshat and I don’t even want to deal with you.”

Which, by the way, might be true. It’s like, “Okay, well you’re here. So now what do you want to do as an agent of change? And how do you show up ready to create that best work? How do you show up with that agency and that power?” Not because we give in to people, but because we say, “What else is possible here?” And it’s going to be a test of imagination for us to reinvent how work works.

The engagement data, whether it’s Gallup or other data, says that we have something like 80% of people at work disengage. It’s crazy. And that number, by the way, hasn’t changed. It just keeps getting worse. The latest statistic was that middle managers were the group that dropped out last, and so they’re just miserable.

So many of the statistic at work says work isn’t working for most of us, which is why people become entrepreneurs and they find other ways of manifesting themselves, because work just generally sucks. And I think it’s about like, “Okay, well, yes, it does suck.” And the question is, “What part of the solution are we?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And talk about solutions, you’ve got some pro tips, some key steps, some key questions you recommend folks engage with as they’re navigating the political side of things.

Nilofer Merchant
Yeah, one of the things I really want to do with this book is not to say, “Hey, here’s what’s not working,” but how do we become, you know, in just the smallest way, more agentic in our power? And so in the power, that politics chapter, I talked about how do you show up and actually ask people, ‘What’s happening here?”

So if you have an idea about the decisions being made a certain way by certain people, you might want to kind of map that out and then go to other people that you work with and say, “Is this how we’re making the decision?”

And have people have that conversation with you and say, “Okay, I’m interested in influencing that decision. How might I do that?” And enrolling other people with you, because this is not meant to be a go-at-yourself kind of work.

Change at this magnitude of actually changing our norms is going to take at least two of us gathering together and saying, “ I’m not in it by myself,” right? Because it’s easy to think, “I’m the problem or you’re the problem.” And, actually, if it’s the norm, then what we want to do is have a couple of us kind of sit at the same side of the table and look at it and go, “Hmm, what is that? What is the situation?”

And then, as we kind of kibitz about that, we can go, “Oh, well, then what are different ways we might navigate that situation?” And we can start helping each other to do that. So I think, my goal is read it with someone else, a bud at work, and then figure out if something’s important to you, how do you team up together and start doing this work? And then you can problem-solve and get creative about that because, otherwise, you’re going to feel alone and not as powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned, you know, “Who is the problem versus what’s the problem?” You mentioned William Ury and the distinction between people and positions, it can be easy to just accept something when, in fact, that is a position that ought to be challenged. Can you speak to that?

Nilofer Merchant
So when I was in community college, I got an opportunity to also represent the entire student body of the community college, not just at my one school, but then for the entire state of California. So for all 106 community colleges at the time, so it was a million plus students.

We were lobbying for community colleges to actually change from being trade schools, which they were at the time, mostly teaching mechanics and nursing and that kind of work, to actually being the front load for your education.

And he got brought in to teach us how to do that negotiation. And one of the things he said is we often assume what people’s interests are, and we assume that they’re baked. So we assume we know what they are, and then we assume that they’re unmovable.

And if we can actually really figure out what’s underlying someone’s interests, then we can often find other ways to accomplish that. So we might say their interest is, oh, what’s a funny one? Their interest is to have lunch. And then we go, “Well, it’s dinnertime, so we really can’t solve that problem of lunch.”

But if we sit there and go, “Oh, the goal is to have food,” or, “The goal is to have nutrition,” or, “The goal is to feel satiated,” there are other ways to solve that problem just by changing what the goal is from lunch to satiation, or lunch to nutrition.

And that’s where I think we kind of get stuck. We get stuck with the initial definition of, “This guy says he wants lunch.” And so then we go, “Oh, well, we can’t give him lunch because it’s dinner time.” And I know I’m making up a funny example, but that holds true for even the most complex situations.

And we can go, “Oh, what actually is he trying to solve for? What is it that we can then create together?” And we’ve just got to figure out how to show up and assume that most people don’t really know what they want. They only know what they can have right now. And so they state the thing they think they can have, like they think it’s lunchtime kind of thing.

And if you can go, “Let me learn more. Let me explore,“ then everyone’s in a learning mode, you know, using Carol Dweck’s beautiful framework of growth mindset, then we’re just going to learn together. And then as we learn together, we can actually find multiple ways to solve any problem.

And if we kind of assume that abundance mindset, the growth mindset, and kind of show up with sort of really deep curiosity, we can usually figure out that the presenting problem is not the actual problem. And no one is a villain and no one’s a victim, and so then we start getting creative together.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve taught my children, when someone says no, a great thing to say next is, “What are your concerns?” And it is so hilarious to see my sweet little seven-year-old girl, Mary, when she’s told no, and she’ll say, “What are your concerns?”

And it does, it gets right to the heart of that, in terms of we might assume that we’re getting a no because, I don’t know, they don’t like us or they’re obsessed with power and money and prestige or whatever. We just have any number of assumptions about what they’re after.

And then the no is really just like, “Oh, I’m not scheduled to have a meeting with that person for another three weeks.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, how about we talk then?” It’s like, “Oh, that was way easier than I expected.” And your example about lunch, nutrition, it can be quite surprising what you learn in terms of, “Oh, they don’t even want food of any sort. They just wanted a break and some socializing.” “Well, we can do that. Let’s, yeah.”

Nilofer Merchant
Exactly. I love this. I love your example of your daughter because you can imagine her asking for ice cream after dinner, “What are your concerns?” “Well, I’m concerned you’ll get too much sugar before bed.” And I can imagine her turning to you saying, “Well, then after school tomorrow, right?” Like, she can negotiate really well. You’re teaching this kid to become a monster in the best possible way.

Because you can then go, “Oh, well, we can get that. We can solve your concerns and get what it is I want at the table.” And that’s exactly right. It’s that, “What are your concerns?” and what else is possible.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Well, tell me, Nilofer, any other key things you want to make sure to share before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Nilofer Merchant
Well, I hope we’ve communicated that it’s not you or them. It’s us. I hope we’ve communicated that management norms aren’t so much persuasive as they are persistent. I hope that we’ve communicated that politics is simply the way we decide what we’re going to decide. And I hope people understand that it’s a way for them to join together and figure out how to fix work.

Like, none of us are happy, really, very few. And even the bosses aren’t happy and I get a chance to talk to a lot of really top leaders, and I can categorically say people are miserable. And so this is, hopefully, a hopeful book and a hopeful set of ideas about how do we pay attention to the intangibles around us and make work better.

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

Nilofer Merchant
You know, there’s a beautiful quote somebody just reminded me of Nelson Mandela said, “Don’t measure me by my successes. Measure me by how many times I got up off the floor.”

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

Nilofer Merchant
I love the one where a team, basically a group of people are asked to watch how often the ball is passed. And between, I think, it’s like some of the teams wearing black shirts and some of the teams wearing white shirts, and they’re asked to count the number of times the ball is passed between the team and who had the ball most in terms of like which shirt.

And a big hairy gorilla, like actually a person in a gorilla outfit walks through the scene. And then after the experiment is over, people are asked how many people notice the gorilla. And something like 50% of the people don’t notice the gorilla at all. And it’s huge. You can’t miss it.

But there’s something about how, when our attention is directed one way, we can get kind of lock scoped and not see the full range, the full aperture of what’s going on in the room. And it reminds me that if we can actually stop being so obsessed about the specific and start just really opening up our own apertures, we can see more of what’s going on and, more importantly, navigate that more of what’s going on.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Nilofer Merchant
I’m going to choose Mary Oliver’s Devotions, which is a beautiful book of poetry collected over her lifetime. So it was published towards the end of her life, so it’s really a beautiful body. And I find it one of those books that you can open up and have it speak to your day about how to be more present to yourself and to the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Nilofer Merchant
I’m pretty much loving all the tools right now that let you do coding online and just, like, create websites and stuff. I’m playing with quite a few of them, so I can’t say I love one particular one, but I love that I can now go back to coding using natural language and having it actually translate that to all the code because it gets you back to that place of being a creator again.

Pete Mockaitis
And, well, just a quick follow-up. In terms of the quick creation of a website with natural language, just like the chatbots, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, or is there something special that seems kind of cool there?

Nilofer Merchant
Oh, there’s like 12 of them so far that I’ve tried so I can’t even tell you all their names.

Pete Mockaitis
Twelve.

Nilofer Merchant
But one of the things that you can now do is, like, go from, “I want to build a data tool set that tells me the answer to X.” And within, like, really short window of time, it can pull all this data that, literally, would have taken three researchers a couple of weeks to do, and organize it in a way that it would break Excel. And I think that gives us the opportunity to sort of prototype ideas.

We can always work with a bigger team later and kind of get it better, but to go, “Oh, what if I could do this? What if the business team could do X or Y?” And just play around with it to go, “This is what an early idea could be.” Because sometimes if we show up with an idea that doesn’t have proof of concept, it’s hard to imagine.

But if you can show up with a nascent idea that also is associated with a thing, then people can go, “Oh, I can see how that would work,” and it would just help that imagination process go forward.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nilofer Merchant
I think that habit that Duhigg said, which is “Choose the one thing you’re going to do the next day before you go to bed,” because if you can do that, your brain can actually start solving that problem as you sleep. And then you wake up just ready and charged up to go. So I love that habit.

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

Nilofer Merchant
The one quote that people always say back to me is they say, “Any good work is not created, it’s co-created.” And I wrote that in my very first book, which was called The New How, and it was about collaborative leadership. And I am so surprised at how many people have turned that into T-shirts and pins and just different ways of communicating all work isn’t created, it’s co-created.

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

Nilofer Merchant
Website is NiloferMerchant.com.

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

Nilofer Merchant
Showing up over and over again to yourself. It’s not about proving to other people how good you are or how worthy you are. It’s showing up to yourself and making progress against your own goals that helps you actually become the person you’re meant to be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nilofer, thank you.

Nilofer Merchant
Thank you for having me, Pete.

Feb 16

1129: Unlocking Your Best Performance through Rituals with Michael Norton

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | No Comments

Michael Norton reveals the science behind rituals that can help us change the way we feel and perform.

You’ll Learn

What makes rituals more powerful than habits
How rituals help you get into the zone
Simple team rituals to build closeness

About Michael

Michael I. Norton is a professor at Harvard Business School. Michael’s research focuses on behavioral economics and well-being, with particular attention given to happiness and spending, income inequality, the IKEA effect, and, most recently, rituals.

Michael Norton’s research has been published in popular media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, and The New York Times, as well as academic journals like Science, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the American Economic Review. His “How to Buy Happiness” TED Talk has been viewed over 4 million times, and his work has been parodied by The Onion.

In 2013, Norton co-authored Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending with Elizabeth Dunn. His recent book The Ritual Effect focuses on the surprising and versatile power of rituals.

Resources Mentioned

Study: “Overearning” by Christopher K. Hsee, Jiao Zhang, Fengyan Cai, and Shirley Zhang
Book: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World by Lewis Hyd

Thank you, Sponsors!

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Factor. Head to factormeals.com/beawesome50off and use the code beawesome50off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. (New Factor subscribers only)

Michael Norton Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome!

Michael Norton
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book and rituals. Could you kick us off by sharing one of the most important or meaningful or fun rituals for you personally and what makes it special for you?

Michael Norton
One of the weird or most specific idiosyncratic ones in my family is that we do, we started this during COVID, during the pandemic when joy was in short supply, I guess I would say. And so, we decided that we would start sticking candles in foods other than cakes. And so, we have a tradition now of happy meatloaf to you where we sing, we put candles in meatloaf and sing the happy birthday song to the meatloaf, and then blow out the candles and then have the meatloaf.

And it’s, on the one hand, completely ridiculous. On the other hand, it’s completely ridiculous we put candles in cakes also, it’s just that we’re used to it. So, for me, it’s just an example of how random rituals really are. Even the ones we’re used to, when you unpack them, turn out to be often pretty strange in their own right.

Pete Mockaitis
But what I love about that is, yes, it’s weird and it’s idiosyncratic and all that, but it does, I think there’s more joy, there’s more connection, there’s more family fun in the food experience by doing that. So why the heck not? Just go ahead and do that.

Michael Norton
This is one of these things that many, many rituals can bring much more emotion to things than, otherwise, we can get out of them. And I think that’s kind of a gift, actually, of rituals is that they can elevate things from boring to something more meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fun, now you got me thinking about family food times and whenever I make something and the kids ask, “Oh, what’s in it?” I think they know what’s going to come. I’ll mention a few of the ingredients, but then I’ll take on sort of a super sweet tone of voice, I’ll say, “But you know what the most important ingredient of all is?” And they’re very much onto those, they’ll say, “Love.” And I don’t know, it’s just fun. It’s just fun, so we do it.

Michael Norton
The other day I made a “joke” that I thought was funny, and my 9-year-old daughter, she didn’t react, she was silent. And so, I said, “You know, that was supposed to be a joke.” And she said, here’s how she did it. She paused and said, “Sadly, I know.” That was the biggest burn maybe of my life from that. So, I feel your pain on they know what’s coming and they’re not always super impressed, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, Michael, rituals are kind of fun. They’re kind of nifty, but could you share with us, what makes them a potentially valuable, important things for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Norton
Yeah, I think that when you look at people’s work lives, what we found was, so one of the things we did with rituals is we started in a couple of domains like grief. And then we would talk to people and they would say, “Oh, but have you looked at it in this domain, like marriages? Have you looked at it in families? Have you looked at it?” And, eventually, of course, “Have you looked at these at work?”

And one of the things we found was that rituals really pattern our entire workday because, starting at home, actually, because we have our morning ritual that we do with our coffee and the things we read and the people. Many people have stuff they do on their commute. That’s kind of a ritual that they do every single time.

Then you have something when you get to your desk. Often people have a thing that they do every morning. Then there’s lunch, they have a thing that they do. Then there’s team meetings and different teams have different rituals. Then at the end of the day, you close stuff down to leave. Then when you get home, you’ve got something to kind of leave work behind and get back into your life mode.

And so, you just have, I’m speaking quickly because all of these we’ve looked at, but you can just see how they, we think of rituals as these weddings or something, kind of they happen very rarely, but we see, really, that they’re embedded in our lives at home and at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so they happen, sure. They are ever-present. And you make a distinction between a ritual and a habit. What is that distinction?

Michael Norton
Can I ask you a ridiculous question?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m listening.

Michael Norton
Do you, in the morning, brush your teeth first and then shower, or do you shower and then brush your teeth?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I shower and brush my teeth.

Michael Norton
You’re saying that as though it’s obvious.

Pete Mockaitis
More specifically, I dip into cold water and then brush my teeth while warming up with hot water simultaneously because it was cold in that cold water.

Michael Norton
Interesting. And how would you feel if tomorrow I said, “Change that up. Change the order”? Can you do the toothbrush first?

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, we could. It just feels disappointing.

Michael Norton
So, the first question, oddly enough, about half of people brush first and then shower, and the other half shower and then brush, this is true like all over the world, so humans haven’t decided what the right order is. But the more important question to your question about habits versus rituals is about half of people, if I say, “Do you mind switching the order tomorrow?” they say, “Sure, absolutely. No problem.”

And about half of people say something like, “I don’t want to. It would feel weird,” you said disappointing, “I have some negative emotion around changing the order.” And for me, I mean, those are the simplest behaviors we engage in, but you can see, for some people, brushing their teeth and showering, it’s like a habit, “You know, I have to do these six things in the morning and I can check them off in any order. It doesn’t matter to me.”

And for other people, even these silly innocuous behaviors, have something in them, some emotion in them that makes them quite different from just a boring habit because we care about what order they’re done in. And when we do it in the right order, people say, “I feel ready to face the day.” And when they do it in the wrong order, they say, “I’ll feel weird all day.”

So, rituals, you know, people in robes with candles is further out on the continuum. But even with tooth brushing and showering, you can see how the same behaviors, for some people, they’re kind of black and white, “Let’s get them done.” And for other people, they get imbued with something more, like putting candles on meatloaf imbues it with something more.

And one thing that I like about the shower and toothbrush thing is you can see it’s not just that rituals are good. Rituals provoke emotion in us, which can be very positive, but sometimes very negative as well. So, it’s almost like a risk-reward. If you have a morning ritual, if you do it the way you like, you feel great, but you run the risk of, you know, your kid comes in and interrupts you, and now you can’t do it the way you like, and now you feel worse than you would have if you never had the ritual to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a helpful distinction. There are some emotional stakes in the world of ritual. Okay. And tell me, any other surprises you’ve learned as you were studying this in depth?

Michael Norton
I asked people, so if something bad happens and you have a superstition and you say, “Knock on wood,” how many times do you knock?”

Pete Mockaitis
About two-ish?

Michael Norton
Two-ish. So, about half of people knock twice and half knock three times, and they don’t know why. They don’t know when it started. They get very upset with each other. I can do it in a classroom and see half of them do it one way, half do the other way. They look disgusted at the other people, like, “What is wrong? What kind of a person would only knock twice instead of three times?”

And if you’re a three-knock person, and someone knocks twice, you have this potential energy of you’ve got to have the third knock or everything’s going to go really wrongly. And this is, again, this idea that, first off, it’s just knocking on a thing. We knock on things all the time and we don’t worry about how many times we knock, but it gets imbued with a crazy amount of emotion and meaning that I actually feel like I’m warding off bad things happening to me and my loved ones if I knock the right number of times.

And that’s what’s, to me, really so surprising about it is that, again, like brushing your teeth, knocking on a table, they’re so mundane. They’re so, in a sense, unimportant. Well, dentists would say brushing your teeth is very important, but in the grand scheme. But they provoke this insane amount of emotion, feeling good, feeling bad, with knocking on wood, feeling angry at other people for doing it “wrong” so that it constantly surprised, honestly, in all the work that we did, and how it’s often the small things that provoke an enormous amount of emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is surprising. And I’m intrigued, when it comes to rituals and work, you opened the book sharing tales of writers Flannery O’Connor and Maya Angelou with their rituals. How might we get some of the reward side of these rituals and more of it?

Michael Norton
You can spend, basically, a day of your life, if you want, Googling a celebrity’s name and the word ritual. Any athlete, any musician, any politician, just type their name and then type ritual, and it is astonishing how many of these people have some kind of ritual that they do at some point during their day or during their life. And they’re very elaborate and they’re very idiosyncratic.

And so, one of my favorites is Rafael Nadal, who has, if you are a tennis fan, you already know where I’m going. Before every serve, he has a very elaborate thing that he does with his forehead and his wristbands and everything. And he even, it’s been described as he picks his wedgie before every single serve. So, he’s got very elaborate sort of thing.

And when you ask him, “Why do you do that? Would you be okay without it?” he will say, “Yeah, no, of course, I could still serve without it. But when I do it, I feel ready.” And I think that’s really, really key because it’s not that…well, there’s two things. One is, if he doesn’t do it, he’s still Rafael Nadal, one of the greatest tennis players ever.

The other thing is, if I copy his ritual, I still stink. Unfortunately, rituals aren’t magical, where somehow if I turn around three times, I get to be amazing. That’s not how they work. But what they can do, again, is change how we’re feeling. And he’s telling us that he’s feeling nervous about the next serve. And this ritual that he’s come up with makes him feel like he’s in the zone and ready to go.

And we see people using those kinds of rituals, even every famous person, as I said, but also people just in their everyday lives. And one of the most common ones that people will say, if I say, “Have you ever done anything before a meeting or before a big talk or you had to present to the whole team?” and people say, “You know what, I do actually do something.”

And I say, “Well, what do you do?” And they kind of lean in kind of like they’re conspiratorially, and they say, “Well, I go into the bathroom and I check under the stalls to make sure nobody else is there. And then I stand in front of the sink and look at myself in the mirror and tell myself, ‘You can do this.’”

And I say, “You’re like the ninth person today to tell me that you do that.” So, people think it’s very weird to do that. And yet it’s incredibly common in our, again, everyday lives that people do something when they’re feeling nervous to help them feel subjectively like, “I’m ready to go.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. But that specific ritual of going to the bathroom, making sure it’s empty, and then checking, looking at yourself in the mirror and the pep talk is something you’re hearing again and again.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And what I love is it’s not like it’s in some ancient text, and it’s been happening for thousands of years. For example, there weren’t mirrors at one time, so you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to.

But people often develop independently the same kinds of rituals. Because if you think what they’re doing, you need privacy in order to do this, to psych yourself up, because you’re going to talk to yourself sometimes. And the place to do it is in the bathroom rather than in the lunch room or something like that.

So, we’re pretty creative when we come up with rituals, like picking your wedgie also is not in ancient text as far as I know. But then once we have them in place, they’re our go-to. And we really try to do the same thing every time when we’re feeling nervous before something big.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, does it work? Will we give a better speech if we give ourselves the pep talk or we pick a better serve if we pick the wedgie?

Michael Norton
This is, mean, the sad thing is, so when we started studying rituals, we did have the hope that, somehow, we would discover some magical sequence that humans could engage in that actually would make them different people. You know, that somehow if you clapped 19 times, you had the strength of, something like that. And, unfortunately, again, that’s not what we see there. They’re not magical.

But what I teach undergraduates, many of them are really gifted athletes who, by the way, all have their own pre-performance rituals as well. And one of the things that they say is that when they do their ritual, they’ll often use the phrase, “It kind of helps me get out of my own way, that my thoughts and nervousness are getting in my way of performing the way I know I can perform, and making me actually mess up in a sense. Like, I’m not in the zone, I’m not ready to go.”

And so, I see these rituals, it’s not so much that they make us magically better, although I wish they did. It’s that sometimes they’re actually just allowing us to perform at the best level that we’re capable of. And that, in and of itself, is a useful tool to have. For me, even if rituals didn’t affect performance at all, one reason they’re so ubiquitous is because they’re still working in the sense that they’re helping us psychologically deal with something that’s very difficult to deal with.

And we often see that with rituals, is that they work not so much that they change something dramatic in the world, it’s that they change something dramatic within ourselves. And that’s very, very useful for humans in all sorts of different situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, if I can go from, I don’t know, average level of Pete Mockaitis, sharpness, creativity, enthusiasm, empathy, whatever, whatever I’m trying to drum up to, you know, near peak levels relatively quickly with a ritual, that sounds super handy. So, let’s go for it.

Well, now you got me thinking about Tony Robbins and Power Moves, and some of that “Rah! Rah!” I guess that’s just one of many flavors of ritual that some folks may engage in to shift their internal state to something that’s helpful for what’s ahead of them.

Michael Norton
That’s right. And we do see, we’ve looked both at the level of the individual, “What do I do when I need some emotion that I’m not having?” And we’ve also looked at the level of the team or the group and see whether those are the same or different.

So, for example, I will sometimes have, like an audience will stand up and I’ll show some things on the board, like clap twice, stomp three times, clap six times, stomp six times, etc. And I just kind of show it to them and see what they do. And what audiences do is they start clapping and stomping and they very quickly sync up with each other.

So, they’re all stomping, I didn’t tell them to sync up, but they all sync up. So, by the end, they’re really, really in unison, everybody doing the same thing. And when we asked afterward, “How close do you feel to these people?” they say, “I feel closer than I did before.” So, we can a little bit engineer via group rituals, something that changes how we feel about the group.

But the other thing that’s important, again, it’s the risk-reward thing with rituals, that’s true that it can make us feel connected to people like us. But if I have people who do the ritual on purpose wrong, so everyone else is stomping and I’m still clapping really loudly, people are enraged at the person because they say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

And so, at the same time that they’re helping us sometimes bond together with people, they’re also making us dislike people who are doing it differently from us. And it’s this fine line between, if I’m doing a ritual or we’re doing a ritual and we think it’s good, that’s terrific. But if we start to think that our ritual is right, is correct, that’s where we start to see, “Well, now if we’re correct, anybody else doing anything different is incorrect.” So, we’re not just good. It’s that they’re bad.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fascinating. It reminds me of some of Bob Cialdini’s work with regard to troops marching in unison and formation, it has an impact, or siblings or friends doing a song dance piece that’s coordinated, it has a similar uniting impact.

And you used the word enraged. It’s so funny because I have had the experience of like I’m in church, right? And someone is praying the prayers way slower or way faster than the collective, and I find that irritating. And then I’m like, “Hey, Pete, we’re in church. We’re doing a good thing. Maybe, like, just try to be patient with it,” you know.

But so, I find that encouraging. It’s like, “Okay, that is a common human phenomenon. When the vast majority of people are doing a thing in unison and someone is deviating, it’s irksome.”

Michael Norton
George Carlin had this line where he was talking about driving a car, and he said, “Anyone going slower than you is a moron. And anyone going faster than you is a maniac.” And I think, unfortunately, it’s still true that we feel that way about people doing things differently than we’re doing them.

But when you add this ritual element, you’re talking about religious rituals, but even with clapping and stomping in a classroom, we do see that people start to say, “We’re doing it right, you’re doing it wrong. And I don’t like you. I don’t like what you’re doing over there.”

Even though I’m aware, it’s fine. As you said, they’re praying. It’s not that they’re disrupting everybody on purpose or something like that, but we have it in us to say, “No, no, this is the way that we do this. Everybody should agree on this is exactly how we’re going to get this done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s eye-opening in and of itself in terms of human nature and what’s inside us. I’d love to hear, since you’ve talked to so many people about their rituals, we’ve heard a common ritual associated with doing a speech or presentation. What are some useful rituals for we’re about to hunker down and enter into some productive deep work focus mode?

Michael Norton
So, again, there’s the individual level, and then there’s the if we have to do it on a team. We’ve done lots of research on the team dynamics on how to think about rituals and how they affect teams. And one of the things, so if I go to a company and I’m supposed to be some ritual guru or whatever I’m supposed to be, even though I’m not, what often companies want is, “Can I give them kind of an out-of-the-box ritual that they can have all their employees do that will somehow make the employees really happy and everybody likes it?”

And if you’ve ever been in a company where they tried to do that, your number one reaction is not, “I love this.” It’s, “Why do I have to do this stupid thing?” It’s like everyone’s had a manager who watches TED Talks over the weekend, and then comes in and demands that you do whatever the TED Talk told them to do.

So, there’s this sense that what organizations want is, it’s a pejorative word, but like a cookie cutter ritual, and that can lead to real reactance from folks and from teams. And so, what I do instead is I encourage people and their teams to think about what they’re already doing, “So, what are things that your team does that other teams don’t do that are kind of idiosyncratic to you that are meaningful to you?”

And teams will have all kinds of different things. Once they start to think about it, inside jokes are a good example, actually, that we have this little ritual where, you know, we always say this one thing. Those are the kinds of rituals that are already having an emotional impact on us. We see that.

We see that teams at work that report having these rituals actually report having more meaning in their work, that there’s some transfer between this meaning of this ritual that we’re sharing and the meaning of the work that we’re all doing together. And so, lots and lots of examples.

One of my favorite examples of a team ritual actually happened again during the pandemic when people were working from home. This team that had daily meetings and had had them for years had to go remote. So now, of course, they’re all on Zoom with little faces on the screen. And what they started to do was, at the beginning of every meeting, everyone would click the emoji that reflected how they were feeling.

And so, you would look at this screen with 20 faces and you could quickly see kind of the average, sort of extracted from emojis, but also see who’s doing well and who’s not doing that well, “Maybe I should follow up with them later.” And it became a ritual at the beginning of every meeting.

And what was fascinating to me is they had never done anything like that when they used to meet in person. So, there was no going around the table and saying how you’re feeling, because you can see how different that is. It’d be weird to make everyone at the table, one by one, go around and say, “I’m struggling today.” That’s not typically something we do at work.

So, even though remote work distances us from people, this team used it actually as a way to use the technology to bring them closer together via something silly, like clicking emojis. And so, the randomness again of the things that people come up with on their teams, that very quickly become very meaningful to them, where if someone starts to start the meeting without the emojis, people will stop them and say, “No, no, no, wait, we have to do the emojis first and then we can start the meeting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, it’s interesting, you say going around and saying how you’re feeling is not typical of meeting behavior, but I have been in some workplaces where they do that. They call it check-in and that’s come up a couple of times with the podcast.

And so, in a way, that’s kind of intriguing how a ritual that emerges in one context can really serve as an inspiration for, like, when they do go back to the office, like, “Hey, you know what, it’s like, it feels like we’re missing something. Well, this is, maybe feels out there to us, but let’s give it a shot in person,” and away you go.

Michael Norton
And my guess is, I don’t have the data just to be clear, but my guess is that the average report when you’re doing it in person one by one is more positive than the average report if you’re clicking emojis. Because it’s much harder as a person in a meeting to say, “I’m really struggling today.”

People do, of course, but it’s a bigger barrier. So, it is this question of, “How do we do a check-in in a way where people feel that they’ve been heard and also that they’re able to really share how they’re really feeling?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Okay. Well, lay some more on us, favorite rituals that seem to really be impactful for folks at work.

Michael Norton
Very, very simple one, and this will be no surprise, is how teams deal with lunch. Lunch at work is a funny thing because we have to eat lunch. We usually eat it, in the US anyway, we usually eat around noon.

And other than that, what we do and how we do lunch is really up to us. So, you can go and get something and eat it in your cubicle by yourself and never talk to anybody. Or you can, you know, go out to a 300-person restaurant. You can do whatever you feel like doing.

But what we see teams doing, and they report it when we survey them, is they often have something they do at lunch that makes lunch just a little bit, back to our earlier conversation, a little bit more emotional, a little bit more meaningful, not just putting food in our faces because we need caloric intake.

And just as an example, one team, it’s a five-person team, they would, every day of the week, was one person brought lunch for everybody else. So, you do it on Monday and then I do it on Tuesday. And in the end, what they’re doing is everybody’s eating lunch every day. That’s not that interesting.

But if you think of what they’re signaling with that ritual, it’s that on one day a week, I’m taking care of everybody else on the team. And every other day of the week, the team is taking care of me. It’s a very strong signal.

And this team felt it was very important to be not just like automatons at work, but human beings. And you can see how their ritual that they came up with really, actually, tries to reinforce this idea that we care about each other. It’s not just that we’re here to punch the clock.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Well, tell me, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Norton
I guess I would say, if you think of how to kind of incorporate rituals, I think people often are thinking, you know, “Should I add something to my life to make it more ritualistic?” And the idea, of course, is not that the more rituals you add, the better your life is. I can get messy very quickly.

But what I do encourage people to do is kind of take almost an audit of your current rituals and see when you’re doing them and how you’re doing them. You can think of family dinner, what do you do? You can think of you and your spouse, do you have little things that you’ve been doing for years? Your teams at work, even what you do in the morning.

And just notice, actually, all the places that you have these little behaviors that you’ve been doing for a long time that are meaningful to you. And even if you don’t add new ones, appreciate those ones a little bit more so the next time you do it, you’re really owning it as, “Oh, we’re doing our silly thing we do when we have dinner every night. We’re doing it again. This is our family thing that we do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like that a lot, and I think you can bring savoring to so many things and enhance them.

Michael Norton
Love that.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember, I was at a class and someone talked, we were talking about rituals or things they really appreciate. This man talked about how he savors the candy, if I’m saying it right, Ferrero Rocher, you know, those little balls with the crunch.

Michael Norton
My daughter loves them.

Pete Mockaitis
And he described it with such detail and sensory language, it’s like, “Is this person a poet?” And it really struck me, it’s like, “You could do that to anything, savoring the warm water or scent of soap on your hands you wash them.” And I think it speaks to what you brought up at the beginning, the difference between a habit and a ritual, “Yeah, I wash my hands,” or it’s like, “Ooh, I savor the multi-sensory experience of hand washing.”

Michael Norton
One of my favorite examples on savoring is Oreos. So, Oreos are just a cookie like any other cookie and, yet, there’s an entire culture around eating Oreos, which is, “Do you twist them apart or not? Do you lick the filling out first?” And people have very strong preferences about this. If you go online, you’ll see, actually, there are serious debates about the correct way to eat an Oreo.

From my standpoint, it’s not that there’s a correct way. It’s that you’re taking a cookie, which is a nice thing to eat, and you’re turning it into something a little more interesting. It’s got a little, to your point, a little more in there because, “You know what, I’ve been dunking it this way for 20 years. And, by the way, my mom used to dunk it this way as well.” So, you get these really strong emotional reactions on, as you said, things like eating something or washing your hands.

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

Michael Norton
I heard a quote a few years ago, “Fame is a mask that eats at the soul.” And I think of it, not that I’m a famous person, but all of us in life, we move forward in our job and we start to feel like we’re important. And so, it’s fame, it’s going to give us, it’s like importance is a mask that eats at the soul.

And I think, and I should say, and also my tendency to, as I move forward in my career, start to think that people are treating me a certain way because I’m amazing, instead of because I’m their boss is a very common mistake that people make. And it does change who you are.

So, I think a lot about, and I can see people the world where fame or importance kind of changes their soul a little bit. And I’m always on the lookout in myself and in the people I love, we check each other to make sure that we’re still staying true to ourselves even if we got a big promotion or we get famous or whatever it might be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Michael, after this conversation, you’re slightly more famous in the world. So, I hope your soul doesn’t get any nibbles from this conversation.

Michael Norton
Well, I was at zero, so anything is going to bump me up past my current level.

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

Michael Norton
I completely love this study. Chris Hsee, who’s at the University of Chicago, the paper is called “Overworking.” And he sets up this thing in the lab where you can do two things. You can watch funny videos, or you can do a really boring task and get a Hershey’s Kiss. And you can do this for a while.

So, you can always choose to watch a video or you can choose to work in order to get paid with a Hershey’s Kiss. So, he’s basically setting up life, which is you can work for future rewards or you can goof around right now.

And the thing that he finds is what people do is they overwork, meaning, he’ll say, “The only Hershey’s Kisses you can eat are the ones that you eat. You can’t take any with you,” which, again, is a metaphor for life, like you can’t take it with you. But what he finds is people can’t stop working. They just keep accumulating Hershey’s Kisses, and there’s this giant stack of them.

And then when the thing is over, they try to eat as many as they can. They don’t feel good about it because they’re eating too many, and they leave them behind. And I love, obviously, the metaphor that he has in that thing, which is we really get stuck sometimes in there’s some currency that we’re earning, often it’s money, but it could be respect or fame or anything like that.

And we become so consumed with getting more of it that we forget everything else about life that might be an enjoyable kind of thing, like our families and our hobbies and things like that. So, I think of that very, very frequently. One, I just love the elegance of the design and also the funniness that it’s Hershey’s Kisses. And it really relates to this fundamental human question about how we’re managing our well-being and our time here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Norton
My favorite book is The Gift by Lewis Hyde. And it’s a book about gift giving across kind of the human lifespan, meaning as long as humans have been around, we’ve been giving gifts to each other. And so, he really looks to see what’s the role of gifts in human life. And they play an incredible amount of roles in everything, in our relationships, at work, at home, all of these little gifts that we’re giving.

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

Michael Norton
That would be, I guess the tool, not quite a tool, but my lab group. So, we have some faculty, some PhD students, some postdocs, some undergraduates, we meet and we brainstorm. And social science really is about trying to notice things in the world that nobody has noticed, and then trying to study them. And the only way to do that is to use a bunch of brains.

Yes, you could sit in your office by yourself and try to come up with all the ideas, but, really, when you’re thinking about social life, social brainstorming is the way to get it done. So, I couldn’t do any of the things that I do without the luxury of using all these other smart brains that are around me.

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

Michael Norton
I think one thing that people have told me is that when someone says something like they’re struggling with something in their life, having a problem at work. And then they say something like, “I know it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, you know, there’s wars happening and things like that.” We have a very common instinct to do that, to downplay our own problems.

And I think one of the things that I always say to people is, “Whether that’s true or not doesn’t help you with your own problem. It’s still your problem and it’s still very important to you or we wouldn’t be talking about it.” So, let’s not judge our problems against other people’s problems to determine how important they are. Let’s deal with them together because they’re problems that are affecting you and we’d like to do something about it.

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

Michael Norton
It’s very difficult to remember. It’s MichaelNorton.com. It’s a very boring website, I’ll say, but there’s one part on it that is a quiz. It’s a rituals quiz. And it doesn’t take that long, but we ask you questions about rituals in different parts of your life. And then we give you a little feedback on how you’re doing and where you might think differently about it. And it’s fun to do with your spouse or partner as well.

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

Michael Norton
I would think about being intentional in meetings, actually, like thinking about what the beginning of a meeting is supposed to do and what the end of a meeting is supposed to do instead of just starting and just trailing off at the end. Really think, it could be a ritual, obviously, that you do at the beginning and end.

But even more, I think, just kind of making the meeting about something, and then at the end summarizing what the meeting was about so we don’t just feel like we’re sleepwalking through everything all day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, thank you.

Michael Norton
Thank you so much.

Feb 12

1128: How to Develop and Maximize Every Voice on Your Team with Jeremie Kubicek

By Ria Dispo | Podcasts | No Comments

Jeremie Kubicek shares his innovative 5 Voices framework for empowering teams and maximizing potential.

You’ll Learn

Why people development often fails
How leaders unintentionally silence their best people
Warning signs your team’s in the pit of despair

About Jeremie

Jeremie Kubicek is a globally recognized speaker, author, and leadership expert dedicated to helping leaders multiply healthy influence and self-awareness. As the co-founder of GiANT Worldwide, he equips leaders and organizations to build cultures of trust, peace, and performance through practical systems of people development.

Jeremie is the author of Making Your Leadership Come Alive and The Peace Index, and co-author of The 100X Leader, 5 Voices, 5 Gears, The Communication Code, and the newly released The Voice-Driven Leader: How to Hear, Value, and Maximize Every Voice on Your Team.

Tool: 5 Voices AI
Tool: The Peace Index
Book: The Voice-Driven Leader: How to Hear, Value, and Maximize Every Voice on Your Team
Book: The Peace Index: A Five-Part Framework to Conquer Chaos and Find Fulfillment
Website: 5Voices.com
Website: JeremieKubicek.com

Resources Mentioned

Book: Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney
Past episode: 424: How to Help People Get to the Next Level with Jeremie Kubicek
Past episode: 926: The Five Codes that Make and Break Trust with Jeremie Kubiceck

Thank you, Sponsors!

Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.
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Jeremie Kubicek Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jeremie, welcome back!

Jeremie Kubicek
Pete, always good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great to have you again. I’m excited to talk about The Voice-Driven Leader and people development stuff. And I got to know right from the get go, chapter one, why people development typically fails. Lay it on us, Jeremie. Why?

Jeremie Kubicek
Because we all know, it’s boring. It doesn’t really work. It’s developed in the wrong way. But, really, the main reason is because it’s driven from one voice to everyone else. It’s not hyper-personalized. And in today’s world, like, imagine if you could actually draft books, content, training, all based on the other person, not on you, we did it. Imagine that, and that’s what we’ve done. We built The Voice-Driven Leader to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, so let’s expand a little bit on about why it fails. You say, and I don’t know how much that was in jest because we both love developing people.

Jeremie Kubicek
No, it’s true. I think what I’d say is this, there’s a difference between development and training. And training is what most people will think of when they think, “Oh, I’ve got to go watch a course,” “I’ve got to go sit in a training session for a day.”

But the actual process is apprenticeship. And apprenticeship is a lost art in America. It used to be a thing. In industrial revolution, “Hey, if you’re a mason, we’re going to brick a wall.” There’s still masons, and there’s still HVAC, and there’s still all these people who do trades. Trades know what apprenticeship is.

But most of us haven’t experienced it like, “Okay, Pete, you’re going to come watch me. Just watch. Now, you’re going to watch me and help me. And now you’re going to do it. I’m going to help you. And now you’re going to do it. And we’re good, right?” And that’s apprenticeship. That’s the full development.

But in the computer age, it’s not like, “Hey, Pete, watch how I do this text message. Watch me do email. Do you see how I did that?”

Pete Mockaitis
“That was great.”

Jeremie Kubicek
It’s harder to do apprenticeship in the technological world. So, development suffers because we think we’re developing people by sending them to watch courses or do trainings. But it’s not necessarily the pathway, like a journey. And that’s what we’re trying to reinforce.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think that is well said in terms of you can learn some best practices, some how to use a piece of software, some tips and tricks, stories of experience, but there’s a giant zone of learning that is like, “No, we just got to get into it, experience some stuff, and talk about it, reflect on it, and see the nuances of the itty bitty details.”

Jeremie Kubicek
Yeah, and it’s really, really like, “All right, you’re on my team.” It’s tied to, “Where are we going? Do you have role clarity? Do you know where we’re going? And do you know and understand my expectations of the job?” So expectations are a massive part of creating awesome jobs, like development of people.

You have to be developed through expectations, “Okay, Pete, this is where I want you to be. Here’s where you’re at right now. We just onboarded you. In the next month, all I want you to do is be with people, spend time,” you know what I mean? I’m laying out the expectations.

What do most people get? “Hey, man, here’s your desk. Here’s your manual. Watch a couple of these videos. See you later.” And then they get thrown in and then people start faking it, acting like they know what they’re doing. And then, all of a sudden, once they figure out that they don’t know what they’re doing, then they try to hide it, and then eventually they end up in this thing that we called in the book, we call the pit of despair.

And the pit of despair, let’s say you have thousand employees, you probably have 20 people who come and clock in in the morning, and they go, everyone goes to their workstations, they go down in the basement into the pit of despair, and they get down there, like, “Hey, man, how long you been down here? Yeah, who pushed you in? Oh, Tom? Yeah, Tom is a jerk.” And, all of sudden, everyone’s talking about Tom.

And it’s this pit where people literally, everyone’s working around these employees. But it’s what it is. It’s just unclear plan, unclear roadmap, and unclear expectations. And then the leader is not taking the time, not giving the vision, not actually doing the apprenticeship process.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, then is that what you would say is the core thesis behind The Voice-Driven Leader or how would you articulate the big idea?

Jeremie Kubicek
Part of it. Okay, so here’s the big idea. If you know who you are, is number one, know who the other person is. And when I say who, we say actually by personality, using the 5 Voices. So if you know who you are, using the 5 Voices, know who they are and their voice, then know where do you want to take them, what’s the journey they’re on, and then what needs to happen to get them to the next level.

So, you have the foundation stage, which is onboarding. You have the immersion stage, which is the development in their role. And then you have the empowerment stage. Now that means, “Good job. You’re doing it. I’m helping you.” Then there’s a multiplication stage down when they get really good at their job.

So a great leader is going to know who they are, who the other person is, and where to take them. The crux of it is, because of AI, we’ve built now 5 Voices AI. So if I know that I’m a connector, let’s say I know that you’re a creative. Well, a creative is going to go through that process completely different than a connector would and completely different than a nurturer or a guardian or a pioneer.

So if I know who you are, now I can speak your language to help you really understand and become competent in your job and your work faster. And so, here’s the core crux of the book. If I speak your language to develop you more than forcing you to only speak my language, then the chances of you developing are ten to one. And that’s it. Like, when I lived in Russia, I learned Russian versus forcing them to speak English. I had a lot of influence.

[In Russian] ”You speak Russian, yes? Do you understand? A little bit?”

Pete Mockaitis
You sound influential.

Jeremie Kubicek
So now all of a sudden, if I speak Russian to someone, and they’re Russian, they’re like, [In Russian] “Oh, mother of God, do you understand?” And now I’m connecting with them because I’ve chosen to speak their language and go toward them not forcing them just to go to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we’re going to talk about these five voices. And so, Jeremie, help me out. In the universe, I mean, you’ve been around the game. You’ve been around the block. So, you got your Myers-Briggs, you got your DISC, you got your StrengthsFinder, you got your Enneagram, you got your Working Genius. So, can you help position for us, how do the 5 Voices sit in the universe of different ways we might categorize humans?

Jeremie Kubicek
So let’s go with a couple. Working Genius and StrengthsFinders are not necessarily personality. They are the strengths of a personality. So they’re not really personality assessments. Okay, so let’s separate those two out. Myers-Briggs, DISC, the Big Five, those are true more personality assessments. The problem is that they don’t scale very well.

So, you can meet with someone, and go, “Oh, yeah.” I get all excited, “You’re an ENTJ?” And then it’s like, “Well, what does that mean?” Like, “Man, I don’t know. But it was great. Yeah, you should do it.” Or, “I’m a high D,” “High I,” or, “I’m a seven with a wing eight,” or whatever it is, it doesn’t produce.

And so, people then feel locked in. Like, they feel like, “Oh, so you’re just telling me who I am, right?” So the 5 Voices are like, “No, you’re all five voices, and a 13-year-old can get it.” So what we did is we took the best of Carl Jung and the best of the Big Five, and we built a system that was simpler to understand so that inside Google, for instance, we’ve worked with them for years for seven-eight years.

Inside Google, they’re like, “Oh, I’m a connector.” I don’t have to go, “I’m an ENFP. I’m a high I with a D, you know?” And so, the speed of scale and then the sustainability of the 5 Voices stays a lot longer than any of the other voice languages because it’s just simpler.

And then we added 5 Voices AI to it, and now it’s like a joke, “Oh, my gosh, we’re doing things with it that are so innovative.” And I’m biased, obviously, of being a co-creator of it with Steve Cockram, but the 5 Voices is just simpler and it stays longer.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say with AI it’s a joke, what exactly do you mean?

Jeremie Kubicek
I mean, it’s dumbfounding because now what happens, if you’ve already taken the assessment, 5 Voices AI, you’re already in my algorithm. You’re already in my AI, in my world so it already knows you.

So, if it knows that you’re a creative connector, and I go, “Hey, help me do a performance review for Pete,” it already knows and it’s going to do a different performance review for you than it would for a nurturer.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear what you’re saying. Like, in the universe of what large language models happen to be good at, reconfiguring words in different sorts of ways, when you’ve got your arms around five really distinct, different vibes with detailed explanations of what those are, you can find an extra layer of translator tool at the ready to make it super easy for you.

Jeremie Kubicek
That’s it. And, like, I got an email from someone on my team the other day, and I didn’t get it, and it said, “Remember they’re a guardian-pioneer,” and I put the email in and it dissected it as a guardian-pioneer, and it translated to go, “Here’s what it is saying to a connector.”

And I go, “Great. Write back to him in his language,” and it built an email. It wasn’t just “Create an email for me.” It was, “Create an email that’s customized.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s handy. Yes. And I guess, as you can feed that upfront context, you can give thousands of words of useful, clear context to the AI about, “What do I mean by pioneer? What do I mean by connector?”

Jeremie Kubicek
Well, it already does it. It already does it for you. You don’t have to feed it anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we don’t now because you’ve built it out. Yeah. Okay. Understood.

Jeremie Kubicek
So, all you have to do is take the assessment. And if you take the assessment, it’s free, 5Voices.com, you can take the assessment and you sign someone else up and they take it. But then the 5 Voices AI now becomes the piece that it’s, like, with my wife, the conversations are completely different because what I’m doing is it’s, like, honoring the other person because I’m walking a mile in their shoes.

I’m trying to understand their context versus, “Man, that guy just drives me crazy.” “Well, yeah, because he’s a guardian and you’re a connector. You’re nemesis voices.” So now it de-complexifies it. Is that a word?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Jeremie Kubicek
But it basically takes it to the point where it’s so much more palatable to know what to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we’ve been throwing these words around a lot, so we’re going to have to hear, what the heck? What are they? What is a pioneer, connector, etc?

Jeremie Kubicek
Okay, so there’s five words in there. The five main categories of personality, we put them in the lower voice first. So the quietest voice is a nurturer, 43% of the population, 70% are female, so they’re going to show up in stay-at-home moms, teachers, nurses, it can be anything, okay? But that’s where they aggregate, and they’re always wanting to make sure everyone’s taken care of. So they want peace. They’re the relational oil inside organizations.

The creative is second, 9% of the population. And they are the most future-oriented, but they’re extremely quiet. They’re still introverts, but they love to add to their blueprint that’s in their brain, but they have a hard time getting it out to someone and they don’t want to throw their ideas before swine if someone doesn’t value or see it. So they’re, oftentimes, the most misunderstood because people don’t know what they just said or what they’re thinking.

Then another 30% is the guardian. The guardian are logic, black and white, A then B, then C, then D, and the 70% are male, they’re accountants, they’re soldiers, military, they’re police, firefighters. They love structure and order and grids, and it’s just that order, right?

And then the next batch is the 11%, the connectors, which are like me. They’re like bees, they pollinate, they take ideas and people, and they always have a guy, “What do you need? I got a guy.” “Oh, yeah, you need to meet so and so.” And they love to connect people to aspirations.

And then the last 7% are the pioneers, and they’re like generals, and they allocate people and resources to do big things. And so, their whole thing is, you know, “Move out of my way. I got it,” or they’re always thinking about winning and are very strategic in that regard. So, a lot of them are executives because they get hired to win. And so, oftentimes, you’ll have an immature executive do a lot of damage. And so what we do is we dissect.

We have all five of these, but there’s 16 variations of the five. So, like, you can be a pioneer-connector, a pioneer-guardian, a pioneer-creative. So, that second word kind of frames the personality, but there’s five categories that make it simple enough for everyone to understand.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. And these terms are kind of, like, is it fair to say, “How you’re wired, what you’re drawn to, what you find motivating, interesting, exciting, care to do, gets you fired up”? That’s like, “What you’re about.”

Jeremie Kubicek
That’s right. It’s your nature. But your nurture, meaning we can be all five. That’s the beauty of the 5 Voices. There’s no labeling. So it’s, like, “I’m all five of them. I can play guardian if I have to, but it is my fifth voice. It’s the one I’m consciously incompetent at. It’s the hardest one for me, but I can play it.”

And that’s the beauty of it is you can go in and out and it gives grace to people versus going, “Oh, you’re a seven. Oh, yeah, you’re a seven with a wing eight, and I’ve got you locked in.” And people don’t want to be labeled because, actually, we’re way more complex than that.

And then if I know I’m a connector and I know I’ve got a guardian that just started my team, and he’s onboarding, well, you know what his expectations of onboarding are, “I need to know exactly what to do. I need to check things off. I need to feel success along the way.”

So, that’s very, very different than if I brought a nurturer in. If I brought a nurturer in, “Tracy, welcome to the team. So excited to have you.” It’s going to be different.

And so, what happens then, why most jobs aren’t as fulfilling is then people join teams, and it’s like, “Well, Tom is not very good at onboarding. Tom doesn’t think about the other person. It’s just like, ‘My way or the highway. This is what we do. This is how it works. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.’” And that doesn’t work in today’s world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, so then once we have a little bit of a sense for, “Okay, this is where I fall and I understand where other people fall,” like what are some of the top implications? You’ve got something called the development square, for example.

Jeremie Kubicek
Yep. So you, now, have to know, “What does development look like? What do we hope this person becomes?” So you take their job description, you then add to it role clarity, “What does winning look like? What do we need to develop in you, intellectually, relationally? What specifics do you need to kill it?”

And then you’re going to apprentice. I’m going to actually have you apprentice with someone. So, it’s the idea of slowing down to speed up. Because a lot of times, a lot of leaders, a leader is two things. They have to perform while helping people perform.

So, we use the Sherpa mindset, the Sherpa model, because the Sherpa on Mount Everest are the best example of leaders. They are amazing leaders. They have to climb at high altitude in dangerous positions and be healthy while helping people climb. So, if you’re listening to this and you’re a leader, give yourself one through 10, how’s your performance right now? We call it a Sherpa assessment.

Like, “I’m an eight.” “Okay, great.” “Well, how’s your leadership?” “What do you mean?” “Well, how are you leading other people while you’re performing?” And, oftentimes, this happens a lot, climbers are put in the Sherpa position, but they don’t know how to lead other climbers.

So, you’ve got an eight-two. They’re an eight in performance and a two in leadership, but we’re afraid to lose them so we put them in a management position over other people. And, all of a sudden, no one wants to work with John. John doesn’t want to lead anyone, and then give it a year and his performance is a six and his leadership is still a two. So he went from an eight-two to a six-two and everyone else wants to leave the team.

So, ultimately, we want leaders who are like a seven-eight or an eight-eight, an eight in performance, an eight in leadership all day long. Now you have proper Sherpa. And that’s, ultimately, what we’re trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you’re speaking their language. And then what are some of the other top dos and don’ts for that developing?

Jeremie Kubicek
Yep, so we’re onboarding, we’re building an onboarding plan and we know what that plan is. Now, once we’ve done that, now we’re immersing them into their actual role and we tell them ahead of time, “We know this is where other people have failed.” So we create a role clarity so they know exactly.

And then we’re keeping them from that bottom right-hand corner of that pit of despair. And we’re being aware that they could get in the pit of despair and they oscillate over it. And we want them to get fully into the empowerment stage where they are consciously competent. They know what to do, they know how to do it, they know what success is like.

And then there’s another trap on the other side. So this one trap pit of despair is insecurity. The other trap is called the green room, and it’s oversecure, overconfident. The green room is meant for people on stage. It’s meant for people who are about to go up on stage, and they have snacks in there and it’s comfortable and it’s nice.

And employees, sometimes the boss, the leader can put an employee in the green room because they’re the teacher’s pet, like, they’re killing it, “Hey, Pete, you don’t need to read that. You don’t need to do this doc. You’re good. You’re good.” And then other people see that you’re the teacher’s pet, right?

Or the employee puts themselves in and they’re like, “Oh, I’m all that. Oh, yeah, I’m really good.” And then they don’t go to the next stage, which is multiplication. Or, the guardian-nurturers, they put themselves there because they’ve already learned something and they don’t want to learn anything new because now they’re in conscious-incompetence again.

So, ultimately, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get people like a Monopoly board all the way around, to now multiplication. And multiplication is, “Help me build this culture. Help me build this team. Or, take my job because I’m going to move up. And I’m moving up, and now, Pete, you got to do my job.” And so, now I’m transferring, intentionally transferring knowledge, wisdom, skills.

So, it’s highly, highly, now you have to know the 5 Voices but we teach it and you get in it but once you get it, it’s now like everything slows down. You ever hear that in the sports when, at the NFL level, like everything slowed down. Leadership slows down once you once you figure out The Voice-Driven Leader because now it’s like, “Oh, my goodness, I’m not manipulating people, but I am, literally, proactively speaking their language and I’m seeing them grow.” And it’s completely different than a traditional leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you’re saying it slows down in the sense that you are suddenly seeing another layer of opportunity, connections, implications.

Jeremie Kubicek
Leadership, growth, yeah, like communication is better. The relational trust goes up. Alignment, you actually can get alignment with people when you speak their language.

So I was just with one of my guys, we’ve launched a new company this week, it’s called Workplace. Just a short example of it. We built a culture ticker, just like a stock ticker, where we can take Teams or Slack, and we basically analyze all the signals that are going on, and it gives a real-time burnout score, a real-time psychological safety, a real-time culture score by the minute with no surveys. It’s called Workplace.io.

Well, in that, the CEO, his name is Bronson. Bronson is a pioneer-creative, so I know what he’s working on is launch week. I know where his brain is. I know how he’s thinking. I know how he needs data to go and process, so this week wouldn’t be, “Hey, I got an idea.” Not helpful for Bronson.

So, I sent him a simple email over the weekend for him to digest some ideas I have for some of our larger enterprise accounts. And so, then he calls me, he goes, “Hey, I need three or four more days.” “Great.” Then when he’s ready, he’ll then go, “Okay, here’s what I learned. Really helpful data. I added it with this. I think this is really helpful. That was really helpful work. Thank you.”

Well, I’m just playing a founder role like, you know, he’s running the company. But my point is, because I know who he is, I’m not disrupting him. I’m actually feeding what he needs and how he needs it because I know how he’s wired.

Now imagine doing that with your kids, your wife, and your key partners and employees. It changes the dynamics so the drama goes away, and then there’s so much more fun. It is so much more fun to work and you can be awesome at being a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could we maybe have an example of going through the foundation to immersion, to empowerment, to multiplication? I like the, “I do. You watch. I do. You help.” Sort of, can we see real time what that might look like in terms of building a person up?

Jeremie Kubicek
Yeah. So, Robert, a CEO, Robert has a smaller team of about 20 people. He’s bringing a new person on board. He’s a pioneer-guardian, his tendency is kind of harsh and like, “Hey, read it. If you can’t get it, we’ll find someone else,” but he’s working on it. So he’s trying.

So, he now knows he has to slow down. So, his first step is he knows himself now well enough that he can blow people up. So, he then hired someone. They took the assessment at 5Voices.com, he found out he’s a creative, so he goes, “Okay, he’s a creative,” but he’s actually a creative-connector, and there’s a little more detail, but creative.

He’s like, “I don’t know how to deal with the creative. What does a creative want?” So he goes to AI, and he goes, “5 Voices AI, how do I build an onboarding plan for my new employee? He’s a creative connector.” “Well, don’t forget, you’re a pioneer-guardian. Your tendencies are going to be this. What he needs is this.” So now it laid it out for him, “Great.”

He then has his assistant, true story, so I know this is going on. He gets his assistant, his assistant takes care of all the details. Creatives want to know the, “Why are we doing this? What’s the big picture?” “Hey, this is what we need you to do. This is why we do these things.” So, she preempted a lot of that. Gets him going and then he laid out a very clear pathway.

So, he made it through the foundation stage. Now he’s into immersion, “This is what we expect your role to be. We have another person that’s just in your same role. We want him to be your mentor-buddy, to walk through so you can ask any questions along the way. We’re trying to accomplish X, Y, and Z by this point. I need a report done.” All the details, the expectations.

So, then that person became the buddy. Well, that person was a connector. The other person, connectors are really good at translating for people. So, that creative was going to the connector going, “No, no, no, that’s not what Robert means. You’re hearing it like this, but he really means this.” So it helped in that process to have that person translating.

So, all the way through, well, there was a couple of moments when this creative was getting to the pit of despair and you could sense it in, like, they were starting to pull away, they were starting to get sarcastic and snarky and using their stress behavior. It was kind of starting to come out, a little Hulk activity.

And so, the pioneer didn’t know what to do. He actually came to me. I was playing a guide Sherpa for him. We built a little game plan.

But we used the common language and we keep everything above, not below so that no one is hiding anything. So, now we’re at a process where this person made it through the pit of despair. Now he’s just in empowerment. And it’s not started yet, but we’re about to start the multiplication process, because this guy’s really, really good and really can see the future.

But it took a while for people to understand what he was trying to say. So we’ve been having to translate with the other executives and the team what he’s trying to say. But now people are seeing the gold and they’re starting to utilize him a little bit more. So, he’s not ready for multiplication yet, but he’s set squarely in the empowerment stage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when it comes to this pit of despair, are there any top principles that are swell for avoiding it and pulling out of it?

Jeremie Kubicek
So, when you see it, it’s basically insecurity. People are starting to work around them. It’s obvious they don’t know what they’re doing. So, you have to use shared language and you have to start with vision again.

And use the language, “Pete, it seems like you’re in the pit of despair. You may not claim that you are, but it feels that you are. So let’s go back through the basics. Here’s the vision, long term. Here’s the short term. I need to do a better job as a leader to have more time with you, so we’re going to schedule more formal time. And then, informally, I want you to go spend time with so-and-so and so-and-so.”

And then I’m going to encourage you but I’m going to give you specific encouragement like, “I really see the work you’re doing. You’re doing great here, here, and here. Now, where do you need help for me? Where can I add value to you?” And now you make it about you, not them. And so now, all of a sudden, I’m pulling, I’m going, “So, I’m going to be here to be your Sherpa. So, what do you need?” So, that usually would work.

Now, if someone gets into the pit of despair, here’s what I would tell you, in all the years of doing this, 12 years of doing this, we can’t think of any stories, we couldn’t think of any experience where, if anyone truly is in the pit of despair, they usually don’t make it. They usually are asked to leave or they choose to leave. So that’s how dangerous the pit of despair is.

So, with the book, the whole idea is how to avoid the pit of despair at all costs. Don’t get in it. Because you’re so demeaned and your insecurity is so high and the trust level from all the other employees is so low that people tend to not make it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe a better question is like, so what’s the red alert, “Warning! Warning! Approaching pit of despair,” sudden redirections necessary?

Jeremie Kubicek
Each voice has stress behaviors, so we talk openly about it and we have a whole chapter on the stress behavior. So, for each voice, a nurturer is going to start withdrawing big time, and they’re going to start clamming up and they’re going to start, “You don’t need to hear from me. No one would need to hear from me.” A lot of insecurity.

The creative is going to start Hulking out if people don’t get it, and there’ll be these moments where they just blew up and no one understood, or got really sarcastic and snarky. The guardian is going to start interrogating people, “Well, why didn’t you tell me? I didn’t know that. I thought that…Well, when did this report come out? How did we even…?” and they start this inquisition because they’re feeling like they need to prove themselves.

The connector will start cyberwarfaring and subtly slandering the boss, not to their face, but they’ll like, “Hey, Tom, how you doing, man?” And then behind the scenes, “Tom is a jerk. God, this guy, this is the worst leader I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anyone this…”

And then the pioneer, they’ll like bulldoze people. The pioneer are rarely in the pit of despair. But if they get in, the stress behavior is like, “Move out of the way. I got it. I got it.” And they just do it all. And they just bulldoze everybody. So, those are some examples of, you’ll know it by their stress behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got a tantalizing tidbit about how most leaders unintentionally silence their best people. How does that happen? How do we not do that?

Jeremie Kubicek
Because most leaders are so fixated on making the donuts, doing the work, the performance, on one side, that they might not be thinking like a Sherpa of getting everyone else. Their people are a nuisance, more than that’s their job to get everyone to the next level. So, they’ll then revert back to default setting is, “Do it my way or the highway. This is how I am. Why can’t you get it? Seriously, why don’t you figure this out?” Versus, taking time.

It’s like training a dog, right? Most people who have ever had a dog, it’s so hard the first three four or five months. And then if you do it well, you’re going to be so glad you did. It’s awesome in year two, three, four. But if you never took the time to train your dog, that dog is the dog from hell, and no one enjoys the dog, even people who come over, right?

So, it’s the same with employees. I’m not saying they’re dogs, but it’s simply the idea that we have to take the time to train them.

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

Jeremie Kubicek
No, that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jeremie Kubicek
Yeah, so I am a massive Will Rogers fan. And so, it’s actually not a quote, it’s his quotes. There’s such veiled wisdom inside the humor that it’s just really fun. So I’m a major Will Rogers fan.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jeremie Kubicek
Heroic Leadership, Chris Lowney. He’s a friend, a good guy. It’s basically how the Jesuits changed the world for 450 years, how they changed the world in Asia and around the world. It is the most fascinating, without technology. And how did they stay aligned when they were all sent out and all around? And he does a brilliant job. So, if you’re a leadership nerd, it is a brilliant job to show how values actually work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Jeremie Kubicek
Favorite tool that I’m using right now, it’s my tool. It’s called “The Peace Index.” And it’s, basically, I use it almost every day, but it’s how to quantify peace and understand chaos and where you’re not at peace. And it dissects purpose, people, personal health, provision, and place. And it reveals chaos and it reveals whether you’re up or down. And it’s a fascinating process. That’s another book of mine, The Peace Index.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jeremie Kubicek
Every afternoon, I took the Jesuit examine model with “The Peace Index” and I basically do this habit at 5:30 every day. I do, “What was I grateful for today? What was awesome about today?” I just highlight it in my brain, “Where was I not at peace today? And where was I off?” And I dissect it so that I keep really small accounts. And then, “Am I ready for tomorrow?” And that’s it. That’s all I do.

And it’s a summary at the end of the day. But what it’s done for me, over the last five, six years now, is I don’t talk to my wife about negative things anymore because they just kind of dissipate because I keep such small accounts that I’m dealing with, like, when I’m not at peace and I’m working on it every afternoon. And it doesn’t build up anymore like it used to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Cool. And is there a key nugget you share that folks really seem to connect with and quote back to you often?

Jeremie Kubicek
One, I say is, “Call people up, not out.” And if you want to get the best out of your people, learn how to call up, not out. And it makes a big difference.

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

Jeremie Kubicek
JeremieKubicek.com. You might have to put that in the show notes, Pete. It’s just Jeremie with an IE. And if you want to take the 5 Voices, just go to 5Voices.com. Take the assessment, it’s free. It’s really fascinating. Obviously, you can go deeper if you want to add the 5 Voices AI. You have to pay a little bit, but I think it’s dying $10 a month, not $20, and you get AI as well. So, if you actually want a cheaper AI, do the 5 Voices AI.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jeremie, thank you.

Jeremie Kubicek
Good to be with you, Pete. You’re amazing. Thanks, man.

Feb 05

1126: How to Build Connection and Understanding through Excellent Listening with Katie O’Malley

By Marco Bartolome | Podcasts | No Comments

Katie O’Malley reveals her three-step listening method that fosters greater trust, connection, and understanding.

You’ll Learn

Why attention is so quick to drift—and three ways to pull it back
What most miss with active listening
Why shared experiences don’t build connection—and what does

About Katie

Katie O’Malley is an Executive Coach and Leadership Educator with twenty (20) years of professional experience serving the nonprofit, education, and corporate sectors. Across these workplaces, Katie noticed her strengths and values consistently steered her toward the support and development of others.

Since 2018, Katie has worked alongside hundreds of individual, team, and organizational clients as the Founder and Principal Coach of (en)Courage Coaching. Established with the noble mission of providing exceptional, financially accessible coaching services to Chicago area professionals, (en)Courage Coaching has grown to support individuals and businesses from around the world.

TEDx Talk: Attention We Give: Lessons From Listening for a Living | Katie O’Malley | M.Ed., BCC | TEDxAndover
Website: EncourageCoaching.org
Instagram: encouragecoachchicago

Resources Mentioned

Book: Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

Thank you, Sponsors!

Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.

Katie O'Malley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Katie, welcome!

Katie O’Malley
Thank you so much for having me on your podcast today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I’m excited to be getting into it. You call yourself a professional listener, which is a great role. Can you tell us something surprising you’ve learned about listening over the course of your professional listening career?

Katie O’Malley
I think one of the most helpful things that I learned is that our brains move entirely too fast for the person who is speaking to keep our attention. And so, we are already at a deficit for being able to stay focused and attending to the person who is speaking because the rate at which we speak versus the rate at which we process information is like a tricycle going up against an F1 race car.

And so, even just knowing there is a misalignment in the pace of speech and the pace of processing of our brain can be really helpful in just folks saying, “Yeah, I am going to not be able to necessarily stay focused on what someone is saying unless that is my intention when I am starting out in the conversation.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, the tricycle versus the race car, so our brains are the race car, because they can go way faster than the person we’re speaking to, listening to, is the tricycle. Now, it’s interesting how you might assume, it’s like, “Oh, great, that means we’re like overqualified. We got more than enough to get the job done,” but that’s actually counterproductive for us. Can you elaborate?

Katie O’Malley
For sure. The first time I read that, I started laughing as soon as you brought that up because I’m like, “This should be so easy. We should be able to understand and hear everyone perfectly,” and yet, look at where we’re at in the world and we can hardly attend to ourselves, much less fully attend to another person.

And so, what ends up happening is we will lose the thread on what someone is sharing with us really, really quickly. And it is hard to pull ourselves back into the conversation without them saying something really surprising, without them saying, “Hey, are you listening?” or using our name. Those tend to be the three things that’ll pull us back.

But, generally, if we are listening, for example, to our parents or our friends and they’re going on with the long form version of the story, those things aren’t necessarily happening. And so, what I encourage folks to think about is what I call the AIR formula for listening.

And it’s an acronym. A stands for attention, I for intention, R for recognition. And it’s a methodology you practice while you are actively listening to be able to fully understand, not just hear, what someone is communicating with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I, certainly, shortly want to go into the attention, intention, recognition framework in some detail. And I guess I’m just curious about this bandwidth point a little more. It’s funny how, well, first you mentioned the name and it is so true. Like, I’ve been in conversations with only a few people in my life actually use my name frequently when I’m speaking to them.

And every time it’s like, “Huh? Huh?” It’s like, “Huh? Yeah?” It’s almost like being called in class, like, “Oh, what did they just say? I better really zero in.” So there’s a freebie extra tip right there. We’re talking about listening, but, hey, you want people to listen, say their name a lot. That works.

So, with this bandwidth point, it’s funny, I’m thinking about like YouTube videos now with regard to many of them, we’ve got multiple camera angles. We’ve got quick cuts. We’ve got like extra footage. We’ve got maybe sound effects, “Oh,” and little emoji things popping up to greater or lesser effect.

And it’s sort of funny, it’s like that is almost necessary. Me just sharing a perspective for 15 minutes is not optimized for retention in the algorithm.

Katie O’Malley
It’s so true. And it’s a bigger part of the attention economy that we currently inhabit, right? So companies are no longer just mining for our dollars. They’re mining for our attention and for our time. And in order for them to keep our attention, they need to do exactly what you were describing. And we actually have to, in some ways, resist that.

So to choose what it is we’re going to attend to every day, and I think part of that starts with the human who is right in front of you, not the screen, not the big screen, not the laptop screen, not the phone screen, not the smartwatch screen, but the actual human who is in in front of you, and starting to practice and build reps around listening in that way.

Because we were… And stop me if you had a different experience in K through 12, but growing up we were taught to read, write, complete math problems all the way up to calculus proofs. But no one ever taught us to listen, even though teachers and parents were constantly saying, “Listen up. Pay attention.” No one ever taught us how to actually do that effectively or to control our brains for long enough to be able to choose what it is we would tune into and tune out of.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned teachers and parents teaching. You had a beautiful story about your mother teaching you a lesson about listening. Can we hear it?

Katie O’Malley
Absolutely. So, taking you back to, gosh, 1993, I’m 11 years old, Northwest suburbs, outside of Chicago. And it was after dinner. My mom was sitting at the kitchen table. And I think this is important, drinking a Crystal Pepsi, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I remember those. Can you still get that? I liked that. I think it’s been gone for years or decades.

Katie O’Malley
Yeah, they discontinued it in pretty short order.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a darn shame.

Katie O’Malley
She was drinking a Crystal Pepsi, flipping through a magazine like Better Homes and Gardens, and I’m on our landline phone that is corded into a wall, and everyone can hear my conversation, right? There’s no privacy as a child in that way, really, back in the the ‘80s and early ‘90s and I was on the phone for about an hour. It was like my after-dinner activity with my very best friend, her name’s Jenny.

And got off the phone after an hour, hung up the phone, and within seconds of me hanging up the phone, my mom very calmly said, “You’re grounded two weeks starting tonight.” And I was just beside myself. I was a good kid. That was the first time I had ever been grounded. And, Pete, I didn’t even know what it was for.

And so, racking my brain, “Did I swear or curse on the phone? Did I tell Jenny a secret I wasn’t supposed to tell her? Was I gossiping or speaking ill of someone?” And I couldn’t find where the issue was. And I said to my mom, tears in my eyes coming down my cheeks, and I said, “I don’t understand why I’m grounded. What is this? What happened?”

And she goes, “You were on the phone with your ‘best friend’ for an hour, and you talked about yourself the whole time. You talked about your day at school, your activities after school, what you had for dinner, what you’re going to have for a snack. You didn’t even pause long enough for her to interject. And you didn’t ask a single question either. And that’s simply not how we treat people in this house. So you’re grounded for two weeks starting tonight.”

And I’ve never forgotten that. It was so powerful because it bumped up against my identity of being a good, caring, kind human. And I had let her down, which all of this was new, I had never really done before. And what I think made that moment even more impactful was she was battling colon cancer at the time and passed away just about a little over a year later.

And it’s one of those last moments or memories that you have with a parent. It kind of gets imprinted on your brain and on your heart. And ever since, it’s just if I’m going to move through the world as the type of human my mom would have wanted me to grow up to be, listening has to be a part of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful. Thank you for sharing.

Katie O’Malley
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s beautiful, and what a legacy, to see that many thousands of folks listening better as a result of that imprinted moment and her conviction and example. So that’s beautiful stuff.

Okay. Well, so then, listening seems like a friendly, kind thing that our mothers would like for us to do. And it seems like something we “should do.” But could you expand for us, what are the concrete benefits of upgrading our listening from whatever is the norm in this day and age to a masterful level?

Katie O’Malley
Yeah, so benefits include, first, really, when we listen, it’s not just about the other person. It’s about us. And so, there is, to some extent, a level of self-development that is happening even while you’re attending to another person and what they’re saying.

But by attending to them through actual listening, not just performing listening, which is active listening, which is something most people know about. And it’s a little bit like you’re doing right now for folks who are listening in. Nodding your head, making eye contact, kind of mirroring my body movements. That is active listening, but that’s a performance. That’s the thing that keeps our busy brain occupied long enough to actually start to focus on what’s being said.

So let me back up, though. The other benefits include, we are so isolated and lonely and starved for real human connection right now. And I think some of that started happening right around 2013, 2014, when Instagram started to pick up speed, kind of doubled down in the pandemic.

But as a result of that, folks have lost the ability to connect with one another and know how to really connect and tolerate the discomfort of, “I’m not sure what this person is going to say and I’m supposed to have a response,” because that’s how we’ve been socialized to respond when someone finishes speaking, not just continue down the path of learning more about them.

And so, iIf we’re able to do this, what the benefits include are greater connection because we have greater understanding with somebody else. We’ve given them dignity from listening, which I also think is something that is missing in our day-to-day adventures in the world, whether online or in real life.

And then also trust. Social trust is so low right now. And you can take just about any community, trust in schools, trust in families, trust on your team, and in your workplace. If we want to get back to a place where we understand and trust each other enough so we can connect, listening has to be forefront of that equation. And it’s just not yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so this framework – attention, intention, recognition, AIR – let’s hear the rundown. How do we do it?

Katie O’Malley
So the way I encourage folks to think about this is applying it almost in, like, a double helix way. Like, DNA has those two strands that are wrapping around, and we are applying the AIR formula to our conversation partner. Simultaneously, we are applying the AIR formula to ourselves. And so, I’m going to go through each bit of it so we can talk about what that looks like.

A stands for attention. And I always say listening is a function of attention. We can’t listen unless we are at attention. And this is where active listening is actually very valuable and doing the things that I previously described, which is very apparent to the person who is talking. And it encourages them to keep sharing when you’re nodding, making eye contact, mirroring body language.

But we also need to be attending to ourselves, because we are the ones that tend to get in the way of our ability to really hear and understand someone when we’re listening. And so, what I encourage people to think about when you’re attending to yourself, scanning your body for what’s coming up.

Are you feeling your heart start to race when somebody shares something? Are you getting goosebumps when they communicate something that is really inspiring to you? Are you attending to the fact that maybe you floated away for a minute and weren’t paying attention anymore? And what caused that?” And starting to look for patterns in your brain and your body to be able to say, “These are kind of the tripwires that get me out of attention on what’s going on instead of staying focused on the person.”

And I also share one of the very best ways to do that. Put your phone on do not disturb. Put it on airplane mode. Mine has been in that setting for the better part of a decade, much to the dismay of friends and family. But when I am with them, there’s nothing that they appreciate more than me being fully with them. And so, they also understand when they can’t get a hold of me for three, four, six hours at a time, they get that same attention when I’m with them. So that’s A.

Pete Mockaitis
And to your point about people appreciating it so much that you’re with them, I have heard this comment made about a number of famous people. And, let’s see, I’m trying to, and I think there was a pope, there was a saint, there was a president, you know, there was a celebrity. And folks were stunned by this mesmerizing power they had, it’s like, “It’s like he was just with you.”

And it’s funny because, in a way, it doesn’t seem like that’s that extraordinary, and yet, apparently, it really is because people are struck when it occurs, particularly if it’s by someone who is of elevated stature, we’ll say. It’s like, “Oh, I am so lowly and they are so important, and they gave to me this gift of their full attention. And I was awestruck by that.”

Katie O’Malley
Our attention is a currency to spend, just like our money. And I think we have two of them right now. We have our money, and we have our attention, and so your point is spot on. And even if it’s just two folks having a conversation, and you’re able to do that for somebody, that’s how starved we are for attention from another human, is that that will stick with you much longer than most anything else that might happen to you in a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and talking about tripwires, let’s see. Well, it’s funny as it’s so meta. We’re talking about attention. You mentioned it’s like a double helix. And then I was transported back in time to high school in which I was looking at a spread in my biology textbook about the double helix and the just amazingness of the process of DNA transcription and translation.

And the first time I learned about that, I was like, “Holy smokes, this is for real. This happens all the time, constantly in our bodies? This is so complex and information rich and miraculous and crazy.” So, anyway, that has very little to do with the conversation we’re having now. The revelations of biology from Pete in high school.

And so, I was there for, I don’t know how many seconds, more than three, and so let’s talk about that. When you’re attending to yourself and other, there will be times in which you are drawn elsewhere. What do I do with that?

Katie O’Malley
Every time, Pete. Every time you’ll be drawn elsewhere. Everytime.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, every time. So what do I do with that?

Katie O’Malley
Every time. I do this for a living. It happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what do I do with that?

Katie O’Malley
The very first thing is that your brain needs to know you’re going to do something with that thought or that you’re going to stay on that path. And so, when I was in graduate school and training up to be a therapist, it was one of the first things they said to us, “Every session you have, your brain is going to go somewhere else. It’s not going to be on your client for 52 and a half minutes, or whatever insurance companies pay for now.”

And that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s how we’re wired. But you have to do something with that thought. And the very best thing to do in that moment, jot it down, write it down. And if you can’t do that, then almost silently talking to yourself, saying, This is important to me, and I’m going to come back to it later. But this person is more important right now.”

And just practicing the compassion of you’re not going to stay focused on the person the whole time. You know this is coming. It’s going to happen at some point. The goal is how quickly can you become aware of it and come back into the conversation? That’s the goal, to reduce that time footprint you’re away.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s intriguing. And I liked what you said about the note. We can write it down or you can sort of mentally write it down. And I’m thinking there are so many like memory tricks associated with forming associations. So, maybe it’s like, “Hey, next time I sit at my desk, I’m going to create a mental imagination association between sitting at desk and, whatever, the DNA double helix or whatever.”

And so, then you’ve effectively “written it down” in your mind such that you feel like you’ve got the permission to let go of it all the way.

Katie O’Malley
Exactly. And it could even be as easy, Pete, as saying, “Gosh, Pete, the double helix is important to you. Be sure to come back to it after this conversation. That’s enough.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Cool. All right. So, attention, it will certainly slip. We become aware. We note. We return. Understood. How about intention?

Katie O’Malley
Yeah, intention, this is the one that’s really tricky, especially for those of us who have been socialized in America and in our culture and in our society, where extroversion and speaking is prized over folks who are more introverted, quiet, not always using their voice, right?

But what I always say is communication has not taken place if the message was not received by the other person. So you can talk faster, you can talk louder, but if the other person isn’t attending to you and trying to understand, communication hasn’t taken place.

So, with intention, within the AIR formula, it’s your constant. It’s never going to change, whether you’re in a boardroom or at the baseball field for your kiddos. Your intention is always going to be to do your very best to understand what is being shared with you and not fall into the trap of trying to respond, debate, win someone over with your perspective.

Because I think and believe we’ve been so socialized to drive toward a singular outcome or result in a conversation that we’ve missed the point of most conversation is about exploration and learning. And if we can shift our mindset, and this is where the intention is internally, to, “Did I learn something?” instead of, “Did I convince Uncle Pat that he’s wrong about this particular piece of news or information?” that cuts down on 90% of the roadblock to be able to listen to understand.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes a lot of sense because it’s a much more achievable objective to learn something and understand someone than it is to convince or have a brilliant rebuttal because that will necessarily require substantial cognitive attention to formulate, as opposed to, “Oh, I’m going to understand this person and learn,” then naturally, your brain is pointing itself at them and, hence, facilitating listening.

Katie O’Malley
Yes, exactly. When we try and figure out what we’re going to say next before the other person has even finished speaking, we’ve missed out on some really good information, and probably information that could connect us, right?

And there are moments where moving from a stance of dialogue to debate might be required in a courtroom or in a negotiation. But even then, when you’re demonstrating an intent to really understand somebody, it is very difficult for them to show up in a defensive way.

What usually ends up happening is then they’ll mirror us and try and give us the same space and reciprocity that we gave them. So, after they finish sharing and then you do the recognition part, which we’ll talk about in a second, you can then say, if they haven’t already invited you to, which they already probably have is, “I’m wondering if I can share my perspective on this or my experience with this.”

Because, so often, too, even if it’s not contentious or a debate, where people will default to is, “I’ve had that same experience. I am going to tell them about my experience so that they can now understand a part of me so we can connect.” That’s not connection. You haven’t given them the full dignity of their own experience by recognizing and giving them the dignity of really being seen, which happens in the last part.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear about this recognizing and dignity.

Katie O’Malley
Yeah, recognition. So I’m sure you’ve probably heard this, “Therapists get paid to just sit there and nod and listen,” right? Listening is a very active brain activity if you are doing it right and doing it well.

And the goal is to help the other person make meaning of what they’re sharing, help them feel seen and heard, and that you’re making the attempt to understand by offering recognition and by – how do I want to say this? – bearing witness to that moment of their life. We’re social creatures. That’s all we want is to know that we exist and we matter in this realm that we’re living in.

And so, an example that I’ve given before is, your kid comes home from school. You just logged off of back-to-back-to-back Zoom meetings for the last nine hours, and you asked them how their day at school was. They’re telling you, whether or not you’re actually listening and trying to make meaning of it for yourself or for them, might depend on the day.

But what I encourage people to do is be able to summarize what you’ve heard, share an observation of something regarding their body language, their facial expressions, their energy, and finally reflect a feeling back to them.

So it would sound something like this, “Wow, it sounds like you had a very full day at school. But I noticed your face light up when you talked about the experiments that you ran in science class. That experience must have been really interesting for you. Can you tell me more about that?” And just see where they take it, right? Instead of, “Yeah, that sounds like a school day.”

Pete Mockaitis
“That was your school day.”

Katie O’Malley
“Let’s get your shin guards on and hop in the car.” And sometimes people will say, “Katie, I don’t have the time.” I’m like, “Well, you have the time while they’re talking to try and process the information in a new way, and then share back a different sentence to them.”

And they can be telling you about the next thing as you’re getting them ready to go to their activity or do their homework or whatever it might be. And the same holds true with colleagues, partners, friends, it’s just, “My only goal, summarize or paraphrase what I’ve heard. Let them know that I’ve seen them and offer a reflection of feeling.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And what’s interesting about that, it’s so funny, I think that I can sometimes be a little reluctant to do a reflection of feeling or to even say people’s names for whatever reason.

Katie O’Malley
It’s vulnerable, that’s why.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s sort of like, “Well, okay.” Well, lay it on me, Katie, what’s going on? It’s vulnerable for me to say your name?

Katie O’Malley
Because then my attention is going to be directly on you. That’s a choice you’re making.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s true. And I am almost a little nervous that if I say a name, it might come across, it’s almost like aggressive or demanding or my tone, because the name is such a special word to us, that my tone might not match how someone wants to have their name said. It’s like, “Actually, the emphasis is more of a KAY-tee as opposed to a kay-TEE. So, Pete, if you don’t mind.”

But great thought. I mean, there’s some counseling in action a level deeper, so there’s vulnerability there. And I think there’s also vulnerability on the emotion side. It’s like, “Ooh, I don’t want to say the wrong emotion,” because it’s like, “You idiot. Did you…? Where were you? Like, why would you take that that way?”

And yet, I think, in practice, and tell us if this is the case, Katie, in practice, I think even if you get the emotion wrong, people appreciate that you identified there was something noteworthy going on there. It’s like, “No, science wasn’t interesting. It was horrifying. Dissecting this animal? Ugh!” You know, it was like, “Oh, well, it was certainly something, and I noticed that it was something,” so you still kind of get some points for that.

Katie O’Malley
You do. And the opportunity to clarify, right, and to keep that person engaged, you’re absolutely right in that you’re going to reflect the wrong feeling. Just accept it. You are at some point. But the purpose isn’t to get the reflection of feeling right. It is one of the most high-level complex skills to be able to practice as a therapist or counselor and get that right.

But what it does is, to your point, shows the other person that you’re making the attempt. And then what they get to do is clarify that for you. And they’re willing to do it because they understand that you’re really making an attempt to understand them, and they’ll keep going. And this is what builds trust and connection.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’re right. And I’m thinking about my own experience in therapy contexts with therapists who are supposed to be the best at this, to have misidentified my emotion. And I never walked away thinking, “Oh, my, what a hack.” It advanced the conversation, like, “No, I wasn’t angry. I was scared.” It’s like, “Oh, well, that’s still rich, fertile ground for us to continue pressing into.” So it was valuable having even the wrong emotion reflected.

Katie O’Malley
Because it gives you the opportunity to really consider what you were feeling in that moment. And that’s the piece I think we so often forget as humans, is that we are feeling beings that happen to have a helpful thought every once in a while. But we really fancy ourselves as these incredibly cognitive, thoughtful beings that happen to have a feeling every once in a while.

And the moment that somebody helps us go there, we’re able to reconnect to our own humanity and develop a deeper sense of self-understanding, which, again, vulnerable but also incredibly valuable and a conduit for building trust.

Pete Mockaitis
And a follow-up question, you said it’s, generally, not ideal to share, “Hey, I had that experience, too,” but rather to finish fully listening to the other person and then perhaps asking for that permission. So, it’s interesting the way our free associative brains, particularly this mind, for sure, if someone says something, it sparks something, and then I’m excited about it. And it’s like, “Oh, I could share this because it feels connective to me, but it may not feel connective to them.” Do you have any pro tips for how do I navigate this domain?

Katie O’Malley
One of the things that I think is really important to remember about experience. It is not the shared experience that actually connects us. It is the shared emotion as a result of that experience. And so, oftentimes, because I am a very enthusiastic, energetic person, and I struggle with this when someone shares an experience and I’ve had a similar one.

What I’ll say is, “There’s something I want to come back to but, first, here’s what I heard. Am I following? Am I tracking?” And then it’ll be that invitation again from that person, “Oh, what was that thing you wanted to share?” And you can say, “Oh, I had a similar experience to you in this particular domain. For me, it kicked up a lot of worry and anxiety. But, for you, seemed to kick up excitement. Can you talk more about that?”

And, again, going back to that reflection of feeling piece. And it’s not so that we can diagnose and pathologize folks, but that is where true connection happens. Because to recognize the feeling that we’ve had around an experience, requires us to be vulnerable and access that, to then be able to reflect it back to somebody else and share that is what creates the connection and invitation to keep going a level deeper.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really good distinction. It’s the shared emotion instead of the shared experience providing the connection. So, if you had an experience and then that happened to me, too, it’s almost like, “Okay.” It’s like, “That’s not doing much for me.” But it is when it’s like, “Oh, yeah. Emotionally, you really understand.”

And in a way, it could be a completely different experience, but it’s a shared emotions. It’s like, “Ah, yes. I, too, was very excited about an opportunity that, unfortunately, did not come to pass. And so, I know, I’ve experienced that disappointment vibe and then it almost makes you wonder about blah, blah, blah.” Like, “Yes, exactly, that’s how I feel in this moment. Thank you.”

And so, I hear what you’re saying, is that that’s much more connecting there, and to wait instead of like, “Well, back to me and my stuff.”

Katie O’Malley
Exactly, because then it’s very clear to them you haven’t been listening. You went off into your own little world of your experience instead of staying with them in that moment.

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

Katie O’Malley
I did a TEDx Talk on this back in June, so you can give it a Google, the, “Attention We Give: Lessons From Listening for a Living.” Test it out. Practice some self-compassion. You’re not going to be great at it when you start. Nobody is. But when we put in the effort to do this for others, it’s only going to enrich our relationships and experiences as we move through the world.

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

Katie O’Malley
One of my favorite quotes is, “Chance favors the connected mind,” to be able to seize an opportunity, right, because you’ve done the work of reflection and self-understanding to know that this is an opportunity for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I was taking that a completely different way in terms of, when you’re making connections in your mind about a thing, and you encounter stimuli in the context of having reflected upon that thing, it serves as an idea, or inspiration, potential solution, and it feels like a huge lucky break.

Katie O’Malley
Yeah, that, too.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, multiple, multiple layers there. Okay.

Katie O’Malley
Multiple interpretations.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Katie O’Malley
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.

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

Katie O’Malley
I love a notebook, a good notebook, and a pen. There’s nothing better than the mind-body connection of writing something down instead of letting AI take our notes for us.

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

Katie O’Malley
“We are humans that happen to work. We are not workers who happen to be human.”

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

Katie O’Malley
EncourageCoaching.org, or you can find me on Instagram, encouragecoachchicago. Great to go there if you’re ready to rage quit your job, for some funny content or cute videos of my dog.

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

Katie O’Malley
Get on the listening train and pick one of the elements of the AIR formula this week to practice just one at a time and stack it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Relationships Archives - Page 2 of 61 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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