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Jun 03
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673: Maximizing Wellbeing at Work with Gallup’s Dr. Jim Harter

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Dr. Jim Harter says, "70% of the variance in team engagement is influenced by the manager."

Dr. Jim Harter shares the key practices that improve wellbeing at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five key ingredients to a thriving work life
  2. Top tips for developing each area of wellbeing
  3. What most organizations get wrong about wellbeing

About Jim

Jim Harter, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist for Gallup’s workplace management and wellbeing practices. He is coauthor of the No. 1 Wall Street Journal and Washington Post bestseller, It’s the Manager. He is also the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller 12: The Elements of Great Managing.

Dr. Harter’s book, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, is based on a global study of what differentiates people who are thriving from those who are not. His research is featured in First, Break All the Rules, and he contributed the foreword to Gallup’s updated edition of this groundbreaking bestseller.

Dr. Harter is the primary researcher and author of the first large-scale, multi-organization study to investigate the relationships between work-unit employee engagement and business results. His work has appeared in many publications, including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Time Magazine, and in academic articles and book chapters.

Dr. Harter received his doctorate in psychological and cultural studies in quantitative and qualitative methods from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL).

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Dr. Jim Harter Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jim, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jim Harter
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into much of your wisdom and research. I understand that your latest here has involved a hundred million plus people. What’s the story here?

Jim Harter
Well, we’ve had a chance to study workplaces all over the world for quite some time, to study individual strengths of people in the workplace. We’ve developed various tools for selecting people into the right jobs, and we’ve studied workplace environments extensively both inside organizations. So, think about thousands of organizations conducting census surveys and mapping the data down to the team level so that managers get a report on how they’re building a culture.

Then, also, we do polls of the entire globe, the only real-world poll of the entire globe, on issues like how engaged people are in their work, their wellbeing, how they think about their lives, and how they experience their days. And so, those accumulated interviews with people add up to actually, a hundred million is pretty conservative.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s interviews not survey responses. Interviews. That’s just huge. Hotdog! Well, while we’re here, I’ve got say the Gallup Engagement Research has been cited so many times by the hundreds of guests on the show that it’s just sort of an institution almost. And so, I’d love it if you could maybe, for everyone who’s wondering, how do we bucket it in terms of putting a person into the engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged categories? How do we arrive there?

Jim Harter
Well, we started off by studying which elements of human nature at work predict performance outcomes and conducted very large-scale studies looking at which particular survey items predict not only how people feel about their jobs overall but also performance outcomes like productivity, whether they’re likely to stay or leave an organization; profitability, were their customers are getting served the right kind of way; safety incidents; absenteeism. We’d looked at all these kinds of outcomes and we found that there were 12 elements that best explain what a great workplace culture looks like.

And so, we had questions we tested over and over again. And so, there are 12 elements that go into that formula that we apply to get at the percentage of engaged, not engaged, actively disengaged. And the percentage that we come up with is really a high bar. If you look at our global data, only about 20% of people are engaged globally. And, in the US. we’re talking about 36% as of the end of 2020. The good news is those numbers have been going up.

And when we study organizations, we have seen them move from less than 20% engaged all the way up to over 70%. I say it’s a high bar because the criteria is performance. There’s a lot of organizations out there using other metrics like combining, on a one-to-five scale, the fours and fives together, and coming up with a percentage of favorable, oftentimes calling that engaged. That’s a pretty soft metric. That’s more like a satisfaction metric than a high bar kind of metric.

The reason for the high bar though, again, is it gets you to a real culture when you improve on it and it gets you to real performance outcomes when you improve on it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s a high bar in terms of the robustness of the study. Is it also a high bar in terms of like the, I don’t know, strictness of the grading on the 12 questions? Or how do you think about that?

Jim Harter
Yeah, it is, because we looked at how each of those questions relate to performance outcomes. And so, if you think about like a on one-to-five scale, there’s a big difference between someone. I’ll give you an example of the question, “I know what is expected of me at work.” Only about half of the people globally can strongly agree to that. That means the other half are at least somewhat confused at what they’re supposed to do. Think about the problems that creates in the work environment when people just don’t know what to do next. That’s why managing is so important.

But a difference between a four and a five is very significant, and so we lean more toward people given those more…those strongly agree kinds of responses. It doesn’t mean that they have to strongly agree to every question, of course. But it’s a formula we apply based on how that scale relates to different performance outcomes. So, yeah, it’s a higher bar in terms of how we’ve determined, you can call them cutoffs, to determine whether you’re engaged or not, but there’s a reason. And the reason is it really gets an authentic culture when organizations improve on it. It gets into a very authentic culture where a leader can feel like they’ve got something reliable that they’ve built.

And it’s been particularly important to see this play out during crises. We’ve studied this research. We’ve conducted ten meta analyses now of how engagement predicts performance outcomes. But we’ve had a chance to study the relationship between engagement and performance during two previous recessions and now this one. And we find the correlation between engagement and performance is a little bit stronger during tough times.

And so, think of it as like an insurance policy, when the going gets tough, are your people going to get into more of a fight or flight mentality or are they going to be resilient and have your back because you’ve had their back?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. I’ve wanted to know that for a long, long time. I’ve seen the 12 questions, I’ve heard the 36% figure many times, and now we know that the 36% is a high bar. But I think it’s also a true bar in terms of if you just talked to your buddies, maybe a little over a third will say, “Yeah, I’m engaged. I dig it.” And others are like, “Yeah, it’s okay, I guess.”

Jim Harter
And there’s a big chunk in the middle there where they’re just kind of if they get a better opportunity, they’ll take it with another organization. They show up, do the minimum required, not much else, but they’re not the people who really are going to be resilient during tough times and surpass the competition with innovative ideas during the good times.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it’s encouraging that some workplaces have indeed gotten to 70% and that feels true as well in terms of if you talked to some folks at some amazing places, it’s like, “Yeah, the vast majority of people really are digging this here.” So, thank you. That was just an appetizer, an amuse-bouche to our main topic today. Wellbeing at Work is your latest. Kind of what’s the big idea here and some of the most intriguing discoveries from these many millions of interviews?

Jim Harter
Well, we wrote a wellbeing book back in 2010, and that one, we leveraged the global discoveries from that world poll I was talking about earlier. And the question we asked for that book was, and all the research we did leading up to it, was, “Are there some universal characteristics in people or elements that drive wellbeing in terms of people having a thriving overall life and experiencing really good days?

Well, we know that every region in the world is somewhat different culturally but we found there are five elements that were universal and consistently predicted thriving lives and great days for people where they had high interests, high enjoyment, lower levels of stress, worry, anger, or sadness, all those negative emotions we can list off.

And the five that we found, that writing was directed at individuals, “How do we help individuals live more thriving lives?” And the five are career wellbeing, social wellbeing, financial wellbeing, physical wellbeing, and community wellbeing. And they’re in an order for a purpose. This particular book, we decided to aim it at organizational leaders and managers, primarily because we see an issue right now where most organizations don’t have what we’d call a net thriving culture, where employees not only their work life in terms of their engagement, but also their overall life is either struggling or suffering.

And we saw this play out during the pandemic, in particular, where we saw drops in the percentage of thriving employees, in spikes in worry and stress in our global data. We’re seeing a continuous rise globally in the percentage of people that have negative emotions. And even before this pandemic, Pete, we were trending on what the new workforce was looking for. And one of the things the new workforce was looking for was a workplace that improves their overall life. It isn’t just a job. The separation between work and life had already started to fade away primarily because we carry these devices around with us that connect us to our work more often, maybe sometimes than we like, and sometimes we can connect with the work when we want to in our spare time.

But people in the younger generations, you can think about Millennial and Gen Z, expect their workplace to improve their lives. And all these trends that we saw pre-pandemic just got magnified. The number one perk people were asking for, pre-pandemic, was flex time. Boom! We had the great shift and a high percentage of people had that flex time. And there’s all kinds of things I can get into in terms of we trended a lot of data during COVID and continue to, so there’s a lot underneath that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s interesting right there. I mean, hey, so we got our flex time but my hunch is that we’re not so much feeling a whole lot of wellbeing during pandemic times.

Jim Harter
Yes. It’s interesting. Pre-pandemic, the people who worked from home 100% of the time, and, by the way, that was only about 4% of the population who were 100% worked from home, and suddenly that jumped up to 48% full-time work from home after the great shift that we call it. And 70% of people in jobs, at least some of the time, and most of those some of the times were most of the time working from home. But the interesting thing was pre-pandemic, those people who worked from home 100% of the time, that 4%, they had lower levels of reported burnout.

During the pandemic, the 100% work-from-homers actually had higher levels of burnout than the others. So, there’s something there. As I talked to organizations, almost all of them that had a lot of work-from-home folks during COVID or continue to, are planning on some type of a hybrid type option going forward.

The good news there is the hybrid employees, pre-pandemic, were the ones that had the highest levels of engagement at work. So, there’s a factor inside engagement around autonomy that’s really important. And great managers find ways to build autonomy into jobs and, at the same time, get involved with people in setting goals and holding them accountable but still have autonomy and connectedness with them.

So, the solution part of all this really does sit not exclusively but highly with managers because they’re in the best position to know what people are going through and get close enough to people to know their individual situation.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, what are some of the key practices that contribute to teams and organizations becoming net thriving?

Jim Harter
At the organizational level, there are some, I think, really important foundational things you have to get right. I’ll come back to this later if you want me to, but there are some threats and some risks, there are barriers to organizations having a net thriving culture that if you don’t take care of those, you’re going to have some issues.

But one of the things is that it’s really important for organizations to think about those five elements of wellbeing that we listed. They’re all science-based. We know we can rely on them. If we work on those and improve them, we can make a big difference in people’s lives, and they’re all changeable to some extent. They’re areas everybody can work on.

But I would argue, the organizations need an organizational structure so that everything that they’re offering employees, they are aligning with at least one of those five elements or more so it makes sense to people, so people know why it exists and why it was developed by the organization. Too often, people might have programs, policies, perks that are offered by an organization, they either are unaware of it, or they don’t know why it exists, or just doesn’t come top of mind to them until there’s a crisis or something. So, the organizational structure is important.

It’s also important that the CEO is highly involved in building a net thriving culture. The reason for that is anytime we look at culture change, it’s owned from the top of the organization, not just stated but actually owned and an important value that the organization holds close. And we’re going to see more and more of that, I think, going forward with all the pressure on ESG, the Environmental, Social and Governance standards that are kind of finally coming to a head, I think, in terms of some more official standards. And at Gallup, we’ve been working on the people component of that, the social part you could say.

I think another thing that’s really important from a practice standpoint is to equip managers to move from a boss mentality to a coaching mentality, and equip them to have the right kinds of wellbeing conversations that don’t feel forced but rather are more natural. So, for them to have those natural conversations, there’s a progression that has to happen in terms of how they become upskilled.

I think, also, what organizations can do is develop a network of wellbeing coaches. And what I mean by that are people who’ve become experts in particular areas and gather best practices and share best practices. Part of that is peer to peer, I think, is really important. In the wellbeing space, people learn a lot from their peers because, “These are people like me. They’re not somebody who’s making a lot more money or whatever,” trying to tell them how to have higher wellbeing. It doesn’t have as high a credibility for them.

So, “Learning from people like me and getting ideas from people like me,” but collecting best practices and having some experts internally. An example would be there’s so much information out there about nutrition. You can look all over the place and you see little tiny studies that say something, and in the next month they say something else. I think organizations need someone who integrates the best science and teaches it back to employees so they know what they can rely on.

And then the other thing, I think, is important from a practice standpoint is to go through an audit how you’re doing things right now, your rules, your guidelines, how you communicate, your facilities, your incentive systems, how you recognize people, the different events and developmental opportunities you have available. Those can all be audited through the lens of, “Does this improve an individual wellbeing?” You can do it statistically, you can do it qualitatively, but just to go through and hold yourself accountable for everything that you’re doing right now and whether it’s really one utilized into, related to higher levels of wellbeing for people.

So, you can go to that level of detail on this but most organizations just want to start somewhere. And to start somewhere, you need to get some good measures in place and you need to see where you have variance, where you have some highs and lows, and start digging into what’s going on, and study some best practices inside your own organization. But, above all, equip your managers to have the right kinds of conversations to move on that boss to coach journey.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, when we think about some of the particular practices that the coaches are learning and sharing, could you maybe give us one or two inside each of the five elements of wellbeing that really make a world of difference for a relatively small amount of effort?

Jim Harter
Well, we’ll just go down the list. Career wellbeing, probably the simplest and most efficient practice you can get really good at is through strengths. So, Gallup has a tool. It’s called CliftonStrengths and it’s a scientific assessment that will list off your strengths, your 34 strengths and there’s all kinds of combinations that anybody could get, but the key is to understand what your strengths are individually.

And when I’m talking about strengths, I’m talking about innate kind of characteristic that are not likely to change significantly once we become adults. We still change and evolve but they’re less likely to change and evolve than something like how we view our workplace or skills. It’s more innate. So, leveraging your own strengths, knowing about them, and leveraging them. It just leads for more efficient activities inside organizations where people don’t try to be something that they’re not and they develop through who they are in unique ways.

So, that’s probably the most direct one on career wellbeing. When people are using their strengths, we’d measure these in the moment, they report much higher levels of energy when they can do what they do best. So, continually figuring that out and refining it, but that tool I’ve mentioned can give people a big head start there.

Social wellbeing, it starts with onboarding, I think, in organizations. We have to make it a priority during onboarding where people get to know other people right away. And I think that became a challenge for organizations that were doing onboarding during COVID. There wasn’t a lot of hiring going on but, going forward, I think organizations are going to have to have strategies for how they do that because the advantage on the social wellbeing front is there for people who already knew each other in working from home and remotely. That’s not difficult to connect on Zoom and to have conversations if you already know somebody and have worked with them for a long time, but it’s really the newer people where I think there’s a big gap there that needs to be filled.

But social wellbeing, we have a question we ask on our engagement survey called…it’s worded “I have a best friend at work.” It’s kind of controversial because not everybody thinks that that’s important in the workplace but it links to all kinds of outcomes so we kept it in there. That’s a social wellbeing component. And people ask me, “How do you change that? How do you effect that?” I would argue it’s the easiest of the engagement elements to act on because it requires creating situations where people have a chance to get to know one another and kind of getting out of the way and letting human nature take over. We’re human beings. We’re social. We tend to connect naturally if we know something about someone else. So, it’s not one you have to try to force or anything like that, but just a couple of thoughts there on social.

On financial, the financial wellbeing is about two things if we’re going to boil it down. It’s about reducing stress. It can be related to money, of course, but it’s not completely about the amount of money you make. It’s also about how you manage that money to reduce stress, daily stress, and increase longer-term security.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How should I be spending my money to do that?

Jim Harter
Well, one thing is we have so much automation now, we don’t have to think about paying bills as much anymore, which helps a lot to reduce stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when I have to write a check and I’m kind of irritated.

Jim Harter
Yeah, it is the activity of writing that check. So, automation can help. The other thing is once you take care of your basic needs, reduce stress, spending money on experiences, we’ve seen, other people seen, and the academic literature, spending on experiences less.

You develop stories, the stories might even evolve that you had during those experiences but they live on. Whereas, the physical purchases, while they’re nice for a short period of time, it kind of fades a bit. We’ve all kind of experienced that. But spending money on the right kinds of things so you’re building those stories and experiences with people, I think, is a really kind of creative way of prioritizing the extra money that you might blow on something else. So, I think that money management is a big factor, of course, but then kind of aiming it at, “How do I create more really good experiences with other people with the money?” Sometimes it’s your own individual experience but, in many cases, it’s experiences with other people.

Physical wellbeing. You might immediately think of physical wellbeing as disease burden or the lack of disease burden, and that’s certainly a part of it. Imagine your life in such a way where you reduce that. That became so apparent during COVID where the people who had less disease burden or just more resilient to the virus. And so, we had some of our researchers develop a model around that and it’s amazingly accurate at predicting mortality rates.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say disease burden, does that just mean I have a lot of diseases or how do we think about that?

Jim Harter
Well, it can range anywhere from obesity to heart disease, to preexisting condition, cancer. Hypertension, so even depression anxiety falls into disease burden but those are more psychological. But the point we try to make about physical wellbeing is that the end goal should be…because some of our disease burden, we can’t do anything about, it’s genetic, right?

So, the goal under the physical wellbeing umbrella should be that we manage our life, in whatever situation we’re in, to increase energy so that we can get things done that we want to get done. And the things that we can influence involve what we eat, involve the quality of sleep that we get, and the movement, our movement. We call this exercise now. The people that we studied, George Gallup did a study of, he called them the oldsters but they lived to be 95 plus. And one thing that they had in common was that they kept working, by the way, until their, many of them, 70s and 80s. They just kept working but they had jobs that required them to move around a lot, not just all farming jobs either. There are all kinds of different jobs but they moved a lot.

They also ate smaller meals. They had jobs that they loved. They loved their work. Their spare time was spent with family and friends. So, you can kind of see those five elements coming out. They lived in a variety of different types of communities, some urban, some rural, some suburban so the type of community wasn’t a differentiator. But I just thought that was interesting that a lot of what he learned back then studying these people who lived long lives, even though their practices weren’t identical to what we can do now. They had some of the same themes that stuck out.

Pete Mockaitis
And while we’re talking physical, so move more, that’s good. Any quick best practices associated with the sleeping better and the eating better?

Jim Harter
Well, one is both too much sleep and too little are both bad, that’s what all the research is showing. But it’s really the quality of the sleep that’s the key, if you wake up feeling well-rested, refreshed. I’m a big fan of the short power nap, going conscious for 10 minutes, that’s very refreshing. I reviewed some research that I found very interesting that said, that showed, actually there’s a YouTube on as well that shows visually there’s a fact with sleep that it’s the only organ in our body, apparently, where the waste cells only leave, only get drained out or cleaned out when we sleep. The rest of our body is continuously getting rid of wastes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the brain is the only organ?

Jim Harter
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Jim Harter
And you can kind of feel that when you take a nap or wake up feeling well rested. I use sleep in my writing, not that I’m writing when I’m sleeping. I just kind of learned this trick where day one, I’ll kind of try to get my head all the information I can around the topic I’m writing on, and in the next morning, after I sleep on it, it somehow kind of gets integrated better, and it comes out a lot more smoothly where I’m kind of struggling day one to even write good sentences. But I think sleep is a really good one to just kind of think about how you do it and when you do it and how you manage that effectively.

On diet, to me, and again there’s all kinds of advice on diet, but to me, from what I’ve read, the two takeaways are try to reduce processed food and eat smaller amounts. The calorie thing is still a thing. It still means something. There’s been so much emphasis on what you eat but the amounts still matters, and that’s the hardest thing to manage, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s physical. And how about community?

Jim Harter
Community, at a basic level, is about making sure you live in a safe area, having a safe place to live, and having housing that’s adequate for you and your family. And at a higher level, community wellbeing is about giving back, giving in a way that makes sense for you. And the giving part can vary by person. It can vary by stage of life, but organizations can really set people up for that by just sharing opportunities for giving, connecting people who have similar passions and interests together, and just providing a wide range of opportunities, and giving as an organization first.

So, “Here’s what we’re doing as an organization to contribute to our community and to society in general.” And many, probably most cases, organizations can do that through what they do in their work, their business, but outside of the work that they do, they can do it so many other ways as well. So, that’s an important one.

Neuroscientists found that the part of our brain that lights up when we get something, lights up even more when we give, so sort of the helper’s high. And so, again, I think organizations can play a huge role there and on all these elements by putting some defaults in place that make it easy for people to do what’s in their best intentions.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so we got some principles in terms of how organizations and leaders can facilitate some more good stuff happening and some specific practices for individuals. Can you share with us a cool story or example or a case study of a team or organization that went from, you know, not so much wellbeing to boatloads of wellbeing and how that unfolded?

Jim Harter
Well, those areas I listed off are the ones that I have seen leveraged the best. I think there’s still long ways to go for most organizations in the wellbeing front. So, for instance, on the career wellbeing component, we’ve seen people move from the bottom of our database over time all the way to the top decile of our database, top 10%. And they did that by being persistent, that’s one thing. But there’s kind of four patterns we saw in organizations that create change.

And one of them is, and I mentioned this earlier, it’s got to start strategically with the CEO and the board thinking about why they’re trying to create a net thriving culture or a highly engaged culture and articulate that and explain it to people so they know why it’s happening, that it’s not just a flavor of the month kind of thing, and it’s really a part of who we’re going to be as an organization.

Second, they had excellent communication. They just continuously communicated best practices and they continuously communicated “What we’re doing and why,” and it’s almost like over-communication so people know the why. And then all the way from when they’re fielding a survey to what they‘re going to do after it and how they’re going to create action plans and train managers.

The third is that manager piece. It’s upskilling managers from boss to coach is really important. And then the fourth pattern we saw was accountability. They make it clear that’s part of the manager’s job to engage their workers and to improve the lives of their workers. So, those are kind of some general patterns we saw but, yeah, we’ve seen organizations move from the bottom all the way to the top of the database. So, I know this stuff is changeable.

I think wellbeing is more difficult to change than engagement but you got to get the engagement part right first because that’s what I think as the nuts and bolts of managing. If you want to help individuals in your organization improve their lives, you’ve got to start by taking care of the work part of it because that builds trust where people aren’t second-guessing your intentions, and it builds more comfortable conversations so that managers and the individuals they’re managing can have open dialogue. And not everybody is going to want to talk about their whole life, and that’s fine, but it opens the door.

And, at minimum, managers can direct people to the right resources and help them know what’s there from the organization. But, at maximum, managers become coaches that actually help people improve their lives, give them some advice, and connect them to the right other people who might be on the same path as them.

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

Jim Harter
I talked earlier about some barriers or risks to improving a culture from maybe struggling to what we would call net thriving, where people in the organization not only have very positive views of their present life but also think the next five years will be even better. Those five elements I listed lead to that. But there are some barriers and they can kind of trick people, I think, a little bit.

Well, one of them, in particular, I’ll just list off a couple of them. One of them that I think maybe most commonly becomes a barrier are to assume that, “Our policies, programs, and perks will change your culture.” If that were the case, a lot of organizations wouldn’t have culture problems. I think policies, programs, and perks are very important but they won’t necessarily change your culture. What you need to change your culture are managers who are well skilled to lead other people because they’re, again, the ones closest to the lives in their organization.

And so, having poorly skilled managers is another big risk. And so, upskilling managers to move from boss to coach, I think, is really important. And that involves integrating several things that are kind of disparate in organizations right now. Over here, you might have a wellness program that’s offered to people. Over here, you might have employee engagement survey and program. Over here, you might have performance management. And over here, you might have learning and development. That boss-to- coach journey needs to bring all those things together so it makes sense to managers and so that it also leverages the strengths of each person. It’s a strengths-based journey where you’re starting off with who you are as an individual and building on top of that instead of trying to make everybody the same or trying to get people to become someone who they’re not.

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

Jim Harter
One of my favorite quotes is one that was attributed to the great Albert Einstein, but I actually looked it up, he actually said this in a more complex way, but, “Make everything as simple as possible but not too simple.” I’m a researcher, and the complexity is already there so, to me, one of the things I learned along the way is, “We’ve got to make sure that the research is A-accurate but also not too simple, but also applicable and useful to people.” So, I really like that quote.

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

Jim Harter
I’ve often referenced the Whitehall studies, the particular part of the Whitehall studies, were done over in Europe, where they tracked people longitudinally. And one subpart of those studies where they looked at mortality and heart disease and other future health issues. One subpart of that big study looked at workplaces, and they found that workplaces with better environments, they call it organizational justice, but workplaces with better environments, the concepts overlap with what we call engagement. Those better environments had lower risks of coronary heart disease and lower mortality rates, and they controlled for all sorts of things. So, I reference that a lot and I think it’s a really important research.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Jim Harter
I like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I think it just does an excellent job of bringing together two parts of wellbeing, the remembering self and experiencing self, which we talked about in wellbeing at work as well. I think it’s important to think about those two parts of how we experience life.

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

Jim Harter
This is kind of geeky but I leverage a lot Google Scholar and PubMed because they’re just great sources for finding things quickly and searching.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Jim Harter
I think that 10-minute power nap. I try to get it as many days as I can. It’s really important to kind of have a refreshing afternoon.

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

Jim Harter
Probably the one that I see quoted the most is “70% of the variance in team engagement is influenced by the manager.”

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

Jim Harter
You could go to Gallup.com and we have a whole series of new articles and findings coming out all the time, reports, or I’m on LinkedIn as well. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn, that’s another place.

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

Jim Harter
I would say make sure you know your strengths and have them clearly in mind, and the strengths of your coworkers. And one thing to build on that is you got to direct your strength at something. Make sure you have a minimum of one meaningful conversation per week.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jim, this has been fun. Thanks so much and much luck to you with all your good work on wellbeing.

Jim Harter
Thank you, Pete. Appreciate the invitation.

May 27
0

671: How to Make Change Happen Faster, Easier, and Better with Jake Jacobs

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Jake Jacobs reveals why organizational change doesn’t have to be difficult and provides  key levers that make the difference.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to keep change from becoming overwhelming 
  2. The hack to accelerate change 
  3. How leaders accidentally kill enthusiasm for change 

About Jake

Jake Jacobs helps organizations, teams, and individuals make monumental changes. He’s worked in 61 industries, from high tech to manufacturing. He’s consulted for 96 organizations, from Fortune 50 to community theaters and supported more than 210,000 people in changing strategy, creating cultures, and mergers and acquisitions. 

Jake has partnered with CEOs, front-line workers and middle management at Ford, Kraft and Marriott. He’s also helped create change in the City of New York, U.K.’s National Health Service, and the United States Army and Navy. 

Clients call Jake when they need faster, easier, better results. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

Jake Jacobs Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jake, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jake Jacobs
Thanks so much, Pete. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad to have you and I’ve got so many things I want to hear from you about how to leverage change but the first thing I want to hear from you is about your massive baseball card collection. What’s the story here?

Jake Jacobs
Well, first of all, we should tell your listeners it’s 45,000 cards, so for some people that’s considered massive; for others it’s just puny. But I started when I was about eight and just got the bubble gum and the packages, and then I hit about 15 and decided this was a potential way to send my kids to college at some point. And so I started ordering full sets and not opening them, which took the fun out of it but at 15 you’re kind of moving onto girls and other things. So, it sits actually in my parents’ basement, Pete, all 45,000. They’re not even with me. I moved into a house that I fell in love with a woman five doors down, so I can keep a ready eye on those cards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good. Now, 45,000 cards, how much space does that consume in a basement?

Jake Jacobs
It’s a healthy pile. It’s a healthy pile. I think it’d go about waist high. And if I did the splits, I’m not terribly flexible, but if I did the splits it’d probably be about that far wide.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. That’s substantial. And then, in the basement, are you worried about flooding? What’s the estimated value when you think on this collection here?

Jake Jacobs
No, you haven’t met my father so there’s no flooding in that basement, brother. And I do have several Mickey Mantles and one card when the Padres were going to move to Washington. Nobody remembers this, but in ’72 they were going to move to Washington and they printed 500 cards with Washington on the card and then they decided not to go to Washington, so I’ve got one of those 500 cards. So, who knows? Neither of my kids ended up going to college.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, hotdog. There are just so much there in terms of do you view these as an economic-type investment or do you go and look at them from time to time? I’m just fascinated by people with big collections.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. On podcasts that I’m on, generally, Pete, I refer to the economic benefits because some people think that I’m crazy having that many baseball cards and possibly even immature. But in my place in the world, I have a heart connection to them because it brings me back to mark, row, sorting baseball cards, putting rubber bands around them with the teams in little pieces of paper, and so I don’t need to open them, and I figure, yes, they’d be worth more if I don’t open them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Fun. Well, so now we’re going to talk about leveraging change. I don’t have a great segue there. Just as sometimes teams change locations and then don’t change locations, some organizations fail to follow through with their changes.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, can you give us the rundown on when it comes to change in organizations, how often do those changes succeed versus fail and what’s behind that?

Jake Jacobs
Well, if you go by the Ready Reports, and in this is in the Harvard Business Review, this is in the Sloan journal, there’s all kinds of books that had been written on this, and the common number is 70% fall short of the objectives they set out to achieve. So, that doesn’t mean that they fell on their face, it just means that what set on to achieve, they didn’t. This is going to sound odd, but I actually, in 35 years of doing this work and had great mentors so this is not all on me, I had some of the mentors who started my field of organizational change, but I haven’t had a client disappointed.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jake Jacobs
After all that time and all that work. And I think part of it, Pete, goes back to like a “Never say no” attitude. So, if we haven’t gotten done what we need to then we’re not done with the work that we set out to achieve. And so, that notion of continuous improvement and hanging in there, and so when I work with clients, we get very clear on the outcomes at the beginning and what the deliverables are, and that’s what we work to. And I don’t have a clock going. Some consultants track things by time, I track things by outcomes. So, if we’re short of the outcomes, then there’s work to be done.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay, cool. Well, sounds like a good consultant work. Good stuff. Well, so then you’ve packaged a good bit of your learnings and insights when it comes to change in your book, Leverage Change: 8 Ways to Achieve Faster, Easier, Better Results. So, can you maybe hit us with a power punch to start. What’s a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made in your decades of work on change when it comes to change? Like, what’s something most of us don’t know but should know about this?

Jake Jacobs
Sure. So, Pete, what I would say is that you, your listeners, people who’ve written about change, studied change, practice change, both been changed and changed others, that’s what they focus on is, “What’s going to be different? What’s changed? What’s going to be different?” And at face value it makes sense. I mean, it’s what you’re trying to accomplish so why wouldn’t you focus on it?

I talk with my clients about what not to change. Now this is a different perspective. It’s what I call a paradoxical approach. So, each of the levers in this book states a common problem that organizations and people bump up against when they’re trying to bring about successful change. And then I have a lever, or a strategic action, a high-impact action, people can take to remedy that problem.

So, in organizations where there’s too much change, a lot of people talk about change fatigue, it’s like, “Oh, there’s one more coming down the pipe,” and what people hope for is, “This, too, shall pass. So, maybe we can get another leader and survive this change effort.” And I have a lever that’s called “Pay attention to continuity,” so what not to change.

And what I tell clients, very simply, is to make a list of all those changes that are going to occur in their organization. And they make a list, it’s a couple of flipcharts long, and it gets a little depressing in the room because it’s overwhelming. You’re surrounding yourself by all of these things that you’ve got to do differently. Then I tell them, “All right, we’re going to change gears. Now, what I’d like you to do is make a list of all those things that are going to stay the same, that are based on continuity. This time I want you to make the list twice as long.”

Well, people have a lot of ideas once they start thinking about what’s going to keep going the way that it’s always been, whether it’s who they work with, how they get paid, where they work, I mean, all kinds of things stay the same. But once they see this continuity lever, it shifts the energy in the room, it shifts the purpose that people have, how driven they are going to work. It changes the organization.

And I think that all of this focus on change is good and right, and it’s half the story. And it’s like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together with half the pieces. You get a great picture of what’s on half that front of the board but you’ve missed half of reality. And so, that’s one that I think has been really powerful with people that I’ve worked with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I mean, that sounds powerful right there in terms of just the feelings you get, when everything is changing, is kind of uncomfortable. It’s sort of like a rising sense of, I don’t know, dread, anxiety, overwhelm.

Jake Jacobs
Those are good words.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you think about all the stuff that’s going to stay the same, it almost feels like after that it’s like, “Oh, no big deal. Okay, so I still got the same boss, I still got the same colleagues, I still get paid the same amount at the same frequency, I go to the same office, I use the same computer. Oh, but a couple of the software programs we’re using to insert inventory orders, or whatever, is going to be different? Okay.” It’s like, “What are we so stressed out about? Game on.”

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. And it really is I think it’s an emotional thing. I think that change goes to the heart of empowerment. And I’ve had clients tell me, “Everybody minds being changed and that people don’t necessarily mind change.” And so, if I’ve got my hands on the steering wheel and I’m starting to make some decisions about my future and I see that some of those are repeating the past, the way I describe it is that people find much firmer footing on that continuity side of the cliff, if you will, and they get a much firmer push-off into the unknown future. And so, you can be a lot more confident about how far you’re going to get because you’ve paid attention to the continuity.

So, when I even have executives give townhalls or they do communications, I had a client once that literally, in the working sessions that we held, it was about a rapid growth strategy and they needed to change a lot of things about how they did business and their roles and relationships and all kinds of stuff. And, in the meeting itself, he made sure that every time they worked on an issue around change, they worked on the same side of the issue but dealing with continuity.

And it was a very powerful session because it gave people permission at some basic human level to reclaim what was theirs. And I think that envisioning and creating our future is the most powerful thing that we can have and making that possible by reminding people of the things that are going to stay the same makes a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, heck, Jake, let’s just get into it. That’s one lever and that’s beautiful. You’ve got eight of them. So, you tell me, should we just maybe do a quick overview and then dig deep into perhaps two or three more that make a world of difference for a lot of folks?

Jake Jacobs
Sure. I’ll tell you what the problems are that people bump up against and then just a short bit on the lever because I think there are a few that can lead to immediate action that people can take. Levers can be used by individuals, teams, organizations. They can be used with existing methods that people already have in place, and it’s like, “No, no, don’t give that up. Build on it and turbocharge it.”

They can be used at the beginning of a change effort or in the middle. They can even be used as informal tools where you don’t have a formal change effort but you’re just looking to do business a new way because the subtitle of the book says, 8 Ways to Achieve Faster, Easier, Better Results. So, if you’re into faster, easier, better results, these are good things for you.

And let me say one quick thing, Pete, because people may wonder, “Why levers? Like, what does this mean?” And it comes from a story about Archimedes who was a 3rd century BC Greek mathematician, and he was known for describing the power of leverage by saying, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and, single-handed, I shall move the world.”

And so, I believe people can move their worlds in the arena of change by taking these levers and putting them under with the right results with a fulcrum and making change, something that can be faster, easier, and better.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. All right. Well, let’s hear some levers. Well, problems and levers.

Jake Jacobs
So, “Change takes too long.” Now this is one that you hear a lot from leaders and there is a lever, and I think I can talk more about this, which is “Think and act as if the future were now,” right? That’s number two. We’ve got one, “People reject your approach because it’s not invented here.” So, a lot of people will say, “Have you ever done this in my industry? Have you ever done this with an organization my side? Have you ever done it…?” And the answer to that is “Design it yourself.” There’s a lever that talks about “Taking the best of what you’ve used and actually looking back at your own organization’s capabilities with change and putting that into place.” So, design it yourself.

There’s “People don’t know enough to make good decisions.” In a lot of organizations, leaders appear to be making decisions that don’t make sense to frontline employees, and frontline employees are taking actions that leaves to throw their hands up. And so, this whole notion about not knowing enough, I have a lever called “Create a common database,” and it addresses this directly. And I’ve got a great story about that one with a client, too.

Then we’ve got “All change efforts must begin from the top.” So, this is one of my favorite ones because every consultant will come in and they will say, “Start with the senior executive team, get them on board, then cascade this through the organization. One needs to be transformed before they transform others. This is the way it goes.” Well, I say start with impact, follow the energy. So, that means start where you can make a difference and then follow where people want to do the work. And that’s a very different model than the waterfall approach that’s quite common.

So many ask, “What’s in it for me?” So, anybody who’s been in an organization may recognize the “WIIFM” way of talking about this, that’s, “What’s in it for me?” laid out in letters. So, the “What’s in it for me?” a lot of people see this as a problem, asking the question, like selfish, like there’s something wrong with the person asking it. And I look and I say, “No, this is a normal human reaction. This is not unreasonable to be asking ‘What’s in it for me?’”

So, the lever that I developed to address this is called “Develop a future people will want to call their own.” And if I developed a future that I want to be part of, then the “What’s in it for me?” question comes off the table, no longer is an issue. People get to only do their routine work of their daily job. Now I’m not saying that that’s unimportant but what I’m saying is that people yearn to make a significant contribution in their lives whether it’s in their places of worship, in their families, in their communities. It’s also true at work. And so, finding ways for people to make a meaningful difference is another one of these levers.

And then the last one. So, “People’s plates are already full.” You hear this all the time at organizations, they’re like, “I don’t want to take on change. I’ve already got enough to do.” And I have a lever that reframes this to say, “Make change work part of daily work,” that it shouldn’t be another item on the agenda, it shouldn’t be the meeting on Friday afternoon. You should be looking at it every day in everything you do, and that will actually change both your paradigm of what’s going on but also your experience of it.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to this extra bolt-on thing, it is rather the thing.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah, and it’s part of it. I had a client that was a team and they were looking at improving their performance, and they did an assessment and I was working with them instead of somebody else, and so they were like, “Well, let’s put a sub-team together, a committee, and they’ll study this,” and all this extra work that people resisted.

And I said, “No, no, let’s make this part of your weekly meeting. Every week we’re going to do something that improves your performance, whatever it may be.” And we started out taking part of the next meeting with feedback and the boss getting feedback first, and deciding what to do differently. But rather than separating change as “Another event, another item, that I got to deal with,” make it part of daily work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, so let’s hear about the common database. You said you’ve got a great story there. Let’s hear it.

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this was in a merger and acquisition. And in that merger and acquisition, they needed to get a lot of people on board with the culture change. One of the organizations, I’m not going to be mentioning the organizations, but was a little slower, a little less rigorous, and worse-performing, and the other one was on the better side of that coin. So, what we needed to do was get everybody up to speed on what was going on with the merger and acquisition.

What we had were meetings. This actually took place around the world 200 people at a time but they don’t have to. You could do this with 10 people around a table. But what we did is we taught the frontline people about convertible bonds and debt and floating interest rates and all these things that the CFO and their people should be paying attention to, but what they were asking of these frontline people would not make sense unless they understood these business terms.

And so, they got a mini-MBA as part of these sessions. And that’s about people knowing enough to make good decisions. And so, that common database, it’s different for everybody. I do these LinkedIn videos, and one of them that I put up recently was “Do you know something that somebody else should know? Don’t keep it a secret.” So, this basic question of, “Do I know something, Pete, that you should know to be able to do your job better?” then it’s my responsibility to reach out and make sure that you know it rather than being too busy with my own work or having these senior leaders say, “People aren’t getting on board.”

Well, they don’t have the information you do. They don’t understand what the payoff is if we make these numbers this year instead of next year, and how much money saved, and what their bonus could be, and all those questions, I think, in that situation, needed to be information everybody knew. So, you get a mini-MBA if you need it as part of the work that I do.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing, and I recall, boy, with my very first internships. My boss, Kevin, we were working in channel strategy for electrical components in terms of like, “How can we get distributors to sell more of our stuff,” basically is what we’re trying to figure out.

Jake Jacobs
Good internship.

Pete Mockaitis
And he mentioned, numerous times, how he did a training in finance, and that he thought of it again and again and again with regard to what shows up with like the share price and the earnings and the expectations, and how things bubble up. And I thought that was interesting in that that’s not sort of directly essential to know that, and, yet, everything you hear from the CEO just makes a bit more sense forever when you have that internalized. And I want to hear you elaborate on how the frontline workers understanding the convertible bonds improved what they were doing.

Jake Jacobs
Well, for one thing, it shifted their motivation immediately because if you understand that if you pay off that debt sooner, you save money for the company. And that money for the company, yeah, it’ll go into innovation, and it’ll go into next year’s budget, but some of it was going to go into their pocket. So, understanding the relationship between how fast they paid this debt off and what they could buy at Christmas was fundamental. They didn’t understand that.

And once they understood that the floating interest rate was there and why was it that they paid so much for this other company if it was underperforming, they understood what it meant to have those assets and what it meant to open new markets that they weren’t in previously on a global scale. And so, rather than just being US-based, they diversified their risks by going global and they diversified their customer base.

And all of these things which could’ve been on the rumor mill, which is very efficient, it’s one of the most effective communication strategies any organizations had, but around the rumor mill they were like, “We paid all this money for this company, and why did we? Look, they can’t even do their regular jobs right.” And that was the scuttlebutt on the street. And when they understood what that new business made possible for them, it made a lot more sense.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool in terms of immediate motivation for your compensation this year and what you can do as well as I think just enhancing some trust forever in terms of, “Okay, our senior leaders aren’t morons. In fact, they got a deep understanding of this thing, I’m just now learning about, that has implications for what we’re up to, okay. And I see how I fit into this.” So, even if there is not that direct connection to, “What can I buy at Christmas?” there’s a huge, I think, emotional energy lift that occurs there. So, that’s beautiful. Thank you.

Jake Jacobs
Sure. One other thing I’ll just jump in with, Pete, this is not just about people who don’t have to do with finance getting financial information. This is like even about what I do on my daily job and having information. So, years ago, there was something called open-book management that came out, and in plants and factories, they would post numbers on production numbers, and people hadn’t seen those before. They didn’t know what they were.

So, it’s not always this big leap in logic to say, “Well, we should teach somebody who’s on an oil platform enough to get an MBA.” But it’s like within your own team, do you know things that other people know? And like I said, if you’re keeping it a secret and you’re frustrated that your team is not performing well, then, I don’t know, it was Michael Jackson who said, “Take a look in the mirror and you might realize that you’ve got a lot more power in this situation than you thought you did.”

Pete Mockaitis
And just while we’re here, what are some things leaders ought not to disclose to more junior team members? Is more transparency, more openness always better? Or are there some guidelines, or limits, or times less is…?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, there’s an approach that I take that really says you can have too much of a good thing, that there needs to be a balance between the sharing of information and the protection of information. And so, I worked with the Department of Defense and there was a lot of information they weren’t meant to share with other people. But if I have personal information about your performance, about the issues that you’re working on, about your family, about your development plan, there are a lot of things that I might know about you as a direct report of mine, and it’s probably not appropriate to be sharing all of that. It’s not helpful.

So, one of the things I would tell your listeners, and this answers the question simply, directly, and, I would argue, correctly, which is, “What do these people need to know to do a great job for this business and themselves?” And if you can answer yes to that 95% of the time, it’s a good thing to be talking about. And if sharing this is not going to make a profound difference for the performance of that team or that organization, like me talking about your personal issues, it doesn’t have a place in that, then they’re going to be safe sharing the information, and they’re going to be in a good place to protect what shouldn’t be shared.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, could you give us another story about a lever and action that made all the difference?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this is the one, when I talk about it, Pete, think it’s most unique. And it’s the one about change taking too long, that it being too slow, and leaders happen to complain about this a lot because they see what the benefits are, what needs to be different, and they’re trying to get things to move faster and they’re not for whatever reason. And I came up with this lever called “Think and act as if the future were now.”

So, what this means, it’s a paradigm shift, you got to think differently. Rather than the future being something that’s out there that will occur later, which sounds like common sense, what we’re going to do is we’re going to get some image of that future, however clear we can be, grab hold of that image of the future, pull it back into the present, and start thinking and acting as if that were our present now.

So, here’s a story that I have. There was a group of executives who were in deep debate, they had a day-long meeting set aside to figure out how to come up with a sales strategy in this new market, and they spent the whole morning arguing passionately about it, not as an unhealthy team. I mean, they listened to each other, but they came up with two answers to the question by lunch. And then people started to pick on sides and I could start to see this was not going to be a helpful way to spend the afternoon.

Now, this organization had said they wanted to create a participative culture. So, knowing my lever, I said to them, “Well, what could you do to create a more participative culture around this sales strategy issue?” Some of them looked around the table, didn’t know what to do, but there were a few of them who said, “Well, we’d probably get more salespeople involved in this conversation.” And that seemed to make sense to everybody.

So, they got out their version of a calendar, whatever it was at that point, and they started to make a meeting for next week when they would bring these people in. So, I saw this as a big, fat fastball down the middle, to go back to my baseball cards. And I thought, “All you got to do is swing,” because it’s going to make a lot of sense. And by that, I mean, I said, “Why wait for next week? You said you wanted to make a difference. And if you think and act as if the future were now, if you became that participative organization right here and right now at lunch, what would you do? Be in that future.”

And they said, “Well, we would grab the salespeople who were walking the halls here, and we would call up the ones that are out in the field, and we’d probably might even get some customers involved in this because we said we wanted to be bridging relationships with them.” And I said, “Great. Set it up for 1:00 o’clock, finish lunch, and let’s go to work.”

And what they found in the afternoon was this common database lever came into play, and a lot more people learned about what the issues were, and people on the frontlines talking about a new region of business, they had opened new regions before, they knew what was needed, they knew what was going to be a good or a bad idea.

And so, by learning that and by thinking and acting as if that participative organization was part of one that they were members of, they came up with an entirely different solution. It was a third solution that nobody in the morning had come up with but one that everybody in the room, customers included who were in on the phone, thought, “I got a lot more confidence in this being a path to take.” And what they found was they opened that new region faster than they’ve ever opened another region before, and it got to profitability faster than any region had before.

So, they came up with a good idea but it goes back, for me, to this, “Well, do we want to wait a week?” No, you lose time, you lose money, you lose energy, you lose political capital, all of these things. Why wait to get a better answer when you can start behaving as if you already knew it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. And I think it’d be really fun if you are a salesperson in that afternoon who are just kind of surprised, pulled into a room full of senior executives, like, “Oh, okay. Well, I feel kind of special and important right now.”

Jake Jacobs
A little nervous too.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And then that creates all sorts of good things in terms of some of the other levers with regard to they all make meaningful difference in that work and bringing it together.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely. Absolutely. And the levers, Pete, work together that way so you can focus on one and start to make gains on two more where you don’t have to think, “Well, let me find a meaningful way for people to contribute. Let me find a way to create a common database.” They were working on thinking as if the future were now, and they got freebies in terms of what the results were on those other two.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, can you tell us, Jake, what are some key things to not do when we’re trying to get a change going?

Jake Jacobs
Yes. So, one of them, I think, is the notion that people see change as something that happens to them instead of with them. And so, if you can engage people in conversations that matter about their future and talk about the meaningful difference that they can make, avoiding those conversations, being nervous about those conversations.

I once had a client, it was a plant, and they were going to close. It was in Cleveland, it was a casting plant, I won’t tell you the company, but it was going to close. And so, they held a big meeting, there were 300 people, to talk about it. And there’s one woman who stood up and she said, “Look, if closing this plant is going to create an opportunity for my son to work at the plant the next town over, I’m willing to close it here.” The place went dead silent and it’s like, “Was she serious?” I mean, that’s something that you’re not really supposed to be talking about. It doesn’t make sense to talk about and, yet, for her, she decided that that was important.

So, a lot of people, when they deal with change, emotion is something that’s off the table. You shouldn’t be talking about how people feel. And what she did is she put on the table, her bare to her soul, and I’ve worked with clients a lot of times. I had a leader once who basically said, “We’re not dealing with feelings; we deal with facts and figures in here.” And his people were dying because of the support they needed and they couldn’t even ask for it because they saw it as a sign of weakness.

And so, if you can create a culture in your team or your organization, where people can speak the truth, and including their emotions and put it on the table, even this woman, it was a safe enough environment for her to stand up and say, “Look, I’ll put my job on the line.” But I think, too often, we look at change as a project, and it’s got deadlines, and it’s milestones, and it’s got resources, and it gets very cold and calculated, and we’re dealing with human beings, and that’s not how we’re wired.

Sure, you’ve got to pay attention to all those things but if you’re not looking at people’s experience of the change and asking them, “What’s going to make it better?” you don’t have to have the answers, but if you ask them, they know most of the time what’s going to work better for them. And so, that ask, and then you got to listen. So, if you’re asking and don’t pay attention, you’re in worse shape than if you hadn’t asked in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
“Man, you don’t care.”

Jake Jacobs
Right. Charlie Brown, Lucy and the football, and Lucy pulls the football out and Charlie Brown ends up on his backside. It’s like asking people what they need and then ignoring it entirely – not smart.

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

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one is actually one that I’ve used a lot of ways in a lot of places. So, this comes from Thomas Jefferson and it goes back to 1820, and he said, “I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves. And if we think they’re not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is to not take it from them but to inform their discretion.”

So, I think what he was saying is if people don’t know enough to be smart about decisions they need to make, then educate them. Help them make good decisions. Don’t take those decisions away from them. So, I’m a big believer in engagement in organizations for all the right reasons. It’s not right all the time but in a lot of organizations today, we err on the side of not informing discretion. So, I think that’s less of an issue for most people to deal with, but I think Thomas Jefferson in 1820 had it pretty darn well.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. My mentor’s mentor, Ron Lippitt, people don’t believe this but actually, was a significant player in the invention of flipcharts, being if you want to claim the fame. Ron was at the University of Michigan, and what he studied was the difference between what he called preferred futuring and problem-solving. So, what he did is he gave two groups the same situation. One of them was to go about it as solving a problem, “What’s wrong? What do we need to do to fix it?” The other, he came up with this thing called preferred futuring, which said, “We’re in our future and what did we do to get there?”

And what they found at the end of this study was that people who were in the problem-solving group had less energy at the end, greater blame on other people, and they had reduction of pain solutions. So, it’s like, “It won’t be as bad if we do this than it normally would.” The preferred futuring group was the exact opposite. They were more energized at the end, they took more ownership of the situation, and they found innovative solutions to their problems.

So, this preferred futuring is actually the precursor or the father of all the visioning work done in organizations today. Until that time when Ron did this experiment, problem-solving ruled the day, and this was in the ‘40s, but he had the insight to say, “Maybe there’s another way.” And now it’s so commonplace, people would look at you like they had their heads screwed on backwards if you didn’t think about what the vision for your organization was going to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Jake Jacobs
So, for me, I think that my favorite book is a book called The Practical Theorist. It was written by a guy named Al Marrow, and it was written about the founder of my field of organization change, his name was Kurt Lewin. And The Practical Theorist was saying, Lewin said, “There’s nothing so practical as a good theory.”

So, to me, it’s very concrete because I love the story. It’s very useful for the listeners. He was in Germany before World War II, and they used to sit and have coffee at the cafes, if you can imagine, and students would sit with them, and they had this wondering about, “Would the waitress remember the bill better before or after it was paid?”

And what they decided was it was going to be before it was paid. Other people decided after. So, they asked the waitress what it was before and what it was after. She could remember to the Deutsche Mark before it was paid, she had no idea what it was afterwards. A woman named Bluma Zeigarnik took this on as her doctoral thesis and it became known as The Zeigarnik Effect.

And what it says is that people have greater recall and motivation to go back to unfinished tasks. So, don’t tie a bow around something at the end of the day or the end of a meeting. Keep it open and you will find that people would be more motivated to go back to it the next day, or the next meeting, than if you finished something at the end of the meeting. So, a lot of times there’s this mad rush to get through the last slide or to get the last agenda item covered, and I would say don’t. Leave it for next time and you’ll find a lot more energy to work on it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. And, likewise, I think, for, I don’t know, books, movies, stories, TV shows, like if the story is not quite finished, it’s like, “Ooh, what’s going to happen?” You got to know and you keep going.

Jake Jacobs
Absolutely. I think a lot of sitcom writers probably studied Kurt Lewin before they got into sitcom-writing.

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

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one for me is that I find that listening is the most powerful tool that I have at my disposal and it’s readily available anytime, place, or with anyone. And when I say listening, I mean listening to see the world through their eyes. And so, I talk with my clients about four magic words that they can use whenever they’re in trouble. It’s like you get a little hot under the collar, you start breathing a little faster, you start interrupting the other person, like we all know what it looks like for our own version of that.

And I tell them, “As soon as you start to feel that happen, say, ‘Could you say more?’” And that gives an invitation to the other person that they have the floor still, and it creates a safe place for that person to go deeper into whatever it was that they were saying because you’re inviting them. So, when I give you an invitation, Pete, that says, “Could you say more?” you’re going to feel better about sharing it with me.

And the other thing it does is it interrupts that whole building of interruption and heat and breathing, all those things when we get a little ticked off. But when you say, “Could you say more?” well, one thing is they see Jake in their face saying, “Say it,” and hopefully your listeners will hear me next time they get in that situation. But it’s very practical advice. I think, like this guy who wrote the book “The Practical Theorist,” it’s like, “If you can’t put theory and put it into practice, then it’s not worth knowing in the first place.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget that you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. So, this one goes back to that lever about “Think and act as if the future were now.” I interviewed people to put on my website, clients, and half of them came back to me and said, “You know that thing you say about living in the future and making it happen today? That’s been really helpful.” And one of the people said, “Yeah, I went back to my team the next day and there was a guy, after I said that, who was like the chief engineer, had a whole list of things that he needed to start doing differently if he was going to operate and do business in new and better ways.”

And so, that has been something that a lot of people have come back to me and said, “You know, one thing, for sure, that I’ve taken away from my time with you is that quote and putting that quote into practice.”

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it one more time.

Jake Jacobs
“Think and act as if the future were now.”

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

Jake Jacobs
I would point them two places. One, my website JakeJacobsConsulting.com. The other thing that I would encourage them to do, if they’re not on LinkedIn, I’d get on it, but if they’re on it, look me up there, I’m Jake Jacobs. And I’ve got a short Jake on Change, two-minute videos, that I put up there, there’s articles, there’s quotes, there’s all kinds of materials because I believe you go into the world with open arms. And the more you share the more you receive. So, it’s really important to me to make sure that I continue to push my own thinking, and I continue to give whatever gifts I have to other people so it will help them create faster, easier, better results, whatever they may be working on.

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

Jake Jacobs
Yeah. I think that the final challenge is for them to picture a day when the results they’re working on for their change effort are achieved, for them to picture a day when somebody who’s been resistant to their change work comes up to them and says, “I’m really glad I got involved. I’m excited about the future we’re creating,” and to picture a day wherein their organization, faster, easier, better results just become the way of doing business. It’s not something special or different. It’s just the way that we operate.

And if they could sit back and picture those days when those things are happening, I think they end up getting pulled into the future more by what Ron Lippitt would call their preferred future or vision, and less of it is about getting mired trying to solve today’s problems. It’s much better to get pulled forward than pushed from behind.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jake, thank you. This has been a treat. And I wish much luck in all the ways you achieve faster, easier, better results.

May 24
0

670: The Four Keys to Leading Successful Virtual Teams with Darleen DeRosa

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Darleen DeRosa discusses how to build top teams and deliver high-impact work while leading from a distance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The quickest way to build trust in your team 
  2. How to ensure accountability with the ATC model 
  3. Simple, but effective ways to keep your team motivated 

 

About Darleen

Darleen DeRosa, Ph.D., is a consultant in Spencer Stuart’s Stamford office and a core member of the Life Sciences and Leadership Advisory Services practices. Darleen brings more than 15 years of consulting experience, with deep expertise in talent management, executive assessment, virtual teams, top team effectiveness and leadership development. Darleen works with leading companies to facilitate selection, succession management and leadership development initiatives. She is a trusted advisor to CEOs, CHROs and boards. 

Darleen earned her B.A. in psychology from the College of the Holy Cross and her M.A. and Ph.D. in social/organizational psychology from Temple University. Darleen is the co-author of Virtual Success: A Practical Guide for Working and Leading from a Distance (with Richard Lepsinger), as well as other book chapters and journal articles on leadership. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

Darleen DeRosa Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Darleen, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Darleen DeRosa
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for hosting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I’m excited to hear about Leading at a Distance insights. But, first, I want to hear about your love for deep-sea fishing.

Darleen DeRosa
I knew you were going to ask that. Well, people don’t know this and they’re often very surprised for whatever reason, I’m not going to read into that, but I love deep-sea fishing. And wherever I go, whether it’s Hawaii, here in Connecticut, we charter boats and we love to go fishing. And I probably go six or seven times a year. I don’t always catch anything crazy, I’ve never caught a marlin, or anything fantastic, but it is something that I love to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I have fond memories. I think I did deep-sea fishing exactly once for a bachelor party and the father of the bride fell into the water and it was a heroic rescue, so that story. You make memories when you go on those trips.

Darleen DeRosa
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear, we’re talking about leading at a distance. Can you share what’s perhaps one of the most surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while researching this stuff and putting things together?

Darleen DeRosa
That’s a great question. And so, what’s very interesting is I wrote a book on virtual teams in 2011, and my co-author, Jim Citrin, keeps reminding me that that is the most, at that time, it was a very obscure topic even though, as you know, companies have been working remotely for quite some time, especially big companies that are more complex and more global in nature.

So, what was surprising, I guess most surprising to me, is that a lot hasn’t changed. Yes, technology, of course, has evolved and business is more complex and more dynamic, certainly, but, in general, what’s fascinating is that a lot of the best practices that we learned way back 10 years ago actually hold true now and have just become even more important. And so, that’s very interesting to me that there’s not a lot of major profound differences in what we found.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is noteworthy in and of itself. You’d think that we, as workers, would have learned a couple of lessons in a decade. So, share with us, what are some of those kind of foundational things that are still at play and maybe overlooked?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah. So, it’s interesting, there’s a number of things, and we try to make the book really practical. What I really wanted to do here, was have a practical hands-on guide for anyone, anyone who’s managing telecommuters, whether you’re managing remote teams, whether you’re a CEO who’s managing a large complex organization with distributed employees. So, we wanted to make it very pragmatic.

And, interestingly, the topics ranged from everything like, “How do you build trust remotely?” to “How do you coach and hold people accountable who you don’t see?” But one of the things that hasn’t changed, as I was mentioning, even from our early research in 2010, is what we found is that, back then anyway, the best-in-class leaders who are managing remotely do a great job balancing the relationship side of things, the interpersonal components, with the tasks and sort of execution-oriented behaviors. In other words, they don’t overly weigh any one of those and they’re really good at managing that big continuum. So, it’s a big complex role.

And what we do know is that managing virtually is hard. It’s harder than managing people who are co-located in the same room. And leaders have really had to adapt a lot, especially in this current environment where you’re leading through technology, but the best-in-class leaders really do a great job at that, balancing that continuum, and we call that RAMP. So, we frame it as the best-in-class leaders are really good at relationships, which is the R; they hold people accountable, which is the A; they know how to motivate people through a screen basically, people they don’t see, or through a phone; and they can use process, things like technology, which is the P, to engage and try to replicate what they would do if they were in person.

So, that’s one framework that a lot of our clients find practical but like the fact that it’s research-based and comes from data on what differentiates best-in-class virtual leaders.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you tell us a cool story about a virtual leader who was struggling and then employed some of this stuff and had a transformation?

Darleen DeRosa
Absolutely. So, we have a number of those but one of the things, and, again, it’s surprising how we fall back on some of our bad behaviors, and we all do this. We all succumb to sort of those bad habits. Especially, in COVID now, I think people have gotten better but we were working with the CHRO of a global hospitality company and he was so focused on results and he had a very large distributed team. And one of the things that he wasn’t really cognizant of was, “How do you build relationships and trust with your team members but also with one another?”

And so, we talked to him about, “Here are some ways on that RAMP continuum to focus on building trust, and how you infuse collaboration and relationships from a distance.” And so, he started doing simple things, things that you would think, “Well, we should all be doing that anyway.” Like, once or twice a week, he blocked time in his calendar proactively to just give people feedback. He had recognition sessions to thank people on the team. He also would call people, and he actually called these care calls, where he would randomly call people and just check in, no agenda, no real need, but just to say “Hey, how can I support you?”

And his engagement scores and the team’s performance, over a period of time, of course, changed dramatically and were much more positive. So, again, it’s a good example of if we focused too much on any one thing, and we’re not very balanced in how we engage and lead, it can become almost like a strength overdone.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear some of those best practice approaches there for each of those four components: the relationships, the accountability, the motivation, and the process. What are some top things people should start doing and stop doing?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah. So, on relationships, and this is by far, when we asked people, “What is the biggest challenge you’re facing?” in our most recent survey for the book, it was that sense of connectivity. So, in other words, if I were to bump into you in the hallway, Pete, or in the lunch room, we could have that spontaneous interaction, and virtually you don’t have that. It’s lacking.

And so, some of our clients have started using apps like Donut, which sounds a little funny, but what it does is it randomly pairs employees with one another all around the world for 15 minutes once or twice a month, and it allows you to create that spontaneous interaction. And some people might think that’s a little strange but it really does replicate, and, again, it’s one example of replicating what you would do if you were in person. So, having a lot of these virtual lunches, building time into your meetings for watercooler conversation.

The chief technology officer that we interviewed at Starbucks for the book, talked about she started using fun warmups at the beginning of her calls, playing Kahoot!, doing Wordles, or Pictionary, putting people in breakouts to do really fun activities. It’s those simple things that really go a long way for relationships. So, those are just a few examples. Again, simple but highly effective.

Pete Mockaitis
And I don’t think I’ve ever played Kahoot! before. What does this consist of?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah, they’re like little quizzes and you could make them up. They’re all random topics. They’re just little fun games. And, again, it sounds crazy but it’s just something to get people to get to know one another, because when you’re building trust virtually, it takes a lot longer. So, what we tell leaders is, “The one thing you can control when you’re working virtually is what’s called task-based trust.” In other words, the most important thing as a leader when you’re managing remotely is to help your people get to know one another and find that they are credible and they’re going to deliver on commitments, and that’s really important.

And, actually, this trust is different in a virtual setting. So, basically, invest in building that task-based trust early on and it will go a long way because it takes a long time to build interpersonal trust when you’re not face to face. So, that’s just, again, a very simple technique but something that best-in-class virtual leaders consistently apply.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to building task-based trust, I guess I’m not quite seeing the connection between how the games accomplishes that. Or are there additional practices for accelerating that?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah. Well, it gets people to know familiarity with your background, who you are as a person, your experiences. So, a lot of the games can be around getting to know people so it sounds like it’s task-based but the idea is that it helps build credibility and are simple ways, again, everything together builds trust. But creating fun, not focusing so much on the work, and focusing more on the people is really, really critical.

So, again, we’re not telling people, “Don’t focus on interpersonal trust virtually,” but if you want to get the biggest ROI, initially, helping people learn about one another’s background through, again, it could be fun games, it could be little polls in your virtual meetings, those things have a tremendous impact on trust.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s interesting, and maybe it’s a matter of the terminology we’re using here, but it seems like if we’re getting to know each other better, that’s fun. It has some connections. I know there’s a face and a name and a person and a story behind that. I guess I’m not quite seeing how that makes me think, “And that guy is going to rock out and deliver on the thing I’m going to ask of him or her.”

Darleen DeRosa
Well, yeah, it definitely is the fun component and that’s what I was starting to talk about early when I mentioned the relationship-building piece, the R in RAMP. But, again, it’s almost like it has a dual purpose. So, when people are playing those fun games, especially if people are just getting to know one another, because, basically, no matter what, people are sharing their experiences, who they are through these polls, these chat exercises.

A lot of our clients do fun chats in their meetings, things like, “What’s the first you can’t wait to do after COVID?” “What’s your favorite hobby?” So, it is a way to get to know one another, and sometimes the questions are around projects, which is very linked to task-based trust. So, again, when we think of trust virtually, it’s the combination of task-based trust and interpersonal trust that matters, but it’s easier and quicker to focus on the task-based trust early on. And you can do that through building people’s credibility and helping people get to know their colleagues.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And then when it comes to accountability, how do we make that all the better?

Darleen DeRosa
So, this is actually a pretty hot topic virtually because, as you can imagine, it’s hard to know what people are doing. And so, the biggest mistake that we see leaders make is they don’t trust and empower their employees. Now, COVID has been a great example because, in many industries, productivity is actually up right now. It could be masking extreme burnout and fatigue, which is actually well-publicized right now, but, in all seriousness, many people are productive. And I think this COVID environment right now has led some leaders who were very skeptical about working virtually to realize that it actually can work.

And one mistake that leaders make is they’re so focused on when people work, “Is it 9:00 to 5:00? Are they available? Are they doing something with their kids when they’re supposed to be working?” and that actually is a myth, and people will be productive, but you have to empower them and find ways to check in and hold them accountable, of course, but just by empowering them alone, you get higher levels of productivity.

So, you’ve got to change your metrics with accountability. You can’t look at when people are working. You have to look at their output, which is much more important. And that’s why many companies have now started to really change the way they measure performance because it’s much different in a virtual setting.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, the clock is not going to be your guide in terms of seeing, “Are people performing well?” And so, what are some of the best approaches to do those check-ins and see the output flowing?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah, some companies use software and different technologies to help measure output but, in general, the advice that I give leaders is, “You have to work harder at setting very clear goals for people.” And one of the things we know is more challenging virtually is making sure that people understand the priorities. So, in a more dynamic virtual setting, priorities shift, and if you’re not seeing people in the office where you could do a quick check-in with them, you’ve got to find ways to replicate that virtually.

So, setting clear goals and then being clear about what good looks like, what’s the deliverable, what’s the timeline, and then having checkpoints to actually check in with people. And we call this the ATC model. Again, lots of models today, Pete. But we call this the ATC model because it’s simple and people get it. And what we tell people is, much like an air traffic controller who’s managing numerous flights, “You’ve got to help your people manage a tremendous workload and priorities that are shifting fairly quickly.”

So, the A is really being clear about what it looks like, what’s the product, and being super clear about that with people up front. So, what’s the action and who’s accountable? Sometimes we see leaders say, “The team should do this,” but no one really knows who’s actually on point for that and who’s taking full ownership. The T is timetable, so, “Is it next quarter? Is it May 1st?” Like, what’s the real deadline and being very clear about that.

And then, finally, checkpoints, which is the most important, in my opinion, is, depending on the tenure and experience of that employee, you may need to check in with them more or less frequently, but actually have a conversation with the person to say, “Here’s what we’re going to be working on. When should we touch base? Would it make sense to touch base in two weeks? Next week?” And for people who you’ve known for a long time and might be high performers, you might not need as many checkpoints. For others, where this might be a newer task or developmental task, you might need to check in more frequently. So, the ATC model is a very simple way to make sure that you’re setting people up for success virtually.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you mentioned some software tools, and I find that intriguing because I guess it will probably vary quite a bit based on what work you’re doing. But it’s really kind of hard to measure one’s true value-add contribution. I don’t know, like if I were to say, hey, lines of code as a metric, or words produced, or invoices processed, in some ways that can be counterproductive to have automated software kind of counting that sort of thing. So, what are the software solutions and what are they doing?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah, a lot of it is things like Teams, which now has a lot of like optionality in there for tracking projects and milestones and things like that. A lot of clients use Basecamp, as one example. But it’s less about tracking, like literally what you’re doing, and more about helping the team members stay on track together when they’re working virtually. So, it’s much more collaborative to help track and measure the team’s performance.

So, to store documents, to have the timeline up there, to keep track of things, to have version control for things that people might be working on together. So, technology has continued to evolve significantly, as you know, over the last decade, and I think it will continue to evolve even more in the next five or six years alone. So, those are just some simple things that some organizations are using but, clearly, depending on the role, the complexity of the job, and the industry, there’s a lot of variability.

Professional services, that’s not how we’re measured. It’s more we’re measured on how we deliver to clients. We’re measured on our productivity. But we have internal software to track that, just as one example.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about the motivation?

Darleen DeRosa
Yes, I love this topic because this is very challenging virtually. So, first of all, you’ve to set people up for success, but what we do know is that motivation takes on a different meaning virtually. It’s harder. Virtual colleagues and employees face very unique challenges. And you probably have seen this in this year alone where it’s particularly difficult for people because people are feeling isolated, there’s much less work-life balance with the blur between work and home being gone, so managers have to think differently and really try to be proactive at checking in with people.

People are exhausted and people are burnt out. Again, I’m making a generalization but this is pretty well documented in all the research. So, encouraging people to take breaks and schedule time for their own personal development is very important. Don’t have meetings just to have a meeting. Having meetings for status updates is one of my pet peeves and it’s very unproductive. Encouraging people to get off video. Non-stop video or that Zoom fatigue that you’ve probably read about, Pete, is real because it’s cognitively draining to sit there and stare at a camera all day.

So, encouraging people to take a walk and just talk on the phone is really good. Again, these are just a few simple ideas but really checking in with people, depending on where they are in their own personal development journey is important, and finding time and encouraging people to make time for non-work interaction, the relationship piece that I talked about, is really important.

The other thing that’s very important virtually is you’ve got to recognize people. So, clearly, recognition is important but many leaders are so busy that they’re not doing it proactively. So, one tip I’ll give to senior leaders that I’m coaching is, “Block time in your calendar, even if it’s once a month, and call it your time to recognize people. Send him notes. You can send gift cards,” a Grubhub Gift Card, for example. Again, it doesn’t have to be monetary. Just send someone a text to thank them. It’s simple things that really go a long way to recognize the team.

One of my clients, it’s a pharma company, they have guest speakers come in, they have recognition sessions where they actually get the team to talk about, like, a colleague who’s been helpful to them. And, again, it sounds really simple but these are critical drivers of motivation when you’re working remotely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about process?

Darleen DeRosa
So, process, the most simple thing about process is technology, that’s what we think about. So, there’s a bunch of processes that fit in the P but the one that’s probably most relevant here is match your technology to your task. So, I talked earlier about using technology well. What we learned is that best-in-class virtual teams don’t necessarily have the most sophisticated technology, they just know how to use it.

So, really, as a leader, what’s most important is if you’re going to have a meeting, don’t have a meeting for a status update, that’s just one simple example. Don’t use email to coach someone. And, again, it sounds crazy but I see this all the time. So, you’ve got to be very thoughtful when you’re working virtually about how you use technology appropriately depending on what your goal is and what you’re trying to accomplish.

So, if you’re going to have a tough conversation with someone or you’re going to give someone feedback, do it by video or phone, obviously. It has to be that high-touch environment. So, really being thoughtful about that and making sure that teams are not overwhelmed by technology, that everyone is using the same thing, that’s very important. So, those are just a few quick examples. But this idea of Zoom fatigue is very real.

And I don’t know if you’ve seen like the articles in Forbes, in Fortune, and the Times, HBR actually has an article on this. Basically, people are sick of video. And I think many organizations went to the extreme with video in COVID because they were unsure how to connect with people, but being thoughtful about video, encouraging people to take breaks, some of our clients are doing video-free Fridays, or video-free half days. So, for those of us who are on video nonstop, it actually really matters. So, being thoughtful about how people are working is really important.

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

Darleen DeRosa
So, I think one of my favorite quotes, is from this book Illusions by Richard Bach, and it’s this quote that says something like, not verbatim, but something like, “Every person, all the events of your life are there because you’ve drawn them there, and what you choose to do with them is up to you.” And I love that because, throughout my career as a psychologist, I really believe that we have some control over how we respond to things, how we handle stress, how we handle all of those types of things that really build our resilience, so I’ve loved that quote even from more than a decade ago.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Darleen DeRosa
I think one of the ones that has been the most profound for me was one that what I read about in grad school, so a long time ago when I was doing my dissertation on virtual team work. And it was a study that looked at trust and how you build trust virtually. It’s exactly what I was talking about before. It was one of the first studies, it was pretty old at that time even, but it still rings true about, “How do you build that swift trust or that task-based task virtually?” and that it’s actually more important.

And that, again, it’s interesting because I never realized, way back then, how much of this would be part of what I do day to day many years later, this idea of studying virtual teams and helping leaders be more successful remotely.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite book?

Darleen DeRosa
One of the books that I love that has been profound in my CEO succession practice is The Leadership Pipeline mostly because I’ve always been fascinated with “How do you identify high-potential leaders?” So, besides the virtual team stuff that I do, that’s a huge part of my work and I’ve been fascinated with, “How do you identify people who have potential to do more? What does that really look like?” and then building assessments around that. So, it is a bit specific but it also has been a big part of the work that I’ve been doing over the last decade.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m just kind of curious. And what are some of the top telltale signs that someone has great potential?

Darleen DeRosa
Yeah, that’s a good question and one that we continue to try to evolve on, Pete, over time. But definitely, people who take initiative, which isn’t a surprise; people who are engaged and advocate for their organization; people who have learning agility, which is one of the most important predictors of leadership potential, so someone who’s put in unfamiliar situations who can really thrive; and then, lastly, someone who’s self-aware. So, self-awareness and then they’re able to flex and adapt and learn very quickly. So, I think, again, these are just some of the dimensions that I think are quite well documented when we think about what really defines people who have the potential to do more over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Darleen DeRosa
Honestly, right now, video conferencing because, besides all the virtual team stuff that I do, I am on video every day. So, using Microsoft Teams and other technologies I use constantly. But the other thing that I do, and I’ve been using a lot more, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with these tools, but in a lot of my training work where I do leadership development with top teams and companies, we’ve been experimenting and using collaborative software technologies to help teams brainstorm, share ideas, whiteboard, and also have fun while they’re working together in our leadership development virtual classrooms.

So, we’ve been using tools like Mural and Miro which are really fun, innovative, collaborative tools that help people. It almost replicates what you do if you had people around the conference room table, so I love those two.

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

Darleen DeRosa
I think one of the things, this was in an article that I wrote in the Wall Street Journal years ago, and it was this idea of out of sight but not out of mind. And it’s the notion, at that time when I was writing this article, it was something that I said and is now very widely quoted. And, at the time, I was writing about “How do you, as a leader, own your career? And even if you’re not in the same office or geography as your boss, how do you win over a boss who’s remote?”

And I started talking about this idea of out of sight but not out of mind. You’ve got to work a little harder at it. And I do really believe, and it’s a great lesson for all of us, that being virtual or hybrid in this kind of some of us in the office, some of us not, really requires more initiative and ownership, as like us managing our time, managing our calendars, and taking initiative to reach out and not just rely on our boss or manager reaching out to us. And I think that’s really important.

And I think it’s actually more true than ever because most organizations, about 80% of companies, are going to land in what we call a hybrid environment where you’ve got some people in the office and some people at home. And, frankly, that is the most challenging environment to manage in because of lack of equity, some people feeling like they’re not next to their boss, they might not get cool projects so they might not get promoted. So, that is the hardest model to manage in but it’s going to be the one where most organizations land.

And so, I think this idea of trying to create an even playing field is going to be really critical for all of us as leaders in the next decade.

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

Darleen DeRosa
They can go to my LinkedIn page. They can go to the SpencerStuart website. We’re actually going to be putting up some pretty cool self-assessments and technologies, or quizzes rather, that people can use as the book launches. So, the SpencerStuart has a Leading at a Distance page that people can go to as well.

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

Darleen DeRosa
I would say get feedback. That is something that I believe is true. Again, super simple but let me end with this one statistic. In our first study in 2011, this was based on 50 global virtual teams that we ended up publishing in the book, more than two-thirds of the leaders were not seen as effective by their boss and other stakeholders, and they had no idea.

So, the biggest learning, again, under this idea of taking initiative and really owning your own career, it’s important to ask for feedback, and most of us don’t do it because we don’t want to hear it necessarily, but even if you don’t want to hear it, people might be thinking it. And so, what I would encourage us to do is to step outside of our comfort zone and check in with people more because it’s more important in a virtual setting where you can actually course-correct and make some improvements.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Darleen, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best as you lead from a distance.

Darleen DeRosa
All right. Thanks so much, Pete. Appreciate it.

May 20
0

669: Making More Impact as a Middle Manager with Scott Mautz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Scott Mautz returns with best practices for leading up, down, and across your organization.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The mindset for middle management success
  2. How to keep progressing with the 50/50 rule
  3. The trick to giving excellent feedback 

About Scott

Scott Mautz is a high-octane speaker expert at igniting peak performance and deep employee engagement, motivation, and inspiration. He’s a Procter & Gamble veteran who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses, an award-winning/best-selling author, faculty at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education, a former top Inc.com columnist (over 1 million monthly readers), and a frequent national publication and podcast guest. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Scott Mautz Interview Transcript

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

Scott Mautz
Fantastic to be back. I’m hoping to help you be even awesomer-er, I guess. How many E-Rs is that? Yeah, I’m looking forward to it, Pete. Thanks for having me back, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I certainly think you’ve got the goods to pull that off. And so, you’ve got a new work coming out, it’s a book Leading from the Middle: A Playbook for Managers to Influence Up, Down, and Across the Organization. Boy, that sounds very necessary. Can you tell us, maybe as you’re putting this together, any real big surprises or counterintuitive discoveries that came to light?

Scott Mautz
Yeah. Well, I have more than I could possibly share with you. I’ll do that by opening it up with a story, if that’s cool with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, please.

Scott Mautz
So, it has to do with why the heck did I write this book to begin with, why focus on middle managers when a lot of the publishing industry is so much more focused on C-suite, or if you just started, you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. What about these middle managers? So, I kind of fell in love with the topic, I have to do this, but based on this particular story.

So, I’m keynoting for a client, and I’m going to disguise the fact, to protect the innocent. Let’s say it was in Minnesota, Upstate Minnesota, I’m keynoting in the company’s headquarters and if you’re any good at keynoting at all, people will come up to you and want to talk to you afterwards. So I’m doing that.

And my handler comes up. He comes up and says, “Hey, Scott, I got to get you to the airport so I’m going to pull you away from the crowd. Come with me.” Okay, I follow him.

He winds me through this office he was taking me through a shortcut to get out the side door where the cab was waiting for me, and he says, “Okay. Oh, by the way, I got to grab one more thing. Just stay right here for a second.” We were right by his desk. And, of course, so what would any person do? I just decide I’m going to snoop while I’m standing there at his desk because, what else, I think he went to get water for me or something for the trip.

And on his desk, there’s literally nothing, Pete. It is blank except for three things: a piece of paper, I’m going to tell you about right now, a picture of a monkey, and the number five. So, when he comes back, I got to ask him about this, I mean, “What? Dude, you got three pieces of paper and no work on your table. What’s going on? Can you explain these things to me?”

So, he hands me the piece of paper, and it’s something I want to share with you now, he said, “This is something that’s been distributed to us that kind of encapsulates the spirit of what it’s like to be a middle manager here. I’m going to read it to you.” Actually, this was what they were handed from higher management in his company which shall not be named. It was directives. It said, Middle Manager Directives, “Lead but keep yourself in the background. Build a close relationship with your staff but keep a suitable distance. Trust your staff but keep an eye on them. Be tolerant but know exactly how you want things to function.” I’ll read just one more, “Do a good job of planning your time but be entirely flexible with your schedule.”

I don’t know how this list, of these things that just didn’t add up, these contradictions, I said, “Okay, so that’s what it’s like to be a middle manager.” He said, “Oh, yeah, there’s no doubt.” And I said, “Okay. Well, wait a minute. What about this number five?” He said, “Oh, that refers to a study that I got from Stanford University.” He handed it to me and I was flipping it through it, he summed it up, and he said, “The study shows, it’s actually a five-year study that’s why the number five, and the study shows that taking a middle manager that’s not very good and replacing them with even an average middle manager is more productive than adding a net new person to the team.”

So, the story reminded him of the value of middle managers on the day when it wasn’t going so well for him. And I said, “Okay, that’s great, dude, I’m getting a flavor of what it’s like to be a middle manager in your company. What about the picture of the monkeys?” We’re all waiting for that, the punchline. So, he hands me another study conducted by some researchers in Manchester, in the University of Liverpool where they were watching monkeys, a family of monkeys, or, actually, I think it was over 600 monkeys in total, across different families of monkeys, to study the hierarchy.

And they would study these monkeys and they would code their behaviors, just like either really, really aggressive, which would include like slapping behaviors and screaming and screeching, or nurturing behaviors like cuddling or picking the bugs out of each other’s hair. And then they collected the fecal matter of these monkeys, which I’ll leave that up to you, Pete. That’s not the job for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun job.

Scott Mautz
To measure the fecal matter for stress hormones, and here’s what they found. They found that the monkeys that were right in the middle of the hierarchy in the monkey tree, they weren’t the boss baboon or whatever and they weren’t the youngest little chimpanzee, the middle monkeys were the ones that were the most stressed out and had the poorest physical health by far because they had to manage in their hierarchy up, down, and across. And that really all summed up for me the net of what it means to be a middle manager.

It was surprising to me to learn this, you asked what was surprising, that, in truth, there’s kind of a stigma about it, isn’t it? It’s brought about by shows like The Office, the movie Office Space, the Dilbert cartoon. There’s a stigma to it and I’m surprised to find in my research how many people are yearning for inspiration to say, “Hey, it’s okay for me to be a middle manager,” and pound their chest with pride. That’s why I decided to write the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful, yes, in terms of there’s contradictions, you’re getting pulled in many directions, there’s a lot of stresses associated with it, and then you don’t get respect at times.

Scott Mautz
You don’t get many respects.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what a combo.

Scott Mautz
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, then what is to be done?

Scott Mautz
What is to be done? So many things can be done here. The first thing I would say is, to help your listeners understand, and I talk in the book about this acronym SCOPE. It spells out the categories of unique challenges that middle managers face. The S stands for self-identity problems. The C stands for conflict problems. The O stands for omnipotence problems, the expectation of knowing everything. The P and the E are physical and emotional problems associated with being a middle manager.

I’m just going to pick out one of those because the book goes into depth. But, Pete, most people say, “Well, the difficulty would be in middle managers is there’s so much to do. I have so many hats on that I’m exhausted all the time.” That’s the most common answer of why people believe it’s tough to be in the middle, and there’s truth to that. That’s undeniable. But what people may not know, and I was very surprised to find out in my research, is back to the number of hats that we have to wear as middle managers, therein lies the real reason of why it’s so difficult.

And that’s because when you wear so many hats, it creates a self-identity problem and it creates a problem with micro-switching, what neuroscientists call micro-transitions, whereby, because you wear so many hats, you have to transition very quickly from a deferential stance to your boss, to assertive mode with your employees, to collaborative mode with your peers, sometimes all in the same meeting, and you have to jump into the roles you weren’t expecting to play. Your boss shows up and, all of a sudden, “Oh, I got to go into boss-managing mode.” And you move from these high-power roles to low-power roles back and forth all day long, and it is exhausting.

So, I’m going to tell you what you do about that in a second, but isn’t that surprising to you at all? It surprised me that that’s the real core driver of what’s happening, why it’s so difficult here to be a middle manager.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I imagine that is one issue, but what’s intriguing is when you get that clarity and that bullseye, like, “This is the thing,” so that’s hugely valuable to come to in the research. So, how do you deal with them?

Scott Mautz
Yes, so what do you do about it? So, here’s what we found. Our research of over 3,000 successful middle managers, Pete, we found that the most successful middle managers had a mindset for how to deal with all the hats that they have to wear that exhaust them because of all the switching. And what we found is the most successful middle managers, they kind of reframe it. They thought of the micro-transitions that you have to make not as segmented but as integrated into one job that you’re uniquely suited to pursue.

Or, here’s another reframe I heard of that I thought was brilliant, so brilliant I wrote it down and it made it in the book. One successful middle manager said, “God, all those roles I have to play, it’s a privilege. My job is to think like an engineer but feel like an artist.” And I thought, “Wow, that makes a lot of sense,” and he went on to explain this, like, “To be a middle manager and effectively manage up, down, and across, you really have to be skilled at being process-oriented and driven like an engineer with detail and follow through in plans and implementation. At the same time, you have to be able to feel like an artist and have empathy for people, and care, because, in truth, when you’re a middle manager, you’re at the intersection of everything horizontal and vertical in the company. And you have the opportunity to be an empathy engine for the entire company.”

And the best middle managers, that’s exactly what they are. Not only are they the backbone of the organization, something to take pride in, but they’re the centerpiece, the epicenter of empathy for the organization as well. I have other best practices and tips. I know on the show, Pete, that your audience really values best practices. Would that be a good place to go next or you want to go someplace else?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, absolutely. Let’s do it. And I just want to simmer with that a little bit.

Scott Mautz
Please, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Think like an engineer and feel like an artist. It’s beautiful and it rings true as something that is necessary. And the micro-switching, yes, that is tricky. And if you’ve got that mindset, I can see how you can do the switching all the more readily in terms of, “Oh, engineer mode. Oh, artist mode. Engineer mode. Artist mode,” as opposed to just a big mess of, “There’s a bunch of stuff I got to deal with now. How do I…? Oh, engineer mode, artist mode.” And so, I want to hear the best practices, and I imagine some of them have to do with, “Well, how do you identify when is the right moment? And how do you make that switch?”

Scott Mautz
Yeah. So, here’s what I thought I would do today, Pete, for your listeners because there’s so much in the book to share. I thought I’d first give a couple overall tips that just kept popping up over and over and over in the research for the most successful managers, then I’ll just share just my one best tip for managing up to your bosses down to your employees and across to peers, if that works for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Scott Mautz
Two quick overall tips that kept popping in the research. Successful middle managers tell me about the importance of the golden question, which is this, to continually ask yourself, “Am I assisting success or avoiding failure?” because those two paths produce very different outcomes and behaviors, and we can forget. We can mean to assist success but fall into avoiding failure behavior.

So, for example, in the case of assisting success, what does that look like, Pete? Well, that looks like you’re helping people past the barriers, you’re removing barriers, you’re coaching them, you’re investing in them, you’re doing whatever it takes to help people succeed. Avoiding failure, that looks like micromanagement, indecision, conservatism, perfectionism.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, CYA.

Scott Mautz
CYA. And when you ask yourself that question of, “Okay, am I assisting success or avoiding failure?” it forces you to be very intentional and self-aware of the types of behaviors you’re engaging in as a manager of others and people have to manage up and across.

Pete Mockaitis
What comes to mind here is the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, about the chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, and he’s got his park coach and his fancy coach. And the park coach where he’s playing the speed chess wants, I don’t know why he’s stuck with me, but he’s sort of like yelling out to him, it’s like, “You’re not playing to win. You’re playing not to lose and it’s not the same thing.”

Scott Mautz
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And it isn’t. And I think it’s quite natural with our human limbic system defense mechanisms to want to protect yourself and avoid a failure and looking like a fool, or getting into trouble, getting yelled at, and often those are the kinds of behaviors that aren’t creating transformational results that are going to make you promoted and have your team love you and have the rest of your team flourish as well.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, I think that’s very, very well said. And sometimes we don’t see it as avoiding failure behavior in the outset even though everybody else sees it that way. We think of it as, “Ah, I’m being smart. I’m being conservative. I’m making sure I have all the data before I move forward,” that’s really not what that behavior is helping along.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear maybe some potential words and phrases that indicate you’re in the avoiding failure mode. One that comes to mind is when you send an email and then you say, “Please advise.” And that’s fine sometimes. Sometimes that is fine, you really do need that input. But sometimes that comes across as, “I’m not going to stick my neck out to make a recommendation here. I’m not going to take ownership or make a decision. I’m going to do a little bit of a buck pass.”

And, again, that’s a broad generalization. Sometimes you absolutely need other people’s inputs on something, and you shouldn’t go full steam ahead before you get it. But sometimes it’s like, “I don’t know. I think you can probably push this a little bit farther before you pass it over to me to do the thinking.”

Scott Mautz
I think that’s exactly right, Pete. A couple other keywords to listen for – parallel path.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy.

Scott Mautz
If you’re using that word, that means you’re creating two ways to approach something which means you’re doubling the amount of resources you’re burning and, frankly, you’re just not making a decision. You’re running a parallel path of, “Should we go route A or route B?” And if you hear the key word of permission, “I’d like to do this, I got to get permission from my boss and see.” Listen, business builders don’t have to ask for permission on everything. Homeowners and homebuilders rather, homebuilders have to ask for permission on everything not business builders so you got to watch out. And you bring up a good point. You got to be really intentional about the language you’re using because that reveals which indications of when you’re engaging and avoiding failure versus assisting success.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, please continue.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, here’s another overall tip and then I’ll go into kind of up, down, and across, just one quick best tip. I hear this a lot, and I’m assigning the words to this concept. I never heard these words exactly but this is what a vast chunk of successful middle managers are doing. And, believe me, we’ve talked to well over 3,000 of what companies determine are their very best middle managers in their organization.

And I see them practicing the 50/50 rule, which is this. When things are at their craziest, Pete, when you feel like, “I’m overwhelmed and it’s so busy, I don’t even know where to turn my focus,” you practice a 50/50 rule which happens a lot to middle managers, that kind of busyness. 50/50 rule says, “In those times of chaos, spend 50% of your time on pragmatism, 50% on possibilities.” 50 plus 50, equals 100, which means you have zero percent of your time left for focusing on spiraling down and, “Pity, poor me, I’ve got so much to do.”

And here’s what so powerful about this. When you say, “Out of all my time, only 50% of it is going to be dedicated to pragmatism,” that means you now have a half of a half of your time to prioritize and focus on priorities, right? So, that means you can’t accept other people’s urgent, you can’t take in every single fire alarm that’s going off and put out every fire. Only half of your time now, half of half of your time, in some ways to think about that, could be spent on pragmatic choices.

The other half should be spent on possibilities, looking for the opportunities in the middle of all the chaos and all the input and stimulus that you’re getting, because research shows us, one of the most common traps we fall into in our busiest times is we tend not to focus on the possibilities and the opportunities right in front of us. Why? Because we’re so busy just trying to cross things off our to-do list, just trying to jump from everyone else’s urgent to everyone else’s urgent back and forth. 50/50 rule, does it make sense to you, Pete? Could you see that apply?

Pete Mockaitis
I totally can. And I’m thinking now, we had a guest from FranklinCovey talk about a mantra from an executive who said, he ran some in the hotel bit space, he said, “Hey, if you want to keep your job, just keep things running. You got plenty to do and you’ll stay employed. But if you want to get promoted, bring me an improvement. Like, show me a few points of lift on customer satisfaction or occupancy rates.”

And I think that there’s a lot of wisdom to that. It’s always more urgent to deal with whatever is in your inbox and whatever someone is yelling at you about but it’s less urgent but also important to see, “How are we getting better? How are we producing some results so that we stay relevant and we get to exist as a premiere hotel chain in a world of Airbnb and new disruptors and all that stuff?”

Scott Mautz
Yeah, you’re right, Pete. And if you look back on people that are great successes in their life, there’s a lot of data on this. This isn’t just my opinion and my personal experience, there’s a lot of data that says a core success factor is the ability, in the midst of chaos, to spot opportunity when other people are just running around taking care of their to-do list and answering everyone else’s urgent. So, I think that’s really powerful. The 50/50 rule is a really powerful thing to kind of take into your activities at work.

With your permission, Pete, I’d love to share with you one very quick tip for leading up, down, and across. Would that be good?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Scott Mautz
Let’s do it. So, here’s how I’m going to do it because Leading from the Middle is packed with so many tips. I’m going to focus on the most frequently asked questions to me on this front. And the most frequent question I get with, “How do I manage up to my boss? How do I do that well?” because that’s tricky.

The most important thing I can tell you on that front is to understand what’s asked of you, to get crystal clear on expectations. And I share that, Pete, at the risk of it being too obvious because, despite it being obvious, we’re not so good at it. Check this out. We conducted, we’re almost up to over 300 now, different boss-subordinate pairs that we’ve been interviewing in focused groups and through questionnaires and through all kinds of different datapoints, to find out, “Okay, with this boss-subordinate pairing, did they really understand what one expects from the other?”

And we are finding that, despite up front, those both sets of people, the boss and the employee saying, “Yeah, yeah, we’re clear,” in over 80% of the cases, it turns out there were material breaches in understanding, they’re understanding of the basics of what one expected from the other. That lines up with what Gallup research shows us as well. Gallup shows us that 50% of employees around the globe have no idea what’s really expected of them. So, how do you solve that?

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s so fascinating and it rings true. Can we zoom in on some examples of, “Oh, I thought you expected this but, in fact, you expected that?”

Scott Mautz
Oh, yeah. For instance, a perfect example, there was one boss-employee pairing, and the boss said, “Okay,” it was a sales position and he expected his employee to engage in sales leadership in a certain way.

Pete Mockaitis
Sales leadership, okay.

Scott Mautz
Yes, sales leadership, that included…

Pete Mockaitis
You got a few ways.

Scott Mautz
“Okay, I want you to follow this selling process. I want you to teach your fellow salespeople,” because this was the number one salesperson he was working with, “I want you to teach your fellow salespeople how to employ the selling techniques that you’re employing as well.” And, yeah, he listed basic expectations. Then when I asked the employee what was expected of him, none of that stuff was on his radar screen.

He thought his job was to protect the secrets of how he was selling so that he could personally rise up the chain and continue to be the number one person and that his boss would never have expected him to share that knowledge. He thought that the way he had devote selling was the right way to go, and he had totally ignored the company-preferred method, and there was a darn good reason the company wanted him to follow this method, so he was doing his own method.

That turns out was creating some problems on the backend, some customers weren’t so satisfied afterwards given all the things this kid had promised because he wasn’t following the standard procedure. So, in something that’s basic is like, “This is how we expect you to sell at this company,” there was a gap in understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And sales leadership can say, “Okay, got you. I’m going to continue to be a more rock star sales leader, a leader in sales, by selling more by the things that I’m doing that are working so well.” Certainly. So, what are the best practices then to surface those misunderstandings and get them cleared up?

Scott Mautz
Yes, so powerful. It’s to develop what I call a good-to-great grid. Here’s how it works. We’ve all heard that book Jim Collins’ Good to Great. This is a different kind of use of this. So, just picture this, I want your listeners to picture this. Imagine a simple chart and it has three columns in the chart. On the left-hand side of the chart, that column, that’s metrics that are important to you at your job.

So, let’s say you work in company XYZ, and leadership, risk-taking, and taking initiative are three really important things you get measured on. You put that in the left column. The next column is the good column, the next column is the great column. In the good column, you sit down with your boss and you define, let’s pick one metric, let’s use leadership, “Okay, boss, let’s you and I, together, write down on paper what good leadership looks like.” Then in the next column, “Okay, boss, let’s you and I agree to a definition of what great leadership looks like.”

And what happens is that you force your boss and yourself to get crystal clear on what just good is and what great is. And what happens is most often we get lazy when we set expectations and we just assume that everybody knows what our idea of great is and, in fact, they’re delivering good at best. And the person that’s delivering the good, they actually think, “Oh, I’m doing great,” and they’re not clear on what great really looks like, and you can’t get to that without specificity. You need tension. That tension is the difference between good and great, defining the difference between good and great. And when you could do that, it forces specificity and clarity, makes sense that it’s a powerful tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that is nice. And so, could you give us an example of something a boss-subordinate pair might agree to on a good picture of leadership versus a great picture of leadership?

Scott Mautz
Sure. Here’s one of prioritization. This is from an actual good-to-great chart that I developed with a team years ago. So, imagine you got this chart, and on the left-hand side you have prioritization, priority-setting as an important thing. In the good column, what if you wrote this? It’s called Trash Compactor Management, and what that means is, you know what a trash compactor is. It takes trash and it squishes it into a cube. Imagine if you thought of your workload that way, and what good would look like is you say no every once in a while, so your work cube gets a lot smaller. It gets squished down into a smaller, more doable work cube.

Frankly, Pete, a lot of us aren’t even good at that. We’re not even good at saying no to stuff that comes on our table. So, if you could start by saying no, that’s pretty good in priority-setting but that’s not great. Great priority-setting is not Trash Compactor Management; it’s Accordion Management. Accordion is a musical instrument that you play that you kind of move your hands in and out to play the instrument. It puffs wind out and you get different notes.

Imagine your workload was like that now. You contract it like an accordion at times when you know you’ve got a lot going on, you’ve got a big sales call coming up, a big presentation to the CEO, but then you contract it in between so people can breathe. You’re not always adding work and expanding the accordion, you’re contracting it so you can learn from a big meeting, so you can take training, so you can enjoy, so you can celebrate. Then you expand the workload back out again when things get busy. In and out all the time like an accordion. Now, that’s great priority-setting.

And the things is, for your listeners, Pete, I hope they don’t agree with any of those definitions, that they might say, “Well, yeah, yeah, Scott, I hear you. I think good priority-setting is this and great priority-setting is that.” Actually, I hope they don’t agree and that they come up with their own definitions sitting down with their boss because that’s the power there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. It’s funny, as I’m thinking about this and the 80/20 Rule, I’m thinking, “Now, great prioritization is I can name for you the one, two, three things that I fully expect to be 16 times as valuable per hour of my time than the other things.” Like, oh, wow. Okay, that’s what great means. And I love that specificity. What’s coming to mind for me is back in the day, consulting at Bain & Company, there were three things that were important, and it’s probably the same today, and I’d say that Bain frequently does well in the Best Places to Work list, and I think this is one of the reasons.

So, they say, ‘Hey, there’s value addition, there’s client communication, and there’s team. These are the three things that really matter.” But then they break it down in like 20 something competencies. So, under value addition, we have, “Achieves expert status.” And this is what I expect from a consultant within the first six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months that they should be able to do. And on your review, if you look like someone who’s been at the job for 18 months doing those kinds of things at six months, we’re going to go, “Wow, you are frequently exceeding, or consistently outperforming on our expectations.”

And I thought that was pretty cool. It’s like, “Okay, so you achieved expert status in the early days” might mean like, “Oh, I’ve got the Excel sheet and I really know the numbers and what’s in them. And in the latter portion, it’s sort of like, “I understand more about this thing than the client does and I can explain it clearly at the drop of a hat.” And so, you say, “Oh, okay, I see how that’s different.” And one of them is certainly elevated to the other, and that’s powerful.

Scott Mautz
It’s that specificity that sets you free, right, Pete? It forces you to engage in the discussion of what good versus great looks like which is why so many of us are not clear on what good or great looks like because we never had that discussion.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so that was fun with priority-setting. Let’s hear another one because I think this is so important, and people are like, “Yeah, I know, I know.” But I think there’s maybe another layer of specificity we need to drill into. So, that’s priority-setting. Let’s hear another example.

Scott Mautz
Let’s keep going. Well, this one, maybe it’s too generic or whatever. But it’s one that I hear an awful lot on, “What does good leadership versus great leadership look like?” You and I, Pete, could debate this all day long but this is an example from an actual client of mine who they defined good leadership was doing the right things, always making the right choices on prioritization. Then they said great was, and I thought this was pretty wise, doing the right things at the right time for the right reason.

And the distinction was, if you just say, “Good leadership is doing the right things,” well, that means is that, in your mind, what you think is right in that time, in a tunnel, in a vacuum, in an echo chamber, “Yeah, we’re going to do the right things,” and they didn’t mean like, “Do the right thing morally.” They just meant, “Prioritize well.” But when you add on “at the right time, for the right reason,” that brings two different degrees of specificity to the table.

For the right reason, what they meant was they want leaders to be acting according to the company values and principles. Doing them at the right time meant they don’t want them to get ahead of themselves, they don’t want them to be making ridiculous decisions without the proper data, or they don’t want them to be waiting around forever to jump on an obvious opportunity. So, that’s straight from a client, I thought that was a pretty powerful and simple way to discern the two things.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And as I think about the clarity, it would be awesome to have some particular examples from recent work, like, “Hey, for example, recently you did the right thing associated with this but it was not quite the right time because we were still waiting on this important thing.” And it’s like, “Oh, okay.” And so, then it’s extra crystal clear.

Scott Mautz
And the good news here, Pete, for today, is that I put together, I’ll mention this again at the end, I put together a toolkit for your listeners, and I’ll give the address for the toolkit at the end here when we’re done. But in the toolkit of free tools is going to be a completed good-to-great grid with probably 15 examples on different metrics of what good versus great looks like on leadership, priority-setting, risk taking, vision, you name it, that’ll be available for your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Beautiful. Well, let’s see, we’ve covered some great stuff here. I also like to get your take on when I think about middle managers, when there is that tension, that up, down, sideways, all over the place, like how do you really get something done in a big organization? What are some of the best practices, insights, takeaways, in pulling that off?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, maybe this one will surprise you, maybe it won’t, and it’s tied to…I also wanted to offer up the best tip that I get for leading down in an organization when you have employees, and this is tied to your question. And this is the question I most often get, by far, for people, new managers of others, I bet you can even guess it, Pete, is, “How do I give feedback and do it well?” And we know that also correlates with productivity in an organization because every manager knows they have to give feedback, everybody knows that. When you’re a boss of others, that’s part of the job.

We’re wired to not do it well. And the ability to get things done, if you don’t want to just do it yourself and burn yourself out, it has to come, of course, through others. But if you want to do that well, you have to be able to correct and mold that and do that through feedback. So, the two things are intertwined.

And what I always tell people is, “The rules are pretty simple.” And I go deep into this in Leading from the Middle. But if you want to master feedback, Pete, here’s a couple of simple rules. You got to be specific. My grandpa used to say, “White bread ain’t nutritious.” Feedback is the same way. Meaning if it’s generic and bland, no one is going to get any value from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Take more initiative.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, right. That’s right. Right. If it’s more like whole grain bread, your feedback, if it’s filled with nutrients and it’s specific and granular, people are going to appreciate that and grow from that. Your feedback has to be sincere. If it comes from the heart, it sticks in the mind. It has to be calibrated. When you give people that feedback, if it’s corrective feedback, Pete, they’re going to assume the worst from it if you don’t put it in context.

For example, let’s say, Pete, I’m giving you feedback on your podcast, and I say, “You know, Pete…” I’m making this up, “…your microphone levels are always too low,” which is not true. You have incredible sound but let’s pretend I’m telling you that. Now, I could just leave it there and then you, as a podcaster, what you most likely are going to do, like most human beings, is take that to the worst place possible, “My mic levels are too low, which means I’m a loser, which means no one will listen to my podcast.”

Like, if I don’t calibrate you on that and say something like, “Now, Pete, where you are in your life in podcasting, it’s very normal to have your mic levels too low. Lots of podcasters make that mistake, so just work on getting the mic levels right.” Or, if I really want you to get the message, I got to calibrate you and say, “You know, Pete, you got to understand, if you don’t fix this right away, we’ve talked about this before, you won’t have a podcast show anymore.” Those are two different ways to calibrate the feedback.

And if you don’t provide that context, people will go to the worst possible scenario. Another important rule…

Pete Mockaitis
And to that.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, please. Go, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it, we’re talking about specificity, it could really be potent if you say, “Hey, man, negative 20 to negative 16 LUFS is the standard. And if someone’s listening to your show, and then another show, they’re going to have to be fiddling with the volume, and that’s not a great listener experience.” And so, I can really see, like, “Oh, who cares? You just crank the volume. It’s all good.” It’s like, “Here’s kind of the implication of what that means, why it matters, and why we are even bothering to talk about it.”

And I think that’s huge too in terms of really, really hitting that. And you’re right, we can take it to the worst place possible, and if we’re not feeling like an artist and solely thinking like an engineer, “Out of specification, hmm, rectify,” then you can totally blow right past that, and now you realize you’ve devastated somebody.

Scott Mautz
That’s exactly right. And even, by the way, the last point on giving feedback, even if you have to give that kind of harsh piece of feedback, it can be devastating, like you say, Pete, if you don’t put the right context around it. You also have to remember, kind of the last straw I’ll share today is being proportionate about it. Research is now showing us very clearly, Pete, that for every one piece of corrective feedback you give somebody, you got to have five pieces of reinforcing and positive feedback.

Now, the exception to the rule is if you’ve been working with somebody forever one-on-one, and you have trust to the gills, filled, and you can say anything to each other, you probably don’t have to follow the five-to-one rule but that’s not most of us. It’s a pretty powerful thing to keep in mind in influencing down.

I have one power tip for leading across. You tell me if you want me to go there next or if you wanted to take a pause.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it, yeah.

Scott Mautz
Okay. So, because I promised I would give your listeners one tip up, down, and across, the final is across. How do you lead from the middle, Pete, when you don’t have authority over people but you want them to do what you want them to do? How do you do that with no formal authority? And to do that, I want to share the golden rule of influence, incredibly powerful. It’s what I branded it, and I first learned about the concept, the general concept from another author by the name of Dan Schwartz, and I took it and ran with it, and I think of it as a golden rule of influence because it’s so important.

And to teach that to your listeners, we’re going to do a little test with you right now, Pete. So, I want you, Pete, to think of somebody in your life that has been very influential, had a ton of influence over you, preferably in the professional range for now, but you didn’t report to them, they weren’t your boss. All right. So, let me know when you have that person roughly in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve got him.

Scott Mautz
Okay. Let’s take a test now. Did that person, were they so influential because they did any of these four things? Did they care, listen, give, and teach? How many of those four apply?

Pete Mockaitis
All four, yup.

Scott Mautz
That’s what we find out is usually the case. If you want to have influence over people, over whom you have no formal authority, Pete, you care, you listen, you give them something, you teach them something. I promise you that will be influential to them. And if you serve that, you don’t have to worry about the rule of reciprocity, that they will then give you what you need back, they’ll feel compelled. They’ll want to not on reciprocity, just out of the fact that so few people do those four things for their peers and for their teammates.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful especially in a world where there’s too much to do. And how do you choose? Well, if there’s someone that goes, “Hey, that guy is just awesome to me. They all look the same to me but it’s coming from someone who’s been great to me, I guess I’ll do that first.”

Scott Mautz
That’s well said, Pete. Well said. So, they have an up, down, and across, man. That’s just a few tips to help you lead from the middle.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, let’s hear a few of your favorite things now. How about a favorite quote?

Scott Mautz
Oh, my favorite quote is probably “Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.” Love that from author Charles Swindoll.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Scott Mautz
My favorite book is, I’m not allowed to say my own, or I’m not going to because that’s just kind of ridiculous, but I have to admit I’m still a big fan of Good to Great by Jim Collins. It influenced the creation of the good-to-great grid I was talking about earlier, and I still find that to be a watermark, watershed book.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Scott Mautz
Oh, my favorite habit, by far, is actually killing an old habit, which is it used to be that I would compare, too often, Pete, to make irrelevant comparisons to other human beings. We know that 10% of the human thought goes towards comparisons most often to other people and to irrelevant comparisons that don’t matter that force us to beat ourselves up. So, my favorite habit now is when I catch myself comparing to others, I simply say to myself, “The only comparison that matters is who I was yesterday and whether or not I’m becoming a better version of myself.”

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

Scott Mautz
ScottMautz.com. And I mentioned before that I put together a toolkit for your listeners, Pete, to help them lead from the middle, to help them influence up, down, and across the organization. If they go to ScottMautz.com/freetools, that’s all one word, freetools with no space in between it, they can get that, all that valuable stuff – ScottMautz.com/freetools.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, this has been a treat. Thanks so much for coming on back and good luck with all your leading.

Scott Mautz
Right on. Thanks a lot, Pete. Thanks for what you do. It’s a great show.

May 13
0

667: How to Cultivate Your Influence and Build Powerful Connections with Jon Levy

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Jon Levy provides foundational principles for connecting better and building your influence.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why relationships are the #1 predictor of your success 
  2. How to make networking feel more natural
  3. How to build trust quickly with vulnerability loops

 

About Jon

Jon Levy is a behavioral scientist best known for his work in influence, human connection, and decision making. Jon specializes in applying the latest research to transform the ways companies approach marketing, sales, consumer engagement, and culture. His clients range from Fortune 500 brands, like Microsoft, Google, AB-InBev, and Samsung, to startups.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

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Jon Levy Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jon Levy
Thank you. I’m super excited. I also want to learn how to be awesome-r at my job. I’m looking through like osmosis and hanging out with you I could enjoy my work more.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing a story. We’re talking about influence here. Could you tell us a cool story about a professional who really transformed their career by cultivating influence?

Jon Levy
So, one of the people that I think is super interesting is a woman named Jean Nidetch. And Jean was, kind of in her eyes, an overweight housewife. And one day, while going to the supermarket to pick up some food, she was going through the aisles and an old acquaintance of hers says, “Hi, you look great,” and she was feeling very beautiful. And the acquaintance said, “When are you due?” And Jean was mortified, the woman thought she was pregnant.

And she said to herself, “I’m going to change my life. I’m going to finally lose this weight.” And what she did was she signed up for a weight-loss course provided by the city of New York. And she had lost some weight but she realized she was really lonely. So, she invited a bunch of women to her home to play mahjong, some game like that, but really it was an opportunity for her to talk about weight loss and her struggling with it.

And the group bonded so much that they kept meeting, and then, eventually, that turned into Weight Watchers and became an international sensation of a company. She became a multimillionaire, a celebrity. And the way that she fundamentally did it was by gathering people and creating an intimate and safe space and, over time, that grew into her influence. And I just loved the story especially because, at the time, she couldn’t even have a credit card with her name on it, it said Ms. Marty Nidetch because women couldn’t really have businesses back then.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then the magic happened when she did some inviting, and said, “Hey, come on over.”

Jon Levy
Yeah, it’s pretty incredible. So, in my personal view, our influence is a byproduct of who we’re connected to, how much they trust us, and the experience of belonging that we share. And what she was able to do was find something to connect with people that they cared about, which is their health and wellness.

She created an incredibly safe space of trust, and then the people who participated in the program had this incredible sense of community because it was that one place where they could speak openly about the trials and tribulations that they went through, the shame that they experience, the struggle from day to day to not eat some cake. And I think that that’s pretty incredible that she was able to do that, and then figure out how to make that scale so that people around the world could really have that experience and belonging.

Pete Mockaitis
And your book You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence, you’ve got a number of principles and stories along these lines. Can you share with us kind of what is the big idea here?

Jon Levy
So, here’s what’s kind of funny, in my 20s, I kept trying to change my life by like reading every self-help book and setting my alarm for 6:00 a.m. to go work out and then I’d beat myself up for not going to the gym or hitting snooze ten times. I was overweight, I was broke, and I was single, and I couldn’t seem to figure out how to get my break.

And I was sitting in a seminar, and the seminar leader said, “The fundamental element that defines the quality of our lives are the people we surround ourselves with and the conversations that we have with them.” And I said, “Well, if that’s true, then maybe, instead of beating myself up for not going to the gym, what I should do is make friends with a whole bunch of athletes and then it’ll be part of my social circle to exercise. It’ll just be a part of my habits.”

Well, it turns out, these two guys Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, researchers, were curious about the obesity epidemic, and what they found was kind of startling. They found that if you have a friend who’s obese, your probability of obesity increases by 45%. Your friends who don’t know that person have a 20% increase chance, and their friends have a 5% increase chance, which means that everything flows through our communities or our social networks, and that’s true for happiness, marriage and divorce rates, smoking habits, voting habits.

And so, the basic premise of the book is that if we can curate the people who can have the biggest impact on our lives around us, and create deep and meaningful relationships, that’ll have a profound impact on everybody’s life in a positive way. And that’s true whether it’s business or it’s longevity. The greatest predictor of human longevity is not exercise or eating healthy. The greatest predictors are, number two, strong social ties, and, number one, social integration, you’re part of the community.

On the business front, you can measure employee sick days, profitability, and stock value to the level of oxytocin, that cuddle chemical, in employees’ bloodstreams. So, the basic premise is, “How do we connect? How do we build trust? And how do we give people a sense of belonging so we can really have an impact on our lives?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And so, when you’re talking about cultivating influence, you’re not so much, well, you tell me, talking about how to be super persuasive so much as cultivating the influences around you, to you, and for you.

Jon Levy
Yeah, I’d agree. So, it’s interesting, right now, the word influence has kind of shifted because of people taking photos of avocado toast on Instagram. And, don’t get me wrong, I really respect people who can cultivate a large audience. It’s like a skillset that I fundamentally do not have. But when we really look at the kind of influence we care about, it’s less about that, it’s less about like marketing a product or getting people to sign up for something. It’s really like, “Do I know the right person to get my kid into the high school I want to get them into?” “I’m not feeling well, do I have a friend who’s a medical expert who can answer a question?”

And so, it’s mostly things that are a byproduct of relationships, “Do I have enough trust built up with that client for them to close the deal?” Like, that’s the kind of influence we want, I’d actually argue in general. Now, proxy for a lot of people is follower count but my guess is that that’s probably generally less satisfying than having a close friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Jon Levy
And, like, I don’t know. I don’t have a really large following but I do have a lot of close friends and I really love having them, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so lay it on us, that sounds like a great thing to have, influence and this view of it, and we’ve got a bit of a key prongs there to pursue in terms of making friends and having great conversations with them. So, how, in practice, can one do that well?

Jon Levy
Great question. So, let’s split it up into three topics, is that okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Jon Levy
There’s, “How do we get people to want to connect with us? How do we build trust quickly? And how do we really develop an experience of belonging?” So, it turns out that what we’ve been touting in our society is that people who are great at connecting go and network. Now, I don’t know about you, I hate networking.

It is anxiety-ridden, it’s uncomfortable, you’re never really talking to the person you want to talk to. It feels really transactional. And, in fact, research by Francesca Gino from Harvard Business School found that people feel, in an unconscious way, dirty. They feel the need to wash, the implicit association. Nobody wants to network.

Now, what’s interesting is we do not feel that way when we’re making friends. And so, let’s forget networking and let’s ask the question, “What will have somebody want to be our friend?” And so, what we have somebody to want to be our friend is kind of like basic things. If there’s something interesting or novel. Meaning, what you’re up to or doing, does it stand out in some way that would make me curious or interested? Are you in a curated group? Are the people that you spend time with really interesting and maybe from diverse backgrounds so that if I engage with that group or community, I’d get a lot of value?

For some people, it’s around skills, and opportunities, and access, and resources. So, what value do you provide? So, if we want to get people’s attention, the context is, “What will attract them?” And I would say that our best bet is to actually just invite people to do something with us. And the reason I say that is very specific, it has to do with that second characteristic, which is trust.

And I’ll give you an example. Do you have any kids?

Pete Mockaitis
I do. Two toddlers.

Jon Levy
Okay. Two toddlers, perfect. So, let me ask you a question. You know, how in life, traditionally, if you want to win some deals where people will take you in the business world to a business dinner?

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah.

Jon Levy
And do you find those particularly enjoyable?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s hit or miss.

Jon Levy
Yeah, but that’s exactly the point, is that if the person is really dynamic and fun – great. Otherwise, you’re stuck there and locked in for like an hour and a half and it’s miserable. So, giving somebody or paying for something for somebody doesn’t necessarily get them to like you more or trust you more. If you go to a party and they give you a swag bag, what do you intend to do with that swag bag?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, I’ve had the experience many times where I have a rental car and I am driving into the rental car lot where I’m returning it, then I have the bag and I’m looking at it over the trash can and deciding which items I’m going to go and take versus pitch.

Jon Levy
Yeah, yeah, because then you have to travel back home on a flight and you’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m not going to carry a, I don’t know, a Powerade onto a flight.” Like, “I don’t want 14 postcards from these brands with their stickers on them.” It’s just not anything I care about. And that’s the point, is that we don’t win people over with gifts. You can. There are very specific situations.

So, let’s say I found out you have two toddlers, if I get you like the most amazing, I don’t know, Baby Bjorn or something like that, in the world, like a toddler holder, you’d be like, “Oh, my God, Jon, you’re a lifesaver. You totally get the situation in my life.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah. So much more for targeted, specific, applicable.

Jon Levy
Exactly. But that doesn’t scale very well. Like, I can do that a few times. I can’t do that with a thousand people. So, the question is, “What actually does work?” And it turns out, the exact opposite of gifting works, which is it’s called the IKEA effect. It states that we disproportionately care about our IKEA furniture because we had to assemble it.

So, if I can figure out a way for you to invest effort into our relationship, you’ll care more about it. So, you know how a lot of people are like, “Oh, I don’t like asking for favors”? Terrible idea. Ask for favors. People, generally, feel flattered that you asked, and by them fulfilling on the favor, they will actually like you more. So, the first thing is that. Let’s apply the IKEA effect.

A second is let’s find an activity or an opportunity to apply the IKEA effect. So, rather than take somebody for a drink or a dinner, go workout together. This will cause the two of you to invest effort into one another and care more about each other in the process. So, when I was 28, I was trying to figure out how to connect with really influential people. I developed these models and I end up launching a secret dining experience.

Twelve people are invited, they’re not allowed to talk about what they do or even give their last name. They cooked dinner together, and when they sit down to eat, they get to guess what everybody does and, of course, eat a terrible meal. I mean, 12 people who don’t know how to cook really don’t make a great meal.

Pete Mockaitis
Also, I think you’re going to need a big kitchen with 12 people actively doing stuff.

Jon Levy
I live in New York. I actually don’t have a huge kitchen. I actually kind of like the fact that they’re stuck rubbing elbows up against each other because it creates more intimacy. But you’ll notice the IKEA effect is in full force. They are working together towards a joint goal with a time that’s time-locked so either they get the work done and we eat, or the meat is undercooked.

So, this leads to a lot of effort being put and a lot of fast bonding. And, in general, human beings don’t bond well when they’re just like interviewing one another. We’ve developed, as a species, that works well together. And so, by having a shared activity, it takes the social pressure off of conversation, and then conversation flows more naturally.

And so, it turns out that if we want to connect and build trust quickly, the best bet is to find an activity that we actually enjoy, and then invite people to participate with us in that activity. Now, let me emphasize, I might a bit more extroverted so I might do something for 12 people. You might be more introverted and just invite two people to come with you on a hunt, or for an art class, or for some kind of activity that you really enjoy, maybe playing basketball. I don’t know.

Whatever it is, it just needs to be something you enjoy because, otherwise, it’s going to feel like a real chore to keep doing it to meet people.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I guess I’m curious, like if you’re inviting someone, is there a minimum level of something that needs to be in place before you issue an invitation? So, like, let’s just say, I bumped into you, you are someone who knows somebody I’m having coffee with, you say hey to that someone, and then I say, “Hey, Jon, do you want to go on a hike on Saturday?”

Jon Levy
That’d be super weird.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, how do we think about the pre-invitation relationship?

Jon Levy
So, there are two or three things that we want to look at. One is I’d encourage for it not just to be a hike. That doesn’t possess novelty.
Human beings are driven by novelty. When something is new or different, they want to engage. And so, in general, rather than just have a hike, add an additional layer of novelty. Have it be like, “Oh, each person brings one problem they’re struggling with, and by the end of the hike, the entire group coaches them through it.” So, now it’s an idea exploration hike and it has direct value to the people participating, especially if we add this additional factor, which is it’s not just novel, but if it’s well-curated.

So, if I say, “Hey, we’ve never met. You’re friends with Tim’s? Great. We both know Tim. Pete, I run an idea hike and I run it with a group of people who are all entrepreneurs who have companies that do over a million dollars in business. Five of us go at a time, each of us brings one idea that we’re struggling with, all of us are experts in different areas. So, one is an internet marketer, the other is an author, and another one is TV show writer, whatever it is. I think it would be super fun if you joined this great group of people. We’re going on a hike on Tuesday. Can you make the time?”

Now, suddenly, you see something novel, something that has shared effort, something that is very well-curated, all these successful people that you get to connect with, and you have a direct value, it’s a very generous experience. You see, “Oh, wow, maybe I’ll finally find the solution to this issue that I’m struggling with.”

And so, you see, you can take a simple idea. I’ve never, listen, I literally made this up with you right now. I’ve never heard of a hike like this. But the fact that it has all this value in there, and it’s a really simple design. Pete, how much would it cost to go on a hike like that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, if you try to package it and have a fancy landing page and all that, it could be thousands of dollars.

Jon Levy
Yeah, but I mean like if I just say, “Hey, this is something that I do,” it wouldn’t cost anything in the sense that people can get themselves to the bottom of the trail, and, let’s say, Hollywood right there is all the Runyon Canyons and all that, like it doesn’t matter how much money you have. You can absolutely gather people or connect with them and create deep connections with them without spending a fortune, is kind of what I’m pointing to.

There’s this misconception that in order to connect with people, especially the people that we want to do business with, it’s going to cost a lot of money. But it turns out that, since human beings are wired for connection and wired for developing relationships, it’s the people who have the least amount of money who are often very good at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, I want to make sure we covered that piece then. So, what are we thinking about with regard to the pre-invitation? So, you’ve boosted the value proposition, if you will, of your invitation, like, “That thing you’re talking about sounds real cool.” So, how do we think about sort of like the minimum level of pre-connection to issue that invitation?

Jon Levy
Oh, I think that you actually need none if the event is novel enough and has some proof of concept. So, if you’re allowed to mention some of the names of the people, I think it was the book Made to Stick or something like that, talked about the Sinatra role, this idea that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. All you need is like one example that, “Oh, the founder of Allbirds. It’ll be like the last time we had the founder of Allbirds and the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a… whatever.” Then, suddenly, you have proof of concept. Those are the types of people who come.

So, in that case, I can say, “Oh, I saw you on the Forbes 30, under 30, or whatever it is, list. You seem to be doing really interesting things. This is the activity I host. Would you like to join sometime? Here are the upcoming dates.” And you could literally, whatever your thing is to meet people and connect with them, you could go on two hikes a week and so that there’s always something to connect with people, and always an opportunity to have really healthy pro-social behavior and activities.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued. So, the novel dimension is, I get it, that’s really cool in terms of dopamine and excitement and…

Jon Levy
Creates curiosity, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get that that’s awesome. But now I’m thinking about sort of the big five personalities and how, you know, I’m thinking of folks who are low on extraversion and openness to new experiences. It’s like the things we’re talking about, they sound really cool to me, but other personalities would be like, “Oh, that seems like a bit much in terms of it’s, I don’t know, risky, scary. I’m not that adventurous.” So, Jon, do you have any, I don’t know if the word is boring, but…?

Jon Levy
Safer. Let’s put on the safer suit. So, I’m going to lean on another book and thought leader on this. There’s something called The Creative Curve, it was a book by Allen Gannett. And in it he suggests that something is created when it’s familiar enough that it feels safe but new enough that it’s exciting. If it’s too safe, it’s boring. If it’s too novel, it’s esoteric. It’s like Bjork’s music.

So, I think you’re absolutely right that there are personality types that may feel uncomfortable with going hiking, and I respect that. That’s totally fine. So, there’s two or three different ways to look at it. One is, maybe, invite a few friends that write for Outlet to come or make friends with people who write for Outlet, and get a story done about it so that you have additional proof that you’re not like inviting people to steal their kidneys. That’s one angle. But that happens over time. It’s not going to happen your second time. It’ll happen your 10th time, 20th time, whatever it is.

The second is you can also do like a board game or a dinner party, and use formats that are more familiar to the people than hiking. The issue is that you’re not necessarily looking to connect with everybody. You’re not trying to boil the ocean and make friends with the entire world. What you’re doing is trying to find people in certain industries that have values that you care about, and sometimes that means that you won’t meet specific people, but that’s okay.

Like, frankly, if people are so introverted, they’re probably not going to networking events anyway, or conferences. And in those cases, you’re probably better off with just a direct introduction and hoping that you get to meet them for something more quiet. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, there we have it. So, you have an activity and it’s sort of a clear offer that is somewhat novel and fun and valuable, and gives an opportunity for people to meet and connect and connect better than just chatting because they’re doing something together, so all that’s excellent. So, then let’s say you’re in it. So, here we are, we’re cooking, we’re hiking, we’re doing the board game, and we’re doing the thing, any particular do’s and don’ts for connecting well in the moment?
Jon Levy
Sure. So, here’s something I only learned while researching this new book. We tend to think that trust precedes vulnerability. Like, if I trust you, I’ll be willing to risk more. But it turns out that it actually doesn’t work that way. It turns out that it’s a process called a vulnerability loop. So, let’s say I started working for you, Pete, and I’m sitting in a cubicle or whatever not far from you. And you hear me say, “Oh, my God, I’m so overwhelmed.” I’ve just signaled vulnerability. I said, “I don’t know how I’m going to handle something.” Now, if you ignore that or make fun of it, trust will be reduced.

Pete Mockaitis
“Ah, Jon, you loser. Buckle down. You can handle it.”

Jon Levy
Now, in certain environments, you might be like in the Navy Seals, it’s probably like the culture but in most offices, people are going to feel really insecure and then not put themselves out there again. But if you acknowledge it, and say, “Jon, my first week I was totally overwhelmed. What are you dealing with?” Then you’ve just signaled vulnerability and now we can trust each other at this higher level. And it’s these vulnerability loops that actually develop trust. That’s why trust, generally, develops over time through small actions.

Now, the IKEA effect, one of the reasons I think it exists is because, as you’re investing effort in a joint activity, it creates a bunch of these vulnerability loops, like, “Oh, my God, pass me the…” then you throw me like whatever I need. And, suddenly, we’ve opened and closed a bunch of loops. Now, this also means that when we meet people, we want to be aware of when they’re putting out loops which we sometimes we don’t notice.

So, if you’re saying, “Oh, how’s your week?” “Oh, my God, it was so stressful.” That is the opening of a loop and that’s your opportunity to increase trust. Now, watch out, there are some people who will verbally vomit all over you but, for the most part, being aware of them and acknowledging them and giving people a space for that means that you can increase trust faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a really interesting framework right there in terms of, “Can you pass me the salt?” I mean, that is like the tiniest bit of vulnerability but, at the same time, it’s like, “Look, I’ve got some stuff sizzling on this pan. This is the perfect moment I need the salt and, yet, there’s 12 people in the kitchen, I can’t reach it right now, so hook me up.” So, that is a little something and I see how that takes you there.

So, let’s zoom way in on these bits. So, some says, “I’m so stressed, I’m so overwhelmed, I’m tired. I’m worried about this thing. My toddler has been screaming all afternoon. He’s driving me nuts.” So, someone puts one of those out there, let’s hear some best-practice responses.

Jon Levy
And I also want to add something that, for some people, saying, “I got a promotion” is a vulnerability loop.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you.

Jon Levy
It has to do with the level of comfort that somebody feels.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true. Like, if someone disclosed a financial item to me and I’m trying to keep it as vague as possible and respectful, and I can tell, it’s like, “Whoa, that is vulnerable” in that I know that something about your situation that is surprising and could cause me to look at you in a different light, better or worse, like, “Holy crap, I didn’t know you were so loaded,” or, “Oh, dang, government assistance, I didn’t know you were really struggling.” Either way, it’s vulnerable and it could be vulnerable in a positive way.

Jon Levy
Yeah, it’s super interesting. And the issue is that, in general, we don’t flex the vulnerability muscle in a great way. Part of it is that we can accomplish a vulnerability loop both by paying attention when other people are opening them or by us opening it in a way that gives them an opportunity to close it. So, if I said, “You know, Pete, I am so impressed with what you’ve accomplished with this podcast. I tried to launch a podcast a while back and it was, I did a bunch of episodes and I just didn’t have the energy to keep it going. I’m beyond impressed.” That in itself is a vulnerability loop. I just called one out on myself.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. And it’s easy to let them just blow right past you, it’s like, “Hey, man, you’re not that lucky. You just got to keep on hustling and grinding and get a good team.” It’s like, okay, that actually did accomplish nothing in terms of like relationship-building.

Jon Levy
It blew it off. It said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m whatever,” on your opinion of me. And so, we aren’t really good with that kind of stuff, and the issue is that when we mess up or think we’ve messed up, which is more common than actually messing up, like an overshare, then we get scared to do it again, and understandably which is uncomfortable. Vulnerability in its core is the willingness to be open to injury of some kind.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Literally, vulneo, Latin, to wound. You’re right. And, in a way, boy, this is really a skill and you kind of got to slow it down at first, like, “Okay, okay. Oh, Jon is opening up a vulnerability loop here.” And so, sometimes, boy, I can overthink it so, let’s hear some best-practice responses. I guess it’s something along the lines of validation, like, “Yeah, man, it’s freaking tough. It takes hours and hours and hours, and then you feel like you got to deliver for an audience, like, “Where is my next episode?” and you don’t want to disappoint them, and so you feel that pressure. And then that pressure can get you all the more tired and overwhelmed. Okay, so that’s where like connecting to the emotion.

Jon Levy
That’s one possible sign. So, the other is, “Wow, thank you so much for noticing that. Most people just see the success and think it comes easy. And, I’ll be honest, I’ve clocked in sleepless nights trying to figure out how to make it better, and I really appreciate that you noticed.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Jon Levy
So, there isn’t a one way to do it. I think the more important is to acknowledge it and give like a real answer or response. Here’s another kind of fun thing about trust that most people are unaware of. When you say, like, “Oh, what’s the most important aspect of a relationship.” Everybody always says trust.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Jon Levy
“Great. What is trust made out of?” And when you ask that question, people are like, “Like, being vulnerable? I don’t know.” And I didn’t know either until I researched this book. It turns out that trust is essentially made of, most researchers agree, three things, some say four. I like the three model. And it would be competence, your ability to do something; honesty or integrity, your truthfulness; and the third is benevolence.

Now, here’s what’s interesting. Not all of the three pillars are equally weighted or important. So, for example, let’s say you have an episode and it bombs. Do your listeners go, “Oh, I can’t trust him to deliver anymore,” or do they seem like, “Oh, that one was just okay, whatever, and he’ll be back to normal. He probably got his second COVID shot and had an off day”?

So, you can see that you can breach competence and it’s not a big deal. But if you were to breach honesty, like somebody lied to you, you would probably doubt everything that they say moving forward, but there’s kind of like this funny loophole. So, let’s say the two of us were walking down the street and it’s like a year from now and we can congregate in large groups at this point. And as we’re walking, I say, “Hey, Pete, do you mind if we stopped by a friend’s house? I need to pick something up.” And you’re like, “Yeah, sure.”

When we walk in, 40 of your closest friends jumped out and screamed, “Surprise!” Now, it would be super strange if you turned to me and go, “Jon, you just lied to me. We can’t be friends anymore.” Like, I clearly breached honesty, I did not tell the truth, but you were okay with it because I did for benevolent reasons.

Now, if you’ve found out that your doctor was getting kickbacks for giving you prescriptions, that’s a lack of benevolence. You’d be like, “That’s really messed up. I need a new doctor.” So, we can see that we value benevolence above honesty, and honesty above competence. And here’s what’s really interesting when I was doing all this research, I discovered that, apparently, and I’m very clearly not a Navy Seal as you can tell just by looking at me, that when the Navy Seals are reviewing potential candidates, apparently, they ranked them on their skill, their competence, and their team orientation, their kind of benevolence.

And if you scored very high on competence but very low on benevolence, or team orientation, then you’re a terrible candidate because it means that you’ll be very arrogant. But if you are very team-oriented and less skilled, they’d much rather have you because you can always upskill a person, you can train them, but what’s really hard is teaching somebody to be benevolent.

And so, I think when the important thing, and you see this to some degree with these vulnerability loops, is that human beings tend to trust when they feel that somebody has their best interest at heart and when they’re being honest, and competence can increase over time. And if you look at misinformation right now, and I know this is kind of a random side topic, but a lot of the misinformation that’s believed seems to be about, like, very wealthy elite people. And my hunch is that it becomes so believable because, although whoever is very competent at doing things, my hunch is the people that believed these things, like they’re trying to microchip us or whatever it is, don’t necessarily feel like that they’re benevolent.

And so, I think that that’s a lot of the issues that we’re facing, is that when the narrative around our relationships are non-benevolent, it’s really hard to trust. In competence, we can kind of get over.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah. You know, that’s interesting because I remember when I fired somebody, there was some incompetence going on for a while and I was like, “Okay, we got to work on it. We got to work on it.” And then I remember there was some hourly reporting going on, and in a conversation I had with her about what seemed like over-hour reporting, she over-reported the hours she spent having that conversation with me.

Jon Levy
Oh, my God, that’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “You could see the timestamp on the Skype and we’re talking about the thing right now.” It’s just sort of like, “I just don’t have any hope that this can be turned around. I guess we’re done here, you know.”

Jon Levy
Oh, my God, that’s so awkward. Oh, but I think that that’s a perfect example of hourly reporting is a vulnerability loop, right? You are literally saying, “I trust that you are going to be respectful of my business, my work, my livelihood, my ability to support my family, and I’m going to trust you to accurately assess your work.”

And what’s interesting about this one is that it’s not up to debate. You either, like an hour is a length of time that you can measure. Like, sure, maybe you got up to go to the bathroom, whatever, like you’re allowed bathroom breaks so I’m not like measuring that. But she breached that vulnerability loop, like trust was fundamentally reduced to the point that it’s not acceptable to keep working together.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, right. So, I mean, that just rings true in terms of benevolence trumping honesty, trumping competence, because competence, you know, I was being lenient for a good while there. So, insightful stuff, Jon. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jon Levy
This has been super interesting exploring the idea and I loved that you brought up an example. And the book is, like I mentioned, super fun. It explores how human connection, trust, and belonging are really the greatest predictors and kind of breaks down the signs and stories of how to bring it to life.

And I think one of the interesting things is that we did a deep dive into how to actually accomplish it digitally because, right now, teams are really having a tough time at distance, maintaining culture, of feeling of belonging, and so that was super interesting on how to actually accomplish it.

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

Jon Levy
“If you wish to improve, be willing to be thought as stupid and foolish.” Epictetus. So, I cannot count the number of times I felt like an idiot. I’ve embarrassed myself more times than I can count. I have opened more vulnerability loops that were never closed. I have put myself out there, leaned in for the kiss in my early days, before I was married, and was rejected. Like, you put yourself out there like some romantic trope and then you’re like, “Oh, no, we’re best as friends.”

So, the fact is, that human beings function in like an anti-fragile process, meaning, “I dropped a glass, it breaks. It’s fragile.” But human beings are anti-fragile, which means that when we apply pressure to ourselves, we get stronger. We lift weights, we get stronger. We try and learn to interact socially, it’s embarrassing at times but we get stronger. And so, I love that quote by Epictetus.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite study?

Jon Levy
There’s two that are kind of fun. One is by Gilbert. I think he’s at Harvard. He’s kind of like the leading happiness researcher. And what he did was he had people take a, I think it was a series of Monet prints, I think it’s like six of them or 20 of them, whichever number it was. And he said, “Oh, please organize these from most appealing to least appealing.” And then he, essentially said, “Oh, I have number three and number four. You can pick one of them to take home with you.”

A week later, they came back and they had them reorganized, the print order, or put it in order again from most to least, and number three, which is what most of them took home, became number two. And number four became number five. So, essentially, making the decision or commitment actually changed people’s preferences.

Now, people argued, “Oh, that’s because they have the print and they remember it.” So, he repeated the experiment in one of these centers for people who can’t form new memories, like 50 First Dates or Memento. And so, he comes in, does the experiment, walks out of the room, walks back in, the person doesn’t remember them anymore, doesn’t remember the experiment, and then has them order the pictures again. And somehow number three becomes number two, and number four becomes number five.

That means that our decisions and our preferences can actually be rewired based on our actions independent of our memory, which means that our preferences are malleable and it’s kind of silly because we view ourselves as the person who likes this drink, and likes this activity. But maybe if we just made a slightly different decision one time, we could learn to like anything. And I think that that’s totally wild.

Another study I kind of like is called the Pratfall Effect. So, for the listeners, you know how like in romcoms, people love the hapless fool that falls over themselves, like one we want to cheer for? A study was done that looked at people going into job interviews and had some people spill a bit of coffee on themselves, and it turns out that they were rated as better and more preferable because they were human. It’s kind of like that vulnerability loop that I was talking about.

So, it turns out that being a little silly, or falling on yourself a bit, or having these moments that humanize us, actually get people to like us more. So, the things that you’re probably embarrassed about are probably working in your favor.

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

Jon Levy
So, my name is Jon Levy, and I’m pretty easy to find on all the social platforms. I’m jonlevytlb across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Clubhouse, if that’s still a thing. Who knows? It could be gone in a week or whenever. And my website is JonLevyTLB.com, and the book is called You’re Invited: The Art and Science of Cultivating Influence. So, feel free to reach out. There’s also a bunch of games on my website for people who want to connect better digitally, and they’re a ton of fun.

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

Jon Levy
Yes. So, people tend to be most engaged when they’re doing something just outside their skillset, like that point of slight discomfort. So, my encouragement is for you to look at the different aspects of your job and ask yourself “What would make you just slightly uncomfortable? What would be exciting for you to try and do?” Maybe that’s go to your boss and say, “Hey, I would like to do a presentation in front of the team.”

Even if it’s not a necessary presentation, just building up that skill because it’s exciting for you is super beneficial. And having like a playground to do it in and that’s safe is essential. And so, whatever that area that makes you a little bit nervous and excited, find that and go and pursue it just so you can develop better skills.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jon, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in all the ways you’re cultivating influence.

Jon Levy
Thank you. And this is an absolute blast. Thanks for having me on and for sharing your stories with me. It’s a pleasure.