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Feb 16
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1129: Unlocking Your Best Performance through Rituals with Michael Norton

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

You’ll Learn

  1. What makes rituals more powerful than habits
  2. How rituals help you get into the zone
  3. 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

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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
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

  1. Why people development often fails
  2. How leaders unintentionally silence their best people
  3. 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.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

  1. Why attention is so quick to drift—and three ways to pull it back
  2. What most miss with active listening
  3. 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.

Resources Mentioned

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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. 

Feb 02
0

1125: How to Reclaim Your Presence, Increase Your Influence, and Build Relationships that Last with Ravi Rajani

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Ravi Rajani shows you how to build meaningful relationships, one conversation at a time.

You’ll Learn

  1. The Three C’s of building trust
  2. What makes people say, “Tell me more”
  3. Why compliments come across as insincere

About Ravi 

Ravi Rajani is an international keynote speaker, transformational coach and LinkedIn Learning instructor, with over 65,000 people having taken his courses on Conscious and Charismatic Communication. Widely seen as one of the world’s top communication experts, mission-driven leaders, entrepreneurs and organizations such as Oracle NetSuite, T-Mobile, and Sherwin-Williams have engaged Ravi to help them and their people become masterful communicators so they can build meaningful relationships that amplify revenue growth and cultivate a culture of trust.

Off stage or camera, Ravi lives just outside of London, UK, with his wife, son, daughter and furry little West Highland Terrier. He loves the movie Limitless, a good stand-up comedian and a quintessentially British suit.

Resources Mentioned

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Ravi Rajani Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ravi, welcome!

Ravi Rajani
You nailed the name. You nailed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I practiced.

Ravi Rajani
First, there wasn’t even, like, “Cut. We’re going to have to run that back.” You nailed it. And because of that, I’m feeling good, I’m feeling great.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, maybe that’s our first communication habit, perhaps, for limitless influence right there, say people’s names right.

Ravi Rajani
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about relationships, the communication, and influence. So could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and communication over the course of your career studying this stuff?

Ravi Rajani
The one that rings the most true for me right now is us humans spend a lot of time trying to be interesting versus leading with trying to be interested in the human being opposite us.

Now, for credit, Dale Carnegie said something along the lines of, to be interesting, be interested. And I do find that the more conversations I have with others, especially in the noisy world we live in today, which can create a lack of clarity and all of the side effects that manifest as a result of that, we can be busy, we can be running from meeting to meeting. And as a result, we lack presence.

And when we lack presence, we can often revert to, “Okay, reactive behavior.” And the way I look at reactive behavior is pulled from the spiritual wisdom of Kabbalah, which is any behavior that is grounded in lack, scarcity, or fear. So, me, meeting you, and leading with my accolades, awards, and credentials would be a form of reactive behavior. And that’s me trying to be interesting in the hope you will find me interesting.

But, actually, what I really should lead with is asking impactful, meaningful, and genuine questions. For me, I found that to be one of the most impactful ways to begin building rapport and meaningful relationship. But what about you, because you’ve had a lot of people on this show? What have you seen?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I think that’s a really fun and solid one right there. And I liked the part you said about trying to be interesting. The word trying, just sort of the effort level required because it’s, in some ways, it’s much simpler to make eye contact, ask some questions, as opposed to, “Oh, yes, I was studying for my sommelier exam.” It’s like, “Oh, that sounds hard to, like, do stuff to be interesting.” Whereas if you’re just interested in people, then that’ll get the job done easier and feel better to them.

Ravi Rajani
Right. I mean, isn’t it hard to figure out what somebody cares about if you are dominating a conversation, doing all the talking?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Ravi Rajani
And, really, when we figure out what somebody cares about in this season of their life, that builds a beautiful foundation for a meaningful business relationship, and in life as well. But, yes, my friend, I subscribe to what you’re saying. I subscribe to what you’re saying.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so you got this book, Relationship Currency, what’s the big idea here?

Ravi Rajani
Well, the big idea is that, in a world obsessed with automation without intention, conversations that lack connection, and also growth without introspection, leaders, teams, entrepreneurs, and professionals are really engaging in short-term behavior that kills our long-term reputation.

And what I believe, more than ever before, is what we’re craving is human connection. We’re craving human connection, and we’re craving real relationships grounded in trust. And this book teaches five habits which will help people communicate in a way that builds trust in a conversation and earns meaningful relationship so they can receive more of what they desire in the long term.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds handy. Tell us, what are a few super common short-term behaviors that kill long-term relationships that you see all the time?

Ravi Rajani
Well, tell me, I’m curious, from your perspective, in the arena of business, what is your pet peeve when it comes to conversations which you know are grounded in, let’s go back to the concept of reactive behavior, lack, scarcity, fear, short-termism?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the first thing that comes to mind for pet peeve and business conversations is customer service things, in terms of, if I’m making a call to a company because I have a need, then it’s pretty drastic, right?

Like, I couldn’t ask the AI chat bots. I couldn’t find it on your website. I even used the Google and site colon website name. I mean, I need to talk to a real human who knows something about the thing by the time I call. And yet, they’re going to every length possible to push me away from having a real human who knows the stuff, talk to the thing.

It seems frequently. And, of course, some businesses do this excellently, but that was my first thought. Like, I saw that I had a package that couldn’t be delivered because they had to have a signature. I saw the email just before we got here, I was like, “Oh, boy, that’s going to be a process.” It’s, like, I think that’s probably my top pet peeve is that.

Well, if you talk about short term behavior, I guess it’s a matter of the organization, because I’ve worked with call centers before. The organization is looking to minimize costs as much as possible in terms of, like, dealing with all those customers and their issues. And so, yeah, the biggest pet peeve is customer service interactions with businesses.

Ravi Rajani
Isn’t it funny that when a company is trying to reduce costs, they forget at what cost? And it’s funny, you know, Pete, I had this experience just recently. So, I bought some electrolytes and amino acid supplements from a company here in the UK six months ago. And I recently realized, I was like, “I never received that package, yet they said it was delivered.”

So I dropped them an email, thinking that, “Nothing’s really going to happen here, but let’s see.” And it was incredible, the service. A human on the other end, emailing me fast, saying, “Hey, we want to make this right. This didn’t work out. Fill in this form really quickly, we’ve done most of it for you. We’ll get one out to you.”

Literally, I filled that form out two days ago and the supplements arrived today. And they’re like, “We’re really sorry for your inconvenience.” I’m now a customer for life. But I went into that being skeptical about if I would be a customer again. Within 48 hours, I’m now a customer for life.

And it’s so funny how these imperfect moments are actually gifts and opportunities for connection. Yet, as a society, we run away from imperfection. But actually, to be perfect would be denying our humanity. It’s just a funny world we live in.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And, well, now I’m thinking about business in terms of, if you look at, in the universe of sales and marketing, folks can spend great sums to shout out to the universe, “Hey, somebody, maybe, please pay attention to us,” and they’re delighted if, I don’t know, one in a thousand people who hear an ad, you know, click or take some sort of an action.

And then, yet when you’re actually in there, it’s like, “Here I am. I showed up. I gave you money. I could be delighted and won over forever.” It’s like, “Nah.”

Ravi Rajani 
Right? The best way to explain it, as I see it through my lens, is nightclubs. Back in the day, nightclubs were a thing. And you would see certain nightclubs, the queues would be, it would feel like a mile long. You’d look at it and you’d go, “Damn, Pete, that looks awesome.” You wait in the queue for one hour.

Pete Mockaitis
“It must be cool if there’s a line.”

Ravi Rajani
It must be cool. It must be great. There’s a line, it must be good. One hour goes by, “Oh, it’s cold outside. But you know what? It’s going to be worth it.” Two hours goes by, you get to the front, and you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’m about to go in,” and you get there, it’s empty. The service is subpar. The drinks are awful. You see what I mean?

And I feel like we live in a world where we are prioritizing width over depth. We really are. And a big part of this book is coming back to a world where we prioritize depth.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think that example is fun with regard to, you said there’s a line and then you get in and it’s empty, you’re like, “Oh, wait,” because then you know, and I remember there was a bar when I went to college, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there was a bar that pulled this stunt all the time.

And it just made me hate them because as soon as you enter, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I was lied to. You were not actually at capacity. You just wanted to deceive us, you know, to create an illusion.”

And I think that it’s quite common to have just little…It seems like, in marketing, for example, we’re not outright lied to, but we’re misled. It’s like, “Okay, technically your AI software product can sort of, kind of, do the thing that you say it can, but, really, it doesn’t actually save any time for the purpose for which you’re marketing it in a real-world scenario.”

So I feel, like, that’s the case with a lot of things, it’s like, “I’m not getting a full-blown lie. Like, being told yes when it’s really no. But there’s key omissions that allow me…” there’s probably a great word for this. Is it dissemble? I don’t remember the word. To be led, to be very deliberately said a number of things that lead me to infer that which you want me to infer, though you know it is not entirely true. There’s got to be a word for that.

Ravi Rajani
There must be. I mean, I don’t have one for it, but what is coming up, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
But it ain’t honest. It ain’t honest, it ain’t candid, it doesn’t make me trust.

Ravi Rajani
Well, the key word there, like you said, trust. So how I see it, is trust, yes, is a buzzword overused by politicians, business leaders, companies, marketers, the list goes on.

But I’ve been really thinking for some time about, “How does one establish trust?” And when I tapped into my intuition, my story, and my experiences, I came up with something called the three Cs, the three C’s of trust. And when we earn that, we’re to earn trust, so the first C is connection. The second C is character. The third C is competence. So let’s take a look at each of them.

So connection, for me, is the emotional glue that forges a bond between two human beings. Then you have character, which is the invisible values which travel with your energy, verbal communication, and nonverbal communication. And then, we have competence, which is one’s ability to signal their ability to solve somebody’s problem and, ultimately, increase or decrease their credibility stock.

And we live in a world where, “Okay, I’m going to connect with you. I’m going to pitch you the right story.” “Great, I’m bought in.” But now, like you said in your example, I haven’t really received what I paid for, per se. So, actually, I don’t believe you have a character of integrity. Done.

Now, even if you connect with somebody, and they can solve your problem, but they have a shady character, are you going to be in business with them for long? No. Even if you connect with somebody and they’ve got great character, but they’re just likable, but they can’t solve your problem, that’s only going to get you so far. I mean, you could play this in several ways, but you see where I’m going. You really need all three singing and dancing at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. It’s catchy, easy to remember, and it’s in order. It was like, first, “I like this guy.” Second, it was like, “Okay, it seems like they’re being straight and direct and following through, just like the way they said they would. And sure enough, they’re getting it done nicely. I like what I see in terms of the product service delivered on the other side. That’s cool.” So you’ve also got five communication habits. Could you run us through these?

Ravi Rajani
Yes, so habit one is transform your story. Habit two is ask conscious questions. Habit three is unearth your charisma. Habit four is tell stories that inspire change. And habit five is become the trusted guide.

Pete Mockaitis
I love this. Now, can you tell me, if I develop and do these five things well, what will happen for me? What kinds of results? Could you share a cool story to illustrate?

Ravi Rajani
Magical things, Pete. But the way I see it is, when one is able to embody these five habits, and by the way, it doesn’t happen overnight. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts, magic bullets, quick fixes. This is a process where you ascend the competence ladder until you get to unconscious competence.

But really, the outcome of this is, once again, being able to build a meaningful relationship through communicating for trust, and the outcome being, yes, increased revenue, yes, leadership growth, but a culture of trust and an environment where people actually want to belong, which is important.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds good. Well, can I hear a story of someone who did just that, that they saw a transformation when they started doing this stuff?

Ravi Rajani
Okay, let’s talk about a specific transformation that happened to me. Let’s talk about this, okay? So, this, by the way, connects to habit number three, which is unearth your charisma. But let’s start with this.

So I believe that we have charisma all wrong in society. I believe I had charisma all wrong for many, many years because I used to think, Pete, it was about receiving accolades, awards, being the smoothest talker, being in the spotlight, etc.

Now, I’ve got to thank my younger self for doing the best he could with the awareness that he had at the time, but how I look at it now is an innate superpower that allows somebody to feel significant in our presence, meaning communicating in the way that makes somebody feel like they matter.

And inside of the book, something I talk about is how imperfection equals connection and how it can break down barriers. So get this, I can’t remember the exact year, but I have a feeling it was like summer ‘22, summer 2023.

But, anyway, I’m on a Zoom call with the COO of a SaaS company headquartered in Singapore. Now, he had heard me speak, you know, a couple of months back, Pete. So, he has some context on me. I had very little context on him.

So we kicked off the call. We get the corporate niceties out of the way. And I see a picture in his background, and I thought, “Okay, what a beautiful opportunity to build rapport.” So I say, “Oh, hey, man, that picture over there, oh, that’s an incredible picture of your daughters over there. How old are they?”

Thought nothing of it. I hear a pause. And he’s confused. He looks back and he looks at me. He looks back again, but this time his head is stuck looking at the wall and I’m thinking, “Is this dude going to turn around?” And he slowly turns his head around, but this time he’s smiling like a Cheshire cat, and he says, “Ravi, that’s not my daughter. That’s my wife.”

Okay. So I’m squirming, right? I’m squirming like a looney tune, and I’m thinking, “I’ve blown this. This sucks, oh, my gosh. That’s all folks,” right? That sort of energy. The best thing happened. It instantly humanized the conversation. It instantly broke down barriers, and that conversation went on for an hour long, an hour plus long. And we really deeply connected.
And here’s what happened at the end. He said, “Hey, I’d love for you to come in and deliver a storytelling workshop for our sales and customer success team. Are we doing it?” I said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” And here’s the thing, here’s what I find, Pete, is so much of the time through life, we try and deflect imperfect moments, cover them up, already shy away from owning our mistakes.

And I’m finding, more so than ever before, that when you feel or see a mistake appearing, pause, smile, and say, “This is a gift. This is a gift,” and use that imperfect moment as an opportunity to showcase your humanity, because, otherwise, we can just end up being corporate robots.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well said because it feels so rare that someone, especially if you’re proactive, in terms of, like, if they let you know about the mistake in advance, like, “Hey, just so you know, unfortunately, we made this mistake. We’re so sorry. Here’s how we’re going to fix it.” You’re almost taken aback, like, “Oh, okay. Well, understood. Thanks for letting me know.”

And then it’s like, “All right, I know this person is not trying to hide something.” It’s a good feeling. So, lovely. I hear you that that is a great trust builder and we can feel better about mistakes as a result, as they come about. Well, could you then share with us a couple of your top tips or perspectives for putting these five habits into practice?

Ravi Rajani
Yeah, you know, each habit has a practice. And the idea is, when you engage in the practice, you’re engaging in a new behavior, which substitutes an existing behavior. And when you engage in that behavior long enough, what will happen, a proportion of those behaviors will turn into habits, hopefully positive habits, which point towards the North Star that you care about in this season of your life.

Now, one of the most popular practices sits inside of habit two. So habit two is about asking conscious questions, Pete. And, by the way, when I say conscious, what I’m talking about is asking questions that are grounded in positive intentionality.

Now, when I say positive intentionality, there’s a difference, Pete, between me asking you a question because I’m secretly trying to lead you to a product or service that benefits my bank balance at the expense of yours, versus asking you a question that’s designed to actually get to the heart of your truth. So that’s really what we’re talking about here.

Now, there are different types of conscious questions that I teach, but one of them I’d love to share now is empathetic questions. Now, empathy, a bit of a buzzword, let’s be real, so let’s define it. How I see it is being interested in what somebody is emotionally invested in, in this season of their life, aka, as we said at the top of the show, caring about what somebody else cares about.

How do we show that? Because I can tell you, Pete, “My friend, I care about you. I care about what you care about.” And it’s like, “Okay, cool, show me.” How do you show somebody without shoving it down their throat? Well, I’d like to introduce you to what I call the what, feel, who method.

So picture this. Okay, you’re a leader. You’re busy. It’s a noisy world. Meeting to meeting to meeting and you’re late for a follow-up meeting with a new team member. You walk into the room, you slam the door, you’ve got a sandwich in your mouth and you say the following words, you say, “Ah, hey, Pete, how are you?”

Harmless, but here’s my truth, they’re lazy. That’s lazy. It’s unintentional. It’s unintentional and it’s lazy. What we’re looking to do is build depth and intimacy in a relationship. So the what, feel, who method. Instead, what I could say is, “Pete, the last time we spoke, you mentioned that you and your wife were moving home, but you were feeling super stressed because your daughter was feeling really unhappy about the change. How has she settled in?”

All of a sudden, you are sharing a story with me about how things are in your personal life. I’m showing you that I care about what you care about by remembering what’s important to you in this season of your life, moving home, how you felt about it, stressed, and who it’s impacting, your daughter. I’m showing you that I care, that I have empathy without shoving it down your throat.

Now, that is, for me, anyway, so much more potent and powerful than, “Hey, how are you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s good. And it’s interesting how it’s easy to do and it’s easy not to do exactly this, because you’ve heard that’s what’s going on in someone’s life, and yet, in the course of living our own lives, when we re-encounter that person, it just doesn’t seem that top of mind.

But it’s quite possible to, I don’t know, take notes, have a pause before you begin the conversations, to say, “What is probably important to this person right now in the background?” It’s like, “Oh, of course. Well, they had that big date, you know? Their kid went away to college.”

And so it’s, like, it takes, for me at least, a stop-and-prompt-myself moment to actually execute that because I have found myself in so many conversations, where someone brings up the thing that they brought about their life that they had brought up previously. It was like, “Oh, jeez. Duh, I should have asked you about that.” So, yeah, it’s easy to do, it’s easy not to do.

Ravi Rajani
It is. My question to somebody who’s feeling that way is, “If it was working for you, you wouldn’t still be listening. You wouldn’t still be listening to this part of the show.” So, I often feel there can be resistance around trying something new.

And here’s what I would say to the listener is, look, this is my truth. It doesn’t have to be your truth, but try it on for size.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you get pushback when you suggest people do this? Because it sounds like, “Duh, of course, we should all do this, but we just forget. So maybe be conscientious and thoughtful about not forgetting.” But are you telling me people say, “Oh, Ravi, I could never do that.” Like, what’s that resistance sound like?

Ravi Rajani
Well, the resistance doesn’t sound like that. It’s a lot more subtle, I find. And it’s not necessarily related to this specific practice and habit, but, in general, what I find is when the cost of making change outweighs the cost of just staying as is, aka, the status quo, people are happy to sit in the status quo. So when you introduce something new that challenges their way of doing things, their viewpoint of the world and belief, you can often get resistance, right?

And it could be through disengagement in a workshop, you know, a corporate workshop where somebody may not have actually paid out of their own wallet to be there, right? Their leader’s paid, they’re getting told, “You should come in here.” They’re like, “Ah, I don’t want to listen to this. I don’t want to try this,” or whatever it could be, “I don’t want to try something new.”

And really, what we’re, I believe, anyway, that we’re selling, whether you’re selling a product, a service, an idea, or a vision, you’re actually selling change. You’re asking somebody to depart from a current set of behaviors and adopt new ones. And that is hard. If change were easy, my friend, everybody would stick to their New Year’s resolutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, I’ve also got to hear, you’ve got a tip for pitching yourself in 12 seconds. What’s the story here?

Ravi Rajani
Oh, gosh, where did you get that? Where did you get that? That’s brilliant! Where did you get that from? Is that AI?

Pete Mockaitis
We stalked you for hours. We stalked you for hours before we have this conversation.

Ravi Rajani
Did AI stalk me or something? Because that’s brilliant.

Pete Mockaitis
No, human beings.

Ravi Rajani
Wow, I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Shout out to my team, yeah.

Ravi Rajani
Kudos. Kudos to the team. Okay, cool. So there’s something I don’t even talk about in the book, but it’s something called the magnetic message. And some of you will be thinking, “What are you talking about?” Let’s take it back to when Steve Jobs first released the iPod.

Now, he didn’t come out on stage and pitch the features and the functionality of the product. No. He did something different. He said something along the lines of, it’s like having a thousand songs in your pocket, “Rah! Rah!” That’s the crowd going wild, right? And it became viral worthy. I don’t even know if virality was a thing there, but if it was, he would have gone viral.

Now, that’s a metaphor. What I’m talking about with the magnetic message is something which embodies that energy, but through an analogy. So, a couple of years back, I was working with a SaaS company in the US, and for one area of their business, they worked with product leaders. And if I had to describe what they help them with in one word, it would be innovation.

But they can’t go to events, well, they can if they want to, I wouldn’t suggest it, but they can’t really go to events and say, “Well, we help product leaders with innovation,” right?

Or, we can’t say, “Well, on this one fine day in 2006, our founder…” like you can’t lead with a story. We need to earn the opportunity to share a story. So how do we do that? By sharing a 12-second magnetic message, aka, an analogy.

And one that I came up with for this team is, “So, you know how Blockbuster struggled to innovate and just allowed Netflix to crush them? Well, what we do is help product leaders prevent their company from becoming the next Blockbuster.”

Pete Mockaitis
I love that Blockbuster example because it’s really emotionally resonant and reminds me of Vince Gilligan, who’s my favorite show is “Breaking Bad.” He’s got these high-concept pitches, like, “Breaking Bad” is, “I’m going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” Or, “Pluribus is the most miserable person on earth must save the world from happiness.” And it just makes you go, “Huh, what? I got to know all about that.”

Ravi Rajani
Isn’t that brilliant? Like, that’s something that punchy, because you are really, what you’re trying to do is earn the following question, “Tell me more.” You know, I worked with a hotel, a large hotel group last year, and they were thinking about how can they pitch their wedding venues.

And one thing that we came up with was comparing it to flying on a first-class flight and how everything is taken care of so you can focus on the journey, really, and the thing that really matters the most. And we created an analogy around that, that’s sticky. It’s universal. It hits.

And, really, with that Blockbuster analogy, what it’s really grounded in is something which every human being can relate to, which is a fear of being left behind. Nobody wanted to be left behind in the tribe back in the day, right? So a fear of being left behind, a lack of evolution, we can all relate to that. So. for me, anyway, that’s how I look at it, often entering a conversation with something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. It’s like… It’s the difference between conceptual, theoretical, talking about something versus, “Oh, yeah, I understand.” It’s, like, we’re connecting to stuff that’s already nicely lodged in our brains and has some emotion. Like a product manager is like, “I don’t want to be like Blockbuster,” you know, or, it’s like, “Oh, I remember Mr. Chips and I remember Scarface, and, whoa, that’d be a crazy transformation,” right?

So, we’re sort of latching onto some embedded emotional associations and language that’s really meaningful. Whereas, sometimes, when I see kind of corporate speak is sort of like, “Well, we provide a diverse array of advisory services for the mid-tier business leaders.” It’s like, “Huh?” As opposed to, you know, “We make sure you don’t run out of cash.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’re worried about that. That sounds helpful. Tell me more.”

Ravi Rajani
I hear you, my friend. And I also feel as though there is a journey with that. Often, we have to start with the corporate spiel to get to realize this is not connecting to eventually get to something which is a little bit spicier. So what else you got up your sleeve, because that was a good question? What else you got up your sleeve? I’m curious now.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I would like to hear about your thoughts on compliments and awkwardness.

Ravi Rajani
I love how you say awkwardness, okay? Here’s how I see it. So, interestingly, there’s a dude called Professor Norihiro Sadato. And in his piece of research, he found that when we receive a compliment, it actually activates the same part of our brain that lights up when we receive a financial reward. Cool, huh?

So compliments are great. Compliments work, but don’t be Mr. Creepy and start giving too many compliments, inauthentic compliments, inappropriate compliments, and say, “Yeah, Ravi told me to do it.” Don’t weaponize what I’m about to share. Okay, disclaimer.

So I could say to Pete, “Great presentation. Good presentation.” Great intention, but the delivery lacks, once again, intimacy and depth. Or, I could say, “Pete, that was one of the most impactful presentations I’ve heard at this trade show, literally all day.”

“In the first three minutes, when you shared that personal story about imposter syndrome as a new CEO and how you overcame it, wow, that was super powerful. And you know what, funny enough, you’ve actually got me thinking about how to use more personal stories in my own presentations. Thank you for that.”

So, the difference there is what I called the ASI framework. The second compliment had authenticity, specificity and impact. Authenticity, what I’m talking about here is leading with a genuinely positive observation. S is specificity, so avoid being generic. And I is impact, sharing how this specific moment has impacted you personally.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s all the difference between great speech and the real deal. That’s good. All right. Well, tell me, Ravi, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ravi Rajani
I’m very excited about the audio book of this book. I don’t know why I just felt like saying that. But anyway, hit me with these questions. You’ve asked incredible questions today. So I’m looking forward to some curve balls.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, it’s pretty straightforward. Tell me about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Ravi Rajani
Okay, so are you a Christopher Nolan fan? Batman? I mean, Batman?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Among the best. Among the best.

Ravi Rajani 
Incredible. Incredible. So, Bruce, aka Christian Bale, is on his jet with his butler, Alfred, and he says, “People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy. And I can’t do that as Bruce Wayne. As a man, I’m flesh, I’m blood, I can be ignored, I can be destroyed, but as a symbol, as a symbol, I can be everlasting.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ravi Rajani
Let me give you one which I haven’t finished yet, but Essentialism by Greg McKeown. So love the idea of less is better.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ravi Rajani
I’ve recently been digging deeper into Claude AI and I’m liking it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ravi Rajani
Telling stories that inspire change, aka, habit four inside of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that folks really connect and resonate with and they end up quoting back to you often or retweeting, etc?

Ravi Rajani
One I’m hearing recently is, I’ve heard recently, was “The depth of your questions dictates the depth of your relationships.”

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

Ravi Rajani
Where I hang out the most right now is LinkedIn. So what I’d love to know is, if you are listening to this right now, drop me a DM and let me know what impacted you the most in this episode. I’d love to know.

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

Ravi Rajani
Well, if you are looking to be awesome at your job, I’m biased, but I will say learning how to communicate with influence should be high on your priority list.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ravi, thank you.

Ravi Rajani
Thank you, my friend.

Jan 19
0

1121: How Managers Can Lead Better TODAY (Not Someday!) with Ali Merchant

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Ali Merchant reveals the small shifts you can implement today to become a better leader immediately.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to make difficult conversations easier
  2. The three things exceptional managers do
  3. How to upgrade your one-on-ones with one question

About Ali 

Ali Merchant has spent two decades scaling Learning & Development departments for public companies, tech brands, and the world’s largest ad agencies. Today, he’s the founder of All-In Manager, a leadership development firm that trains and coaches managers to become leaders. 

Since 2018, Ali has trained thousands of managers and coached hundreds of senior leaders worldwide. He’s also the author of The All-In Manager: Become a better leader today, not someday. Ali lives in Chicago with his wife, Sarah, and their dog, Lenny.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Monarch.com. Get 50% off your first year on with the code AWESOME.
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Ali Merchant Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ali, welcome!

Ali Merchant
I’m grateful to be here. Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am grateful to have you here. In preparing, I noticed that you signed up for the email list in 2017. So, like you are a legit fan of How to Be Awesome at Your Job, and I’m legit excited to have you here.

Ali Merchant
So, I’m beaming here. I have a big smile. And before we started recording, I was telling Pete that I would listen to this incredible podcast in 2018 on the train, in the cold Chicago winter, thinking that maybe, maybe I would turn up here. So, it took me seven years, but I am super grateful that we’re doing this today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, me too. Me, too. Well, you’ve got a great book here, The All-In Manager: Become a Better Leader Today, Not Someday. So, I’d love to start with any particularly surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about effective management from your years of researching and putting this book together.

Ali Merchant
Difficult conversations do not ruin relationships. Avoiding difficult conversations, typically, tends to ruin a relationship between a manager and an employee, which was fascinating to me because, I don’t know about you, but I’ve avoided a lot of difficult conversations in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really beautiful in terms of, if we think about the avoidance of difficult conversations that’s mostly driven by fear, emotional resistance. And then you’re saying, “Au contraire, we can flip the risk profile on its head.” You’re more likely to lose by avoiding the conversation than by engaging in the conversation.

Ali Merchant
Yeah, and in the book, I talk about this idea, and let’s see if we can relate to this, when it comes to having a difficult conversation, what I find is all of us are kind of on a spectrum. Some of us are avoiders, but we don’t confront the person.

So, if Pete, I have a problem with you, I’m not going to tell you what my problem is, but I’ll go to happy hour with my wife and I’m going to complain to my wife about you, right, or I’ll tell the dog that, “Oh, my employee Pete, oh.” I won’t talk to you. That’s the huge problem.

But on the other end is we have these impulsives who will have a difficult conversation, but they’ll shoot from the hip. They’ll tell you, “Pete, you know what? You’re just not professional enough.” That tends to ruin the relationship as well. In the middle is what I call a responder who doesn’t hold back, who doesn’t shoot from the hip. That’s why you choose the word responder. He or she doesn’t react. They respond through a specific step.

And if you do that, chances are you’re actually going to end up building a better relationship by having a difficult conversation than the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And I’m curious, does this also apply for the individual contributor who’s thinking, “Oh, yeah, I want to share something with my manager, but I don’t know if that’s really going to go over well. I don’t know if that’s my place. Aargh! Could he yell at me or cast me out of their good graces or withhold cool opportunities from me”? Within that zone, what’s your perspective there?

Ali Merchant
Yeah, and that’s a good question, and it’s a tricky question, and the cop out answer is, “Well, Pete, it depends,” but you know what? We’re going to lean in a little bit here. The same principle applies here, which is you want to confront the problem, but you want to confront the problem correctly.

Now, the stakes are way higher if an employee confronts their manager than if a peer confronts another peer or if a manager confronts a direct report. But to answer your question, yes, I would still encourage a direct report to summon the courage and have that conversation. But, Pete, I want to be very clear here. I don’t want us to just whiff it. I want us to do it correctly at this point.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, how do we do it? Let’s hear it. What does correctly mean?

Ali Merchant
Right. So, what correctly means is we have to prep for it. And again, that’s common sense, but that’s not common practice. What happens is we keep avoiding it and then we just attack the person, like, pinch, pinch, pinch, and then crunch. And then it just breaks the dam. That’s not how you want to do this.

So, we’re going to parse this a little bit here. We’re going to, first, talk about how a manager can talk to an employee and then we’re going to flip this and do an employee to a manager. How does that sound?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah.

Ali Merchant
Yeah? So, if I’m a manager, and Pete is my employee, Pete, you’re a good person but you’re struggling in this example here. The first thing I want to do is, before I tell you you’re struggling, you’re doing this thing incorrectly, or you need to step up, or you need to be more visible, the first thing I’m going to do, and this is a little controversial, is I’m going to take your permission before I even give you my feedback.

Now, when I teach this, a lot of senior leaders are like, “Oh, are you asking me to take permission from my direct report before giving them feedback?” And my answer is, “Absolutely.” The reason why taking permission is important is because I want us to level the playing field first.

And if I come to Pete, and I ask Pete, “Hey, I’m noticing certain things here, and I want to share those certain things with you. What’s a good time for us to talk about it?” Now, Pete, if you’re just like any other human, your heart’s going to beat a little faster. You’re like, “Okay, maybe I’m in trouble.” But, regardless, if we’ve built a little bit of psychological safety, I am giving you a little bit of context and I’m asking you, “Hey, man, let’s talk about it when we’re ready.”

Now, let me kind of add a story to this because it’s important for us to understand the method behind this. So, 2014, I was extremely sick. I was in the hospital for some really difficult surgeries. My wife was at work. My wife’s boss knew I was going through some surgeries.

My wife comes to the hospital and we’re talking, and she starts to cry, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And she’s like, “Oh, you know, my boss knows I’m really stressed out. He knows you’re going through these difficult surgeries. And he just laid into me, gave me all of this feedback and, you know, he’s right, but I just wish he would have read the room a little bit. He would have waited before giving me that feedback, right?”

And I’ve never forgotten that moment and, yes, this is my wife, but I’ve heard this over and over again from people, but just, “You know what, my boss just came in on a Monday morning and just told me, and I just wish he would have asked me if I was ready to receive said feedback.”

So, the first thing I do is level the playing field, ask for permission. Again, that’s simple, common sense, but not common practice, right? That’s step one.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’ve loved it so much, Ali, right there, is that it’s funny because I feel like, you know, I’ve had, I don’t know, a number of therapy sessions in my day, and, at times, recurring. And what’s so funny is the timing makes all the difference.

Because, I mean, I’ve been told, not to pat myself on the back, but that when in certain contexts, like, I don’t know, going to confession, you know, literally the confession booth in a Catholic church, or therapy, or whatever, it’s like, we’re going some places, you know, it’s vulnerable, it’s sensitive, we’re getting into it.

And, like, I will go all in, to use your terminology. I will go all in and say all the things that it’s sort of like max, max vulnerable. And people seem, I guess, impressed, like that’s rare, or maybe they’re just great at affirming me. But I’ve had those environments where it’s like, “Oh, this is the time and place for us to go there, but this other person’s holding back.”

And what’s funny is, for me, and it sounds like what you’re saying is for many or even most professionals, the same principle is at work. It’s like, “We can get into it, but they want some prep, some heads up. I got to get in the head space. I’ve got the time, the energy, the emotional resilience to take on this challenge.” Just like, “Well, hey, I’m warmed up. I’m wearing my gym clothes, so let’s lift some heavy stuff.”

As opposed to, “Hey, man, can you help me move this couch?” Like, “Oh, I guess I could,” but it’s much more unsettling when it’s a surprise and you’re not in the zone for it.

Ali Merchant
Right. And you used the word time and a place, and that’s what’s literally happening, where, Pete, if you realize, I am giving my employee more control by asking them, “Hey, we do it when it’s the right time for you, okay?” That’s really important. And I like the confessional example because, when you’re giving confession, you’ve chosen to do that interestingly enough, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s true.

Ali Merchant
In this dynamic, I’m giving you the choice here at this point.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. And with regard to choosing, it’s so true. It’s like, “Oh, maybe I should go to confession.” It’s like, “Hmm, not today. I can’t handle that today. Let’s try maybe tomorrow.”

Ali Merchant
Right, exactly. Now, I’m going to throw a curve ball here. When I teach this, someone always asks, “As an employee, can I say no to my boss that today is not a good time?” And in the book, I talk about this idea of establishing psychological safety first, which is, if you’re working with a manager who is a reasonable manager, they’re going to respect your no. In fact, they’re asking for the right reason. They’re okay if you say no at this point.

So, the first step is let’s get permission. It’s easy. You don’t even have to read the book to figure out how to ask for permission, right? The second step, Pete, people really skip this one all the time and it kills the conversation. The second step is, before you tell me what you want to tell me, do me a favor and tell me why you want to tell me that.

So, you have to share your intention with me first. So let me give you an example of what that looks like. And this example comes from my life. This is what my boss did to me a long time back. Well, I think this is 2005, 2006. I was part of a four-person team. Three people got promoted, I did not. That gutted me. I was like, “I’m better than all these three people. How come they’re getting promoted, and I’m not?”

And this is in San Francisco. I clearly remember, around 1:30, my boss emails me, he calls me into his office, and he says, “I want to tell you why you didn’t get promoted.” And then he tells me, “I have higher expectations from you and I know you can meet them, but you haven’t at this point. Here’s what’s going on.”

Now, if you think about that, what he did in that moment is he sided with me over the problem. He shared his intention before giving me a lot of the other bad news, right? So, the first step was, “Get permission.” The second step is, “Tell me your why,” or share your intention. Give me the why before you tell me the what.

Now, as far as the third, fourth, and fifth is concerned, I’m going to give you a really simple framework. And I’m a simple guy, simple works. The framework is “What?” “So what?” “Now what?” That’s all you have to do. The “What?” is going to be the specific challenge. So, if, Pete, you seem to be coming in late to our meetings, you’re dialing in late, you’re not showing up on time, that’s the “What?” here.

Now, the mistake we make is instead of calling out Pete’s specific behavior, we judge Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
“He’s lazy. He doesn’t care about the team!”

Ali Merchant
Right, we might think it, “But, Pete has checked out. Pete slacks off. Pete is not professional.” The amount of people who’ve come to me telling me, “Oh, my boss just said I’m not professional.” That’s a judgment that kills the conversation, right?

Pete Mockaitis
You what’s funny is you could also invent a judgment. I mean, these are just stories, that’s positive. Well, Pete is having so many ingenious, revolutionary, innovative ideas. And his creative deep work fugue states that, of course, is to be expected that sometimes he’ll be late.” So, like, I mean, you just made that up, too, but it’s still a judgment and isn’t serving anybody.

Ali Merchant
And you’re right, it is a judgment, but it’s not serving me and it’s not serving you. And when I make the judgment, here’s what happens most of the time. My favorite is, “You’re not being strategic enough.” What does that mean? I honestly do not know what that means, right? All I know is you’ve made a judgment.

Pete Mockaitis
“You don’t like it. It’s a bad thing.”

Ali Merchant
Right. So, my guidance, and it’s not my guidance, it’s a phenomenal book called The Nonviolent Communication, NVC.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, by Marshall, yeah.

Ali Merchant
Right. And they talk about this idea of, yeah, judgment is like you’re attacking the character of someone, and you don’t intend to do it. You don’t intend to do it. We’re humans, we’re messy, that’s what happens. But if you want to become an all-in manager, you have to get better at these things, right? So, I want you to be a little more specific.

Then what you’ve done is, once you’ve been a little specific, then tell me why I should care. What’s the so what here? “Pete, when you’re late or, Pete, when you raise your voice,” see, I almost caught myself. Yeah, I know people can’t see me, but, Pete, I don’t know if you saw me. I was going to say, “Pete, when you’re rude…” Rude is a judgment.

I corrected myself by saying, “Pete, when you raise your voice…” Raise your voice is a behavior, “When you raise your voice, the team stops contributing,” that’s the “So what?” And the “Now what?” is, “Pete, can you tell me if this is something you’re observing? Pete, can you tell me how we can correct this behavior?” Or, “Pete, I need you to do this to correct that behavior.” It’s pretty simple here. You take permission. You tell me the why, the what, the so what, and the now what.

Now, Pete, let me just slip one thing in. I will bet a dollar that someone who’s listening to this podcast is going to be like, “This guy is telling me I got to do all of this to give feedback? I don’t have a lot of time,” and that person is correct. These steps that I just described to you are reserved for really difficult behavioral types of things.

The other branch of constructive feedback is in-the-moment feedback where, you know, if I see a Slack message from you, or if you send me a slide and it’s not great, I’m not going to go through the steps. I’m just going to tell you, “Hey, Pete, I saw a couple of typos. Maybe you want to fix X, Y, Z,” that’s in the moment. I don’t have to go through all of these things.

Behavioral feedback is the tough stuff. It’s the stuff that gives us sleepless nights. It’s the stuff that upsets us. It’s the kind of stuff where people raise their voice or, you know, they’re making a lot of mistakes, or they’re not being proactive. That’s the heavy stuff that we kind of hold close for those types of conversations, difficult conversations. These types of steps are almost necessary.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I hear you that you don’t have to go through it every time. But I guess, I’m also thinking, what you’ve described doesn’t sound like it takes a boatload of additional time. It seems like blocking off 10 minutes on your calendar with a legal pad to think through a little bit of these framework pieces, and you’re good to go.

Ali Merchant
You’re absolutely good to go. And, Pete, if you want, we can actually add a little document to your show notes for your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please.

Ali Merchant
It’s, literally, a prep doc, and it’s 10 minutes. You got 10 minutes. I got 10 minutes, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, yeah. Well, Ali, this is great stuff, specifically in the zone of feedback or difficult conversations. But could we zoom out a bit to hear the big picture? What is the big idea behind The All-In Manager?

Ali Merchant
Well, let me take a step back here. The reason why I wrote The All-in Manager was out of sheer frustration. I was really frustrated with a lot of leadership advice, which is very well-intentioned, but a lot of leadership advice, I find, at least, is designed or written for the ideal world.

I wanted to write a book for the real world. I wanted to write a book which was a problem-solving manual of sorts. I don’t know about you, but, Pete, I’ve been to enough leadership conferences where the person on the stage talks about, “And then we scaled Mount Everest.” And that’s cool, that’s inspirational.

But what I want to know is how do I have a very difficult performance review with someone I like? I need to fix a problem today. I don’t need the pie-in-the-sky stuff. That was one of the reasons why I wrote the book. But I want to explain to your audience what I mean by the term all-in manager, because anyone can use the word all-in.

For us to understand what I mean by the word all-in manager, we have to first understand what is an accidental manager. An accidental manager is someone who was given the promotion, to lead others without any training, coaching, mentoring. They were just given the job because they were really good as individual contributors, right?

Nearly two-thirds of managers are accidental. I’m an accidental manager. Now, what’s the problem with that? The problem isn’t that you’re an accidental manager. The problem is they remain stuck as accidental. They stop learning, they stop growing because they get so busy.

But here’s the dangerous part. They start winging it. They start winging leadership. They’re like, “Oh, I know how to do this. I’ll just do it like my boss does it.” An all-in manager is someone that rejects that status quo. An all-in manager is not a guru. I can’t stand that term. An all-in manager isn’t a charismatic leader who never says ums or ahs. None of that.

An all-in manager is a human being just like you and I, but an all-in manager does three things exceptionally well. And, Pete, the language is going to matter. Number one, an all-in manager personally cares about the success of their people. Common sense, not common practice. Two, an all-in manager is an insatiable learner. I didn’t say a learner, I said insatiable learner.

And the third thing, which is my favorite, is an all-in manager is responsible to drive meaningful results. I did not say results. I said meaningful results. There’s a huge difference between results and meaningful results. Now, here’s the caveat. You can’t have one or two. You need all three. You need all three to go all in at this point.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that checks out very nicely in terms of my experience and in my own world, in terms of, like, people will tell me, when I’m making conversations, “Oh, what do you do?” It’s like, “Oh, I have a podcast.” “Oh, cool, what podcast?” “How to be Awesome at Your Job.” “Well, hell, Pete, how do I be awesome at my job?”

Like, that’s the one-word answer is care, in terms of, if you’re invested in your product, your service, your offer, your customer, your shareholders, your team, your process,” then, I mean, it all flows from that.

And when you don’t, it’s like, well, you could just sort of go through the motions for a while until you get fired or you retire, but it’s not going to be magically transformative for anybody on any dimension.

Ali Merchant
Right. Caring is such a core component of this. It’s, like, you can be brilliant, but you can be a brilliant jerk as well. And I don’t know if a lot of people want to work for a brilliant jerk, right? So, in the book, I talk about this idea of trust. And again, trust is so, like, we all think we know it, but when you ask someone to define what trust is, we’re like, “Oh,” it can be a little nebulous.

And in all the research around trust, what I find is caring pops up a lot. And for your audience, I want us to contrast what I mean by caring here. The easy definition of caring is you care for me. You’re good to me. You’re kind to me. That’s half of the coin here. The other half is you care enough about me to tell me the truth.

That’s the hard part because we know a lot of people who care but they care only to tell us the positive stuff. But when it comes to having the difficult conversations, they’re like, “Oh, they might get offended.” No, what my definition of caring is you care enough about me so much that you tell me, “Ali, you need to step up,” right? But caring is not that easy.

I’ll give you a story again from the book. I worked with the head of HR a long time back. This is again during those days when I wasn’t feeling well and she called me, she checked in on me to find out how I was doing. Again, a head of HR, normal stuff for a head of HR. We have a nice conversation, a pleasant conversation. This was Google Hangout.

We finished the phone call on the Hangout, she calls me again after five minutes, and I’m like, “What’s going on?” And she’s like, “Hey, I just wanted you to know I called our insurance company and I enrolled you into this concierge service.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I’m like, “Well, what is that?” She’s like, “Well, I know you’ve been really sick. This service is going to help you get to the right people faster.”

And if you’ve been sick, it’s difficult to go through the hospital maze and all of that. And it took her two minutes to do that. It’s been 11 years since then, I haven’t forgotten. That is an example of an all-in leader, someone who cares enough for their people to go the extra mile, right? Common sense but not common practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, yeah, this reminds me, I’m tearing up a little bit just thinking about it. I remember, boy, during the COVID time, you know, it was tricky and my wife was sort of sick and out of commission. And then it was the first time that I was kind of solo duty with the two kids for week plus contiguously. And it was like, “Oh, my gosh.”

And then, someone I was working with sent me a variety of kids toys activities, they’re like, “These will be of assistance to you.” And it was magical, and, yeah, the kids liked them. But more than that was here’s a human being who genuinely put himself into my shoes, like, “Oof, in that context, it is tough. And I can’t do a whole lot, we’re not in the same city, but here’s something I can do.” And it made an impact.

Ali Merchant
It sticks with you. And, you know, it’s funny, you hear these incredible stories that happen to us in our personal lives. These types of stories happen in professional lives as well. But I would love to see a world, or to live in a world, where they happen a lot. I’ll tell you, since you inspired me to share a story here.

Our dog died last year after he was 17, and we’re in Chicago. Chicago gets pretty cold here in the winter time. And my sister-in-law, who lives in Michigan, travels a lot, sent us this really cool, flavorful soup with ladles, and it was an incredible gift. Soup is soup, but it was so meaningful at the end, right? And the world of work sometimes is devoid of that.

And, Pete, I tell you, that is my definition of an all-in manager, who does these types of things for their people because, “Man, why would I follow you? Why do I give you the gift of leading me when you don’t do these things for me? You have to do those things for me, especially now.”

Pete Mockaitis
And this is a really good, feel good, positive vibe, and I want to reinforce that, and to not pervert it or twist it for mercenary ends. But this is triggering for me a memory of, in Bob Cialdini’s, I think it’s his book, Pre-Suasion.

He talks about, like, even people who are like war prisoners, when given a super thoughtful, relevant, useful gift, or maybe it was informants, or maybe both, that’s sufficient, like, “You know what? That was so awesome. I’m cool trading my company, or my country, or my regime to be of service to you, US soldier, because it’s, well, it’s beautiful and it’s powerful on a human emotional heart level.”

And, of course, do it with a pure intention as opposed to, “I’m going to get something out of this person.”

Ali Merchant
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s impactful.

Ali Merchant
And, you know, since we’re talking about impact and positive vibes, I would be remiss if I didn’t say that we started with difficult conversations and feedback. But here’s the thing, when I write the book, the book on the chapter on feedback doesn’t start with constructive. It doesn’t. I made a deliberate choice not to start. I wanted to start with positive feedback.

And there are two reasons, because humans change best by feeling good about themselves. And the second is, if you are the type of leader who gives genuine recognition, your constructive feedback is going to land that much better, “Because now I know when I drop the ball, or when I do something good, Pete gives me really great recognition. And when I drop the ball, Pete is always the first one to tell me, ‘Man, you got to pick that up.’”

However, in the world of work, positive feedback is warped. We think we’re doing it correctly. Some of us are, but most of us are not. And we can dive into what correct or rich recognition looks like. But my point is, if you see something good, say something good. And, by the way, for the individual contributors listening to this podcast, if you see your boss doing something good, let them know. Empathy only flows down. It needs to flow up as well.

And every time I’ve sent a note to the CEO saying, “Hey, I really liked the presentation,” the response was like, “Oh, my God, thank you. That makes me feel great,” because no one does that, right? So be a different person. And if you see something good, call them out. Don’t catch people doing wrong things all the time. Catch them doing good things and let them know as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good, yes. Thank you. Well, you got a cool subtitle, “Become a Better Leader Today, Not Someday.” I want to hear about that thoughtful choice. Do we fall into a someday trap at our peril?

Ali Merchant
Yeah, it’s a hot take. I think there’s a myth that it takes decades and decades to do this. I think that you can do small things today to start leading today. And, Pete, I’m going to give you an example, because if people are skeptical, that’s good. You’re in the right place because I’m going to build my case here.

When I teach people how to do one-on-ones, I’ll tell them, “Hey, you know what, next time when you’re having a one-on-one with your direct report, don’t go in asking, ‘What’s the status on this or that?’ You can do that, but don’t do it all the time. Maybe today, what you do is you ask Pete, if Pete is your direct report, ‘Pete, what is top of mind for you today?’ or, ‘Pete, what is it that you want to talk about today?’”

And, Pete, it’s such a small thing, right? Even when I teach this, I’m like, “No one would care.” But what shocks me is, after a couple of weeks, people come back, and they’re like, “Oh, my God, Ali, I tried that. And for the first time, my direct report started to talk to me. It was their meeting. They seemed a little more engaged.” So that is leadership. You get to do that today.

I’ll give you another example of how you get to lead today, which is, you know, managers, and I’ve made this mistake all the time, I love giving advice, and I thought giving advice was me being helpful. But, Pete, I don’t know if you worked with an executive coach or a therapist, what does a good therapist do? They’re drawing something out of you. They’re asking you really good questions.

So today, challenge yourself that, “In my next one-on-one, instead of defaulting to giving advice, I’m just going to ask a question or I’m going to ask a follow-up question.” And it’s these small tune-ups or small changes that you can make that will allow you to become a better leader today, not someday.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s intriguing is, when you ask, “What’s top of mind for you?” and, Ali, if I may, do you have, this is, we’re tuning up precise verbiage and phraseology. If people feel that’s a little too corporate-y or consultant-y, do you have some synonymous phrases for what’s top of mind for you today?

Ali Merchant
Yeah, totally. Totally. Wow, man, I’m like a corporate person now. That is interesting. I’ll tell you. “You got any hot topics?” Hot topics is good, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like it.

Ali Merchant
“What’s got you occupied this week?”

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about the mall store hot topic. Like, “Yeah, I’ve got a black fedora on me.” No, but what’s great about that is that it opens up exactly what you want in terms of, and it might be that you might get a response about work, you might get a response about not work. For example, what’s top of mind for me is, we had a pipe burst in this house.

Ali Merchant
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s a whole situation with the remediation and reconstruction, and so that is top of mind. And so, like, it’s quite possible that in a professional context, a manager would have no idea that that’s occurring in my life, and yet it’s consuming a substantial amount of my mental emotional energy.

And then that opens up any number of cool things in terms of, “Oh, well, I know an amazing contractor,” or, “Oh, shucks, that sounds terrible. Is your family, are they in a good spot? Well, hey, I’ve got some hotel points.” Yeah, whatever.

It could go any number of opportunities to, at least, be a little bit more considerate and understanding about what you’re putting on their plate, or, at most, say, “Oh, I just so happen to have an extremely appropriate and valuable something-something that I can contribute into your life.”

Ali Merchant
Right. And we’re going to stick with the pipe burst because I love that example. Now, imagine I use the question, “What’s going on?” instead of, “Hey, what’s happening with this thing?” And the person says, “It’s winter time and our pipe burst, and it’s been a whole mess.” And now I know, we have a project due today, and now I know, “Hey, maybe, like, are you okay to do this? Do we want to extend the deadline?” Do you see how the pipe burst leans into work?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Ali Merchant
That’s the beauty of this because if my pipe burst, but I didn’t tell my manager, and I said, “Hey, you know what? I’m really struggling today. I can’t do this,” and my reasoning as a manager is like, “Well, you had two weeks to do this. What’s the problem?” Now I have more context about the situation.

And when you have context, the next line of inquiry becomes way easier. Now, I just want to be mindful here, right? These one-on-ones aren’t going to be about personal things all the time. Most of the time they’re going to be about work and that’s okay. They should be about work. But that’s, in the book, I talk about the three Ps. Sorry, I’m a learning and development guy. There’s always going to be three P’s, right? Priorities, position and person.

Person is the pipe burst. Position is a career conversation. And, by the way, you’re not going to have it every week, not even every month, maybe once a quarter, once in six months. But typically, all your one-on-ones are going to be about priorities, “What is, like, the big thing you’re working on and where do you need my help? What are some of your blockers? How can I help you reduce some of your blockers?” That’s a good one-on-one right here.

But let’s not forget that there is a person behind the title and pipes burst in life. That’s also what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well said. Well, Ali, tell me, any final things you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ali Merchant
You know, we spoke a lot about these difficult conversations. My wish is that we do have those difficult conversations, but I think the easiest thing we can do is find one person in our orbit, on our team, or our peer, or our manager, and just give them some very specific recognition. Not just, “Hey, you’re great.”

You know what, that’s good if you’ve never said that, I’ll take it. But something which is specific, something which is timely, something which is sincere, it could be a handwritten note, it could be an email, it could be a thoughtful Slack message. I’m telling you, and I know this sounds so simple, but I just don’t see it in the world of work as much as I would like for it to see.

So, the one thing I would advise or request everyone listening to this, the simplest thing you can do, if you see something good, say something good and make it specific.

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

Ali Merchant
I’ll give you a line. It comes from this book by David Brooks. I think the book is How to Know a Person. And he says the whole world has diminishers and illuminators.

And diminishers are people who will diminish your light. They won’t give you the recognition. They won’t tell you the encouraging thing or they won’t send Pete toys or something. Illuminators are people that will take the smallest of things and they’ll amplify it. So, in a world of diminishers, you want to be an illuminator.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Ali Merchant
Yeah, so the favorite research comes from Stanford, and this was done in 1990. This research is called tappers and listeners. And, Pete, when I wrote this in the book, I thought no one would care. This is one of the most highlighted passages in the book, which blows my mind. It’s a cool study. So, in 1990, I forget the name of the researcher. The researcher came up with two groups of people, tappers and listeners.

She told the tappers, “Your job is to tap a well-known tune, like Happy Birthday or Jingle Bells or Christmas Season.” And the listeners were supposed to guess the tune. Simple. The tappers thought that the listeners would guess the tune at least 50% of the time. Any idea what the percentage is of the listeners guessing the actual tune?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I haven’t read the full text of this study, but I remember from people talking about it, it’s way low. It’s way less than 50%.

Ali Merchant
Right, it’s 3%. The accurate figure is 2.6 or 2.7. Why am I sharing this with you? I am sharing this with you because if you’re a manager, you are a tapper. And if you’re an employee, you’re a listener. What do I mean by that? A lot of managers, present company included, I’m raising my hand, we think that our employees listen to the melody inside of our heads. They don’t.

We have to make the implicit, I’m pointing to my head right now, we have to make the implicit explicit. We have to tell our people what we expect them to do. The tappers and listeners study, hopefully, is something that captures your imagination and it reminds you that, “I have to do a better job of communicating my standards and my expectations with the people who report in to me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. And a favorite book?

Ali Merchant
I absolutely love this book. This book is called Zen and the Art of Firefighting. It’s written by a firefighter.

This incredible firefighter who talks about life and leadership from the lens of an actual firefighter. It’s a great book. It’s going to make you a better leader regardless of whether you have thousands of people who report into you or you have none. It’s a phenomenal book as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Ali Merchant
I’m not going to give you any AI tools, but I will tell you, I am not a podcaster like you, not even close, but I do love Descript because that is the only tool that has actually saved me hours and hours up on work. I lied. I have to mention one AI tool. The Google Tool Notebook LLM, I think, is very cool. It does a lot of cool visuals. I’m a fan of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really connects and resonates, and people quote back to you often?

Ali Merchant
Well, there are two things. The difficult conversation line, “If I hear you correctly,” that resonates a lot with people, especially people who are conflict averse.

And the second thing that I hear a lot from people is the idea that we’ve been taught that giving an answer is an act of value or of helpfulness. That is incorrect. Sometimes listening and asking a question is also an act of value. I think it gives people permission to not just fix things but to listen, observe, empathize, and stay curious.

Pete Mockaitis
And the first one you said was just the phrase itself, “If I’m hearing you correctly”?

Ali Merchant
Yeah, difficult conversations don’t ruin relationships. Avoiding them often does. Yeah, that sticks a lot. I think it kind of rhymes a little bit, to a certain extent, but I love it. I’ve been a conflict-averse person for a majority of my life. And after I discovered this, I’m like, “Wow, I can do this. I can have a difficult conversation without hurting someone. I can be direct. I can be kind.”

And from my personal experience, I’ve learned that you get to build a better relationship if you have those types of conversations. Now, I just want to also be clear here. I’m not using the word candor. Candor is a good word. Unfortunately, it’s been hijacked by a lot of people for saying whatever the heck they want to say, “Oh, I was just being candid.”

No. Candid is you being direct and you being kind at the same time. You can hold someone accountable while being empathetic. That’s not like a mutually exclusive deal you make. You can do both at the same time. In fact, if you want to become an elite leader, you have to learn to do both at the same time.

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

Ali Merchant
AllInManager.com, one word. That site will take you to my book. They can find me on LinkedIn, Ali Merchant.

The book is available on Kindle. It’s available on paperback. It’s available on hardcover. One thing, a shameless plug, if I may, if you get the book, chapter two will give you access to all the tools, all the templates, all the bonuses, all the fun stuff.

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

Ali Merchant
I’m going to double down on what I said, which is, next week or in the new year, make a plan to find one person in your orbit, go to them and share rich recognition with them.

One person. Make that into a ritual of yours. Don’t have to do it every week. Do it once a month. Your life will meaningfully improve if you become the person who looks for the good in people and calls it out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ali, thank you.

Ali Merchant
This was so much fun. I appreciate you.