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Jun 01
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303: Inspiring Teams through Purpose with Fred Kofman

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Fred Kofman says: "The way to integrate a team is not by payments, not by rewards and punishments, but inspiring them."

Fred Kofman shares how to unlock the power of purpose to strengthen your team and drive better performance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The first hurdle to working in a group
  2. How to find the inspiration in your work
  3. How to solve the problem of disinformation

About Fred

Fred Kofman is a Leadership Advisor at Google and former vice president of executive development and leadership philosopher at LinkedIn, where he worked with the top CEO’s and executives around the world. Born in Argentina, Kofman came to the United States as a graduate student, where he earned his PhD in advanced economic theory at U.C. Berkeley. He taught management accounting and finance at MIT for six years before forming his own consulting company, Axialent, and teaching leadership workshops for corporations such as General Motors, Chrysler, Shell, Microsoft, and Citibank. At its height, his company had 150 people and created and taught programs to more than 15,000 executives. Sheryl Sandberg writes about him in her book Lean In, claiming Kofman “will transform the way you live and work.”

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Fred Kofman Interview Transcript

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

Fred Kofman
My pleasure, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so curious to hear, so you had a nice run there as the Vice President of Executive Development at LinkedIn. You just recently made a switch. What are you up to now and what’s the story?

Fred Kofman
Well, I’m now an advisor for Leadership Development at Google. Well, the story is I would say a transition, but along the same line.

I’d been with LinkedIn for five years. They are – I feel that they are all my brothers and sisters. It was an amazing opportunity that Jeff, the CEO, gave me to work with all of them. But after five years I think I worked with almost every executive in the company, so my mission was fulfilled.

I had shared what I can do and what I can help people learn and I felt that the value of my contribution was going to start diminishing quickly because it would be mostly repeats or tweaks, whereas there were a lot of other organizations that could use that and I wanted to offer my gift more broadly.

I agreed with the people in LinkedIn that I would be out in the market and combine the work I did with them with some work I would do for other companies. Then when I went out, some people from Google asked me if I could consider doing a more extended engagement with them, a project that would be more absorbing.

I thought it was a fantastic opportunity, so I just accepted and I’m here. I’m beginning this project of Leadership Development or advising them in the area of leadership development.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. I’ve been enjoying digging into your book a little bit, The Meaning Revolution. Could you give us how do you conceptualize it in terms of what’s the big idea behind the book and why is it important now?

Fred Kofman
There’s a fundamental problem that every person that is trying to work with a team has to solve. It starts with a couple, just two people or a family, a small team and is the same problem that an organization with hundreds of thousands of people will have.

That’s to try to combine or integrate the need to have each person be accountable, to do what they’re supposed to and also the need to have each person cooperate for the achievement of the common goal.
This seems obvious. You want a group of people that work together. Every company wants the same thing. We want people to work together and each person doing what they’re supposed to do.

But there’s a hidden problem with this. There’s some incompatibility between these two imperatives. That is that if you evaluate people based on their what’s called OKRs or KPIs, which are the key results or key performance indicators, people are going to focus on their own individual jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed.

Fred Kofman
And they won’t really collaborate with others and they will even build silos to make sure other people don’t prevent them from doing what they need to do.

Today we live in an illusion where people think they are getting paid or that they’re hired to do what they call their jobs, but they’re all wrong. Every person is wrong when they say, “My job is accounting,” or “My job is sales,” or “My job is engineering.” I think everybody’s job is to help the company succeed, just like every player’s job is to help the team win.

But a defensive player will think that his or her job is to stop goals and the offensive player will say my job is to score. That’s not wrong, but it’s not true either. The job is to help the team win.

You normally do your job as a defensive player by stopping the other team from scoring, but in some instances, under some conditions, it would be better for the team if you left your position and you went forward and tried to score. For example, if you’re losing one – zero with five minutes to go.

It’s a typical strategy that teams will send the defensive players to the offense to try to tie the game. But if a person thinks, “Oh, no, no, my job is just to defend,” they will not want to go forward.

The same thing happens in a company. If you feel that your job is to reduce costs, you are going to be less interested in satisfying the customer because it could be expensive to satisfy the customer, even though the best thing for the company to achieve its mission would be to pay attention to the customer.

Or if you’re in customer retention – I tell this story in the book about somebody that was trying to sign off on Comcast and saying, “I don’t want your service.” It went viral because that was a crazy conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Fred Kofman
It lasted like ten minutes with the customer service

Pete Mockaitis
Cancel the account. Yeah, I remember that.

Fred Kofman
Exactly. That costed Comcast tens of millions of dollars in brand loss – in brand, I would say, distraction.

This was a stupid tradeoff that a person made because they think or they have a performance indicator that is how many people cancel the service during your time, when you’re on the phone.

The less people that cancel their service, the better your performance, so of course you’re going to try to convince everybody not to and you will even try anything to the point that you’re going to upset the customers and then create a brand disaster for Comcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Then that’s making a lot of sense in terms of your job is broader than your job description, whether it’s to prevent customers from leaving or what not. Then at the same time, given that there are perhaps thousands of things that an organization needs to do in order to succeed and you’ve got to have some degree of division of labor and responsibility.

How do you think about that appropriate balance between folks sort of executing on their key performance indicators versus doing whatever is necessary to help the organization win?

Fred Kofman
Yeah. That is what the book is about. I’ll give you a hint; it’s not a balance. It’s a relationship of subordination. The primary goal is to achieve the mission. That is the super-ordinating imperative. That’s why you’re here.

If you’re a soccer team, you’re there to win the game. You’re not there to say, “Well, how do we balance winning the game with having more shots or having less goals scored against.” It really doesn’t matter. It’s better to win seven – six than to lose one – zero. You say, “They only scored one goal against us,” yeah, but you lost. It’s not really balance; it’s a subordination.

But it’s very difficult to try to incentivize this subordination because the moment you tell people, “We’re all here to win,” and you can’t observe what people do directly or even if you observe, know if people are doing the right thing or not, because many times it requires judgment or discretion.

When you give people a collective incentive and you say, “We all win together or we all lose together,” you become vulnerable to predators and parasites, people that will come and prey upon the system because they are –

For example, if you pay an average sales commission, like the whole everybody sells and then you pool the money and you pay every salesperson the same, well, all the people that are below average would love your company and they will come and work for you and all the people that are above average are going to leave because they are going to be brought down by the average.

In a sense, average pay drives the best ones away, if I can do a little verse, and makes the worst ones stay. That’s a very unfortunate result in economics that if you want to encourage individual excellence, you have to evaluate people by their own individual performance. But if you evaluate people through their individual performance, you’re discouraging them from contributing to the team objective.

That is in mathematical terms an insolvable dilemma. If you just take self-interested agents and you try to create an organization, you can’t. It just doesn’t work. There’s no clever incentive system that will solve this problem.

The book is about understanding why that’s the case, but then seeing how do you manage this problem better. What can you do?

Very, I would say, surprisingly for me in an ironic sense, the solution of the most material, the hardest problem is soft. I would say the solution to the economic problem is really spiritual because the way you have to integrate a team is not by payments, not by rewards and punishments, but by inspiring them. That’s where leadership or what I call transcendent leadership comes into play.

You have to give people the opportunity to participate in a project that they feel passionate about. They’re not doing it just because you pay them, but they’re doing it because it makes sense, because it fulfills a deep longing they have in their lives. It is done in a way that is ethical and makes them proud. It also gives them the chance to connect with other people who they just crave to be in community with.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds like a great place to be. Could you maybe help us go from a bit of a point A to point B sort of given what is currently the case in many workplaces? What are some of the very first steps to bring it into that spiritually robust, purpose-filled great place?

Fred Kofman
Yeah. Okay, let’s just say that some of your listeners are entrepreneurs or leaders in existing companies. The first step is to find the deeper meaning of what the company does.

Let’s imagine that I’m a doctor and I go home and I have a seven-year-old daughter that asks me, “Daddy, what do you do?” I say, “I make money.” Well, that’s not very inspiring. She goes, “Oh, well, good.” If she asks me why is that important, “Oh, because I can buy nice things for you.” She’d understand that and that’s okay. We have a nice house or we can eat tasty food and so on. But it’s not very uplifting.

If I dig deeper, what do I do “Well, I cure the sick,” or “I use medicine to make people well, to help them reestablish their health.” But if I go deeper, it’s like, “Well, when people are at risk and they have illnesses or they feel terrible or they are hurt, I help them first survive, and then come back to health,” and so on and so forth.

If I describe that as my job, as my profession, well, I feel uplifted. I feel happy and my daughter will be happy too. She will be proud to tell other kids at school what her daddy does.

I know it sounds a little perhaps simplistic, but if you are running an organization in the market, the people that are buying your product or service are finding some way in which that product or service makes their lives better. It makes them sufficiently better that they are willing to part with their hard-earned cash to acquire your product or service.

Don’t focus, as Peter Drucker, said, don’t focus on the drill because people don’t really want drills. Focus on the hole. What people want is holes. That’s why they buy drills, to make them. The question would be what is the human need, the human aspiration that your product or service is helping people to address and take care of.

You need to know that and you need to feel that in your bones, like deep inside that you’re super proud of what you do. If you’re not proud, like if you’re not on fire, you’re not going to be able to light up the people that you want to inspire. You need to feel it inside and then be able to communicate and invite people who join you in that project.

Don’t invite people to work and say “Okay, come and put your effort and I’m going to pay you.” Of course, that’s the economic deal, but the economic deal will only get you average performance.

Pete Mockaitis
This is really reminding me, Fred, of a fun chat I had. I think I was freshly hired at Bain & Company. I was chatting my fellow consultants in between some training stuff. Somehow it just sort of came up, it was like, “Hey do we do good as strategy consultants?” For me, it was kind of like, the answer was of course or else why would you have ever taken this job.

Then I went on I guess what was a rant associated with, “Well, what we do is we make companies more valuable which is extremely important because folks who are saving for retirement or for college education need for the stocks in their portfolio to appreciate and we help make that possible so that their dreams can come true.

Non-profits and foundations within their endowments have their investments placed in a basket of equities that individually we are helping make. And the leverage of us doing it is so huge in terms of being 23 years old and not having a lot of experience yet and trusted to tackle things that are going to liberate millions and billions of dollars of economic value that …”

So I went on this whole rant and the others were kind of like, “Whoa, I just thought this would be a good place so I could get into Harvard Business School or something.” I was surprised. I guess for me, I call it naïve or what, but I would just sort of assume, “But, of course, you would only choose a job that had deep purpose for you or else you would have chosen a different job.”

But different people, I quickly learned, operate from different starting points in their career decision making.

Fred Kofman
Absolutely. Yet, if you allow me, Pete, to challenge you a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Please.

Fred Kofman
I think you missed the most important part of your job when you described the benefits. I agree with every one you listed, but for me at the top of the list, not for me, economically, at the top of the list, the reason why these companies are going to become more valuable is because they will serve their customers.

The real value in the economy is not the mission of giving jobs to people or money to the investors. The real value in an economy, the one that propels humanity forward, is the competition to give value to the customers. That’s what good consultants help companies do. That’s what the mission of every company needs to be.

If not, we become a bureaucracy. But, “Oh look, we’re doing so much good because we’re hiring all these families.” Okay, that’s like 1% of the good you are doing. Don’t forget the 99% because the real good you’re doing is that people are buying your product because they find it useful in their lives.

You have no idea how much value you’re adding because as I say, if I use an Apple computer, it would cost me maybe 1,000 dollars to buy, but I would have been willing to pay 5,000 dollars. Even if Apple makes a profit of 2 or 300 hundred dollars, I made a surplus value or a consumer profit of 4,000.

Now, nobody knows that because there’s no place where I say I’m willing to pay 5,000. That’s something only I know how much value this computer is going to give me or how much would I be willing to pay for it.

I find it a little problematic today when people talk about social enterprises or “We’re doing good,” or we hire whatever people you’re hiring and say, “Well, so many families eat because of us.” Yes, that’s true, but that’s so small compared to the wealth that you’re creating in terms of life richness, not necessarily measured by money.

But we at Google today is the Input/Output conference for developers and just looking at all the developments in artificial intelligence and the assistant and all that, there’s thousands of people here that are just day and night thinking non-stop, “How can we make people’s lives better?”

There was a clip of a lady that had a difficult handicap. I’m guessing something similar to what Steven Hawking’s had. The kind of life that she was able to live because of the products that were created, it’s infinite. There’s no money in the world that would pay for that or she would not be willing to pay to access the level of quality of life that she’s able to achieve through some of these new technologies.

I want to be very emphatic. I emphasize this in the book, particularly in the last part, that there’s no system that we know that creates social cooperation and the growth and development of humanity like a market system, where everybody opts in because they think they’re getting a good deal or opts out otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. It does connect and resonate and it’s easy to get kind of lost in the weeds a bit. As we discussed this, it kind of reminds me of the book, The Goal, in a manufacturing context in thinking about you had all these performance indicators about manufacturing, but it’s really just about making an efficient product such that it can be sold profitably and then that is enriching the individual end-user who are engaging it.

I’d love it, Fred, if you could tackle, maybe just bring to life a little bit some industries that might be kind of tricky in terms of finding that fulfillment and purpose. I guess some of them could just be controversial in terms of weapons or – well, I could name all kinds of controversial issues, like weapons, tobacco, alcohol, certain insurance drugs, insurance products, hedge funds.

Could you give us a few examples of how “No, no, if you’re working here is actually awesome in this way.” Or maybe you say, “Yeah, maybe work somewhere else.” What do you think about some of the trickier ones?

Fred Kofman
Well, let’s with weapons. What would be the need that a person buying a weapon can satisfy?

Let’s just say an honorable need. I’m not talking about a criminal buying a gun to murder people or to rob them. I’m talking about good people because if you’re going to be inspired, you have to believe that your mission is conducive to some higher good. If you can’t come up with anything, then you shouldn’t work in that industry.

I’ve never worked with gun manufacturers, but I’ve heard the arguments, so I’m sure you have heard them too. What would be the argument for a noble goal that weapons could pursue?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting, when I said weapons, I was originally thinking of tanks and jets and nukes for nations. But I guess on the personal-

Fred Kofman
Okay, that works too. That works. What would be the reason to – let’s just say you’re working for McDonnell Douglas and you’re a leader and you want to inspire some young people to come work there.

Pete Mockaitis
I would suppose you would say, “We are keeping our servicemen and women safer with these offerings. We can rest easier in our homes, in our nation, knowing that we can resist the threat of a foreign power who would seek to kill and enslave us and we don’t have to worry about that much on a day-by-day basis because we have brave people equipped with these useful tools.”

Fred Kofman
I would work for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Fred Kofman
That’s inspiring. Again, I’m not claiming that this is true and that there are no weapons manufacturers that are evil. There are weapon manufacturers that work for the other guys too and they create the possibility of aggression or dominance or all these horrible things.

But at best, it’s possible to work for a certain kind of military-grade weapon manufacturer or even a gun manufacturer and say, “Yeah, it’s about protection. It’s about maintaining the quality of life, of sleeping well because I am aware that any thug can come and abuse you.” That’s inspiring.

Again, it’s not the weapon, but what is it that the weapon allows a human being to do that will allow this person to take care  of important human concerns in an ethical way, meaning without aggressing or without hurting other people in a violent manner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now that that is well-established in terms of your view or purpose in terms of how folks are enriched by the existence of your product and service.

If you zoom into sort of the day-in/day-out of work life, how can we stay connected to that and let the meaning really serve to be energizing and empowering day after day. I’d particularly like to hear that from a vantage point of maybe not an executive or a founder, but perhaps a manager who only has a few direct reports.

Fred Kofman
Yeah, well, let’s start at the bottom, not even a manager with individual contributor. There’s a great story that I found and I use it in the book that refers to President Kennedy’s visit to NASA. I think it was 1962.

He went to NASA and was touring the facility and there was a custodian that was mopping the floors. Just being gracious, the President stopped and said hello and asked him, “So what’s your job here?” He said, “I’m helping to put a man on the moon, Mr. President.”

That is culture. That is a culture that clarifies every day what are we here to do. He was certainly mopping the floors, but that’s not the way he felt about it. Just like it’s different to put brick over brick than to build a cathedral. If you keep the cathedral or the man on the moon in mind, then everything you do takes a different meaning.

This is true, there’s lots of studies. I quote several of them in my book about hospitals for example, and you’ll see the custodians in the hospitals finding a lot of meaning in helping people regain their health and cleaning their rooms and even chatting with them and bringing some joy on the nurses too.

You say, “Oh, some of these are menial tasks. They have to change the sheets.” Yeah, but in the process of changing the sheets, they’re making contact with another human being. They are participating in their life. They are giving them hope when they feel down, when they’re distressed.

It’s profoundly meaningful. It’s almost like a saintly thing to do. You’re going and touching with love and compassion people who are suffering. That’s an amazing opportunity that you only get if you work in a hospital.

I know we may consider some of these things like, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter. You’re just washing clothes in a hospital or making rooms in a hotel.” You say, “Those things are just worthless, meaningless tasks,” but the truth is there are people who do find a lot of meaning in that, but it’s not about the task. It’s always about the goal, the human concern that is being taken care of through the task.

If you’re a manager, then your job is first to remember that and second to remind other people in your team what are you really doing, maintain this awareness day in and day out and everything we do is for that. Everything we do is to fulfill our mission, the service that we’re proud to provide to the community or humanity in general.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I’m with you there. Then you also mentioned a few problems that crop up within the organization in terms of things being disorganized with disinformation or disillusion. Do you have a couple actionable steps you recommend for hitting these pieces?

Fred Kofman
Yes. You may have a clear mission and everybody could be aligned to the mission, but different people see different parts of the organization and have different opinions about what would be the best way to accomplish the mission. I call this touching the elephant.

There’s a great story of a king bringing five blind men and putting them next to an elephant and telling them to describe the shape of the elephant. They start arguing. One of them says, “The elephant is like a column,” touching the leg. The other one says, “Oh no, it’s like a wall,” touching the side. The other one said, “No, no, it’s like a snake,” touching the trunk and so on and so forth.

The king at the end says to them, “Well, you’re all right and you’re all wrong. You’re all right because the part you are touching is really like you describe, but you’re all wrong because you are … extrapolating the part you touch and using it to elicit or to infer what’s the shape of the elephant as a whole.”

Many times in organizations we do that. People are close to some part of the organization and they think that the whole organization is an extrapolation of the part they perceive. The ones that see the organization are so far away, it would be like seeing the elephant from a mile away, that you can see the whole thing, but you don’t have any granularity and you don’t have the details that are required to make intelligent decisions.

I call this disinformation. Different people have different information and nobody knows the whole picture with the level of granularity that’s required to make intelligent decisions. How do you solve this?

Well, if people are aligned on the mission and they know how to share information in a non-arrogant way, I call it humility, then they can come together and each person can say what they see, and what they infer, and what they experience in their immediate environment.

Then the other people can integrate that and create the pool of common information out of which they can make an intelligent decision together, what would be the best way to proceed to accomplish our mission. But that requires kind of gathering the intelligence of everybody and creating this collective consciousness, this group awareness that encompasses the information that everybody’s bringing.

That is surprisingly difficult to do. After I wrote the book I was having some interactions with General Stanley McChrystal who wrote the book Team of Teams. It’s surprising how in the military and particularly having to fight guerrilla warfare that is very decentralized, they were dealing with exactly the same problem in spades.

One of the biggest managerial revolutions that McChrystal triggered in the US military was the creation of the Special Operations Command, the Joint Special Operations Command as a learning adaptive network, as a group of people who were operating in a decentralized manner, but were creating this shared consciousness to have all their resources available to make intelligent decisions to win the war, not win each particular battle, but to achieve the mission.

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

Fred Kofman
I’d say that one of the consequences of this revolution from money to meaning is that you can’t do it as an addition to your personality. You can’t say, “Well, I’m who I am and then I’m going to do this.” The inspiration to use meaning as a galvanizing force, that inspiration requires you to be in a certain form, not just to do things. But who you are really creates the drive for people to follow you.

You have to earn your moral authority from your life. You can’t use formal authority to do this or monetary authority or economic power. You are trying to elicit the internal commitment from people so that they give you what you have no way to extract.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a nice turn of phrase. ‘They give what you have no way to extract.’ Thank you. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Fred Kofman
Well, this is a quote from Mother Theresa that says, “Not everybody can do great things, but everybody can do small things with great love.” I find that very inspiring that this being a moral hero is not about having super powers; it’s about doing day-to-day things with great integrity, with great care, with great compassion. But it’s something I’d like to … in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Fred Kofman
Well, I’ll tell you a shocking study if it’s favorite, but it’s the fact that the level of engagement worldwide is about 12 – 13%, so meaning almost 90% of the people hate their jobs. That’s incredible that so much suffering is happening because we don’t know how to work together and in way that uplifts human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. How about a favorite book?

Fred Kofman
I’d say from Ludwig von Mises, Human Action. It’s not an easy book to read, but it’s a treatise in economics that changed my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be more awesome at your job?

Fred Kofman
Gmail. Google search and Gmail. I think they’re incredible service opportunities. They’re so well designed.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours?

Fred Kofman
I won’t turn on my phone until I finish meditating, doing my yoga exercises, and going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. How about a particular nugget, a piece that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks and has them quoting it back to you?

Fred Kofman
The distinction between a victim of circumstance or being a player and responding to whatever life gives you.

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

Fred Kofman
The best way would be to look at my profile on LinkedIn. I put hundreds of short videos and papers there. They’re publically available. There’s also a website called Conscious.LinkedIn.com. There’s also the book on Amazon or my previous book, Conscious Business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, perfect. Is there a final call to action or challenge that you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Fred Kofman
Yeah, find something that inspires you then live in that space. Don’t waste your life doing something that doesn’t have that juice.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Fred, thank you so much for taking the time to share this wisdom and expertise. It’s powerful stuff and I just wish you tons of luck and all the meaning that you’re bringing to folks.

Fred Kofman
Thank you, Pete. It was a pleasure talking to you.

May 30
0

302: Curing the Under-Management Epidemic with Bruce Tulgan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Bruce Tulgan says: "Delegation is not like putting your kid up for adoption. Delegation is like hiring a babysitter."

Bruce Tulgan makes the case for why it’s good to be the boss and the massive business costs of under-management. He also reveals the true definition of micromanagement and empowerment.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why and how to avoid ‘managing on autopilot’
  2. The central importance of regular one-on-one meetings
  3. How to use the ‘Manager’s Landscape’ tool

About Bruce

Bruce Tulgan is internationally recognized as the leading expert on young people in the workplace and one of the leading experts on leadership and management. Bruce is a best-selling author, an adviser to business leaders all over the world, and a sought-after keynote speaker and management trainer.

Bruce has spent decades working with tens of thousands of leaders and managers in hundreds of organizations ranging from Aetna to Wal-Mart to the U.S. Army.

Bruce has received Toastmasters International’s most prestigious honor, the Golden Gavel. He’s written numerous books and his writing has also appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers such as the Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, HR Magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Items mentioned in the show:

Bruce Tulgan Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bruce, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Bruce Tulgan
Thanks so much for including me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, first I want to hear all about… You have a 6th degree black belt in Uechi-ryu, if I said that right.

Bruce Tulgan
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
A karate style. And I’m so intrigued by this on a couple of dimensions. First of all, the degrees. More degrees is harder and takes longer, right?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah. I’ve been studying karate for 44 years, since I was 7 years old. And in our style 6th degree is a master. And so I had to go to Okinawa to be promoted to that level, but I’ve studied since I was a little boy. And in fact, my lifelong teacher since I was a young child – he now has come here to live with us. So, next door to my home is my office and my dojo, and my lifelong teacher lives with us now.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really cool, that’s really cool. And so, I’m intrigued then, with Uechi-ryu, is that distinctive from other karate styles, and in what way?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, all karate comes from Okinawa, which was the Ruykyu Kingdom and was annexed by Japan in 1879. And it’s kind of a nexus of Japanese and Chinese influence in Okinawa. But our style is a very hard style; it’s half hard, half soft, is what it comes from originally. And it’s based on conditioning the body and practicing kata, which are prearranged series of techniques, and fighting. And that’s true of all classical karate practice. So our style is a very effective style; it’s upright and it mixes the movements of the tiger, the dragon, and the crane. And it’s a lifelong passion of mine.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, that’s cool. And so, is there any overlap between your interest in… I’m going to try to pronounce it the way you pronounced it – karate. Did I say that right? I always say “karate”. I feel so American.

Bruce Tulgan
American say “karate”. But “kara” means “empty” or “Chinese”; it means both things. And “te” means “hand”, and “do” means “way”. So “karate-do” means “the way of the Chinese hand” or “the way of the empty hand”.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you. Well, so, is there some overlap there from that, I guess, mindset or way, and your company RainmakerThinking?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, karate influences everything in my life, because I’ve been doing it since I was 7 years old. So, it’s an art of the mind and the body and the spirit, and certainly it influences everything I do. I mean I’ve learned from karate that the fundamentals are the most important, no matter what you’re doing. The fundamentals are what it’s all about. I’ve learned that simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy, but simple is often what you need and simple can be pretty darn hard. And I’ve learned that practice, practice, practice is the way you get good at anything. And I think half hard, half soft, which is what our style comes from – those principles work in everything. It’s yin-yang. It’s also much of what we teach in our management seminars, is accountability and flexibility go hand-in-hand. So that’s kind of a nice analog to hard and soft – accountability and flexibility.

Pete Mockaitis
And so your company has done a number of interesting studies long term, over many years. Not quite as many years as you’ve been doing karate, but since the ‘90s, right?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, we started doing this research in 1993. I was a young, unhappy lawyer at the time, and I began interviewing young people, people my age, about their experiences in the workplace. And those first interviews turned into my first book, which was Managing Generation X, which finally came out in 1995. And we’ve been continuing the research ever since. So now more than a half a million people have participated in our longitudinal interviews, and from 400 different organizations. And tens of thousands of those interviews lasted 10 years or longer. So we’ve been tracking these issues – generational change in the workplace, human capital management, and leadership and management best practices – we’ve been tracking these issues since 1993.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could share sort of a key insight that has high applicability from some of these studies.

Bruce Tulgan
Well, our generational shift research is where we’re tracking generational change in the workplace. And of course demographers have been talking about this great generational shift that’s going to happen for a long time. Now it’s actually happening. The age bubble on one end of the spectrum is growing, as the Baby Boomers continue to age, every single day in North America alone 8,000 to 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65, and they’re filling up the age bubble on one end of the spectrum.

On the other end of the spectrum, the fastest growing segment of the workforce is made up of those born 1990 and later. By 2020 those born 1990 and later will be 28% of the workforce, and by 2020 the Baby Boomers will be well under 20% of the workforce. So this has implications for staffing strategy, attraction, selection, onboarding, up to speed training, performance management, rewards, incentives, retention, knowledge transfer, succession planning, leadership development. All of these issues are affected by the shift in the demographics.

And of course it’s not just numbers that are changing, but also the mindset of the workforce is changing. Everyone’s talking about the Millennials, especially the second wave Millennials – the youngest, least experienced people in the workplace – those born 1990 and later, and what our research shows is that they are like the canaries in the coal mine. The young emerging workforce, they think short-term and transactional, they want to know, “What do you want from me today, tomorrow and this week? What do you have to offer me today, tomorrow and this week?” They do not want everything on a silver platter – that’s a lie, or a misunderstanding. They don’t want to be humored at work – that’s nonsense. They want to be taken seriously and they want to know, “What do I need to do every day to earn the rewards and flexibility that I need?” And so, I think that’s where we’re all headed. What we learned from our generational shift research is as the numbers shift, we’re all headed in that same direction. People of all ages… We’re all Millennials now.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say “the canary in the coal mine”, I get that metaphor suggests a warning of danger and changes that need to be made. Can you expand upon that a little bit?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah. Any organization that’s still trying to recruit people by, “Hey, welcome to the family. Pay your dues, climb the ladder, and in the long run the system will take care of you.” So, “We expect you to make lots of short-term sacrifices in exchange for vague promises about long-term rewards that may or may not vest in the deep, distant future” – that’s from the workplace of the past. That doesn’t work anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, as you describe that, I was immediately like, “No, no way, don’t believe you”, because downsizing, layoffs, it happens all the time. And I don’t know where it got baked into me, but I remember even in college I thought I cannot depend on any employer long-term for anything, therefore I’m going to assemble an unbeatable, indispensable set of skills that make me valuable anywhere and everywhere. And that’s one of the main reasons I chose to start a career in strategy consulting. And so, it seems like I’m not the only one who figured that out; this is pretty widespread, that these vague promises of future rewards ain’t cutting it for folks.

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, look. So that’s a big part of it, and I think that employers, they know on one level that job security is dead, that people have to take responsibility for their own success, but then they can’t figure out how to drive performance and retain the best people. A lot of organizations are having a hard time figuring that out, and the reason is because even though everything’s changing, they’re still operating on the same assumptions. So, organizations need to adapt. They need to realize that in a highly uncertain environment people are going to think short-term and transactional.

That doesn’t mean you can’t retain people for the long term, but it does mean you’re going to have to do that in a much more granular, high maintenance way. And so I think when people point to the youngest, least experienced people – the second wave Millennials – and talk about, “They’re so high maintenance”, I think that’s true. But I think people of all ages are becoming more high maintenance, because if you can’t trust the system to take care of you in the long term, you look to your immediate boss to take care of you in the short term, and that’s high maintenance.

And so it’s not that people are not willing to do a lot of grunt work very well, very fast, all day long. They just want to know, “Okay, how are you going to make the quid pro quo explicit every step of the way? How do I score enough points around here today, tomorrow, this week, this month, this year, to earn more of what I need and want to take care of myself and my family?”

And as you say, career security no longer lies in an organization chart, but it lies in the marketable skills you’re able to build up in yourself, your ability to add value, your ability to collect proof of your ability to add value, the relationships you build with decision-makers who know you can add value. That’s where career security lies nowadays, I think more and more. And we see this in greatest relief among the youngest people, because they’ve never known it any other way. So older, more experienced people maybe are having to adapt to this free agent mindset, but the youngest, least experienced people have never known it any other way.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got to be like Liam Neeson, with a particular set of skills.

Bruce Tulgan
[laugh] Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Whether you’re going to take down a bunch of kidnappers or have career security. So, I’m right with you there. And so, I got turned on to your work through Chris Deferio on the show earlier, and he was raving about your book It’s Okay to Be the Boss. And I too became quite intrigued as I dug into it a little bit. And so, could you share a little bit with us there, what’s the main idea behind this book and why do you think it’s really just connecting with folks and striking a chord here?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah. Well, that book, It’s Okay to Be the Boss, comes out of another line of our research – our research on leadership and management best practices, and the experiences that leaders and managers are having every day. And we’ve been tracking “under-management” is what we call it – it’s the opposite of micromanagement. We’ve been tracking what we call the “under-management epidemic” that so many leaders, managers and supervisors in the real world, they’re just not doing enough leading, managing and supervising.

And there are a lot of reasons for that, but when leaders are not highly engaged with their direct reports in today’s environment, things go wrong. And so the book It’s Okay to Be the Boss, what I tried to do was share the research we’ve been doing on under-management. What is under-management? What is the state of practice when it comes to most leaders and managers? What does it look like? What’s going right, what’s going wrong? And when leaders and managers are not leading and managing in a sufficiently engaged way, why is that? Why is it that leaders have such a hard time on the front lines, spending time in high-structure, high-substance dialogues, guiding, directing, supporting and coaching people? Why is it that managers have a hard time doing that? What’s going wrong? What are the costs? And then, what are the most effective managers doing differently? And that’s what the book is about.

It’s eight steps back to the fundamentals of leadership, it’s get in the habit of managing people every day; take it one person at a time; learn to talk like a teacher or a coach; make accountability a process, not a slogan; spell out expectations every step of the way; track performance every step of the way; solve small problems before they turn into big problems; and reward people extra when they go the extra mile.

That’s the basic thrust of the book, and I think it’s hitting a chord because I think a lot of leaders and managers feel like it’s getting harder and harder and harder to manage people, and they start looking out in the world of management experts and leadership books. And a lot of those leadership books and management books are telling them a lot of formulas that don’t really work. And my book has the virtue of, it’s not the flavor of the month; it’s just the old fashioned basics.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then let’s talk a little bit about this under-management crisis that’s there. So, can you paint a little bit of a picture in terms of what does that look, sound and feel like in practice, in terms of the state of management, leadership, supervision, and employees that is all too common and problematic right now?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, I think what most leaders and manager feel like they don’t have enough time to provide high structure, high substance, coaching-style guidance, direction, support every day. They feel like they don’t have enough time. And if you really talk with managers as we do every day, what they’ll tell you is, “Oh, I talk to my people every day”, but what that looks like almost always is they touch base: “How’s everything going? is everything on track? Any problems I should know about?”

And then the problem is those questions tell you nothing. And they interrupt each other all day long. So, when something pops into somebody’s head, they text their manager, they email their manager, they go look for their manager, they call the manager. When something pops into the manager’s head, they go look for the person or they text them or they email them or they call them. We call that “management by interruption”. The problem is nobody’s at their best when they’re interrupted. And then we see each other on email, we see each other in meetings.

And if you take those four elements – touching base, interrupting, email and meetings – that is what makes managers think they’re managing, because they’re spending a lot of time communicating. It’s just that it’s not very effective communication. It’s not time effective and it’s not effective in terms of getting into the details. So what happens is managers feel like they’re managing, and we call that “managing on autopilot” – touching base, interrupting, email, monitoring, and meetings.

And what happens is, problems hide below the radar, and then every so often a problem blows up and everyone jumps into firefighting mode. And then it’s roll up your sleeves, all hands on deck, and boy, is that time-consuming. It’s a whole lot harder to put out a fire and salvage the wreckage than it is to prevent a fire. So this is what we call the “vicious cycle of under-management” and it’s why so many leaders say, “Well, I’m already talking to my people”, but what they’re not doing is creating a structured dialogue where they spell out expectations, where they make sure people know exactly what’s expected of them, what are you doing, how are you doing it, what steps are you going to follow, show me your plan, they track performance in writing, and troubleshoot, problem-solve, resource-plan, hold people accountable, and provide recognition when people go the extra mile.

That’s what’s not happening in nine out of 10 management relationships. Nine out of 10 managers are not providing a regular structured dialogue, where they make expectations clear, track performance, problem-solve, troubleshoot, resource-plan, and hold people accountable and provide recognition and reward when people go the extra mile. Nine out of 10 management relationships that’s not happening, and that’s what we call “under-management”.

And there are eight business costs – problems occur that never had to occur, problems get out of control that could have been solved easily, resources are squandered, people go in the wrong direction for days, weeks or months without realizing it, low performers hide out and collect paychecks, mediocre performers mistake themselves for high performers, high performers get frustrated and think about leaving, and managers end up doing tasks, responsibilities and projects that should have been delegated to someone else, or sometimes were delegated to someone else; they just come back to the manager. So this is what under-management looks like.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Bruce Tulgan
And it’s the elephant in the room in most workplaces. It’s a problem that hides in plain sight.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that is quite a picture, thank you. And it’s spooky, and it resonates, and it’s real. And so, well, I guess I’m wondering then, it sounds like you are asserting that if you spent some time upfront engaging in these structured dialogues and having less of the interruption stuff, you would in fact come out ahead, in terms of time turning into great output.

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So, it’s not that managers don’t spend a lot of time managing already, they just don’t put their management time in the right place, and they don’t use it in a sufficiently effective way. So one way to think about it is think about all the time that people spend firefighting. Remember Smokey the Bear?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Bruce Tulgan
Smokey the Bear used to say, “It’s a whole lot easier to prevent a forest fire than it is to put one out.” And Smokey was one smart bear. And so in many ways, the discipline we teach is managing upfront in advance before anything goes right, wrong, or average. It’s fire prevention. Or if you like Stephen Covey, it’s quadrant to management, it’s putting leadership and management upfront, and making it easier for people to go in the right direction in the first place, so you don’t have to spend a whole bunch of time solving problems that never should have happened.

Pete Mockaitis
So the “important but not urgent” quadrant there.

Bruce Tulgan
Exactly. In many ways, good management is like taking a walk every day and eating your vegetables. It’s simple but it requires discipline and focus, and you’ve got to build those habits.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you talk about having a structured dialogue, what does that look like in practice? What are some rituals, the equivalent of the taking the walks and eating the vegetables that should just be happening and be sort of like one-on-ones, schedule that recurring times, or how does that look like in practice?

Bruce Tulgan
Yes, so it’s team meetings, but only for what team meetings are good for. And then one-on-one is where all the action is. And the reason for structure… So, look, maybe it’s the same time – Tuesdays at 10:00, maybe it’s everyday at 10:00. Or maybe your schedule’s a moving target so you can’t do it at the same time every day or every week, so that at the end of each conversation, you schedule the next one. But the key is to have structure.

And the reason for structure is so that you, as a leader, know you’re going to have this conversation. And me, as an employee who relies on my leader, as your direct report, I know it’s going to happen too, so that I can prepare and you can prepare. The key to structure is instead of interrupting each other, we keep a running list because we know we’re going to have that meeting. Now, of course, we should be able to talk informally in between one-on-ones. And if the building’s on fire, then we better interrupt each other. But so often we interrupt each other – nobody’s at their best when they’re being interrupted – so often we interrupt each other when we really don’t need to, the building is not on fire.

And it works so much better if you keep a running list, and then before each one-on-one, you prepare. Some leaders and managers, what they do is they have their direct report send them a one-page document before the one-on-one, maybe the day before, with what are your burning issues, maybe status updates on ongoing tasks and responsibilities and projects, burning issues, resource needs, questions, and other matters. And then the key is by preparing, you’re going to make that dialogue so much more effective because you’re preparing. The structure leads to the substance.

And when it comes to the substance and structure, everybody’s different. The dialogue you need to have with one employee may be very different from the dialogue you need to have with another. That’s why one-on-one is where all the action is. Some people, you need to go over their to-do list with them every day. Some people, that would be ridiculous. Some people are self-starting high performers. The reason you meet with them is to make sure that you’re helping them clear obstacles out of their way, or get them the resources they need, or help them navigate interdependency, or maybe you’re trying to get ideas from them because they’re so good.

The conversation you develop with one person will be very different from the conversation you start developing with another person. And so the structure is key, but it might be every day for one person, every other day for another person, every other week for another person. And likewise, the substance will be different depending on what you need from that person, and depending on what that person needs from you.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, and as one who really doesn’t do well with interruptions. Not that I start screaming or anything, but it’s so true. It’s like, “Where was I?” All that time, reconnecting to what I was doing before the interruption, that really does add up. And so I’m curious then, there’s this time saving occurring with those eight business costs avoided. And so what kind of time investment are we talking about here in terms of daily, or weekly, or one hour, half an hour? What are the rough ranges that you’re seeing?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, it depends on how many direct reports you have. Look, the reality is there are some managers who have unwieldy spans of control. If you have 30 people reporting to you directly with no chain of command, best of luck. Now you’re still better off to have one-on-ones and maybe have a 20-minute one-on-one with each person. That means you could get to three in a day, and that means you get to 15 in a week, that means you could get to all 30 in two weeks. And that still would be better than the random unstructured loosey-goosey ad hoc touching base interrupting and firefighting that most managers are addicted to.

So, look, I say start with an hour a day. If you think you don’t have time to manage people, set aside an hour a day. If you really think you don’t have time, like, “No way,” then set aside 90 minutes a day, because it’s high leverage time. The less time you have, the more important it is to set aside time for guiding, directing, supporting and coaching upfront, in advance while you still have a chance to prevent problems from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good, that’s good. Alright, so then I’m intrigued by the title of your book itself, It’s Okay to Be the Boss. I think some would say, “But of course it’s okay to be the boss. Who thinks it’s not okay to be the boss?” What specifically are you challenging there?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, so many people, they don’t want to be in charge, or they feel like they don’t know how. A lot of people want the status, and the authority, and the prestige, and the rewards. They want the business card, but they don’t want the burdens of being in charge of other people. They don’t want the actual day-to-day work that comes from guiding, directing, and supporting and coaching people. So maybe they want the paycheck, maybe they want the business card, but in fact they resist the interpersonal difficulties that sometimes come with having authority over someone else.

If you have authority in relation to someone else’s career and livelihood, that’s powerful. And I’d say, do not take that power lightly. That is a lot of responsibility and it’s not to be taken lightly. On the other hand, you have to own your responsibility. You’re someone else’s boss. They go home at night after work, and sit at the dinner table and talk about their boss – they’re talking about you. So it’s okay to be the boss, but you’d better be good at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so I’d like to get your take then – in the realm of what you’re describing, being a little bit more hands-on and planful in these exchanges, what’s the right way to think about the empowerment versus micromanaging elements? It sounds like it’s quite easy to go too far in one direction or another. How do you think about navigating those waters?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, my view is that micromanagement is a big red herring. Micromanagement is the shield people use when they want to be left alone. “You’re micromanaging me.” “Nope, I’m just managing you. Good news we’re also going to pay you. If this were an amusement park, there’d be a line outside the door and somebody would be selling tickets.” And by the way, micromanagement is also the excuse a lot of managers use when they don’t want to do their job of managing. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to be a micromanager.”

But micromanagement is really quite rare. Real micromanagement is too much direction and feedback for this person with this task at this time. How are you going to know how much direction and feedback this person needs with this task at this time if you’re not in regular dialogue? So the way to calibrate is precisely to get in there and start talking about the work with this person until you are engaged in a regular ongoing structured dialogue with every person about his or her tasks, responsibilities and projects. Then how do you know how much direction and feedback this person needs?

And it’s a moving target. Maybe I’ve been doing X, Y and Z projects for a long time, so I know how to do those, I don’t need as much direction on that stuff. But what if I have a brand new responsibility? Well, then I’m going to need a lot more guidance and direction on the new responsibility for a while until I get up to speed on it.

So, I think there’s a lot of false empowerment thinking out there. The way to empower people is to leave them alone. What’s empowering about that? False empowerment is sink or swim, reinvent the wheel, figure it out, do it however you think it should be done, even though it’s probably not up to you. There’s nothing empowering about that. Real empowerment is about setting people up for success. Real empowerment is about making sure people know exactly what’s expected of them, giving them the resources they need, spelling it out, breaking it down so that people know exactly how to succeed.

That’s real empowerment. Real empowerment takes hard work on the part of the manager. And so what I tell leaders is, real empowerment is not so sexy. It’s the boring art of delegation, is real empowerment. It’s spelling out an area of responsibility for someone else, making clear all the guidelines and parameters, establishing good timelines, and following up at regular intervals. That’s how you properly delegate.

Some people think that delegation is giving away responsibility. Delegation is about giving away limited execution authority. So delegation is not like putting your kid up for adoption. Delegation is like hiring a babysitter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s a nice metaphor, thank you. I have a baby at home, our first, at the moment. So I’m right with you on that. And so then, I’m curious, you mentioned that we can do this. You can avoid folks kind of hiding out and collecting a paycheck, the stowaways. And so I’m imagining that this would be tremendously effective at surfacing very quickly, “Well, you’re really kind of not doing anything. I’m talking to you every week, and I’ve looked at what it is you’re working on and it ain’t much, and it hasn’t been much week after week. And I’m trying to ask you to do some extra things, you’re not doing those things.” I’m wondering that once you start engaging folks in this way, I think that many workplaces will surface many such people in that boat. Any pro tips for handling that once you’re in the thick of it?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, what I always tell managers is… When they ask me, “How long should I tolerate a low performer?”, what I always say to managers is, if you’re not providing regular high structure, high substance guidance, direction, support and coaching, then you don’t even know if you have a low performer working for you. Because if you think you have a low performer and you’re not managing, then the first question you should be asking is, “Is it you or is it me?” Because a lot of problems in the workplace can be avoided or solved relatively easily when managers start practicing the fundamentals.

But if you’re practicing the fundamentals of leadership, if you’re every day, every other day, once a week, spelling out expectations, following up, following up, following up, breaking it down, spelling it out, breaking it down some more – if you’re doing everything you can to set me up for success and to give me the support I need, and when you come back to me say, “Did you do it?” and every time it’s, “Nope, I didn’t do it.” “Well, okay, let’s talk twice a day.” You come back in four hours, “Did you do it?” “Nope.” “Okay, here’s a checklist for the checklist for the checklist.” You come back the next day, “Did you do it?” “Nope.” Well, how long does it take to figure out that I’m really not doing the job?

So managers often say to me, “Oh, the hardest thing is giving negative feedback. Oh, the hardest thing is letting somebody know when they haven’t done as good a job as they think they have.” Well, if you’re bending over backwards and jumping through hoops to help me succeed, all of a sudden, if I’m not doing it, I’m the one who’s uncomfortable, not you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Bruce Tulgan
All of a sudden, when you come tell me, “Hey, you’re not doing it,” it’s not going to be a surprise to me. We’ve been having these conversations every day. It’s becoming increasingly clear to both of us that gee, I’m just not doing the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And then any choice words that you encourage managers to deliver under such circumstances?

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, that if you’ve been documenting this. As long as you’re documenting that you’re spelling out expectations and you come back, document that my performance is not meeting those expectations, then yeah, the choice words I recommend at that point are, “Hey, we’ve got a problem. And it’s not me, it’s you.” [laugh]

Pete Mockaitis
[laugh] I’m wondering if we should use the same intonation. [laugh]

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, it’s like when employees come to the manager and say, “Oh, you’re picking on me and you’re favoring Mr. Red.” And what most managers want to say is, “I’m so glad you noticed. The reason I favor Mr. Red is he comes in early, he stays late, he bends over backwards and jumps through hoops. He dots his i’s, he crosses his t’s. The reason I favor Red is he does more work than you.” And if you’re meeting with people and spelling out expectations and tracking performance in writing, it becomes much easier to be authentic and hold people accountable in a meaningful way.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m right with you there. And then I think you mentioned that this has so many implications for so many different parts of the organization, I’m thinking about just performance reviews. And we had a lawyer on the show previously – I believe it was Eliot Wagonheim – who mentioned that performance reviews in court cases for wrongful termination are never brought up by the employer saying, “As you can see, judge and / or jury, there’s a long history of underperformance.” But they are always brought up by the defense, like, “Time and time again, the performance reviews said, ‘Met expectations’.” And I think that is just a super clear, official, institutionalized way that you see this with regard to, is this management really happening on a meaningful basis, or is it not at all.

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. We call that “false fairness”, “false nice guy syndrome”, and “avoidance of conflict”. And what happens is that if you’re not managing people every day, every other day, once a week, guiding, directing, supporting and coaching them, tracking performance in writing, then what happens is the review period comes up and everyone’s got to kind of figure it out. And often people are making reference to work that they’ve never seen directly, or they weren’t supervising directly, or something that was 10 months ago, or people think it’s politics or who you like.

And a lot of times what happens is because of all of these complications, managers do not give real granular feedback, but rather everyone gets a “Meets expectations”. And so it means the paper trail is not helpful, it’s not accurate, it’s not driving performance, and it’s a sledgehammer that has no real management impact. If anything, it has a negative impact.

So, one of the beauties of guiding, directing and supporting people on a more granular basis and providing more structured feedback on an ongoing basis is then when you do get to those performance reviews, it’s much easier to create them, it’s much easier to differentiate between high performers and low performers and people in the middle, and there are a lot fewer surprises. And it’s much easier to align rewards with performance.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. I’m thinking about, I’ve shared… I’ve looked at some people’s reviews before when they’ve opened up to me a little bit. And I guess I’ve had a privileged formative years in work with consulting, because I would see someone’s review and it was so sparse, it was like, “This is barely a page, and you get this annually?” Well, I got a four-page review, it’s single spaced, full of specific instances of my work every three months, at the end of every project in consulting.

And I actually looked forward to the review period because it was like, “Oh, I am learning stuff now. And this is enriching for me and part of value proposition of having taken this job.” And it’s just a shame how so often it’s just a joke. And it does, as you mentioned, cause problems in terms of, I guess, credibility, authority, trust – all that stuff being undermined because the words are often hollow in these documents.

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And by the way, high performers like to keep score, high performers like to get reviews, high performers want to be evaluated, because they know they’re going the extra mile all the time, they want to get recognition and reward for it. The only people who want to be managed by false empowerment and false fairness, the only people want to be left alone and treated like everyone else are low performers who are hiding out.

So, this sort of hands-off management and false fairness approach caters to low performers. High performers want a manager who knows who they are, knows what they’re doing, is in a position to help them do more better faster, get unnecessary problems out of their way, get rid of low performers who are in their way, and help them get recognition and rewards so they can earn more for themselves and their families.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Bruce, tell me – anything else you really want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and talk about a few of your favorite things?

Bruce Tulgan
[laugh] No, I think you’ve been very thorough.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks, thank you. Put that in my review, Bruce.

Bruce Tulgan
Yeah, there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Document it. Then can you start us off with a favorite quote, something that inspires you?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, gee, where shall I begin? I guess the title of one of my favorite books, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith, that’s one of my favorite quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And how about a favorite study?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, we’re always doing research. So we’re releasing a new white paper in a couple of weeks called Winning the Talent Wars, so I guess that’s my current favorite study.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Any choice insights that you can speak to in a sense or two?

Bruce Tulgan
Yes, the supply and demand curve is totally out of whack. There’s much greater demand for skilled talent, especially in the STEM fields than there is supply, and that’s going to be true for the foreseeable future. And employers who don’t become more nimble in their employment practices and their management practices are going to find themselves engaged in frustrating bidding wars for talent. So you either are going to commit yourself to a bidding war, or you’re going to do the hard work of building a winning culture.

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

Bruce Tulgan
Well, gee, probably my favorite book of all time is The Last Lecture, and that’s just an amazing book. Siddhartha is one of my favorite books. Jonathan Livingston Seagull is one of my favorite books. There’s a few.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Bruce Tulgan
A favorite tool? Well, I guess in my own life, probably the tool I use the most are reading glasses and my iPhone. But I think in the management world, the tool that I recommend the most is what we call the “manager’s landscape”. And at the top of the page, you create a horizontal axis with six questions: Who, Why, What, How, Where, and When.

And then in the Who column, you list all of your direct reports and make a few notes about them – A player, B player, C player, that sort of thing. In the Why column, for each person you say, “Here’s why I’m managing this person. Here’s my goal with this person. Here’s what I’m trying to help this person get better at.” In the What column, you put what’s your message for this person right now, or what are your questions for this person right now. In the How column, it’s a trial-and-error thing, but it’s how do you talk to this person. Some people, you ask question; some people, you give orders; some people, it’s a combination of both. And then Where and When – where and when are you going to have these conversations, and how often of course? So that’s what we call the “manager’s landscape”. So that’s a very powerful tool that we recommend.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice. And how about a favorite habit?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, I think fitness is at the core for me. Take a walk every day and eat your vegetables. But I think in general, human beings are creatures of habit. And the only question is, do you have good habits or bad habits? That’s where you have to make choices. Human beings are creatures of habit. Habits feel good. And the problem is that bad habits feel just as good as good habits. The good news is that if you take the time and discipline to develop good habits, they feel just as good as bad habits, and they make you stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
And tell me, is there a particular nugget, an articulation of your message that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, I guess, “The fundamentals are all you need.” “Own your responsibility, own your authority.” “It’s okay to be the boss, be good at it.”

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

Bruce Tulgan
Well, our website is RainmakerThinking.com, and there’s a whole bunch of free resources at RainmakerThinking.com. Or you can always follow me on Twitter @BruceTulgan, or LinkedIn, or the normal channels.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or a call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Bruce Tulgan
Well, the first person you have to manage every day is yourself. And that means you’ve got to be honest with yourself about your work habits, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about your personal habits, you’ve got to take care of yourself outside of work so that you bring your best to work. You’ve got to get good at being on time or a little bit early, take notes, use checklists, stay focused. The first person you have to manage every day is yourself, and then the second person you have to manage every day is everybody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Got it. Well, Bruce, thank you. This has been fun, it’s been eye-opening, it’s been intriguing. Please keep doing your good work. And just thanks for taking this time!

Bruce Tulgan
Likewise. Geez, I’m honored to be on your podcast, and thank you so much. Thanks for making it so easy.

May 09
0

297: Encouraging Insight Through More Coach-like Conversations with Michael Bungay Stanier

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Michael Bungay Stanier says: "Be lazy, be curious, be often."

Michael Bungay Stanier returns to talk about become more coach-like by staying curious longer and giving advice a bit more slowly.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why we more naturally give advice rather than ask questions
  2. The questions effective coaches ask
  3. How to deal with the uncoachable

About Michael

Michael Bungay Stanier is the founder of Box of Crayons, a company best known for teaching 10-minute coaching so that busy managers can build stronger teams and get better results. On the way to founding Box of Crayons in 2002, Michael lived in Australia, England, the United States and Canada, his current home. He has written a number of books. His latest, the Wall Street Journal bestseller The Coaching Habit, has sold over 350,000 copies. It has been praised as one of the few business books that actually makes people laugh out loud. He was the first Canadian Coach of the Year, is a Rhodes Scholar, and was recently recognized as the #3 Global Guru in coaching. Balancing out these moments of success, Michael was banned from his high school graduation for “the balloon incident,” was sued by one of his law school lecturers for defamation, and his first published piece of writing was a Harlequin romance short story called “The Male Delivery.”

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Michael Bungay Stanier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back to the How to Be Awesome at Your Job Podcast.

Michael Bungay Stanier
It is lovely to be back. This is will be fun. I can just feel it in my bones that this is going to be a great conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel it too. The last one was so fun and you’re too kind for coming back. I was but a newbie, only 55 episodes in back then. I misspelled your name. I kind of had some facts about you wrong. And you came back for more, what a sport.

Michael Bungay Stanier
It all made me sound much more interesting than I am, calling me Nigel Bungay Stanier is odd, but I flew with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Nigel, it’s among the most sophisticated and intellectual of options. I realized last time we never talked about the balloon incident in your high school. I think that’s important to get on the record over here.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You’re right. In my bio it says ‘was banned from his high school graduation for the balloon incident.’ Here’s my decision on this. I’m never going to tell what that is actually about. But I’ll tell you what, Pete. The truth is the story itself is actually less exciting and enticing than that awesome one-liner sounds.

It is true that I was banned from my high school graduation for the balloon incident, but I want to leave it up to people’s imagination, just what can one man do with some balloons that is significant that he is not allowed to then graduate from his high school, where, by the way, I won prized and I did this and I did that and they still wouldn’t let me participate in the ceremony. I’m just going to tantalize people with that.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so intrigued and I am tantalized. In a way I can kind of relate. You’re a Rhodes Scholar, yes?

Michael Bungay Stanier
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
An impressive intellect. You’d think they’d want to honor one of their best and brightest during the big day. I’m going to just imagine that the balloon ended up destroying an expensive piece of equipment. That’s what I have in my imagination.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I can neither confirm nor deny that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, well I’m going to roll with that for now.

We talked way back in episode 55 and we kind of got the basics of what your book The Coaching Habit is all about. It’s since become much more of a smash hit now than it was before.

Michael Bungay Stanier
It’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about living that life. When you hit 1,000 Amazon reviews does Jeff Bezos come by your house or-?

Michael Bungay Stanier
He does, yeah. Exactly. In fact Jeff got my name tattooed on to his arm in celebration of the book. No, that didn’t happen.

The book is a little over two years old now. It launched February the 29th 2016 because February the 29th, why wouldn’t I choose that date. It has gone from strength to strength. It’s about 400,000 copies sold. It’s constantly in the top 1,000 books sold on Amazon, which is exciting.

In fact last week it got up to the number six book overall on Kindle books on Amazon. Number one in the business category. To all of your audience, they don’t care about this, but I was geeking out about this.

As you said, we’ve got over 1,000 reviews on Amazon. In fact, we’ve now got over 1,000 five-star reviews. It’s just a well-received book that we worked really hard to write and publicize and all of that. But somewhere along the lines someone sprinkled fairy dust into the mix and so it’s just going gangbusters. It’s very exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so good. I’d like to maybe first get your take when it comes to –you say the word coaching, could you get us oriented a little bit in terms of what you mean, what you don’t mean and any kind of preconceptions you want to make it clear that you are not that?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it’s a great question and I’m going to just tweak it a little bit and frame it up.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so coach-like of you.

Michael Bungay Stanier
That is right. The purpose of this book, even though coaches love it, is actually not to make people into coaches. It’s to help people be more coach-like.

Because actually the person that I had in mind when I wrote this book, and I will say the people more broadly than this, but the person I desperately had in mind was you are a busy, engaged manager. You are doing the best you can, but you are a bit overwhelmed. You are a bit stuck. You’re not …. The one who got the next leap forward is for you to have more impact and find more meaning in the work that you do.

This is the person who I imagine, she goes up to the airport book store, she sees the book there, she picks it up, she goes, “I could read this”. It’s a short, interesting looking book and she finds a tool to help her be more coach-like.

What do I mean by more coach-like? Here’s the thing. I boil it down to a very simple behavior and it is this, can you stay curious a little bit longer, can you rush to action and advice giving just a little bit more slowly.

Now you can talk about coaching in different ways. In the book I talk about a coaching cycle and that’s a new insight typically generated by good question, an insight about yourself or about the situation leads to a positive behavior change. In other words you do something differently.

Positive behavior change leads to increased impact, hopefully positive increased impact, which in turn leads back around to new insight about yourself and about the situation. That’s kind of the dynamic of what coaching is.

I like John Whitmore’s definition of coaching more broadly which is helping people learn rather than teaching them, helping them to unlock their own potential. I think that’s really nice.

But all of that stuff is a bit abstract, a bit theoretical. I just love keeping it at a behavior change level, which is can you stay curious a little bit longer, can you rush action and advice giving a little bit more slowly because I think most people are advice giving maniacs. They love it.

They’re trigger wired to actually leap in with ideas, suggestions, solutions, ways you should do it even when they have no idea what’s actually going on. We’re just trying to shift that behavior just a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s very handy. Then you lay out some excellent questions that are powerful and flexible. That’s where we spent most of our time in the last conversation. How about I take a crack at doing maybe a two-minute summary and you can tell me all the ways that I’ve grossly mischaracterized your opus.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’m quietly confident you’re totally going to nail this, so take it away. The seven questions from the coaching heaven. Drumroll please.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, it’s on.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Pete, number one is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, the opening question, what’s on your mind that enables you to focus the conversation and position your partner to do the thinking?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Perfect, and get into the juicy stuff fast. Sometimes it’s like… it’s like trying to chat somebody up at a bar. You know once you get into it, it’s going to be fine, but what’s the question that gets you into it.

We call this the quick start question, which is how do you accelerate into a more interesting conversation more quickly. That’s perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Then there’s the AWE question, which is actually a mini-acronym. It stands for And What Else. That helps you get into further depth and seeing really where they’re coming from with that.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Perfect. We call it the best coaching question in the world in part because it gives juice to every other question and you’ve got to know that their first answer is never their only answer and it’s rarely their best answer, but secondly, it is a self-management tool to help you stay curious a little bit longer because if you’re asking anyone else, you’re not giving advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Then there’s the lazy question, how can I help. Well, it’s lazy because you don’t have to figure out how you can help. You can just give up and let them figure that out for you. But that actually helps eliminate redundancy and make your contributions all the more on point anyway.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, I love that. The insight that people tend to leap in and start fixing things before they really know what’s going on, the lazy question is a great anecdote to that. Now I think the lazy question in the book is number five or number six. Can you remember what number three is?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe I’m out of order.

Michael Bungay Stanier
The focus question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
The focus question is what’s the real challenge here.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Kind of focusing in on the main thing.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, and if you want to make that really powerful, you don’t just ask what’s the challenge here, you don’t just ask what’s the real challenge here, you ask what’s the real challenge here for you. That ‘for you’ on the end of it is a way of spinning the spotlight from the problem to the person solving the problem. It becomes a deeper, more powerful, more useful conversation right away.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Then – well, now my numbers, I don’t even know.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Number four, which is the foundation question.

Pete Mockaitis
What do you want?

Michael Bungay Stanier
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like I’m in school. Praise me, Michael.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You nailed it. It’s classic. You’re amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s sort of that get after the primary goal and focusing your energy there. A lot of people don’t even know what they want.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Perfect. The next question is the strategic question.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just sort of like an opportunity cost. If I say yes to this, what do I say no to?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. Where are you powerful? It connects actually to a previous book I wrote called Do More Brave Work, which basically says three types of work in this world. Everything you do falls into one of these three buckets.

It’s either bad work  mind-numbing, soul-sucking, life-crushing work. It’s either good work, your job description in short  productive, efficient, effective, getting things done, but also keeps you stuck in a bit of comfortable rut. Or it’s great work, work that has more impact, work that has more meaning.

When it comes down to it, the coaching question, the strategic question, what am I going to say yes to, if I’m saying yes to that, what must I say no to, is actually the core question that lies behind helping you and everyone do more great work.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Then the final one is the learning question. What did I take away from this conversation?

Michael Bungay Stanier
You got it, exactly. There’s variations on that. The variation I use most often was what is most useful and most valuable here for you. Not only forces them to get … from the conversation and a … that they may well otherwise miss, but also beneficiary, it gets you feedback as to what went well in that conversation, so the next conversation is going to be even more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good. There we are, we’re all on the same page in terms of what are the questions. Now I really want to know having lived it, worked with many, many clients, many, many readers, what are you noticing in terms of in practice what is really working well and what is not working so well when folks are trying to adopt a coaching habit?

Michael Bungay Stanier We picked seven questions. You can guess that I think they’re the best seven questions. I spent a lot of time adding questions, subtracting questions, putting more questions in, trying to do fewer questions. But I think these are seven really powerful, useful questions.

But in the end it matters less which question you pick and more about can you commit to staying curious a little bit longer. It’s worth looking at the things people struggle with, which is actually that behavior change. Why do people, when they’re rushing and give solutions, give answers, give ideas so quickly into the conversation?

Well, there’s an obvious answer, which is it’s habit. This is the thing that for your entire career basically your entire life because in high school and university as well, you’ve been praised and rewarded for having the answer. You have a pretty deep habit here of the way I add value, the way I get an A, the way I get a star, the way I get a pat on the back is by being the person with the answer.

It’s fair to say that on that kind of top level, the reason why being more coach-like is so hard is just that we’ve been practicing other stuff for years and years and years now.

But there’s a deeper level, Pete. I think that’s interesting to uncover. It’s where your question takes me is there’s a more subtle reason why people don’t want to become more coach-like, in other words, stay curious a little bit longer, rush to action and advice giving a little bit more slowly, is that it’s about power and control. Those two things that typically just below the surface in most relationships at work and at home as well.

Because when you’re giving the answer, it’s a pretty nice place to be. You feel like you’re the smart person. You feel like you have high status in the conversation. You’re the one with the answer; they’re the one with the question. You know what’s happening; they don’t know what’s happening. You feel in control of the conversation. You know how it’s playing out. You know how it’s going to end. You really go, I love giving advice.

Here’s the thing, even if your advice isn’t nearly as good as you think it is, which almost always is the case, even if you’re giving advice about the wrong thing, it still feels pretty good to give advice. However, when you ask a question – and questions are the portals toward staying curious a little bit longer – when you ask a question, it’s a much less comfortable experience.

First of all you hand control of the conversation to that other person. They’re going to take it some place that you don’t quite know where. By the way, this is what’s called empowerment. Nobody makes a strong case about I’m anti-empowerment. But the subtlety of empowerment is actually giving up power to the other person. That’s what’s happening when you ask a question.

When you ask a question, you actually move from a place of certainty to uncertainty. You step into this place of going, was that a good question, did that land, did they understand it, what answer are they going to give me, how do I handle that answer, what’s going to happen next. There’s all these uncertainties.

Part of our brain wiring is avoid uncertainty. Uncertainty is how you get eaten by a dinosaur or saber tooth tiger or wooly mammoth or something.

It takes practice and kind of overcoming some of your wiring to say, I’m going to ask a question, I’m going to give up control, I’m give up certainty, I’m going to stay in ambiguity for the longer game, the longer game of empowering those around you, increasing focus and productivity, and self-sufficiency, and accountability, and all of those good things.

It’s actually going to help me work less hard, but have more impact because I’m going to have a smarter, braver, more courageous, more focused team around me. But in the moment, it’s just really tempting to resort back to the advice giving.

When you ask kind of what’s worked, what’s not worked, the questions work. We’ve done this with 70 – 80,000 managers now plus the 400,000 people who bought the book. We know these are good questions but the struggle is the behavior change. That’s the thing for people to work on.

But actually, I’m just going to say one other thing, just one other things about, don’t tell anybody else, but we’ve just released kind of on stealth mode an app onto iTunes. It’s called Ask More. It’s only available for the iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
We won’t tell.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Don’t tell anybody. But it’s a Tinder meets coaching. It’s a way of tracking your own commitment to being more coach-like. Swipe left, I gave advice. Swipe right, I stayed curious. You actually get to track your own practice like that.

We haven’t really made a big deal about that, but if people want to go and check it out, they’re welcome to kind of test it a bit for us and give us some feedback.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. Thank you. We’ll definitely link to that in the show notes. I’m intrigued. It’s about the behavior change and part of the behavior I guess is just doing it in the first place, like just choosing to ask the question instead of giving advice.

Then I’m also thinking about when you spoke to that notion of power, I guess I’m thinking about how you ask the question too. Because as you described it, it’s true, there are times I’ve asked questions and I was entering that vulnerable place of “Okay, what’s going to happen. I don’t quite know.”

There are other times I’ve asked a question and I’ve still felt very much confident and empowered. It’s just like, “I’m just segmenting you. You’re going to give me one of four answers and based upon that I will proceed to give you the appropriate advice.” They’re very different experiences.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I think you’re right. The thing that I think is the subtlety here and the thing to bear in mind is to go for who’s sake am I asking this particular question.

It’s one of the reasons why in general we encourage people to stay away from the idea of asking why questions. Obviously why questions have their place. If people … you start with why. It’s all about being a purpose-driven company. Fantastic. Some of you may know the ladder of inference. You ask why five times to get a root cause of a situation. Perfect.

But in terms of every day interactions with people, asking why doesn’t work so well. Here’s why. The first is it’s actually quite tricky to ask the question why without it sounding a bit accusatory, a bit judgmental. “Why did you do that?” will typically be heard as, “Why the hell did you do that?” You’ve got that.

But the second thing and this feed to that more subtle reason about for whose sake are you asking this question. If you’re asking why, what you’re really doing is explain your motives, explain your thinking, explain what was going on for you. What you’re typically doing is you’re trying to gather data so that you are better able to then provide advice as to what the person should do.

Our approach in our corporate training programs is basically we’ve got three principles  be lazy, be curious, be often.

Being curious, of course, managing the advice monster, that tendency we have to leap to advice. Being often, understanding that every interaction can be a little more curious, a little less rush to action and advice.

But being lazy, is this piece about going how do I stop talking responsibility for that other person’s life. In that asking why, you’ve got somebody working out how do I figure out what’s going on, so I can give the better answer. I can jump in and fix you for you. As opposed to saying, “Hey Pete, big challenge ahead of you, but this is your challenge, so let me help you figure it out.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I’d also love to get your take then when folks are having troubles with the implementation or making the shift. Have you encountered any other surprises like, “Huh, how about that? When people are doing this, this sort of thing keeps popping up.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
It’s a good question. I would say that one of the points of resistance to coaching is the fear that you will inverted commas ‘go too far,’ like I’m going to ask a question that will make this person reveal their dark, and terrible, and sad, and horrible past, and I won’t know how to handle that.

What happens in kind of subtle ways people go, “I’m not going to ask Pete this question because he probably can’t handle it.” But what they’re often saying is, “I’m not going to ask Pete this question because I probably can’t handle it. I don’t know where it’s going, I don’t know what this is going to reveal, I don’t know what this is about.”

We kind of make up this, “Oh, look how nice I am to protect this person from themselves,” when in fact it’s really just a justification to step away from having the courageous conversation.

It was a bit of a rambling answer, but I do think there’s something to say for people … who like, “I’d like to give this a go, I just don’t know,” is it’s an art, not a science. What you’re doing is you’re practicing staying curious.

What you’ll find is you can ask more questions than you thought and that will make more progress then you thought possible if you can just follow the discipline and ask a good question, be genuinely interested in what the answer is, and shut up and actually listen to that answer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And courage, I think yeah, that’s the word. I guess depending on your state of mind as you talk about some of these stakes that show up and what can unfold. I guess sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, how exciting. Let’s see where this goes,” other times I’m like, “Oh, how terrifying. I don’t know where this is going to go.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. Right. You’re pointing to it perfectly which is, “Oh my goodness, where is this going? Ah.” Okay, but if you’re in service to the person you’re having conversation with, I think of this as a classic example of servant leadership. If you’re in true service to this person, you’re going to go, “Right, how do I help? How can I be of service? How do I put my discomfort aside so that other person can find something valuable here?”

Pete Mockaitis
I heard you on Todd Henry show, The Accidental Creative. He was on our show recently. I’m using the past tense. I’m assuming it will air before this one airs. Awesome guy. I love the definition you shared about what is it to be an adult or to have an adult conversation.

Michael Bungay Stanier
This caters nicely to that fourth question, the foundation question  what do you want. You could say that Box of Crayons, we have this focus of teaching 10-minute coaching, so busy managers can build stronger teams and get better results.

But behind that is a commitment to help people build adult-to-adult relationships in the work place. How do you show up as a grownup in your own life knowing that institutions work really hard to overturn that dynamic? They much prefer a feel like a parent-child relationship rather than an adult-to-adult relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that because folks will just do what they’re told and cause less headaches for everybody?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah. I think they think it means about it’s about being compliant so we get forced into – do we get forced – the culture encourages us to sometimes be the parent, sometimes be the child.

But it’s harder to show up as an adult because with an adult – and I take this from Peter Bock, who taught me about this. He’s saying, “Look, when you’re an adult, you take responsibility for your own freedom.” You take responsibility for the choices you have in front of you and you take those choices.

When you make those choices, … experience of an adult is you have the liberation of owning your own life, but when you make choices it comes with both guilt and anxiety. Guilt about, “What about those other options that I turned down? What’s going to happen to them?” Anxiety about “Is this the right choice? What if this choice doesn’t play out?”

For me, talking about your question, a nice way I heard of defining an adult-to-adult relationship is can you ask for what you want knowing that the answer may be no.

I would say that for many of us, we often don’t know what we want. We haven’t done that thinking, that work, that kind of connecting to heart, mind, soul. We’re not good at asking for what we want even if we know it. We’re not good at hearing other people’s requests and knowing that we can say yes or no to those requests.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s potent stuff there. I’m wondering about maybe the why and it’s I guess just fear. It’s like if you do know what you want and you don’t ask for it, what’s underneath that is probably the sensation of if I hear a no then this dream has been murdered. There’s no hope for it.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Right, yeah. I think that’s absolutely right. Then you find yourself trading away your life for the temporary comfort of not pushing for what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this got deep.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. It suddenly got deep. Come on everybody, lighten up for goodness sake.

Pete Mockaitis
I also want to get your take here to shift gears a bit, I’ve heard the term often when I was in consulting about how one should be coachable. It’s great to be coachable and “Oh, you know, she’s not so coachable. Oh, be coachable.” This is a word I hear a lot of.

What’s your take having done a lot of coaching, helped a lot of people be more coach-like? Are some people uncoachable? How does one become more coachable? What is to be done with this?

Michael Bungay Stanier
That is a good question. I’ve been wrestling with this myself. I think people are – there are some people who are in that moment uncoachable.

Pete Mockaitis
In the moment, okay.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’m sure I’ve been uncoachable in moments myself.

What does that mean? I think it means that you’re – if you think of the outcome of coaching being new insights leading to new actions, leading to increased impact, it means that you’re unwilling to let in new insights. It means that you’re unwilling to try something new and try a different behavior; therefore that increasing impact isn’t going to be available to you, certainly not in a more mindful, deliberate way.

Yeah, I think it’s probably easy enough to be uncoachable.

You can frame it in another way, which is like if you think about the bell curve. In the one end you’ve got people who are the keeners, who are like, “Oh man, I love this coaching stuff. I’m all over it.” You’ve got people in the middle who are like, “I’m open to it, but I’m not sure.”

Then you’ve got people on the other end who you could call them the cynics. I think there’s some sort of Greek – the translation of what a cynic is. Is this right? It’s something along the lines of – and this is probably not suitable for work – but it’s like doglike, meaning like a dog you lift your leg and you pee on things.

The cynics tend to have already made up their minds about what’s going to happen and nothing’s going to convince them otherwise.

Skeptics on the other hand, I quite like. Skeptics are people who are like, “You know what? I’ve had my heart broken too many times, but secretly I would love this to work because if it works, I’m going to be a great champion for it. I’m just suspicious because I’ve heard the promises before.” But cynics like you’ve already decided this is going to be bad and it’s hard to work with cynics.

That answers part of your question which is are people uncoachable. I think some people are some of the time. I don’t think that means you’re uncoachable for the rest of your life.

Then what does it take to be coach-like. Well, if you come back to that definition of insight, action, impact, I think, in general, it’s a willingness to allow insights to show up and it’s a willingness to move to action and try something new.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. I’d love to hear, when you’re sharing this with folks, because I imagine listeners are all excited like, “Oh yeah, we’re to do this in our group. It’s going to be great.” Then if they do encounter a cynic or a wet blanket or those who say that is very – “That coaching stuff, that feels very touchy feely. That feels very California. You know what? We’ve got a lot of tasks we’ve got to knock out now, now, now. There’s urgency.”

I’m sure you’ve heard all the resistance points as your team is selling the good stuff How do you – if folks are feeling like they’re not feeling it, sort of entice them with a little bit of curiosity and openness, so we can take a little bit of a step?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Part of it is a bigger approach to coaching, which is we rarely try and push coaching on people because people are too busy, people are skeptical, people have baggage around coaching which I totally get.

The metaphor I offer up is it’s a little bit like trying to feed a two-year-old spinach. One of the options is you put a lump of spinach on the two-year-olds plate and go, “Hey, eat the green, slimy vegetable.” For some reason the two-year-old is going to go, “You know what? I’m just not eating your spinach. Sorry about that.”

I’m not a parent, but I’ve heard it said that smart parents take the spinach and they blend it into the spaghetti sauce and they actually eat, so the kid doesn’t even know that they’re actually eating the spinach.

I think my approach to being more coach-like, which I’m differentiating from coaching. Different to stay curious than it is to say, “Alright Pete, come into my office. I’m going to coach you now,” which is slightly terrifying for everybody.

Being more coach like means staying curious a little bit longer. Really it’s just another way of having a conversation. If you can just slow down that rush to action and advice, stay curious a bit longer, you’re going to have a coaching experience whether you want to particularly label it being more coach-like.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, got it. Cool. Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your latest favorite things?

Michael Bungay Stanier
No, I think we – I mean we’ve gone to some interesting places already.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Can you share with us then a favorite quote, something that’s been inspiring you lately?

Michael Bungay Stanier
My quotes all tend to circulate around the giving a strong yes or making a no. The – oh, I’ve forgotten his name. The guy who created CD Baby. He says, “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no.” In terms of thinking about commitment, I think that can be great.

I’ve got a quote on my desk from Charles Bukowski, who’s a poet, something similar it says, “If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start.” I’m like exactly that. That’s a quote that’s … in Box of Crayons we’re writing strategic planning moments, so we’re thinking what are big gambles are for the next couple of years.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, can you share a favorite study, something that you find quite insightful?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, I’ve just had the luxury of coming back from the TED conference in Vancouver. Part of what TED is about is to both in kind of equal parts inspire you and terrify you as to what’s happening in the world. One of the studies that could be see business leaders and educators talking, but sometimes it’s scientists and engineers as well.

One of the guys who got up and talked, and I’m sure this will be released eventually as a TED talk, was basically saying, “I’ve just –” you know how DNA has four letters to it  G, T, C, and A and that’s the alphabet that makes up our entire life. What he’s done is found two additional letters to add to that so that there are now six letters rather than four letters.

Very engaged and he’s all sorts of and this is how it gets contained, but he’s actually showing us slides of synthetic life that he’s made in this tweaked DNA. I have to say that’s a pretty amazing thing to reflect on. How’s that going to work?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That just sort of stretches the brain into whole new places it’s never been before.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it totally does.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I am going back to a book that I read some years ago, but I’ve just pulled it out again recently. I’m just reaching over to my bookshelf there. It’s by Carl Honore and it’s called In Praise of Slow.

It kind of talks about the slow travel movement and the slow food movement and just a reflection that so much of our life and our pace and the complexity of everything is only ratcheting up. Somebody said to me today, your life will never be less complex than it is today. I’m like, “Oh, that’s depressing.” It feels pretty complicated already. That book, In Praise of Slow, I think is an interesting read.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’m not sure if you’d call this a tool or not, but it’s my attempts to shut down my technology, so it’s like an anti-tool. I don’t have the discipline I would love to have to not check my phone as much and not check my laptop as much.

On my phone, I’ve recently removed a lot of the key apps. I have removed my email app and I’ve removed the Facebook app, and I’ve removed my Asana to-do app. It just means that my phone is now useful for a few things and useless for much of things. I’m trying to remove all the areas where I get easily seduced into behavior that is I feel less useful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, any other favorite habits to speak to?

Michael Bungay Stanier
The only habit that I can consistently maintain is making myself an espresso coffee every morning. All sorts of like meditation and journaling and stuff, it ebbs and it flows a little bit, but my main habit  drink two good espressos early on in the morning. Not very useful to most people I’m afraid.

Pete Mockaitis
It had its purpose. It has its place, its value. Is there a particular nugget that you’ve been sharing that’s really been connecting, resonating, getting note taken, retweeted, etcetera?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, the conversation within Box of Crayons, I’m not sure of this is echoing beyond that. Most of the stuff that tends to be repeated and resaid around social media tends to be around The Coaching Habit book at the moment. People have heard about that.

This comes a part of being in TED again and watching Peter Diamandes who created the X Prize, the thing about trying to get a private company to land a machine on the moon. He is very much about the bold scalability of things. It’s like what’s the 10x version of that.

The thing that is kind of echoing around Box of Crayons at the moment is how do we imagine what 10x’ing some of the projects that we have on the go might be. We don’t really have good answers to any of that, but it’s making us think really hard.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
If you’re interested in the book, The Coaching Habit book, TheCoachingHabit.com is the place for that. You can download the first two or three chapters and get podcasts and tools and other kind of stuff to pillage from the website, so you’re welcome to go there. Obviously the book is available in Amazon and elsewhere.

If you’re interested in our program for your organization, need to do corporate training, so that’s BoxOfCrayons.com.

If you’re interested in just a little bit more about me and what I’m up to and some tools outside practical coaching skills, my full name MichaelBungayStanier, my surname is Bungay-Stanier, .com is the place to go for there.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yes. What’s the bottom 10% that you’re going to eliminate?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now 10% of I guess, of what?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Percent of people, of activities, of-

Michael Bungay Stanier
People can go any way they want with that, but there’s a bottom 10% in some area you could pick which is limiting you and the courageous act is to eliminate that bottom 10%, so what do you want to do?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about the bottom 10% in my refrigerator.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
That would be a courageous act to get in there.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. That thing that was formerly known as lettuce probably isn’t anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Michael, this has been a great deal of fun yet again.

Michael Bungay Stanier
It has.

Pete Mockaitis
Please keep doing the great work you’re doing for the world.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thanks man, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Apr 18
0

288: Managing First-Timers in the Workplace with Chris Deferio

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Chris Deferio says: "You don't want to rob people of their failures; you don't want people to only do exactly what you say in every case."

Coffee shop guru & latte art champion Chris Deferio speaks on leading people who are at their first “real job” and keys to thriving in a chaotic environment.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Best approaches for managing first timers
  2. How to offer feedback so it’s received well
  3. Tips on how to keep sane and focused in a chaotic environment

About Chris

Chris Deferio is the host and producer of the Keys to the Shop podcast. He lives in Louisville, KY with his wife and son and has been in professional coffee service for 17 years. He provides training, consultations, and wisdom to owners, managers, and employees across cafes worldwide. His podcast is dedicated to the success of coffee shops and the professionals that make them work.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Chris’ championship-winning latte art

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Chris Deferio Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, thanks so much for joining us here at the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Chris Deferio
I’m honored to be on your show.  I really love and I’m looking forward to talking about this subject today.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.  Well, I was honored to be on your show, Keys To The Shop.  A good spot, and so, folks, check that out.  But first I want to talk about you being a champion in latte art.  How does that come about, and what does a latte art contest look like in practice?

Chris Deferio
Well, we can define the terms.  Well, I work in coffee.  And in coffee, and specialty coffee in particular, there’s this thing where you steam milk so that the foam is tight enough and flows enough to be able to form ribbons on the surface of beverages, specifically espresso drinks.  And you can see rosettas, what we call leaves, hearts, designs like that – usually symmetrical leaf / heart designs on the tops of coffees.  It’s actually pretty popular; so popular now, weirdly, you’ll see it on International Delight creamers.  They’ll hire a barista to do a heart and they’ll use in their marketing.  So that’s latte art, so milk art, because “latte” is Italian for “milk”.
So, we have competitions for these types of things, of course, because we’ve got to entertain ourselves, and there’s money on the line.  And I won my first one back in 2004 and I ended up winning two times after that, so three times total latte art champion.  And just sounds really funny to say, but the skill involved in it is one of just becoming sort of familiar with what the two liquids do when they meet in the cup, and it’s important.  I don’t want to downplay it too much, because a well-presented coffee is one that you’ll talk to your friends about, which means repeat business.  So it translates into something practical, and it’s fun to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to know what are the game-changing, winning designs that capture the judges’ hearts?

Chris Deferio
Well, speaking as a judge – I run a competition now with Coffee Fest tradeshows.  And I’ve been a long time judge before; I’m back again leading the Latte Art Competition as a judge, head judge, and there’s a lot of things we look for.  My designs when I won were basically variations on a leaf pattern that involved a lot of layers from the outside of the cup into the middle.  So, just a nice base, and I’m speaking in coffee terms – symmetry is really important, striking contrasts between the brown of the coffee in the white of the milk is also very important.
In the competition we judge on speed and also a general kind of flexible category, depending on the judge, of aesthetic beauty.  So, those are some of the categories we look for.  So there are some game-changing designs out there where people will do multiple different designs in the cup at the same time.  I was one of the people – old guy in coffee – that have pushed some of those designs out there into the industry, and now it’s really just about perfecting.  There’s not a ton of brand new stuff, just variations on classics, as far as I can tell.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, do you have some photos we could see in the show notes?

Chris Deferio
Oh yeah, I’ll send you some of mine and I’ll send you some of the winningest baristas’ examples.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.  Well, I’m trying to imagine, because you don’t have a lot of space to work with, and I guess it can’t get too out there, in terms of, this is a portrait of a person who is running on the beach.

Chris Deferio
Oh yeah.  Well, it does in some ways, it does, because people do one of two types of latte art.  You have etching, which uses a tool to draw a design like you’re describing.  You theoretically could do that.  The drink might be cold by the time you’re done, and it might not taste great.  I don’t know what they’re using for drawing, but we do free pour latte art predominantly.  I think that in competition may be the more respected version of latte art. So there are two types of latte art – there’s free pour and there’s etching.  So etching is just using a tool, so you could draw that.  You could draw yourself in a cup of coffee if you really wanted to.  But we do free pour latte art, so there’s no tools involved, just the flow of milk.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.  So, you are coffee master and professional and you share some of that in your podcast Keys To The Shop.  What’s that all about?

Chris Deferio
Well, Keys To The Shop I’ve had for the last year or so – back in January 2017 – is a podcast that I run collecting best practices essentially from the industry to help people.  My tagline of the show is to give insights and inspiration and tools to people who work in retail, especially coffee retail.  And my audience is built, it is made up of owners, baristas, managers, people who would one day want to own a coffee bar.
And we bring in not only just industry experts to talk about workflow behind the bar, like how to build a drink quickly and well, or conflict resolution and things like that.  We bring in outside experts as well – authors of books dealing with management, or like I said conflict resolution is one.  Tom Henschel of The Look & Sound of Leadership did an episode on the podcast about conflict resolution, which translates into whatever industry you want to, because you’re working with people.  So, the point is, I want to provide a really focused podcast to equip my industry with the tools they need to succeed, and tell the stories of people who have succeeded in the industry as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool.  Alright.  So now when we talk about some of these management issues, one thing we were discussing is that you have lots of experience and see lots of coffee shop owners doing leadership of folks who are at their first job.  Maybe they are interns, maybe they’re in college or they’ve recently graduated.  And so I thought it would be great to really dig into your wisdom on this point.  So maybe you could orient us first of all, how does managing folks in their first job substantially differ from those who have maybe just even one or two or three years under their belt?

Chris Deferio
Well, I think the way it’s different is that the structure under which they’re used to operating is just alien and different.  l like to think about, if they’ve come from a school environment, where there are things set up for them to go to, there are classes – you’re not really having to think about it, in fact you’re part of a group – there’s not a whole lot of individual attention in most cases.
And so by and large I’d say once you’re behind the bar and a lot depends on you individually, there’s kind of this deer-in-the-headlights.  There’s just so much to take in.  It’s not necessarily unique to them, but I think it’s times 10 with somebody who’s not used to being on display and being the focus of the individual attention that a manager has on them, because that manager is responsible for the owner’s business and the business is on the line.  And they understand that responsibility but don’t necessarily know how to function under that weight.  And so, sometimes it does feel like you’re drinking from a firehose and they can act that way.
So, there’s a lot of things that you need to bear in mind when you’re managing somebody who doesn’t have a lot of employment experience.  Even if they’ve had like a summer job, a job that’s a full-time job, even their first quote-unquote “real” job, is quite different.  And so, how you approach them as a manager has to bear that in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I’d love for you to expand a little bit upon, we talk about the deer-in-the-headlights or the overwhelm or the reactions of the new employee.  Could you share a little bit there, in terms of… I imagine some of them are probably jarring and not what you want to see.  So, could you maybe highlight a few of those?  Maybe they’ll be some twinkles of recognition from listeners to say, “Oh, okay, okay.  Maybe I should have a touch more patience with that at first.”

Chris Deferio
Sure.  So, I’d say a good way to recognize this… Or let’s just say a common way to recognize that – you’re dealing with somebody who’s under that kind of situation is that, like I said, deer-in-the-headlights, but in the restaurant industry they call them “pan shakers”, or people who would start cleaning something that doesn’t need to be cleaned; they’re just looking for something to do.
There is just a general lack of awareness, the peripheral awareness.  Even though you’re in a busy cafe, none of it really affects you much.  And it should, and it’s odd that it doesn’t, because there’s so much stimulus going on you don’t know what to focus on.
And so, I think a manager who’s in that situation needs to be able to have a strong hand of guidance on what is it that they should be doing in that moment.  Having a good onboarding process for example is a great way to kind of counteract the confusion and the shock of being in an environment where now we really are relying on you to make this rush of customers work, or this cafe work.

Pete Mockaitis
And so when you say “manager” here, the manager is the person who is the first real job person, kind of working for and reporting to the owner.  Is that how you conceptualize this?

Chris Deferio
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you there.  So indeed, intriguing.  So there’s a whole lot of stimuli, and it seems like folks in that position where they’re unaccustomed to it may just sort of start doing something, even though that something is not at all the right thing.  Any other kind of key symptoms or behaviors you notice?

Chris Deferio
I would say emotional is another one.  In any case where somebody is under that kind of pressure there’s going to be overly emotional responses to things that are just commonplace work-related tasks, that you and I, having been through the ringer maybe for years, or at least some experience, might not take it personally.  But I’d say taking things personally is one of the symptoms that I would see.  It’s like, “Okay, this is…”  They maybe weren’t expecting it.
I know I felt that way when I had my first job, which was in a grocery store just stocking things in freezers and fridges and milk cartons and what not.  The pressure was just so great to perform that you just kind of took everything to heart.  And there’s really no stopping that; it’s almost a rite of passage, I think, when you have your first job.  But where it can go south, I think, is when a manager then takes them taking it personally, personally. [laugh] And then it kind of goes off the rails.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is interesting.  So, could you maybe paint a picture there, in terms of an example, where you’ve seen this happen with folks either in some of the shops that you’ve worked with or consulted for, in terms of making it all come together?

Chris Deferio
Well, okay.  So, I would probably just use an example of when I was a trainer and I had some experience in coffee, when we brought on new baristas.  This was actually an example of one of my failures, in that I was so confident – having some experience I just had too strong of a hand in my management.  But the individual was performing the job okay, but not really to my standards as a manager, and I was kind of arrogant at the time anyway.  But tamping is an example of something we do – we press the coffee down into a filter so that it could be extracted.  And I was noticing that the tamping was off or lopsided so that it wouldn’t extract properly.  And I brought it up in a way that maybe in hindsight wasn’t the greatest, but they took it so personally that…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’ve got a problem with my tamping, bro?”

Chris Deferio
“How could you notice that from where you’re standing?”, or… There was a lot of pushback, and I realized what I had done was I stepped on the only security that they had, because they’d just been trained by the manager at that store.  And what I was doing was coming in and essentially removing the only security that they had, without care for what it would do to the rest of what was built on that foundation.

Pete Mockaitis
Now we say “the only security”, you mean like he’s coming from a perspective of, “Tamping is the one thing that I have nailed.”  Is that what you mean?

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  Well, if you call into question parts of what they know to be true, then you might as well be calling into question the entire thing.  So, “If my tamping is off, maybe my milk is off, and if my milk is off, what am I doing here being a barista?  Maybe I was taught wrong.  I’m not ready for this.”  Your mind can kind of go a million miles an hour down the wrong path.  And it all kind of stemmed from a non-empathetic approach to an issue that could have been resolved by some other means that reinforced what they had learned, or added to rather than stripping it away simply to be right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, intriguing.  So I’d love to hear, in retrospect, how would you address this issue, because you can’t have a sub-optimal temp at the end of the day.  Right, Chris?

Chris Deferio
No, I don’t think you can.  In the moment, I either could have… I think this would have been the best way to do it, is to investigate what kind of training the person had, before assuming what they had first.  So if I had questions for the manager as to how much training the person had, I should have asked.  Instead of addressing it with the individual first, I should have just let it go, because by the time I got there they had probably already been making drinks that way for hours, if not days.  And my stepping in in the middle of making drinks for customers is not going to solve it in their mind.  It might solve my personal need to sort of get my fidgety, “Ooh, you’re not doing that right” out there into her world, but it really didn’t accomplish what I wanted it to long-term.
So, I think having a more patient view of that situation and allowing myself to shoulder the burden of having unresolved tension, rather than just kind of chucking that tension right onto what was happening in the moment, if that makes sense.  I, as a manager or a leader, there’s this tension you would have that you want to see people do something right, but sometimes you have to let them do it wrong a little bit longer in order to wait for the right opportunity to show them in a way that’s effective.  And so it forces you to question, “Do I just want to talk, or do I want to affect change?”

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.  So then, what might be some indicators that this is the right time?

Chris Deferio
I’d say when things are more calm, when people are in a good mood, and when you are not upset.  Because you might be responsible for the bottom line of your company, you have to know yourself well enough to know when you can not sound like a jerk, or be passive-aggressive, or give somebody the feedback, a crap sandwich with the critique and the praise.
There is a bit of self-knowledge that’s needed to know how you sound first of all, and when’s the right time for you to do it calmly.  And then, like I said, when things are calm in the store, when there is a time that talking about technique is brought up, in fact – that’s a way.  Hopefully you have mechanisms or systems of communication in place, where feedback lives, like a one-on-one every week with the manager, or an ongoing training session.  Those are perfect times and require forethought as an operator to say, “You’re going to have these conversations with people, so where do those conversations live?”  They can’t just be invented on the spot; they have to have a place for your peace of mind and the security of the barista.  So, I’d say rather than indicators, maybe just dial back even more and say, “Have I built a system in my shop or my business that allows for a safe space for feedback, both from me to the barista or employee, and from the employee to me, to critique me?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  Well now, you used the phrase “safe space”, so I am thinking about South Park – that’s the name of the show – where they did this song, “My safe space…”  And I want to touch upon the word “Millennials”.  I guess I am one, but in a previous episode we had Lee Caraher say like 72% of Millennials don’t like the word “Millennial”.  They don’t want to be called a Millennial, because there’s so much baggage and negative associations with it.  So, I’d love it the more that you could be fact-based, experience-based, research-oriented to this.  To what extent is there something real when it comes to the difference in managing Millennials or folks who are fresh out of college?  Are they still Millennials or are they the next one yet?

Chris Deferio
Maybe, and maybe it’s Gen Y, I’m not sure.  Or Gen Y is the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
So what’s real and what’s just a bunch of stuff that people cook up to sell books or to try to stereotype and sort of offload responsibility?

Chris Deferio
Yeah, it’s a good question because we like to categorize.  Part of the human mind is all about, “This goes in this section of my brain, and this goes in the other.”  And if we need to understand people it’s easier to have a sorting mechanism, and so that’s what these names start to become.  And in no other time in history, especially with the rise of the Internet, do we have as much access to articles that kind of form our thinking towards people before we even meet them or know them in reality.
So, the reality of Millennials, I think, is simply that they are young, and I don’t know that there’s that much of a difference outside of the world they interact with.  They’re not not humans, and they have the same drive for success and love and acceptance and to interact with the world around them.  And they have the same idea that they want to change the world the way that any other generation did.  So, I think Millennials as a group have been given a bad rap by people who don’t want to take responsibility for leading Millennials.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chris Deferio
Yeah, so on the show I had Bruce Tulgan, who’s the author of a book which I think every manager should read.  The book is called It’s Okay to Be the Boss.  I bought that for all of my managers in the store I worked at, and they all agreed it’s a fantastic book, practical.  The author also works for… His company is called Rainmaker Thinking, and they authored this incredible long-term study on the workplace opinion of Millennials toward management.
And what they found is essentially that Millennials want leadership, they want to be told how to succeed in the workplace, and actually are looking for people to, as the book that Bruce wrote says, to be the boss.  And they say in the book that there is an undermanagement epidemic, not a micromanagement one; in other words people are abdicating their responsibility to be leaders within an organization.
And Millennials I think are, just based on this study and my own experience – like I said, they’re people who want to do a good job.  And when somebody says to you, “I want to come in your company and deliver a ton of value, and what do I do, where do I sign up?”, and they’re eager – if you look on that with distain, there’s a lot of issues there.  You need to be prepared to help that person succeed.  So I view Millennials as eager and will not take lack of clarity for an answer.  So the mystery of just figuring it out on your own – hey, we have Google.  That’s gone.  Figuring it out on your own looks more like YouTube than just hacking away at it.
So yeah, Millennials I think have been given a bad rap and they are young people looking to be led, and then to lead themselves.  They want to make a difference in the world and we have an opportunity in jobs like coffee that are historically transient jobs – they’re not the jobs that they’re going to have for the rest of their lives – to shape people for the career that they actually are going to be spending a lot of time in.  So, managing first-time people, first-time employees, especially young ones, as impressionable as they are – they have a ton of energy and they have a ton of vision to contribute to a company if you’re up for the challenge of continuing to actually work in your company.

Pete Mockaitis
So that doesn’t sound unique at all to Millennials, in terms of if you’re young and inexperienced, “Figure it out” isn’t great leadership, management, guidance, at that sort of stage in a person’s development.  I mean you might say “Figure it out” in a nicer way, which was, “Why don’t you take a rough draft at a plan of attack and we’ll sync up in a day?”  That’s maybe a nicer version of “Figure it out.” [laugh] I’m not 100% abdicating my responsibility for getting to the bottom of this thing, but I would like you to take the first approach there.  Well, cool.  So then, you’ve got some takes on how one manages expectations optimally in the first real job environment.

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  So, managing expectations is a great place to start because as I was just touching on how we as an older generation – myself turning 40 here shortly – have a responsibility to manage ourselves first, so that we can lead others.  And that means if we have expectations of people that are unreasonable and are secretly based on our desire to just not have to do as much as we actually have to, then we need to deal with that so we don’t pass on dysfunction.  In today’s day and age there’s a ton of leadership dysfunction, and leaders in restaurants and coffee bars and politics are under fire.
And so, all eyes are on people who have authority and power, and we need to be able to have some kind of forethought about the people we’re bringing into our organization and stop being surprised by what happens when we bring young people into an organization.  You can’t really be effective as a leader or as a company if you’re constantly just scratching your head and complaining and surprised by something that you knew was going to happen.  So, embrace it, prepare yourself for it, and be the leader that’s necessary for what you’re going to inherit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so the managing expectations there – you’re talking about what it’s fair for you to expect of someone who’s newer, younger, inexperienced from the get-go.

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  So, they’re going to make mistakes, no doubt, when you onboard somebody.  In coffee for instance a lot of us have labs, and we have labs for a reason – because we don’t want people experimenting on the customer.  Or we have shadow shifts for instance, where you are on with the manager and they are watching you to make sure that you are performing in the critical areas.
However, you don’t want to rob people of their failures; you don’t want people to only do exactly what you say in every case.  You want to see them spill milk or you want to see them kind of strain to figure something out and not just jump in and not let that muscle develop, because then you will never be truly confident in that person’s “a-ha” moment, because they could fake it.  They could just say, “Oh yeah, I understand now”, but when you’re gone, because they didn’t develop the muscle of understanding through failure, then it’s just going to crumble under the pressure, especially if it’s one of their first jobs, like we were talking about earlier.
So, having a lab for another company might look like just an entry level position within the company, where consequences of failure are not dire – you’re not going to pass it on to your big accounts.  But you have somebody there that can walk them through the process and explain, as failures are made, how to do the job from A to Z.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s great.  Don’t rob them of their failures – nice turn of a phrase there.  And so, when you say a “lab”, can you help me visualize?  I’m imagining a lab coat and a white room and…

Chris Deferio
It’s exactly right, that’s what we do.  We actually recreate, so the speak, the coffee bar.  So it’s like a micro coffee bar, and sometimes it’s behind glass and other times it’s just hidden in the back corner.  It’s not usually the prettiest place but it’s got an espresso machine and a brewer, it’s got a couple of tables, and you schedule sessions with baristas when they are new employees, or existing employees that need work on one particular area.  You schedule some time in the lab to work on your tamping, to work on understanding a particular policy.  A lot of meetings are held in labs.
So, a lab for a coffee bar I think is critical, and the equivalent in any organization like where does the training take place, helps kind of anchor the idea, like, “Yeah, I’m here to learn right now in this space.  And we can just bang around in here and nothing is going to happen in the outside world, except I’m going to learn and bring what I learn to that outside world.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting when you describe the lab, it conjures to mind almost like a movie montage, like there’s music playing and someone is failing repeatedly and spilling it all over themselves.  And then the wise mentor is frustrated but sticks it out until there’s a maestro coming out on the other side.

Chris Deferio
Yeah, this is very much like Rocky.  Ivan Drago versus Rocky lifting logs in a log house.  It’s an approximation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great.  Okay, so we talked about not robbing people of their failures, managing the expectations, giving some protection so there’s not dire consequences if things go awry.  I’d like you to also kind of unpack a bit, you’ve got some takes on when it comes to the follow-through.  Not just saying, “Hey, do this”, but what comes after the “Hey, do this”?

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  This is a super hard one, and it is one of the things that erodes trust the most between direct reports and managers, or baristas and managers, however you want to phrase it.  When you tell somebody to do something and they do it – let’s say they do it well.  And nothing happens, except they do it well and they know, but nobody sees it – that is going to demoralize the individual, because nobody is there to see their victories.  I think you get some satisfaction out of it, for sure.
Yeah.  So if you are on the bar and you are not having follow-through from your manager, what that looks like is like you said – just “Do this” via text message.  You get a text message or an email that says to do it this way.  You need to have the presence of the manager there to follow up with you in order to either correct you or praise you, to guide you or affirm you.
And the present leadership is a good phrase for this.  A shop I worked at used the phrase “present leadership”, because often times what we have is a secondary culture form around this abdication of leadership to follow through.  So, for us it happens on closing shifts, when management is home – they try to get themselves on a 9:00 to 5:00 schedule, and then the closing shift is there by themselves.  And what you’ll find is that it’s kind of like a different culture, and they don’t have the kind of contact with the leadership as their counterparts in the morning do.  And the difference is that the people in the morning get the benefit of getting to see the manager every day, so there is a natural built-in opportunity for follow-through.
You can’t really judge an employee’s performance if you haven’t observed their performance in a consistent way.  So when you give them a raise and you tell them they’re doing a good job, but they know that you haven’t actually followed through and seen how they’re doing, if they need help, and been there along the process – they know you don’t know what you’re talking about, and it’s hollow.  And so you erode trust, they don’t trust you when you say “Good job”, because they know you haven’t even seen them do their job.
That’s part of what I mean by “follow-through”.  For managers who really want to be there for their employees, it’s going to take a lot of work upfront, but you build momentum in the future so where you might have to schedule yourself to come in during a time where you normally don’t come in to the store – maybe it’s a closing shift for coffee bar examples – just to make yourself known, to ask how things are going, see if there’s any questions, observe them in action.  Do that for a week or so, two or three times a week.  And that person will get the drift that you are concerned about their progress and you’re building rapport with that individual and following through on the thing that you said they should do or how they should do it, etcetera, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s interesting.  It sounds like this sounds pretty, I guess, fundamental and just, “But of course leaders should do that.”  And yet at the same time, I think there is a healthy opposition force that would say, “Oh my gosh, Chris, that is just too much work.  Why do I have to do all this handholding?  Come on, we’re grownups here.”

Chris Deferio
Well, yeah.  Grownups who can plan ahead of time, like we said manage your expectations – well, part of the expectation is that you’re going to have to spend some extra time with people who are new.  And I think the thing that really throws people is the minutiae of their job as a manager, because so much of our job in management has to do with reacting to situations and putting out fires.
And if you never really get that under control and don’t have control of your own schedule, keeping on human relationships on top of just ordering these other things for the office and responding to emails from people who may or may not want to buy your coffee or your product – there’s no room left for the people that you hired.  And there’s this weird relief – you come in and they’re doing fine; you’re like, “Oh hey, how are you doing?  How are you doing?  Good?  Are they taking care of you over here?  Great.”  And then you just walk away.
Now you’ve abdicated your responsibility as a leader to the people they’re working with, who have become the sort of surrogate managers for you because you can’t get it together with your schedule.  So it all kind of comes back to the leadership and what you expect from yourself.  It all kind of comes back to leadership having their stuff together, so that they can actually help other people form their careers and their understanding and their skillsets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that example you used, in terms of, “How are you doing?  Are they taking good care of you?” – that’s an example of abdication.  Can you expand on that?

Chris Deferio
Yeah, so not in all cases, I think, but I see it a lot of times in coffee bars, where you throw people on to a bar and you hope that the most senior barista there will kind of show them the ropes – show them all this stuff about the POS and show them this other thing over here too, and, “By the way, I just remembered, can you show them this?”  Now, that might be delegation if it’s done with clear intent and structure, and always done that way, if that’s purposeful, but often times it’s just Plan B or Plan C when it comes to what the manager maybe ideally wanted or found out that they don’t have enough time to spend to walk this person through the POS system, the register.
So, what I say is advocation I mean naturally when you’re entering into an office or a service industry or whatever it is, the manager is the person you understand to be the source of knowledge, the one who is going to help you understand how things are, at least at first.  But when you never get that and they’re just the person that has you sign your tax forms, and then they just kind of throw you on bar but then show up at your review, it just feels like, “Why are you even here?  My coworker should be reviewing me, because they’re the ones who taught me, corrected me, were there with me during that really crazy rush, where we all burned ourselves.”  There’s rapport, and managers often times miss out on building that rapport, because they unintentionally, I’d say, in most cases, give away their opportunity to build those relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good.  And I kind of finally want to get your take on when it comes to retail or coffee environment, there are times where you mentioned the rush.  In a realm of crowds and chaos and a whole lot happening real fast, what are some pro tips just for keeping your cool and your sanity and focus about you with all the stimuli?

Chris Deferio
Two things.  One – have workflow already in place.  If you own a bar, if you manage a system where you have to deliver a result, you have to have a workflow.  And that workflow has to actually be taking into account different situations that you could come up against.  For us, let’s say you have a menu of 15 items with four different variations on those items, okay?  So, you’ve got to practice all of the ways that people can alter those drinks, and maybe there’s ways that they’re going to… How is it going to be in the worst scenario and what do we do?  What’s the plan?
Too many people just cross that bridge when they come to it, and if it’s on fire they don’t cross it at all.  The workflow is a critical one.  And that was one of our first episodes actually on the show Keys To The Shop, with my friend Ryan Soeder on mastering workflow.
The other part is managing yourself emotionally.  You need to detach, essentially.  Not in a robotic way, but if you’re working the workflow, if you’re working behind the bar and you have a line out the door and you know you’re doing your best – there’s no reason, logically, to stress out.  You can’t go any faster, and everybody understands that.  And they keep coming every day, so they know.  They see, they have eyes, they understand what’s going on.
And somehow what happens when we forget that – we try to rush the process, we don’t fall into a rhythm.  And when we do that, we don’t do the other thing also – I had a third – is, communication.  Our communication can either come from a place of fear and insecurity, or it can come from a place of, “We’re in this together, we’re doing the best we can and we’re going to lean into the pressure rather than trying to run away from it.”
I’ll give an example.  There are times when I have personally been really stressed out on the register, and when I’m that way what I like to do is… I don’t know how to describe it, but I just kind of smile to myself and I overexaggerate my hospitality as a way of reminding myself what I’m doing here.  I don’t go goofy or anything, but I turn an inward switch.  And I think it’s important for people to figure out, “What’s my approach to the chaotic workplace environment and how will I pull myself away from that, observe it as an outsider, so to speak?  And not become out of control emotionally, but lean into the fact that this is what’s going on and it’s not going to define us.  We’re not going to let the shift run us; we’re going to run the shift.”  That’s a good way to just remember it.

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

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  I just want to encourage everybody who works with young people and transient employees – it kind of goes hand in hand – that they are training up a future generation of leaders and owners and managers, people who will influence the course of history.  And it sounds really dramatic to say it that way, but every person who you know who you read a biography about who’s inspirational, worked at a deli, worked at a restaurant or a coffee bar at some point.
And maybe not everyone, but they had jobs that were kind of what they might consider menial.  But have had lessons that shaped them in the dish pit, in the mop closet, in a one-on-one with a manager; kind of like your favorite teacher in elementary school.  So our responsibility to actually take up a mantle of leadership and lead young people well in these jobs is really, really critical.  And it’s all about relationships and allowing yourself to be vulnerable, while at the same time being a strong leader that will help shape the next generation.

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

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  So, I think my favorite quote comes from David Whyte. David Whyte is an English poet and I think the quote is, “You must learn one thing: the world was made to be free in.  Give up all other worlds except the one in which you belong.” So his book, if I could recommend it, is called Crossing the Unknown Sea, and it’s kind of a philosophy on vocation as a way of becoming, a journey into meaning through your work.  And so I really, highly recommend that book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh great, thank you.  And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Chris Deferio
I don’t have a… Okay, tool would be just pen and paper, honestly.  I don’t thrive in digital environments as much as I thought I would, and I do have things.  I love my high-end drawing pens and special graph paper notebooks for organizing my thoughts.  I’m not full into bullet journaling or anything, but I do like to braindump onto paper and organize myself that way.  And sometimes it makes it into my reminders on my phone or something like that, but more often than not I’m trying to write something down.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.  And how about a favorite habit?

Chris Deferio
So, I guess a favorite habit of mine, besides coffee, would be – which is a great habit, it’s very healthy for you – I try to get up early.  It’s something I started doing a couple of years ago, actually started to try to adopt a way to kind of embrace the day.  Now I know this is not unique to me, but when I started doing it, it really turned my world upside down that I could actually start my day well by just getting up early and stretching and drinking a lot of water and thinking, including things like morning pages is a huge one, stream-of-consciousness, because I don’t get a lot of time, especially at a coffee bar, to create and to express.  You’re always reacting to outside situations.  So it’s nice to have some space where you can set your trajectory internally, and then embrace the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And tell me, is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate and get folks quoting yourself back to you?

Chris Deferio
Yeah.  There is something that I used to say in talks and I think I should bring it back, and that is that the customer has been hurt in the past by coffee.  The customer has had some kind of a traumatic experience in a coffee bar and they bring that experience in with them.  So, we have to approach them from a position of owning the stuff that our industry sort of did to them and earn back their trust.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so intrigued.  I can’t recall an experience of my own.  Are we talking about hot spills, or what do you mean?

Chris Deferio
I mean emotionally, like you go into a specialty coffee shop and often times what you find is maybe the barista is not as welcoming as you thought they should be for the price point of the coffee.  We promise a special experience a lot of times and when somebody walks in, the expectation is set so high by the marketing that the actual reality of the experience is disappointing.  And so, knowing that people are sort of accustomed to dealing with disappointment when it comes to something that’s so hyped as specialty coffee with all these latte art flowery drinks and what not, we kind of have to approach it with some empathy and realize that A) it’s not personal, B) let’s make that up to you; let’s make this the best experience that you could possibly have.

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

Chris Deferio
Well, I would definitely recommend they go to KeysToTheShop.com, and the podcast the same name on iTunes.  It’s just KeysToTheShop on Instagram and Twitter as well.  And those are the best places.  My email is chris@keystotheshop.com.

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

Chris Deferio
Be patient with yourself, be patient with others, and take a look at the big picture on a regular basis.  And learn to be happy with the work that you’ve already done and hopeful for the work that you’re going to accomplish.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.  Well, Chris, thanks so much for taking this time.  Lots of fun.  I wish you tons of luck in your coffee adventures, and you are a champion in more ways than just latte art!

Chris Deferio
I really appreciate that.  Well, thanks for having me on the show.  It was really fun.

Apr 16
0

287: Establishing Motivation, Intention, and Boundaries Like a Boss with Emily Thompson and Kathleen Shannon

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Emily Thompson and Kathleen Shannon say: "Do the work is what happens between the wanting and the having."

Emily Thompson and Kathleen Shannon of Being Boss talk setting intentions and the importance of boundaries.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The benefits of creating monthly intentions
  2. How to set boundaries – and stick to them
  3. How to have healthy dialogue with your boss

About and Kathleen and Emily

Kathleen Shannon and Emily Thompson, self-proclaimed “business besties” and hosts of the top-ranked podcast “Being Boss,” know what it takes to launch a business, do the work, and be boss in work and life. Both successful independent business owners, Emily and Kathleen started the podcast in January of 2015 to talk shop and share their combined expertise with other creative entrepreneurs.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Emily Thompson & Kathleen Shannon Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kathleen and Emily, thanks so much for joining us here at the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Kathleen Shannon
Pete, we are so excited to be here.

Emily Thompson
For sure. We are ready to tell people how to be awesome at their job.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, you’ve been doing it for a while and you do it in style with fun. Your branding – well, that’s what you do. It’s so awesome with regard to the colors and the photography. It says boss through and through.

Kathleen Shannon
Our brand board was like Lisa Frank, me, The Craft, like that witchie ‘90s movie, basically.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say it that way, it kind of makes me look at the purple smoke in a different way.

Kathleen Shannon
Do you see it in a whole new way? Like, there’s going to be a unicorn flying through, and a Tarot reader, and a crystal ball.

Pete Mockaitis
That is funny.

Kathleen Shannon
They might make it rain.

Emily Thompson
Definitely make it rain.

Pete Mockaitis
Nice double meaning there.

Kathleen Shannon
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I much appreciate it.

Kathleen Shannon
I’m glad that you got that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, cool. Obviously I’ve got to get into so much good stuff. I learned, Kathleen, you shared that you like to work in complete silence. What’s the story here?

Kathleen Shannon
I know, so you asked me one thing that people might not know about me and as Emily knows and as our listeners at Being Boss know, I’m kind of an open book. I’m probably talking about things I shouldn’t be talking about. But the thing I think that people don’t know about me is that I work in complete silence. I definitely give off this vibe that I’m this crazy, cool, creative. At least, that’s a vibe I hope I’m giving off.

But I find myself working in complete silence because whenever it comes down to getting focused and doing the work, I find myself even listening to ambient music, tuning it out, so it becomes this extra distraction that my brain is having to work around in order to do the work. I think it’s just maybe the one thing that people don’t know about me is it is dead quiet. You can hear a pin drop whenever I’m working.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. How do you enforce quiet around you? Isn’t noise just going to happen? I shopped around at length to find a sound-blocking door. I totally resonate with this. What are your tricks?

Kathleen Shannon
Well, so I do work from home. My kiddo is in full-time daycare. My husband is at his day job. I am completely alone during the day at my home office. This is part of the reason why I decided to work from home and not go to a co-working space.

I do have an agency. I live outside of Detroit and I have an agency located in Oklahoma City where all of my partners and employees work. I did build out in that space two little office spaces with doors and sound proofing for podcasting and that sort of thing. But I have a spray bottle to keep my cats away from me and that’s about it. That’s how I enforce it.

It’s just like in the decisions I’ve made along the way, I suppose. At some point every creative does kind of have to decide, like, “Oh, am I lonely being all by myself at my house or should I go to a co-working space, should I go to a coffee shop?”

I certainly have the tools. I used to work in an open office space before I started working for myself, so I can go to a coffee shop and tune things out, but I get so focused then that it’s almost like silence, where you would have to get eye-contact with me to make sure that I’m listening to you, like I’m that focused on my work.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. When my wife comes in sometimes I’ve got the headphones and the noise cancelling on and maybe even ear plugs underneath the headphones straight up.

Kathleen Shannon
You’re not messing around.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll like be startled, like, “Oh, there you are.” I’m resonating. Thank you. Tell me, Emily, how do you find yourself in the work groove?

Emily Thompson
I’m pretty similar where I used to listen to music. The first time Kathleen told me that she worked in complete silence, I was shocked, like, similar where I felt she was probably just like dancing around her office listening to Beyoncé all day, every single day.

Whenever she told me she worked in complete silence, I was super shocked because I, at that point, liked to listen to music while I worked but I found myself as, I’ve guess grown in my entrepreneurial endeavors where I’m responsible for all things, this sincere need to get super focused. I can only do that when it’s pretty quiet.

Now, I do home school my child. Actually, hear her in the kitchen right now banging forks and plates around. I’m trying not to get too terribly annoyed at. So I do have to drown out a whole lot of noise, but I’ve kind of gotten used to it. But otherwise, like pretty quiet. I’m not listening to music.

Here’s a funny tidbit though. I used to develop websites. That’s what I did as I began growing my online career. I do code best when I’m watching TV.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

Kathleen Shannon
I was about to say that too, Emily. I feel like our jobs have changed, where you used to be coding, I used to be doing a lot more graphic design and busting out that Bezier pen tool, any designers listening know what that is, and this kind of redundant work where you can listen to music or watch TV.
That’s my favorite, are days whenever I have to do some design and I’ll sit down in front of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and just knock some stuff out.

Kathleen Shannon
Now we do so much writing that I feel like it requires a different kind of focus where it’s harder to drown out those outside noises and it’s harder to get that focus with background noise happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Yeah. Well, thank you for setting the stage here and could you maybe continue that. But first, I want to make sure – I first learned about your show from one of our mutual listeners. It’s Beth in Baltimore. Can we just talk about how great she is?

Kathleen Shannon
Yeah. Beth, high five.

Emily Thompson
Thanks for spreading the Being Boss love for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Shout out accomplished. Tell us, what’s Being Boss all about?

Kathleen Shannon
Being Boss started as two business besties, that would be me and Emily. We were really craving that connection and conversation, so, as we mentioned, we’re working alone out of our homes, sometimes in complete silence. That can get kind of lonely.

So we became creative peers and colleagues whenever we were hiring each other for the work that we were doing. Beyond that, we started to connect on a more friend level. We would hop on a video call and really talk shop.

After a year or two of over Skype talking about what was working, what wasn’t working, our conversations were getting deeper. We were talking about real numbers, like sharing money, which is kind of taboo.

We were sharing our biggest secrets as far as business secrets, the kind of stuff that people like to keep to themselves. We were sharing insights as to how we were juggling work and life and time management and growing families while growing careers.

Emily was even there when I was like, “Okay, I’m thinking about starting a family. How am I going to make this work?” She’s like, “Okay, you need to automate. You need to get some systems in place and you’ve got to put that kid in daycare.” Well, that’s not entirely true because Emily homeschools, but I definitely had to do the daycare. Anyway, all this to say, we were having these conversations.

One day Emily sent me an email saying, “Hey, you know those business bestie conversations we’re having, we need to hit publish on them. We need to start a podcast. Other creatives are craving this kind of conversation and probably feel just as alone as we did and we could be their work buddies.”

Our podcast, Being Boss, it really did catch on pretty quickly and we became the go-to podcast for other creatives and aspiring entrepreneurs who wanted to hear some insights and real talk about what it takes to do the work. ‘Do the work’  has essentially become our mantra because we all know making a living doing what you love isn’t always easy and it takes hard work. That’s the conversation that we have been having for the past three years.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. But I’ve seen several Facebook ads that tell me if I just follow this bulletproof system I can make millions of dollars online easily working from home.

Emily Thompson
Yeah, yeah and how has that worked out for you?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s like all the ads I get on Facebook. I guess like some of the wrong things that get me targeted for that.

Emily Thompson
Yeah. There are so many people in the online space or not even in the online space, who have laid out these blueprints or plans or mapped out success in a way that if you follow them, X, Y, Z, you’ll get the thing that you want.

Kathleen and I, we’ve done some of those probably back in the day, like here’s how you build a six-figure launch or whatever it is. We quickly realized that that’s not how the world works. It only took us a time or two to realize that’s not how things go down.

That’s really what a lot of those beginning conversations were, were here’s the thing that I tried. Here’s what worked and didn’t work. You do it, find out what works for you, and then let’s share back and forth.

We realized that everyone’s success is defined differently and therefore the path to your success is always going to be different from someone else’s. That’s really been the core of what Being Boss is, is define success on your terms and then take the steps that you have to take to get there. It won’t look like anyone else’s journey; it will look like your journey and that’s what makes it all the more special.

Those blueprints and things, they may work for three or four people, which is great for those people, but buying into those things is a mistake when what you really need to do is define success on your own and make it do the way you need to make it do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said.

Kathleen Shannon
One of the things I always think about are working actors, like those actors that have tons of jobs but you never see them as the lead role, but they’re probably living a pretty nice life. I kind of think of us as that as well. We are working creatives who are in it with you. We’re not those million dollar overnight successes, but we’re going to show you that you don’t have to be a million-dollar overnight success to do the work and do what you love.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love that. That reminds me of the documentary, maybe you’ve seen it. It was pretty engaging. It’s called That Guy … Who Was in That Thing. It’s all about those actors.

Kathleen Shannon
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
Interviewee after interviewee are like, “I kind of recognize that guy.”

Kathleen Shannon
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
“He was in that thing.” He sort of talks about the struggle. I love how you talked about defining success on your own terms as opposed to sort of just knee-jerk reacting to, “Hey, quit your job. Leave the rat race,” because for the most part, my listeners enjoy their jobs most of the time or are actively trying to find a switch and are finding some fulfillment and fun and flourishing – oh, alliteration – in the world of being employed at a place as opposed to being the sort of the owner CEO.

But, nonetheless, you talk about boss in many ways as a mindset in your upcoming book, Being Boss. Could you unpack that a little bit?

Emily Thompson
Absolutely. I mean for us it all starts with mindset, with the sort of foundational belief that you can do whatever you want. You have the right and ability to define things the way you want them to be and then you have the ability to go make it happen for yourself.

If you don’t believe those things, it’s not going to happen for you. It’s really important to get into that right frame of mind in order to tackle all the challenges that come at you, whether that’s creating your career or building your life and doing those in a way that you find fulfilling.

It’s being confident. It’s seeking out motivation and inspiration. It’s committing to setting and working towards really big ass goals or maybe not really big goals if you’re not a super big goal kind of person.

We also believe that a lot of it comes into trusting yourself, trusting that you’re going to make the right decision and that you’re going to be able to show up and do the work and get the thing. It all starts with that foundational mindset that you can do what it is that you want to do as long as you show up and do it.

Kathleen Shannon
Yeah, whenever I think about the boss mindset and all of the people that we’ve interviewed and even in our early conversations with each other, it’s this idea of self-reliance, trusting that you’re not going to have all the answers, but that you can absolutely figure it out.

Emily talked about trusting that you can make the right decision, but I’m going to take it even a step further and trusting that no matter what decision you make, right or wrong, trusting that it’s going to get you where you need to go. That definitely is that primary foundation that we always start with is mindset. Part of that is really understanding your values as well.

This can be applied for people who are working for themselves or working in the context of an organization or a company where they are an employee. It’s really understanding what you value and bringing intentions and action to those values so that you are living them out not only in your life but in your work.

Pete Mockaitis
I am loving that. As you say values, you’re firing off some connections for me, thinking back to my Coaches Training Institute training back in the day. How would you define a value and can you give us a couple of examples of what a value is and what’s not a value, like you said that is a value, but that doesn’t quite sound like a value?

Emily Thompson
Sure. I mean values are sort of the foundational beliefs that you sort of build your own characters. For me, I value freedom where whatever I am going out into my work or even my life, like that’s something I’m consistently seeking, it’s something that I value seeing in other people. Wherever those opportunities are presented to me, those are more intriguing than the ones that aren’t.

For me, something that I value is freedom. Everyone has values, whether you value kindness or assertiveness. Kathleen, feel free to jump in with any additional one.

Kathleen Shannon
Yeah, so one of my biggest values is authenticity. I know that’s a word that’s being really used a lot lately, but I can’t think of a better word for it. It’s one that resonates with me.

This is another thing whenever it comes to values is choose words that resonate with you on that kind of cellular level because there are a lot of words that mean the same things and so once you start to unpack your value, really explore all the words that are similar to that value or synonyms with that value.

Mine is authenticity and that is really, whoever I unpack that a little bit, it’s being who you are 100% of the time. And as I’ve gotten a little bit older and hopefully wiser, I realize that being who you are 100% of the time takes a lot of self-awareness and it takes a lot of questioning and curiosity. I would also say being who you are 100% of the time and seeking out who that is.

For me, anything I create – I use my values as a guidepost for making those hard decisions. I think that decision making is one of the hardest things whenever it comes to being your own boss or even making tough decisions about if you’re working a day job, whether or not to leave or to switch careers or to switch companies.

For me, I run every single decision I have to make through the question is this going to help my listeners, readers, whoever is consuming or engaging with me in any way be who they are 100%. If the answer is no, I’m not going to do it. If the answer is yes, alright, let’s go. For me and Emily too, we both use values as a way to really set boundaries in our business and to really draw that line between what we’re willing to do and what we aren’t willing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s so good. That point about thinking about what resonates at the cellular level and thinking through some synonyms. Because I might say integrity. I’d think we’d all agree, yes, that’s important. Integrity is good. But for me, if I think about synonyms, I think about count-on-able, which is a little weird way to articulate it.

Kathleen Shannon
Nice word.

Pete Mockaitis
But it resonates more. I want to be someone that can be counted upon as opposed to, “Oh boy, that flake.” You know?

Kathleen Shannon
Yeah, totally.

Pete Mockaitis
It just resonates more and I think it’s powerful in terms of making them all the more real as opposed to I guess – and exciting as opposed to just sort of obligatory, like, “Yes, I should do that because that’s a value,” as opposed to, “Oh, this is how I roll, so I’m fired up about it.”

Kathleen Shannon
Oh yeah. It should absolutely be something that you’re fired up about. This is a monthly practice for us, if not daily. But every month Emily and I set intentions. Sometimes we do use the word value and intention interchangeably, but the way that we like to think about it is that intentions help you bring actions to your values.

We’ll set intentions every month. I think what was mine last month was to rally. Another word for that could have been reliable, like I want to be really reliable this month, but I really wanted to rally and bring enthusiasm. For me it had this whole other kind of energy beyond reliability that really resonated with me.

We like to also do this on a monthly basis to explore new values and to really test some out and see what sticks and see where we can work on our own character by bringing in more of these intentions into kind of a practice in our personal lives and in our business.

Pete Mockaitis
Those intentions, that is powerful and one of our best episodes was How to Have a Good Day with Caroline Web. It’s so powerful. When you set an intention, all sorts of things go off in your brain in terms of what opportunities you notice and the decisions you choose to make in each of those opportunities. It’s a little thing, but it really has profound cascading ripples that go down when you’re living life.

Emily Thompson
Absolutely. I think the most I ever sort of got out of intentions or I guess the time that I realized they were probably so powerful, several years after – Kathleen and I sort of had this intention practice for a couple of years now. We share them with each other. We hold each other accountable. We’re always cracking jokes about having adopted the other one’s intention or whatever it may be.

I was listening to the Making Oprah podcast. One of the episodes of that podcast was when Oprah decided to start adopting an intention practice. She made her entire team at Oprah do it. Everything they did had to be based on some sort of intention. There had to be a good reason for doing everything that they did and how much of her sort of life and success she has placed on this adoption of an intention setting practice.

I was like, “Well, if Oprah can do it and be Oprah, then this has to be super powerful. It gave me a whole other level of appreciation for this practice that Kathleen and I have sort of kind of accidently fell into but we definitely see how profound and life changing and business- and career-changing it can be.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. I love it. I’d like to get maybe a little bit even more sort of tactical into the day-in, day-out in terms of if someone is in a job, what are some of your top tips for being more boss like or some top boundaries that might make great sense to set right away?

Kathleen Shannon
Oh, I’ve got one.

Emily Thompson
Yes, ma’am.

Kathleen Shannon
I do. I do. This is to stop checking your email in the evenings and on weekends.

Pete Mockaitis
There it is.

Emily Thompson
Yeah.

Kathleen Shannon
That’s it. It’s funny because whenever we were writing our book and running the first draft by our publisher, our editor said, “Hey, what about emails? How do you pry yourself away from your email?” This is something that Emily and I do not have a problem with. We are not slaves to our email. I think it is because of some of those early foundational boundaries that we set in place. It’s just kind of a non-issue. We forgot that some people might even have an issue with that.

We really thought it out and I think that this applies to anything though, anything that is capturing your attention that you don’t want to be giving. I think that email is a huge one.

Really tactical, turning off the alerts on your phone for email. It is not a text message. Don’t open your computer. You don’t have to check your email. I think that this can be hard too because a lot of it is setting those boundaries with your coworkers and that can be really tricky.

But one of my favorite mantras is ‘it’s only as weird as you make it,’ right? If you can be strong enough to set this boundary and just say, “No, it’s actually more weird to check your email in the evenings and weekends,” then you can just own it. That’s a big part of being boss is just owning who you are and owning that time.

Another thing that I do and I’ve been doing this since I’ve had a … is scheduling time for myself on my calendar and literally putting in a meeting on my Google calendar and pretending as if it’s the most important meeting of the day because so often we treat our deadlines and our client meetings with more importance than our meetings.

For me I’m scheduling every day my daily workout. I’ve been doing this since I’ve had a day job. I have a kid and I can still squeeze it in.

One of the things that Emily and I are constantly talking about is your to-do list will fill up with as much time as you give it, so I just give it a little bit less time and I prioritize myself and I find that I’m more productive whenever I do that. I would say scheduling time for yourself on your calendar is another really great boundary that you can literally see that boundary.

Then also looking at your calendar can help you see what you value and if what you value and where your intentions are aren’t being reflected in your schedule, it’s time to update something.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. Emily, more.

Emily Thompson
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m demanding.

Emily Thompson
Right. We have this little exercise that we have people do occasionally, I even think it’s in the book, where we tell people to write their own sort of employee handbook for themselves.

If you are an employee, you have an employee handbook, but it probably – actually, I think number one is actually read your employee handbook if you haven’t already, if you’re not super familiar with it, to really see where the lines are already drawn because those boundaries are so important.

If you have a boss who’s overstepping those boundaries or if you have a coworker who is trying to nudge you into showing up too early or staying too late, too often or whatever it may be, knowing what the employee handbook already says, can be super helpful for helping you draw those boundaries.

But I also like the exercise of creating your own employee handbook, like what is not outlined in that employee handbook that you need to outline for yourself and whether that is stretch your communication boundaries or making sure you’re giving yourself an extra 15-minute moment in the afternoon to regroup so that you can really give the rest of your day the best you’ve got.

Defining some extra rules for yourself so that you can really show up and do the best work that you can do.

Pete Mockaitis
I love this. I’m just sort of imagining how it can play out in practice in terms of with the email if there’s resistance like, “No, I can’t.” I think you can just have some candid honest conversations, like, “Hey, I’m trying to unplug and be more present to my family, so I’d really appreciate it if something super urgent that you’d give me a call or text message if it’s in the evening time,” and there you go. It’s kind of hard to override that.

Kathleen Shannon
You know what? Unless you’re a doctor, unless you are saving lives, then at that point you’re also on call and getting paid for that. There is no emergency. Emily used to deal with this a lot with launching websites. People act like that is a life or death situation and it just isn’t. Maybe this is some tough love here.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Keep it coming.

Kathleen Shannon
I don’t want anyone texting me either or calling me. I don’t even want them to have my phone number.

Emily Thompson
Yeah, yeah. I think it’s looking at the points in your work where there is pain and trying to define your way out of that pain. If you are getting text messages from your boss and you don’t want text messages from your boss, tell your boss to stop texting you or whatever it may be, maybe it’s a coworker or whatever the case may be.

Those boundaries are super important. They keep you really good at your work and not resentful of the relationships that you have at work.

I also want to point out here that people will only take your boundaries as seriously as you do. If you say, “I won’t be emailing on the weekends anymore,” but you’re sliding out emails on the weekend, then no one’s going to respect those boundaries. You have to hold those to the highest standards as you set them and people will follow suit.

I’ve had people ask me before, “Your employees or the people you collaborate with, do they have issues with your email policies?” Because Kathleen and I are not emailing outside of regular 9 to 5 business hours and people would assume that the people we work with struggle with that or have issue with it.

What we’ve actually found is that people respect us more and they definitely respect those boundaries because we know what we need to do to get the job done and that does not mean responding to an email at 9 PM. We’ll be there at 9 AM to respond and you’ll get us fresh and ready to go. We’ll have really great relationships in the life outside of work as well. It really only holistically makes the entirety of our efforts better by putting those boundaries in place.

Kathleen Shannon
Okay, I want to mention that Emily has been her own boss like forever and I do come from an agency world where I did have a boss. If any of your listeners are like, “Oh my gosh, there’s no way I can tell my boss like, ‘Sorry, I’m not responding,’” because I know that that can be tricky. I think for me the hardest thing is what you don’t say.

You can respond to the text or to the email on Monday morning at 8 AM or whatever your working hours are. That’s a more subtle clue as to here are the times you can expect me to respond.

Then I also think that being really fully present and working your ass off while you’re at work and really staying focused means that you’re going to get more done in that time and you’re going to be more present for your co-workers and your boss and whoever else during that time, that they’ll start to see like, “Oh, maybe this actually works, this whole work/life being intentional in all the places kind of thing.”

Pete Mockaitis
I appreciate that you brought that into real experience if folks are having some resistance to this notion. I think I can think of a person, Kelsey, who told me just that. I was like, “Oh, you’re consulting, is that really draining you?” She’s like, “You know what? I just kind of told people how I work best and it works.” It was almost like, “Whoa, you can do that?”

I’d love it if you could maybe bring in some additional experiences from maybe your listeners or those you’ve interacted with who are in jobs who have had kind of a case study or a success with this.

Kathleen Shannon
We talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. But one thing I was going to say as Emily was sharing earlier with writing your own employee handbook, one of the things I have found to be really helpful in my own business is creating my own policies and saying things like, “Hey, it’s not my policy.” I’m just going to keep using email as an example since we’re there, but this could apply to a lot of things.

Like, “Hey, it’s not my policy to work for free,” or, “It’s not my policy to email on the weekends.” I wonder if there’s a way that if you are working a day job, like really think about your own policies and even using that verbiage to go with your boundaries might be really helpful for you.

I am married to a guy who has a day job. It’s been stretching him recently and it’s been kind of tricky navigating because you want to please the people that you work with, you want to be a good employee, you want to show that you’re enthusiastic and that you’re in it and that you’re a team member, but you also have to show them that you are a responsible parent or you’re a responsible husband and you’ve got more obligations or even if you don’t have kids or a wife or any of that, you do have a life outside of work.

I think that a good thing whenever it comes to that that you can do is kind of blend – like instead of this work/life balance and separation, is blend a little bit of it, so maybe even sharing with your coworkers what you’re doing outside of work and really just setting the stage and saying, “Hey, I’m going to go pick up my kid,” or, “I’m going to go hiking on the weekend.” I think whenever you can do that, it can help them get a sense of who you are outside of work and make them respect that time even more.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. I’ve noticed that often, other professionals will have sort of a respect or awe or admiration for, “Well, good for you. I’d really like to do that myself.”

Sometimes if it’s kind of heavy, what you’re dealing with, like, “Hey, you know what? My mom is sick so it is really important to me to be able to spend some extra time because we don’t know how much time we have,” or there’s a hospital or even with the hiking example. It’s like, “I find that I am so much more brilliantly refreshed and creative at work if I’m able to do this,” so everybody wins if this works out.

Kathleen Shannon
Right. I want to point out here that the key here is communication. It’s talking about what it is that you’re doing and how it is that it helps you be better at your job.

I can’t speak a lot to having conversations with people who have day jobs, but I do know that as a boss of people who I’m providing their day job, we talk about those kinds of things all the time. I do prompt a lot of it because I do understand how that makes for a much healthier work environment for all of us, but they also bring those sorts of things to be.

I’m super cognizant of the fact that there are ways in which people are more efficient and more effective and those are the sorts of things that I want to nurture.

I recently had one of our employees, who’s actually a contractor, come to us recently and say, “I think that I would be more effective if I were to focus at being boss on Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and leaving Thursdays and Fridays open for other endeavors that I’m working on.” I was like, “Great. That’s absolutely fantastic. We can adjust some things to make sure that we’re only relying on you on those three days,” and it wasn’t an issue.

It was clear communication. If she had stopped showing up on Thursday and Friday or was only half putting in the work on any of the days, that would have had a negative effect on what it is that we’re trying to build together. But it’s just that direct and clear concise communication that is appreciated and effective and allows us all to move forward and creates an organization where we’re all working better for it.

I think very often, even in large organizations, people think that their efforts don’t affect everyone or that their hike on the weekend isn’t going to make anyone’s job better but their own, but the truth is that it affects everything. You’re a part of a larger system and the more you can really give to that part whether it’s your communication or your undivided attention or your best self because you took that hike, the better off everyone is going to be for it.

Pete Mockaitis
I love this stuff. Thank you. To shift gears, I know you’ve got some great wisdom in the realm of confidence and dealing with fraudy feelings. What are some of your pro tips there?

Kathleen Shannon
Oh, I’ve got one. I love it whenever I need to cultivate confidence or overcome what we call fraudy feelings, which is kind of imposter syndrome, is to throw a dinner party. For me this is kind of calling on my inner mentors. I pretend as if I’m hosting a dinner party with these people who can give me boss advice and really guide me in this super mentored way into where I need to be going.

If my dinner party includes Beyoncé, Neil deGrasse Tyson, maybe Bill Nye the Science Guy. I’ve got a couple of scientists there. It may be a comedian like Dave Chappelle. I’ve got a few guests at my dinner party. You might be thinking like, “Wow, Kathleen is super connected,” and I’m not. I’m not.

This dinner party exists only in my head, but it really does help me cultivate this confidence of what kind of advice would Beyoncé give me if I feel like I’m struggling with having a hard conversation with a business partner. It’s really fun to kind of almost play it like an ad-lib game or have unexpected people give you unexpected advice to the problems that you’re trying to solve, like how would Neil deGrasse Tyson, how would he help advise me in solving this design problem.

It can really lead to some creativity and innovation. Whenever you’re feeling creative and curious and innovative, there is no room for feeling bad or feeling sorry for yourself or having fraudy feelings. At that point, you’re energized and excited just to make the thing. That’s how I like to do it.

Emily Thompson
Love that, Kathleen, your fake dinner parties. I like to be a little more practical I think. I always look at
proof.

One of the things that Kathleen say to each other and ourselves consistently is ‘I can do hard things.’ We know this because we’ve done it. We can look at the past, at what it is that we’ve built. I imagine anyone listening to this, you’ve done something hard in your life at least once or you probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast on that cool device that you have in your hand or in your pocket or wherever it may be.

You can do hard things. If I ever need to bolster my confidence and get something done that I maybe haven’t done before or it seems a little daunting or I’m trying to tell myself that I’m not going to be able to accomplish it, I always look back at all the things that I have done.

If I can’t do it for myself, I call up a friend or pour a glass of wine and go talk to my partner, David, and we’ll go over some of the things that I’ve done, whatever I need to do to remind myself that this is just one more hard step on a very long path and journey of hard steps. It’s not quite as fun as Dave Chappelle and Beyoncé, but I find it just as useful.

Kathleen Shannon
Well, Emily, one of the things that you’ve always done that’s really inspired me is to approach everything as an experiment and to know that you can test and change. I think whenever you approach a project as an experiment rather than like, “Oh my gosh, this is my livelihood and I need to make some money,” you’re open to failure because aren’t scientists looking to fail. Aren’t they looking to prove themselves wrong?

I think that that’s what we’re trying to do as well is really see what works and what doesn’t through the lens of an experiment, like this is a thing that we are trying. Yes, our livelihood does depend on it, but whenever we can get curious and be open to failing, we succeed nine times out of ten.

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. I love that notion ‘I can do hard things’ feels like a much more tangible and specific belief to cultivate as opposed to what you might call self-esteem or self-confidence.

This brings me back. Boy, when I was a freshman in college I remember, I just kept getting rejected from stuff. I wanted to join all these clubs and they wouldn’t have me. I was like, “What the heck? I was such a rock star in high school. This is bogus.” It really did kind of bring me down in terms of what you’d call self-confidence.

So I made a big old notebook with bullet after bullet of cool things that I’ve accomplished. If you sort of look at those evidence points for not just, “I’m great,” but, “I can do hard things,” I think that’s really galvanizing and resonating.

Emily Thompson
Yeah, it’s important. It’s so easy to start beating yourself up and forget that you’ve gotten here because you did cool things or you did something and the next thing is just the next thing that you have to overcome. It’s just an easy, simple tactic for getting you there.

Kathleen Shannon
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is that it’s not supposed to be easy. No good story doesn’t come without some challenges. We’re on a hero’s journey and that means we’re going to be falling on our faces sometimes and that’s okay. We’re supposed to.

Pete Mockaitis
This is so good. Tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear, rapid-fire, your favorite things?

Emily Thompson
My favorite quote, it’s not even inspiring, it’s one of those things that drives me a lot. It’s really funny, I also have to share the story that surrounds it. The quote is ‘Look for what’s different.”

It came from a teacher that I had once. I think about this all the time. It was in reference to looking for four-leaf clovers of all things. We’re like out in the school yard, looking at clovers, and she told us to look for what’s different because it’s the four-leaf clover that’s different from the three-leaf clovers.

I think about that all the time. I absolutely know that little mindset nugget, that little just quote that seems so simple, is one of the things that’s definitely brought me to where I am, where it’s not the 14-step blueprint that’s going to make me 18 figures or anything like that. It is the thing that’s different that will take you down the path to what it is that you’re supposed to do.

The quote that I’m always thinking of is Dear Ms. Thompson, because we did share a last name too and that’s just a whole other level of magic there, this idea of you should be looking for what’s different, not at what’s the same.

Kathleen Shannon
Is that how you find so many four-leaf clovers? Is that your secret?

Emily Thompson
Yes, it is. That is my secret. I also just shared the secret to how it is that I find four-leaf clovers more easily than anyone I’ve ever met.
Kathleen Shannon
Wow, I love it. Mine is – I’m going to butcher his name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and it is “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

Pete Mockaitis
And it rhymes. Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Emily Thompson
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. This one changed my life and we’re often asked what business books we recommend and this isn’t a specific business book, but it is one that will teach you the power of vulnerability and resilience and it has changed my life.

Kathleen Shannon
Mine is just Harry Potter, all of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely, thank you. Could you share a particular nugget that really seems to connect and resonate with your audience? You hear them quoting it back to your often.

Kathleen Shannon
Do the work. It’s so funny whenever we were writing our book, we were asking our audience, “Is there anything that we have said that really stands out for you?” All of them said, “You’re constantly just telling us to do the work.”

That means to get into that mindset, to get into your habits and routines, and to establish those boundaries and to lean on your wolf pack, and your tribe, and your community, and to really be who you are 100% of the time in work and life and that takes a lot of work, but you can do it, so do the work.

Emily Thompson
I agree with that one, except I think I’ll expand because one of things that I feel like comes back to me often, I feel like there’s been some Instagram graphics made out in the world where at one point I said, “Do the work is what happens between the wanting and the having,” so a nice little definition there for it’s all the work that happens between wanting something and actually having it.

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

Emily Thompson
BeingBoss.club.

Kathleen Shannon
I was going to say, www.BeingBoss.club.

Emily Thompson
Good job. Good job Kathleen.

Kathleen Shannon
We’ve had our listeners get stressed out about the way I say www.

Pete Mockaitis
I was thinking that. I noticed that myself. I’m like interesting choice.

Kathleen Shannon
Yeah, yeah right. We have an interesting URL, so I like to include the www for context. But yeah, that’s where you will find us.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue forth to those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Emily Thompson
I do, and Kathleen, I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this one. One of my very favorite ones and I think this is especially for people who have jobs because I think there are a whole other set of rules, it applies to both, but job people. I think I challenge people to say no three times this week.

Kathleen Shannon
That one makes me start to sweat a little bit.

Emily Thompson
I know it does. I know it does.

Kathleen Shannon
I have a hard time with it.

Emily Thompson
I think it’s a good one.

Kathleen Shannon
Mine is going to be make space for what you want, whether that is on your calendar or whatever that looks like for you, make space for what you want. I would say on your calendar and schedule it and make it happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm. Well, Emily, Kathleen, this has been such a treat. Thank you for sharing the good stuff. I hope that your book is a smash success and you keep on being boss and flourishing in all you’re doing.

Kathleen Shannon
Thanks for having us, Pete, this was so much fun.

Emily Thompson
Yes.