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Mar 09
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271: Building Social Wealth with Jason Treu

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Jason Treu says: "The most important capital we'll ever have in our life is the relationships that we build with people."

Jason Treu shows how to encourage strong and meaningful connections.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Easy ways to facilitate more meaningful connections at work
  2. How to address your blindspots more quickly
  3. Questions to cultivate empathy

About Jason

Jason is a top business and executive coach. He’s a leading expert on human behavior, influence, sales, networking and leadership. At the heart of his strategy is the understanding that people and your relationships are your true “wealth.” Everything we accomplish in life is with or through other people.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Jason Treu Interview Transcript

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

Jason Treu
Well, thanks for having me on the show and speaking to your fantastic tribe.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to hear first and foremost about a game and workshop you invented called Cards Against Mundanity. What’s the backstory here?

Jason Treu
Well, probably now going on 18 months or more ago, I was talking to one of my mentors. And they told me that I needed to try to do something that had the potential to go viral, and I needed to pick something big and something I was going to go all in on. And it was just like, “Well, you just need to figure it out and do it.” And although that’s sort of not specific, I knew that there was some big idea. And I went through a list of things I was like, “I really would like to do a TEDx speech, but if I do one, I want to do one that’s a “How To” speech because then if I finish it, I’ll have something specific that I can translate to a corporate audience or entrepreneurial audience, other people.
So, I thought to myself the one thing that I really wanted to try to do was to try to work on some challenge people might have on culture and performance. And so, I spent about three months doing research and I almost gave up because I wanted to find a research and then build the idea around that, not go in with the premise of something that I thought might work, because I thought that ultimately would be flawed and that might lead me to a result that wouldn’t be as good as the one that I would come up with.
So, I was looking through some research and I came across this professor – his name is Arthur Aron – and he did some research back in 1997, and it was on how to make best friends. And I was like, “This is pretty interesting.” So I read through the research report, which is always pretty dry. And as I was reading at the end the thing that really jumped out at me was, he did a game with 54 grad students that were complete strangers, had never met each other, had no knowledge of each other or anything else, sat them in front of each other, put 36 questions that they asked each other in only 45 minutes.
And they measured afterwards what those people thought of the experiment, and 30% of the people rated that relationship with the complete strangers that they did not know any knowledge of before, as the closest relationship in their life.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, yeah.

Jason Treu
That’s pretty amazing. Just think about that – in 45 minutes someone has done what most people are doing decades or a lifetime – they had done in 45 minutes. And I thought to myself, “That is absolutely extraordinary.” And then in the original research study, one of the couples ended up getting married. But the interesting part is that’s 1997 – pre-social media, so none of the distractions. But he’s done it dozens of times since then and the results have stayed pretty much the same every time that they have done it.
And then the other part of it, I was going across some research by Google, and they were looking at how to build the perfect team. And they hired researchers and they spent three years and millions of dollars, and they could not see any patterns or trends. And then one of their researches walked in on a group and the manager of the group said, “I have stage 4 cancer and I may not make it. I want to let you all know.” And they saw the performance in that team soared over the next six months. And they figured out the only characteristic across all of Google’s 180 teams was psychological safety.
And that’s a fancy word for “vulnerability”, and what that means is that they got to know each other on a deep personal level, they were able to raise controversial ideas and ask questions about people making fun of them or anything else. And that is the basis, and in fact it’s become so embedded in Google’s culture. They had this other business called Project X – it’s their secret business where they go and try these crazy experiments, and they’re spending I think a billion dollars a year on this business. And the first thing that everyone goes through in training is psychological safety, over everything else.
So, when you combine all that, it was like, “Okay, how can we do this in a group scenario?” And so basically I put together cards, like Cards Against Humanity, and you ask questions, such as, “If you could pick one year of your life to do over, which one would it be and why?” And you share this in a group full of people.
And it’s extremely powerful, people who’ve done it had great results, because you start to bond people over experiences. You get emotionally involved with the people. And the thing about it is when you start to care about other people in the room, your performance goes up, your collaboration goes up, your communication goes up, and it’s just like magic. You’ll see results overnight, and teams have rocketed in their results, and organizations, if you’re a small business. So it’s pretty interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so cool. And I’ve played with the Arthur Aron’s study, and once on Valentine’s day I was with my girlfriend at the time. I said, “Hey, let’s go through these questions.” And sure enough it did facilitate closeness. And I know that Aron has replicated it, in terms of same gender and mixed gender cohorts in doing it. So, with your game, how many questions are there and to what extent are they same versus different than Arthur Aron’s?

Jason Treu
I switched them around; they’re not the same. Some of them are. And so, what I do is I put it in a group full of people, and you can play on the small side of it it’s four people, and I’ve done it up to 15, which is probably the maximum; 12 is probably closer to it. And I asked people to do about three rounds, because I’ve seen that’s the magic number. And the other part of it I changed is that at the end everyone goes around and has one minute to say three things that they learned about people inside of the group, because I found it’s very powerful to be able to do that, because it shows you’re listening and hearing other people.
And one of the things that in research and my TED Talk I found is that if you have a very good to best friend in an organization, your productivity is seven times higher and your retention rate on staying in the organization is seven times if you have that. And so, it’s really to find even one person that you’re really closer to out of this experiment is game-changing for any team or organization. And the other last thing I found is that I’d done this on parallel teams in bigger organizations, meaning they haven’t participated in the same room and you see the results, as long as they know that they’ve both done it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s so cool. So then, I’d like to dig in here a bit. So, when you talk about coworkers being able to engage with each other and create these meaningful connections – so you have one specific tool, which is the card game and that facilitates psychological safety and good friendship formation, which is linked to all kinds of goodness. So, could you share with us in workplaces what are some additional tools or approaches or mechanisms by which we can encourage and facilitate this kind of transformation to take root?

Jason Treu
Yeah, so another thing that you can do that I’ve had clients do is when you start off a weekly meeting of any kind, is I’ve had people bring in pictures. And have 30 seconds to a minute and share a story about what that picture means to them and why it’s meaningful. And that builds really great connections and you’ll find that people who do that in a short period of time will rate that meeting as their favorite meeting of the week that they have. And they’ll be way more productive because they have a lot more of emotional investment inside of the organization.
I found other things, like if you have a meeting with people, if you allow the junior staff to go first and senior people last, you create a lot better conversations between people, and if you get them out, and I think that’s pretty important. I found the other thing too that’s helpful is when you have a big event, is to go back and really have a brainstorm on what went right, what didn’t go right. But do it in a very productive way, where there is no right or wrong answer necessarily.
At the beginning and you start to have a brainstorm and then you whittle it down, because then everyone has a voice and you get all of the people to communicate. And that’s why creating psychological safety is so important, because what happens is that a lot of the greatest ideas in the business aren’t getting shared, because no one’s putting them forward, because they don’t know where to go to.
So I’d say the last thing, and a quick thing is, people who own businesses or are at a senior-level often get entrenched and never really communicate with people in the organization. And so, I have them walk around for 15 minutes three times a week and just talk to people about what’s going on in their life. And they immediately see significant results, because it shows people that you care. And I think that if you start to do that, you’ll have people come up to you with ideas, suggestions, they’ll be much more engaged, because the key element of building trust, which is the fabric that holds everything together, is caring. And that is the one factor that trumps everything else. And so you’ve got to deeply care about the people and organization and have everyone do that from the top down, or you’re missing out on a lot of productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Jason, you went right to the actionable tactics, which is great fun and so handy. And so then, you sort of, I guess, synthesized a number of the drivers for why this stuff works into a few key principles, which you lay out in your book Social Wealth. Can you orient us to that a bit?

Jason Treu
Well, one of the things I did with the book Social Wealth is I wanted to do a “How To” guide on how to build relationships, because I found they’re really learned behaviors, and I think a lot of people believe that they’re born with these skills, and if they don’t have them, then they won’t be good at them or they’re introverts or socially awkward, which is really the majority of people. And so then they just opt out or they just don’t have great relationships or they settle for way less than they should.
So I wanted to go through and have it so people could understand that there are great ways to meet people, build these skillsets. It’s just like going and getting in shape. If you go once a month, you probably won’t be in great shape, unless you have freaky genetics. So, you’ve got to go and do that. And the reality is the most important capital we’ll ever have in our life is the relationships that we build with people. No one had a tombstone that said, “I worked a good life.” That’s not happening. So, it’s the relationships and the experience. My dad passed away…

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sorry.

Jason Treu
Several years ago. He shared with me in a moment at the end that he was like, “I should’ve invested more in the relationships and in people, because there’s a lot of regret I have with relationships in my life.” And I thought to myself, “That’s pretty wise words from someone who’s hours away from passing away.” And I truly believe that in the end the only thing we’re going to look back is the relationships that we had built; nothing else. So we need to spend time doing this.
I think also what’s happening is that you’re seeing that there is no work-life balance, there is no work-life integration. Basically what’s happening – people who work – their friends are at their job, they’re one and the same. And so you’ve got to be able to navigate that, you’ve got to be able to build these relationships, you’ve got to understand how to do it, and build the best ones for you. And that you are going to have to change those relationships over time, because just like there’s a great quote by this movie Stand By Me, and it said, “Friends will come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.” And I really believe that.
Now you’re going to have some good friends that might last for a whole lifetime, but a lot of people won’t evolve the same way you will and they’ll go in other directions. And if you continue to hold on to those relationships, those are the ones that hurt us the most because they tend to start being 70/30, 80/20, and then we feel used and taken advantage of, and they take a really big emotional toll. When the reality is then when you get out of balance you should have a conversation, and at some point you’re just going to have to let them go, if they don’t readjust and swing back.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Now when you say 70/30, 80/20, you mean sort of like the give-take?

Jason Treu
Yeah, the give-take, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s intriguing. Could you give us an example of that unfolding? So, how one person maybe grows in maybe a greater or different direction than another, and as a result there’s more taking that evolves, and then how that conversation could go?

Jason Treu
I think if you look at a person who is focused on their career, on their personal growth, on creating a better version of themselves – there’s not that many percentage of people that are doing those types of things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Jason, I’d love it if you could drop a number for us. Rough guesstimate inside your heart and mind.

Jason Treu
I probably would say 5 or 10%. I think that may be even optimistic. But I think the challenge is if you’re of those people or maybe a version of that slightly down, that’s at least 75% committed to that, and you’re around people that are very complacent or okay with what’s going on and are not looking to be accountable in their life and looking to overcome challenges and are willing to choose paths to help them get better – they’re going to eventually drag you down, because they are looking out for themselves and they’re not going to be in a situation where they’re givers. And that is the challenge that we all have.
So when that starts to happen, you emotionally more invest in people – you’ll start calling them more, you’ll start planning things more, you’ll start spending more money when you go out and do stuff. You’ll see all these things start, the tide will turn. And you then have to have conversations with people about that and then take a hard look at the relationship you have with people, and that can either be personally or professionally. And then you’ve got to make some decisions based on their response and your interaction. If they’re committed to their own growth and their own creation of a better version of themselves, or if they’re fine sitting in their comfort zone and complacency, and that is where they’re committed to stay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So then, I’d love to hear some more, in terms of the skills and principles to bear in mind as you’re going about living life and doing work. How do you recommend that we go about engaging with others to create all the more meaningful connections that we can make?

Jason Treu
I think that the key is, change comes from the inside out. And the first step is self-awareness, and understanding your own emotions and how you’re reacting to situations. So I think it’s important to go back and understand and find out what are your blind spots. What are the patterns that can sabotage your own success? Because if you don’t, you’re going to have a difficult time interacting with other people, because you won’t understand why you’re torpedoing your relationships or not building them forward. You’ll think it’s someone else, luck, or all these other things, when the reality is that everyone has these challenges, and you just have to start to identify them.
So, for instance an example would be, I had a client and I did sales training a couple of years ago. And this woman came up, and she has a pretty high-pitched voice and she was in her mid-30s and was saying, “I want to sell better. I’ve been doing well…” And this is in front of her peers and other managers. And I was like, “Okay, let’s talk about this.” And we ended up getting out of her that she felt shame, that she was really despondent, she felt she wasn’t good enough.
And the reason stemmed from back in high school and college, whenever she got on the phone and she talked to her mother or grandmother, they would make fun of her voice. And they would say things like, “You’re never going to be successful in business. You’re never going to get married. You need to lower the tone of your voice.” And they almost always mentioned it to her, and it’s something that stuck in her head. So now, every time when she gets on the phone with clients, that tape is running in the back of her head. So, you could tell her how to build better relationships, but that’s not the issue in and of itself. It’s the fact that you’ve got to turn that on its head and eliminate that, because otherwise she’s going to be maybe a little bit more successful, but not much, because those things are going to continually hold her back.
So, that self-awareness and fixing that issue and challenge is going to go a significant amount of way, because then you can teach people the next step, which is more social awareness and the emotions, thoughts and behaviors you can sense then in other people and better relate to them. And that is how you build faster, quicker relationships. But if you can’t relate to yourself, then you’re not going to be able to do it with other people, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So then what are some of your top suggestions for getting that self-awareness, and surfacing and addressing blind spots quickly?

Jason Treu
Well, the challenge is you really ultimately need help from someone else, because our brain is wired to keep us safe. It is not wired to keep us happy, so it blacks out these things. Now, what you can start doing is start asking yourself, “Okay, what behavior do I want to change?” The next question to someone else is, “What are the stories that I’ve made up in my head about that behavior?” For instance if it’s, “I want to lose weight in the new year”, and the story is, “Well, I can’t lose weight because people are constantly making fun of me, people won’t interact with me because I’m overweight, and that’s holding me back.” Okay, that’s great.
Well, then you start to look in what emotions that is coming up from, what emotions are you feeling when you feel that you aren’t losing weight and you aren’t making progress? And then you start to battle and grapple with that, and then you start asking yourself questions around, “What are the limiting beliefs that come up when I feel those emotions? I’m not good enough, I’m not smart enough, I’m not pretty enough”, I’m whatever it is. And then you ask yourself, “When’s the first time that I’ve ever felt that way that I remember?”
And you really have to push yourself, because then that starts to jog a memory in your head about when was the first time you felt like that, because then it starts to trigger patterns and show you what’s gone on, and when and how long and pervasive this has been. And you can start linking it back. And then you have to go back up the stack and you have to say, “Okay, if weight was not an issue and I was in great shape, then what beliefs would I have around that? I’m enough, I’m awesome. What emotions would I be feeling? What stories what I have around the world around me?” And then you can start reverse engineering what it is and how you’re feeling, and then start to read that, take a look at it, and then take actions.
But the other part of it too is that I found that there are two things that people mistake. One is motivation and drive. And motivation is very fleeting. It’s like we’ve all read a book or seen a movie or done something and we’ve been like, “Man, that’s awesome. That’s great, I love that.” And the next day nothing happens. Well, the differences is drive, is you understand the “Why” behind whatever you’re doing, and you will do that. For instance you will run when it is 10 degrees outside; you’ll not make an excuse that it’s too cold, because the drive is much more powerful. But you have to ask yourself questions: “So why am I doing this? Why is that goal or what I want, why do I want it?”
And then you have to ask yourself the harder question: “What am I lacking in my life that that goal is going to help me with?” Because once you do that, then in both of those questions you can move forward and you’ll be really successful because now you’ll be holding up basically an accountability in and of yourself, and getting to the real answers, instead of letting yourself off the hook and dealing at the surface level. Then you can start really having much greater self-awareness, and you can create massive change in your life really quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, excellent. So from that point of having collected some self-awareness, what are some of your top suggestions for building that social awareness?

Jason Treu
So I would say one, you need to practice empathy, because I think when you can practice empathy with people, you can start to understand their viewpoint and you will find common ground much quicker. I tell all my clients and in my conversations with my friends I say, “You’ve got two choices in life – you can be right or you can be happy. Rarely can you be both. So which one do you want?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jason Treu
When you cut it down like that, then you have to realize that is a significant part of life. And I think when you have more empathy, the other thing that happens is that you’re able to have more difficult conversations with people, because really that’s the requirement for being a great leader or a manager, is having difficult conversations when you don’t want to have them, because then what happens is that you get a greater understanding of the people around you, of the challenges, of emotions, and then you’re on the same page.
And that really is game-changing, because then you don’t have this stuff bottled up for months, years or whatever, or never have it. And then that will make a significant conversation. With empathy there is listening skills – that’s a requirement to do that. I think you start doing a few of these things, you’re going to see significant changes in how people respond to you or people interact with you, how people want to help you, because it will be different than how they are interacting with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now when we talk about some of these empathy elements, do you have any favorite questions that you use either to ask yourself internally, or to ask the person that you’re speaking with, that sort of naturally cultivates more empathy?

Jason Treu
Well, I like to ask people questions… In my head I try to ask myself, “What would the other person be thinking or feeling?” Not how I would be doing it. And then that helps me put me in a frame that takes me out of my defensive posture, and also puts me more in the moment. The other thing too is I try to listen without formulating my counter-argument, because if you do that… That’s what people do, typically they’re not really listening and they don’t really hear what the other person is saying.
And I ask clarifying questions. So, if someone says to me, “You know what? Jason, I’m really upset with you because you didn’t show up for my party or event.” And then I’ll tell them why, and then I’ll be like, “Okay. Well, is there another reason? Is it because you feel like I haven’t been showing up?” And if they say “Yes” or “No”, I try to ask a clarifying question, like, “Okay. Well, there’s something else going on here. We need to dig deeper in order to figure it out, because I’m willing to do whatever it takes. I just don’t know and I need your help to understand why it is that you’re feeling this way and what actions I can take to make the situation better.” So you have to dig down and keep asking “Why?” and ask clarifying questions, and then I think you can get at the heart of the matter, because usually it’s several layers deep.

Pete Mockaitis
And that takes some courage too, because it could be like, “Well, because, Jason, you always do this.” You tell me. We could role-play a little bit. “Because, Jason, you always do this, and you’re one of my best friends. And you said you’d make it and you didn’t. And so, it just makes me kind of wonder what can I really count on you for, and it just makes things feel pretty darn insecure.”

Jason Treu
Yeah. And I think what you’d say to someone in that situation is that, “I hear what you’re saying, and being late and not showing up is a problem. So I’ll make a commitment to you that if I say that I am going to come, I’m going to come. And if I can’t make it, I’m going to tell you I can’t make it and not feel bad, because the problem is I feel bad if I can’t make it, so I just always say ‘Yes’. And I need to draw more clear boundaries and communicate them better, because the way that I’ve been acting is not helpful and it’s not considerate of your feelings, your effort, your time and everything else, and I have to be accountable for that.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what I like about this is, it sounds almost like yeah, of course, we should always do this. But it’s not as much common practice as it may be common sense.

Jason Treu
It isn’t at all. And the problem when you don’t do this is that people harbor ill will and you don’t know why that is. And if you’re in a business setting, that undermines what’s going on, because then people’s retention goes down, they sabotage projects, they don’t put forward their best effort, they don’t help people collaborate. All this stuff is a chain reaction. And the same thing obviously in your personal life.
So, the key thing is, you have to be accountable, and that requires you to lower your ego and you’re going to have to put it in a different place and realize that you don’t have all the answers, and you are on a journey and you’re going to have to pivot constantly in your life. Now, if you’re unwilling to be in that situation and you’d rather be right than happy, then you’re going to be getting very limited results in your life and you’re going to live a very, very small life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so big stakes. Jason, thanks for this. Tell me, is there anything else you really want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jason Treu
I would say that if you’re going to go out and start building relationships both personally and professionally, the key thing is to get in the right rooms with people, because I feel like if you’re not there, then it’s a waste of time. And the places that I love to go that are gold mines are charity organizations, because they have movers and shakers, people who are socially aware, that care, are successful people; cultural places such as museums, symphony, opera; and the other place, which may have a mix of people but at least they have things that you’d be interested in, is interest groups, like running groups, art groups, painting, book clubs, whatever it might be. Those are great places to meet people, because you have things in common. And I think a group scenario’s helpful, because then you can meet a lot of people quickly in those organizations, and people have their defenses down, so they’re much more open and it’s much easier to meet them and to build relationships. And obviously that helps you both personally and professionally.

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

Jason Treu
Yeah, so the quote that I really like is a quote from Maya Angelou, who said, “I’ve learned that people forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” And I think unless we really understand the true role of emotions in our life, and being able to relate to other people and how powerful that is, we’re setting ourselves up to live a really small life, because people – it’s about how you make them feel when you engage and interact with them. It’s not an intellectual contest.

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

Jason Treu
Really, I would say anything by Brené Brown. She’s a great author on leadership and management. And she’s a shame researcher and she has the top five most downloaded TED Talk of all time called The Power of Vulnerability, and she really talks about a lot of these issues on shame, vulnerability, how to build better relationships. And I think it can get at the real nuggets that are going to help you both in your professional and personal life. And every time I hear her speak – and I’ve heard her several times – she’s brilliant in what she does. So, I would highly recommend her, and she has quite a few books out, so you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

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

Jason Treu
Again, I use two things. One is an accountability mirror – to ask myself every day what am I opting out of doing, and why? Because that helps me keep real in what’s going on and not procrastinate and put stuff off. The other thing is, I just go old-fashioned, I use Google Calendar and I schedule everything in for the week.
I sit down on Friday or Saturday or Sunday at the absolute latest and put in time when I’m going to work out, I’m going to go do meetings, after at night, or whatever I’m going to do, so I can see what I need to do. And when I need to wake up, and the rest of the things that I need to do during the week, because I feel like you’d be way more productive when you know what you have to do and you’ll procrastinate a lot less, because you’ll understand what’s possible and what’s not, based on the calendar that you have. And also if you don’t have any free time, you’re going to find out that you’re going to turn into someone in business who’s very tactical, and you’re probably putting out all these fires and not being strategic, which means you’re not really working to your capability, and the organization itself is suffering. So, you’ve got to block out time and you’ve got to use it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And is there a particular nugget that you share that seems to really connect with folks and gets quoted back to you frequently?

Jason Treu
Again, I think that the one thing I found from doing my TEDx Talk with people is that you will build relationships a hundred times faster if you’re vulnerable. But the key is that everyone wants everyone else to be vulnerable, but they don’t want to be vulnerable themselves. So what you have to do is be vulnerable first, and share something, even very small, because when you’re vulnerable and you share, people unconsciously believe that it’s safe for them to share because you led with it, and they’ve been taught that their life when people do that.
So, be vulnerable, lead with something, and ask really great questions. The questions I like to ask people initially when I meet them is like, “What are you most excited about in your life right now?” Or a question might be like, “What are you passionate about at work?” or, “What are you passionate about in your life?”, because it gets to the core things that people care about.
And you can ask that during a first conversation; you don’t need to wait. Waiting around is just because you feel like that’s a story in your head that needs to happen. Because I do it all the time, and it leads to way better conversations and I speed up the relationship-building process really fast, because I’m getting to real conversations when I meet someone the first time. I’m not waiting until the third, fourth, fifth or tenth.

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

Jason Treu
So, they can go my website at JasonTreu.com. And then if they want they can go download the game that we talked about in the beginning – Cards Against Mundanity – at CardsAgainstMundanity.com. So, playing it is free, and you can get results, and you can play with your friends. And you can play you’re your wife, so you have a Valentine’s Day thing.

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

Jason Treu
I think it’s true, and it may seem trite, but all growth comes outside of your comfort zone. So if you don’t feel like you’re doing something that’s scary or making you feel awkward, you aren’t really pushing yourself. And you’ll find the people that are the most successful are learning to deal with more and more uncertainty, but dealing with it in a healthy way. And that requires years and years, so you might as well get started now and just you’re going to see your life go in some magnificent directions.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Jason, thank you so much for sharing this great stuff. I wish you tons of luck, and hope that you keep on rocking with your coaching and your mundanity-breaking, and all that you’re up to!

Jason Treu
Yes. Thanks a lot, and thanks for having me on the show!

Feb 16
0

263: Building Relationships like a Superconnector with Scott Gerber

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Scott Gerber says: "Social capital is the new currency."

Scott Gerber discusses the “superconnector” approach to build meaningful human relationships and go beyond networking.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to become a conversational Sherlock Holmes
  2. Questions that spark great conversations
  3. How to introduce yourself with impact

About Scott

 

Scott Gerber is Founder and CEO of CommunityCo and founder of YEC and Forbes Councils. He is an industry leader in building and managing personalized, invitation-only communities for world-class executives, entrepreneurs and professionals. Scott is an expert on youth entrepreneurship, community building, youth unemployment in America, recent college grad unemployment and small business.

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Scott Gerber Interview Transcript

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

Scott Gerber
Thank you so much for having me. It’s going to be a lot of fun, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I think so too. Well, I was intrigued. When you filled out the form to get this conversation going, you described yourself as a big family man. And I just had my first child born mere weeks ago, so I’m very interested to hear…

Scott Gerber
Congratulations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. So I’m interested to hear all about that from you today.

Scott Gerber
Absolutely. It’s funny. People look at me, I’m a 34-year-old living in New York City, three-bedroom apartment with four children, a wife, and a dog. And we’re as in it as it gets because they’re ages, seven, five, about to be three, and eight months.  So we’re not sleeping, we’re dealing with multiple levels of personalities at all different ages. But, as I tell all my professional and business friends, what’s the point of doing what you’re doing if you don’t enjoy actually building a life?
And so, having these amazing, unbelievably different kids interested in so many different things, a very loving wife who is a wonderful mother, but also someone that we share our passion for really not just being present in the physical space of our children, but present with our children, and growing and learning together. Those are the kinds of things that make working so hard actually worth it. So that’s what we’re all about. There is no such thing as work-life balance by any means, but I think there’s something to be said about working so you can have a life.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, very good. And tell me, any pro tips on managing low sleep?

Scott Gerber
Well, I am the first one to say I believe I truly have the best individual piece of advice, from one parent to another. Are you ready for this?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so ready.

Scott Gerber
The best piece of advice, from one parent to another is, “Don’t listen to advice from any other parent. ”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got it. Alright, well then I’ll stop asking you about parenting matters, and completely shift gears to your book. So, Superconnector – what’s it all about and why is this important for the world to learn about right now?

Scott Gerber
Yeah, so Superconnector: Stop Networking and Start Building Business Relationships that Matter – my partner and I wrote it really with one core idea, and that is people as a society at this point are really falling into this lazy, out-for-yourself, transactional mindset of networking more and more. And as the world gets noisier, and as social platforms become even more ubiquitous, you need to actually be a human that builds relationships, and not a technology that amplifies non-human practices. You need to go back to being human, to build human relationships.
And so we’ve spent the better part of a decade building a number of very engaged professional communities for YEC, for its councils, others, for ourselves, for other brands and companies, to learn the ways in which you can actually build these meaningful relationships from the ground up, and not have these tips and tricks and hacks and growth hacking and conversion strategies, but rather just going back to saying, “I want to build smart ways to communicate with people, and smart groups of people to surround myself with, because that makes life better.” And when you’re valuable to other people, they can also be valuable to you. But it doesn’t mean you have to go into every relationship you’ve ever built looking for value.
So that’s why we wrote the book, taking all these best practices and frameworks, really to help people learn the mindset of a connector from our insights and from the top superconnectors around the world in various industries, so they stop doing these really stupid and terrible inhuman networking practices that we all love to hate.

Pete Mockaitis
Inhuman networking practices and processes. Okay, so maybe could you really lay out that contrast first to clear for me here? So, could you share with me, “Here is an inhuman networking process. Instead, do this.”

Scott Gerber
Well, here’s something I think we can all relate to here. Everybody has been subjected to a networker, right? It’s the person that walks up to you, shaking your hand with the right hand, having the business card in the left hand, talking at you about themselves while looking over your shoulder at the next person they should try to meet, right? The person that’s not investing real time, that’s trying to get the stack of business cards, that’s not really listening and only guiding and taking on a conversation for their own personal gain.
And then in 30 seconds, instead of thinking about, “How do I figure out where value can be created for you, the person I’m talking to?”, they’re thinking about, “Is this person going to be relevant to my individual goal or need or revenue metric?”, or whatever KPI you’ve decided on that day is valuable for your time, instead of the more practical way to do it, which is just to have a framework of the kinds of people you want to surround yourself with, and dedicate meaningful, smart, context-rich time and conversation to over not one year or one month, or any definitive amount of time, but over a lifetime; build a tribe around you of people that would be there for you in an instant and you do the same.
I think it’s a different mindset to look at surrounding yourself with great people that you can create mutual value, and exchange, and knowledge-share, than just trying to have this really, quote-unquote, focused way of looking at someone as dollar signs or a stepping stool. And so that’s the difference, I think, between the two categories. It’s not semantics. It is a fundamental difference of belief in how you view the point of a business relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. So, that sounds appealing, to be surrounded by people that you think are fantastic and there’s a mutual sharing of goodness over the course of a lifetime. So in practice, how is that done? How does one become a superconnector? What are some of the habits and practices and beliefs that they roll with?

Scott Gerber
Yeah, I think first and foremost, you have to learn how to have a real conversation. I think a lot of people suck at conversations – they have an issue leading them or they have an issue being a part of them, because your instinct is always to go to the lowest common denominator or lowest hanging fruit like, “Oh, the weather is nice today.” Small talk, right? Things that are inconsequential, that don’t really extract any new learnings or knowledge. And so first and foremost you have to understand, what is the point of a conversation? And I know that sounds like remedial. I’m sure someone right now listening to this is, “Oh my God! Great, Scott, you know how to talk. Well, that’s obvious. You’re so stupid. Why are you wasting my time?” Yet, they don’t do it, right?
So first it’s, what is the point of good context? Well, any conversation that allows you to extract context means that you’re creating a treasure trove, if you will, of great insights and data to really learn about someone, and not just the surface-level LinkedIn, Facebook-type stuff, but things such as what the goals of an individual are, or what they’re working on right now. That way, you can learn about what they’re working on, what is success and what is failure to them, what’s the timeline by which they’re looking to do these things – that kind of information that you can play an active role in, right? So great context.
Great context comes from good questions. So, in order to know what a good question is, you first have to ask, “What is a bad question?”, right? And a bad question is – I love this one – are you ready for it? It’s, “How can I help you?” Don’t you love that question? That question is horrible. It’s one of the worst questions ever created, and it’s become a social script marketing tactic for most people. Why does it suck? One, it puts the onus on the other person that in some cases you’ve just met, with a homework assignment or to come up with a good answer, or they’re going to feel stupid.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Scott Gerber
Number two, it’s not founded in any kind of specificity. It’s incredibly broad. Number three, if you had a conversation with them, the logical answer should be, “Don’t you know how to help me? If I’ve given you all the pieces to the puzzle, shouldn’t you be able to put the last one in to complete the puzzle and tell me the help I need?”
So it’s not specific, whereas a question like, “What are you working on right now?”, as I just mentioned – much more specific, comes with a timeline, comes with something that they’re passionate about and excited about, because it’s right now and it’s meaningful to them, comes with a series of naturally next step curious follow-ups: “What does that mean?” or, “Can you tell me more about that?” or, “What made you think that this is important to do right now?” or, “What’s the steps to success?” Again, things that you can help them help you to help them.
And then finally, again, it’s about putting together the pieces of the puzzle, the context, to figure out, “Who in my world or what resource do I have that might be able to fill the void?” So, maybe you’ve heard a series of things that it’s like, “Oh, well, I know this guy John and this woman Sally that have expertise in XYZ. Would that be helpful to you if I can see if they’re interested in having a conversation on that?” Again, you’ve given actual next steps versus, again, a wall, like a “Yes” or a “No”, or some sort of question that leads to a phrase that goes nowhere. These are the kinds of ways to have that conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, excellent. So, you’re taking that proactive initiative to say, “I’ve done the work. I’ve done the work for you,” instead of asking, “How can I help you?” You have done the digging to discover a few valid potential suggestions, and then brought up the specific idea, and then they can approve, or veto, or defer as necessary.

Scott Gerber
Correct. It’s almost like you’re the Sherlock Holmes of discourse, right? Because, look, if they love the suggestion, you’ve created a bond. The person knows you’re really listening, you really care. Even if it’s not the exact right fit, I appreciate the fact that you’re actually making a proactive suggestion. It’s very rare people do that, and that’s why it really does stand out.
Number two – if they say, “Oh, that’s a little off-base” – what does it do? It gives you the opportunity to ask more questions of, “Why do you think it’s off-base?” and, “What part is off that I can maybe tweak in my framework that I’m thinking of in my head?” So, again, it naturally lends itself to a hypothesis, and then either, is the hypothesis true or false, or incomplete?
So, you never want to end up with a wall like, “The weather is nice, isn’t it?” “Yes. ” Okay, great, now what? That’s why these continuous conversations where you’re leading, and not being about me, or trying to talk about you all the time – that’s where ultimately the difference is made, in showing you care, not just telling. And I think that is where ultimately people leave a conversation, and know that if they see you again, they will remember more times than not, that you were actually a thoughtful individual, that you actually did express interest and tried to do your best even if it didn’t exactly work out – and if it did, even better – because you cared. How many people can say that? Not many. And I think it all starts with great conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
That is great. And so then, one of the best questions there was, “What are you working on right now?” And can you share a few of the other great questions that often pop up when you’re doing your Sherlock Holmes-ing of discourse?

Scott Gerber
Yeah, it depends on the kinds of conversation we’re in. So if it’s a personal type thing, I might say, “What’s something you’ve tried recently that’s totally out of your comfort zone?”, because again, it allows for an anecdote and a series of stories that might bring in other context like how big is their family, or where’s the place they like to travel to. Again, all these little things individually might not mean the world, but put together, you really paint a picture of someone. And if you store that information – again, it could be in the contacts at Notes section, it can be in a CRM – over time, you’re going to develop this unique profile that no one else has access to, except you, so you know how to engage further later on.
Another question I ask people all the time is, “If I see you again in a year from now, what dictates success to you in the next year?” And there’s a million ways you can go with that direction. I think the goal is when you get people to feel comfortable talking about themselves – again, not in an arrogant or celebratory sort of way, but in a way that helps them to navigate an anecdote, or a series of things that they’ve been wanting to talk about but couldn’t articulate – you really are helping to lead without being the leader. And I think that is very meaningful for not only results but to build the foundations of a smart relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good, thank you. So tell me, Scott, maybe could we do a demo here? You will ask me some questions and be the Sherlock Holmes, and we’ll see what happens.

Scott Gerber
Sure. Paint the scene, because here’s another thing, just before we get started: Context isn’t just the words out of your mouth. It’s where we are, is if we’re at an event where we were both invited by a mutual friend, if we’re at a generalized networking event, is it a conference that brought us here?
So just to keep in mind, and maybe not for the demo purposes, but as people are listening to this – I want you to think about everything in an environment as context, because it’s a very different situation that if you and I are randomly at a bar having a beer, and we’ve never met, and it’s just a random Friday afternoon burning steam, versus we’re at an exclusive invitation-only event with 15 people invited, and our mutual friend is the person that brought us both there. Whole different level of conversation, right?
And so, it’s just about looking at the whole board, and not just the moment or the zone you’re existing in. So with that being said, I kick off and I can introduce myself, and you would introduce yourself, and I may ask a question like, “It sounds very interesting, what you do. What made you get into that type of XYZ?” And then you would respond.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. Well, I’m just so fascinated about people and what it is they find has really worked for them, in terms of generating particular results. And I’ve just always had an interest and enthusiasm in this skill-building stuff, about leadership, success, influence, communication, problem-solving, creativity, ever since I was a teenager reading books about it in the library.

Scott Gerber
Were you ever somebody who had a bad example, or a setback, or a major setback of some kind where everything you thought you were doing right was actually the wrong way to do it, and that’s what led you to want to learn best practices?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, kind of. I’d say, I was interested in the information and the power within it, just because the possibilities opened up before me even before, I guess, I had to experience some setbacks. But then afterwards certainly, yeah, along the way.

Scott Gerber
Have you learned about one particular leader or two particular leaders that you think are fundamentally best-of-breed that you’d recommend to everybody?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, from just a leadership perspective?

Scott Gerber
Just someone that whether it’s a CEO, or a politician, or an inspirational person that you’ve read about their leadership style, or way of looking at the world, and that just was a fundamental game-changer for you.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. As a child, Tony Robbins was my role model, and I wanted to be just like him. [laugh] I just thought he had the coolest job that there could be, and I wanted to be him.

Scott Gerber
What’s really cool about Tony Robbins, out of curiosity? I don’t know enough about him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess what I liked is that he was just so outrageously goofy and perfectly himself. And in some ways, that could really turn people off with all the F-bombs and profanity, and it kind of turns me off at times. But in other ways, it’s like there’s a guy who’s just genuinely doing his thing. And in a way, that was kind of liberating in a sense that I got my own weirdnesses and eccentricities, and so I can express those in a large space and find success like Tony did.

Scott Gerber
And so, there you go. See, in that short period of time, what have I learned about you? Professional development, you really care about. You wanted to meet someone or learn about someone that made it okay for you to be the person you are, and to form your own framework around what leadership meant to you, and so on and so forth. And all these things start to add up, right? Not every conversation is going to end up in a situation where you’re going to just immediately help someone. That’s not always an action step. Not everybody needs help, right?
But it could be the kind of thing where it’s like, if you could have a conversation with a leader, would you want to have a conversation with someone that is totally contrarian to you, or someone that’s exactly the way you think but at a bigger level or a bigger stage? And if you were to say someone like a contrarian, my response would be, “Oh man, let me just think. Do you know XYZ or XYZ? If he’s game for it, he loves debating this kind of rubric or this kind of challenge.” Now all of the sudden, I’ve engaged you in, “What do you disagree with him about? No, what a great debate that would be.” And you know that I’m connected.
So you get the point. There’s a lot of variables and directions to go, but you’re playing with a lot of information, and you’re moving your brain as quickly as you can to figure out where you can provide value. The key for that is at the end of the day, there’s one mindset shift that you have to have. And this is the moment when I tell people you have to audit yourself. So if I went into a conversation with you like we just had, and I, in the first 30 seconds, said, “Oh God, professional development. I want nothing to do with this guy”, then I would know that my mindset is that of a transactional networker, because my instinct is to say, “This person is not valuable to me.” And if people think that way, then they have to totally reverse course, and break themselves, and deconstruct themselves down, because they’ll never be a true connector.
Whereas in the way that I think, and other great connectors think as well, is I’m trying to find the different ways in which I can understand you to be of service to you. And I’m thinking, “Where’s the value that I can provide?” – resource, person, challenge request, whatever, as you’re speaking. And that’s my initial thought; not, “Man, how am I going to figure out a way to get you to introduce me to Tony Robbins?”, if you said you knew him. So that’s the whole thing. I think people need to understand who they are at their core and what they’re trying to achieve – great people, great conversations, great outcomes that scale long-term. Short-term gains, transactional value, totally a no-no.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s interesting, that mindset shift audit. In some ways, that gets to the very core of a human being, in terms of how generous versus selfish are they in their whole life?

Scott Gerber
Yep. There is a great quote and I’m going to muck it right now, of course, because I’m saying it off the top but, “To give selfishly is to give selflessly,” right? It’s the idea that habitual generosity is the cornerstone of what a connector strives to do – to always be of service, to always provide value.
But it shouldn’t be thought of as a tactic. This is a total overhaul of a framework of how you should live your life. And I think it’s important people understand that, that it is the marketing hacks, and the growth hacking, and these various different pedestals that social media and vanity metrics have created, that have put the wool over our eyes to think that this is the stuff that we should be caring about.
Let’s talk about power and money for just a minute here. If we’re going to go to the most successful elites in the world – those people get the game. They understand that relationships are currency. Social capital is the only currency that matters long-term. Why? Because somebody can reach out to one person one time in one phone call and do a billion-dollar deal. A thousand people can reach out to that one person and never get a call back. That’s the difference.
Everything we talk about here should be the beginnings of you internalizing, auditing, thinking, but none of these should be, “I’m going to do this exact thing five times a day, because if I do it five times a day, my ROI will be XYZ. And that’s how I should reverse-engineer my success.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So I want to dig into that a bit and talk about your whole life shifting. So, what would you recommend are some of the initial baby steps if someone has habituated selfishness, and is primarily thinking about their own wants and needs and desires from the first minute of waking up to the last minute of night, not just in conversation, but in…

Scott Gerber
In life.

Pete Mockaitis
In any number of things. That’s such a tall order, so how do you start chipping away at that, Scott?

Scott Gerber
It’s funny. First off, I’d say this is where guys like you and I have it made being family men, because we gave up selfishness if we’re good dads or husbands long ago. The second you change a diaper for the first time, life changes as you know it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
I saw a coupon for $5 off diapers today, and I was excited by this. It was like something has shifted.

Scott Gerber
My, my, how things change, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Scott Gerber
But again, for the every man and woman in any state of life and any level of profession – again, I start with what I said earlier – you’ve got to begin with the audit, and you can’t lie to yourself. Listen, if you’re a truly selfish individual, and you just can’t fundamentally break yourself out of that, I feel bad for you, because you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. And you can’t gamify this, because all you’re going to do is cheat yourself and cheat reality.
Number two – I would give yourself an additional audit to determine a couple of key things. The best connectors have three fundamental traits. The first one is self-awareness. They are okay to assess themselves and figure out their strengths and weaknesses. They are okay to understand and can fundamentally figure out what people think of them in an honest and non rosy-glass colored way. So that’s the first thing, self-awareness. How self-aware are you with? Would others say you’re self-aware? That’s one key thing.
The second trait is emotional intelligence. Are you empathetic? Do you actually care about other people? Can you allow yourself to care more about others, or feel for their plights, big or small, put yourself in their shoes, regardless of situation, regardless of level of severity, and regardless of your personal feelings towards whatever they deem their level of severity being?
And then finally, number three is the idea of curiosity. You have to generally be curious. You have to be someone who really doesn’t have to care about a subject matter to want to learn more about it, or feel like if you’re not an expert, you don’t care. Again, there’s going to be many people who can be very valuable to you and you to them along the way. But if you cut short because they want to talk about physics and you’re a liberal arts grad – well, you’re going to miss out on a lot of the context that could create mutual value for the long run if that relationship is to be. And so those are some of the key things you have to look out for yourself.
When you determine you want to be someone who is a connector, you also… And this is where I will say you have to be selfish in only one regard. There’s only one way you should be selfish as a connector, and that is your time. Because it is the one asset you cannot buy more of, and it’s fleeting every day. And so if someone is going to take your time, you want to make sure your investment is going to be valuable. Again, not valuable in an ROI way, but valuable even in the exchange you’re going to have, that it’s not a one-sided selling fest, that someone is really understanding the value of that time and being specific, or not just saying, “Oh, we should get together sometime,” and getting mad when you don’t because they don’t have an agenda of specificity.
Because the one thing I’ve learned in my life, and I say this in the book – there’s a saying that one of my mentors said to me early: “You cannot cheat real time. And relationships take real time.” And so for every amount of real time you spend in a real relationship, that’s less time you have for other relationships. So you are placing bets on the people you want to surround yourself with, that you feel are going to help you to make your life amazing, and you to help make their lives more amazing.
If you misplace that trust, or misplace that time, or misplace that relationship-building prowess, you could put yourself on the wrong path, or you could find yourself meaning nothing to no one instead of something to someone. And that’s really crucial, to be methodical about protecting your time. A couple of key productivity hacks that we found from some of the top connectors to give some color to what I mean by that. There are many people, I’m sure you being included in this, that get hit up all the time, “I’d love to take you for coffee.” I’m assuming that that has been an ask somebody has made of you, probably recently, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, yeah.

Scott Gerber
So, what a lot of the top connectors will do is they’ll take these people that ask them and say, “Look, I don’t have time right now, but I get people together once a month or once every couple of weeks that all want to meet me for coffee, and we all get together and have one big cup of coffee.” So here you are, taking one-on-one meetings that would take an hour, to make it ten-on-one meetings. And it’s a better experience; it’s curated because the person can say “Yes” or “No” to who’s invited, and you’ve just maximized your time, met everyone, and learned more than you probably would have in a one-on-one introduction.
Plus, on top of that, if you are the curator of that experience, you probably have a stronger relationship now with each of the original ten, because all of those ten received exponentially more value than you, had you been just one-on-one. It’s a more worldly perspective, less time, very clear, right? So that just gives an example of, it doesn’t mean you have to be less human or say “No” to everything necessarily, although “No” sometimes is the right answer. But it allows you to think about the blocks of time you have as maximizing efficiency and community-building investment. Because again, you want to go incredibly deep and meaningful, but you want to do it in a way where you can find the right time for the right people, and not lose that time.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, and you talk about the art of selectivity in the book. And so, I’d love to get your sense for what are some of the guidelines you’re using. in terms of making determinations like, “This is a person that I really think it would make sense to invest heavily in good time there.”

Scott Gerber
Yep. And first and foremost, I always want to tell people, when we talk about these things like the art of selectivity, this is not, said another way, the art of elitism snobbery. It’s not meant to be, “You only want to be with these elites, professionals, or individuals.” That’s not it at all. It’s the idea that you want to have a cross-section of people that share not only your business professional interest or industry, but your value system, the way that you spend your personal time.
Again, community is not just meant to be some goal-oriented KPI, like we‘ve been talking about. It’s how do you want to spend your time to create a meaningful life, personally and professionally? And so for example in the book we talked to Elliott Bisnow, who is the founder of Summit Series and the owner of Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, which is a telluride for the 21st-century concept. And he talks about this idea that he wants to not just be surrounded by entrepreneurs all the time, or specific kinds of entrepreneurs in his industry, but rather health-conscious, athletic people that are big on travel and worldly conversation and share his ethics and moral and value systems.
And so it’s about creating these almost criteria sets for what do you want to be the average of in the circle you’re in, and then really figuring out who that initial circle is, and again, taking the proper time. This is not a day-to-day exercise. This is a life-long exercise of creating that small intimate circle. Mind you, that small intimate circle might eventually be dozens of people, but the goal of these spheres is to feel incredibly intimate regardless of size, because the values, the moral systems, the cross-section of value that you’ve created is only bringing in other very similar, authentic, meaningful people that those in the sphere have brought into the fold. And that’s the key for success in any time you’re trying to be selective with those you’re building strong, meaningful relationships with.

Pete Mockaitis
And I would also would like your take on that – is there a potential risk of having an echo chamber or folks who all agree with you and thus not giving yourself the mental challenge of thinking and seeing as others do?

Scott Gerber
I think that it’s interesting. I believe that there’s a time and place for any kind of relationship to be segmented in different communities, different thinking. And so for example, I have a lot of friends who are political junkies. And I purposely surround myself with people that are on opposite ends of the spectrum in a big way, because I want to have these more thoughtful debates. I don’t want just some Facebook commentary style argument, “Oh, he sucks, he’s terrible. He’s great, he’s not”, but rather like, “Why?” Can somebody actually articulate the “Why”?
And so, surrounding yourself with people that you believe to be morally and values-driven, but not necessarily share your specific vision of the world – that’s the time and place for that kind of community, whereas in certain ways, when you’re talking, say, about business… I have a group connector friends who I don’t want them to be network-y type thinking people, because I wouldn’t want that in my circle, because to me that would go against every fiber in my body of my most core professional belief.
So there’s a time and place to figure out where is the place where you want to have fundamental agreement, and where you want to allow for contrarians or total disagreement, but know the value system is aligned with your overall view of a human. You know what I mean? There are certain people you might fundamentally disagree with, but you love and trust. You’re going to fundamentally disagree with them about politics or money or something like that, but it’s not because they’re crazy or whatever. It’s just they have a different set of principles, but that are rooted in wholesome values that you can link to.
I think it’s important not to be in that echo chamber, but that’s why I also think you should never allow yourself to just be in one community at any given time. I think the value of having multiple communities that collide and create value, where you can pick and choose different kinds of conversations or relationships or depth of relationships you want to have in different sort of groupings, allows you to be a more well-rounded human being.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So you’ve got close friends you like and trust who love Hillary and who love Trump, and you enjoy the enlightenment that could come about when you engage in such discussions.

Scott Gerber
It’s the idea of respecting people, and respecting the place by which their position comes, because it can be defended or discussed in a material and mature manner. And that is the bond, right? The bond is, you might want to harden your position by being able to defend against someone else’s, or you might want to be able to open your eyes to a different perspective. I think that right now in this country, if there was more community-building around communities of dissenters that were thoughtful dissenters, we’d probably not have such a red-blue or whatever the specific subject matter or issue is, be so black and white.
I think a connector’s job – and going back to the context conversations or ways in which they run their relationships – is to always play in the gray, because that’s where you can form relationships out of what would be assumed on the surface level as an adversary. Because the adversary is the people that don’t go beyond surface level and stop there, but the most meaningful relationships might be nine out of ten points connected but one point disconnected, but those nine out of ten allow you to listen and thoughtfully respond to the one you don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Thank you. I also want to make sure we could quickly touch upon your pro tips for introducing yourself well.

Scott Gerber
So the number one way – and I know this is going to sound sort of counterintuitive, because obviously you have to be able to say who you are, what you do, and so forth – but the number one way that I enjoy people finding out who I am and what I do is by other people telling them the results we’ve driven, or their perspective on what I do. Most times, when I go to say, an event or meet with a group, I very rarely will go to a large group setting without a very core group of my influential sphere. Again, not influential in the sense of they’re big-name people, but influential in my world – people that I deeply trust and care about, my anchors in life and business.
And more times than not, they will go ahead and actually introduce me in a group that I wouldn’t know, which immediately lends credibility. We talk about this in the book. It’s called the power of association. The people you know move trust through them to the person that you’re connected to, and infinitely create stickier glue and a more immediacy to a bond than if you were introducing yourself or asked to introduce yourself.
So that’s more times than not what I like to do, because it doesn’t come off as I’m marketing to you, it doesn’t come off as I’m trying to be ego-driven or pat myself on the back or shoulder. But rather that others feel compelled enough that you and I should be connected, and they’ve gone the extra step to give the bona fides in whatever way and lens they see fit, which also lends to conversation as a natural next step, as, “Oh, tell me more about that.” Instead of you talking about yourself, you’re being asked, and that starts the conversation. So that’s my number one way, I think, that you should always look at it. Don’t just try to introduce yourself. Look for others that can really play the heart card rather than the bona fide, CV, LinkedIn profile card.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, great. Thank you. Tell me, Scott, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and then hear about some of your favorite things.

Scott Gerber
I think what’s most important to me and why we wrote the book, at the end of the day, is we really do believe that relationships are the cornerstone and the fundamental purpose for your professional and personal lives, and so many people are squandering that opportunity every day. And frankly these are, in many cases, very smart people who if asked, “Do you want to be approached this way? Would you like to be talked to in this way as a networking relationship?”, they would say “No”.
Yet, they’re guilty of doing the same stuff. That’s the irony of today. This laziness, social media-esque response mechanism, or series of frameworks that we’ve been put into by the powers-that-be, has really taken a step back for human touch. And so, my message today is whether you buy the book or not, I hope you find value in it and the connectors that were thoughtful enough to share their time and tradecraft and secrets of what they do.
It’s just to take a step back and realize when you look around you, are you happy with the relationships you have? Do you feel you could have better, more meaningful ones? And for the people that you believe are your most trusted relationships, do you really know them at all, beyond what everyone else knows about them? If you can answer those questions in an honest way, I think you’ll surprise yourself more times than not.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, thank you. So now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Scott Gerber
I have a quote from my grandmother, who passed a number of years ago, but she used to say, “Don’t dream to live. Live to dream.” And it sounds funny. I didn’t really understand it at the time she told me, in middle school or high school, whatever it was. But the idea that you should live a life of wonder and excitement, and wake up every day to be thrilled about what’s possible, rather than what you have to do and be a cog in the machine, I think, says a lot. The other one I mentioned earlier which is, “Real relationships take real time, and you can’t cheat real time.” I think that if you really understand what that means, you’re going to be better for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Thank you. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or a bit of research?

Scott Gerber
I think that right now, while I’m not going to cite a specific study because there’s a number of them going on right now, I would encourage people to take a look at a lot of the studies around social media’s effect on the human body and the human psyche. I think that these kinds of studies are scary and startling.
Even the founders like Sean Parker talking about the dopamine effect with social media, and what that’s doing to people, especially for dads and moms out there, to talk about the effect of social media on their children, technology on their children. I think all this ties very deeply to what we’re talking about today around building relationships, because we’re letting technology be the deciding factor, be the driver, instead of us driving the technology. We’re letting technology amplify the wrong things instead of the humanity being amplified. And I think it’s time we understand what the effects of these various platforms are.
So I would encourage people to really do their homework on all of that, whether you’re a parent or not, looking at it personally or professionally. There’s a lot of really unique studies out there right now about the effect on the brain, social anxiety, depression, all kinds of things that are very important for you to understand.

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

Scott Gerber
Ooh, anything by Adam Grant is just… He’s just an amazing human being. Give and Take, Originals, Option B – these are all amazing books, and he’s just solid. And I hate to be on the bandwagon with millions of other fans, but I really do think that everything Tim Ferriss does is gold.

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

Scott Gerber
Okay, so I run my entire company off my iPhone. Even though we have nearly 100 people in our headcount, and everything else, I rarely go to the office. When I meet with people, it’s over coffee, or video chats and so forth. But it’s the idea that if you really think through how you use your phone every day, there are so many ways to cheat productivity time, or to develop instrumental systems that can scale your human brain, to allow you to do the things we’ve talked about today, like simple as writing notes in your contacts Notes section is what I do when I meet people.
Three to five bullets that was most compelling or very new information, so next time I meet them, I’ve got my cheat sheet of things that are valuable and important to them. It lets me continue the conversation and have key things to remember. Just little ways to go all in on your phone, but not let it control you but you control it, I think is something that I’m a big proponent of. Giving yourself the freedom to do what you will in your surroundings, your environment, and so forth, but use the tools you use every day smartly and effectively to do the things you love.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you flourish at work?

Scott Gerber
I am really big on letting my team actually make decisions, explain their decisions to me, and stand by them. I offer advice, not mandates. And so when big decisions are made, I rule by consensus. It’s not a full democracy like it isn’t in any business, but I don’t rule as a dictator, so to speak. My partner and I are very methodical about groupthink and letting smart people do smart jobs, but they have to be able to defend their position, and they have to be able to take criticism and defend the points that they put out there to the idea that if I came and attacked you point for point, you could stand your own. So I think the exercise in critical thinking on a regular basis is one that I believe has fundamentally helped us to improve company culture, the business as a whole, revenue, and the customer experience for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, thank you. And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to really connect, resonate, get Kindle book highlighted, retweeted, and heads nodding when you say it?

Scott Gerber
I think that the most important thing that sort of sums up this entire interview and what we’ve been talking about for the last hour is, “Social capital is the new currency.” It’s not Bitcoin or Ethereum, or all those things that are coming out now. It’s social capital. And it’s the idea that when you have the right walled-off access to people that are valuable and find value in your company and those that you’ve surrounded them with, it’s an invaluable community that cannot be replicated, and you can’t buy it.
And I think that more people need to invest in creating these sort of very tight-knit communities. And when I say that, I don’t mean necessarily a membership group or something like that. I mean literally mastermind group, or a group of people that enjoy each other’s company, go out for drinks once a month, whatever it is. But creating the value that enables you and those you surround yourself with to have direct and indirect access to an exponential number of more people, because the people in the circle all trust one another so implicitly, is literally, in my opinion, the most valuable currency you will ever have. No one will ever beat it, and it’ll be the reason you’re successful.

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

Scott Gerber
Yeah, for daily communication, you can ping my partner and I on Twitter. His is @ryanpaugh, and mine is @scottgerber. And you can definitely check out the book at SuperconnectorBook.com or pick it up wherever books are sold.

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

Scott Gerber
Don’t treat it like a job. As someone who has never worked for someone else since I went into the professional world. ‘ve always been an entrepreneur; I’ve never been a nine-to-fiver. But I’ve watched really impressive people meet me and really impressive people work for me that really put in the extra work on two key things.
One was allowing themselves to listen and be empathetic, to understand, take in, and adjust as a result of those two things. And the second is the idea that they were responsive and timely and understood the investment of time that my partner and I were making in them, and that every moment that they were given was to be valued. Especially as a family guy, sort of going back full circle to where we started – I want to watch my kids grow up and be there.
And if you can tell me in a business meeting something in five minutes versus 50, and the same outcome as a result, and I trust you as the steward of the information and action steps – go at it. Take the five minutes, not the 50; let me go watch my kids play baseball. So, understanding that putting the effort in, in community building and responsiveness and empathy, I think, are things that anyone from an entrepreneur to someone who works for others in a day-to-day job – I think that is the difference maker.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Scott, thank you so much for taking this time and sharing this goodness. I hope that you sell many, many copies of Superconnectors, and that it is empowering and enriching to folks in all the right ways.

Scott Gerber
Thanks so much for the time.

Feb 07
0

259: How the Best Teams Operate with Adrian Gostick

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Adrian Gostick says: "Customer experience will never exceed the employee experience."

Adrian Gostick talks about what the best teams today are doing differently.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The differing forces that motivate each generation
  2. How to encourage your leaders to initiate regular career discussions
  3. The best ways to disagree without causing offense

About Adrian 

Adrian Gostick is a global workplace expert and thought leader in the fields of corporate culture, teamwork, and engagement. He is founder of the training company The Culture Works and author of the #1 New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal bestsellers All In and The Carrot Principle. His books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold 1.5 million copies around the world.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Adrian Gostick Interview Transcript

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

Adrian Gostick
Well, thanks Pete. Thanks for your interest in our work.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I’m quite interested, and it seems like you are too, and you apply it in multiple contexts, when it comes to studying teams and great performance, as well as in the context of being a high school soccer coach. So, I’m curious what inspires you to volunteer this way and keep volunteering this way.

Adrian Gostick
Well, it’s something I’ve done for several years. I started when my son was the high school goalkeeper and I got involved, and it’s just great to see young people need that connection to team. It’s one thing we’ve noticed in our research too, is that especially Millennials, Gen Z coming up into the workplace, really sparked great teams. And unfortunately so many of us as managers, maybe we’re not as good at creating those great teams. So it’s kind of fun to try some of our philosophies out on the soccer pitch.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued. Any stories of sort of leadership, team management sparking goodness coming to life with the high schools?

Adrian Gostick
It’s funny – I think in life we learn more from our mistakes than we do anything positive that we do, unfortunately. And when I first started I was assisting the head coach, and I don’t think you realize the importance of these concepts of motivation. It was more about the Xs and the Os, and he was very good at that. But slowly over the years we’ve helped him understand that you’re going to get a lot more out of these young men when you begin to understand their drivers – what motivates each of them individually, and quit worrying so much about the Xs and Os and worry about each individual – what drives them, what motivates them. And now he’s got a team that for the first time ever was in the state finals last year. And he’s got a team of young men who walk through fire for him, but it didn’t come until he began worrying about the soft side of leading people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So then, I understand as I’m flipping through here, that is much of the good stuff inside your upcoming book The Best Team Wins. Tell us what’s sort of the main idea within this book, and why it is important here and now.

Adrian Gostick
Chester Elton – my co-author – and I, we do a lot of work with large organizations – American Express is one of our clients, California Pizza Kitchen. We’ve got some really fun clients that many people have heard of over the years. But what we try and do as we work with the CEOs and the leaders of these teams, is to realize sort of what their worries are. So, for example about five years ago we were hearing a lot on culture, and we were lucky enough to become one of the first to write a big book on culture and how you build a great culture. It was called All In, with Simon & Schuster.
And then over the last few years we’ve been hearing so much about teams. I know we’ve heard about teams for a long time, but things are changing, and there are challenges facing teams today – working cross-functionally, with Millennials coming into the workplace, with the increased speed of change – that a lot of the CEOs and senior leaders we were working were saying, “Really, teamwork has changed so much in the last few years, there’s really no guide to help me and help our organization understand how to navigate the waters of teamwork today.” And so, that really was the impetus to write The Best Team Wins, was how do we face the challenges of leading a team in 2018?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s go into it then. So you’ve actually laid out five disciplines of team leaders. Could you maybe orient us a little bit with a preview to start and hear what are those disciplines?

Adrian Gostick
Now again, we’ve got about 850,000 people in our database that we’re looking at, so we’ve got a plus or minus here at a fraction of a percentage that help us understand really what the best teams today are doing differently. Now, The Best Team Wins isn’t a Bible of everything that you ever need to do to build a team; there are still some really solid fundamentals out there but there’s been lots written on those.
So what this is about is what’s different about the best team leaders today, and as you mentioned, Pete, five disciplines emerged that we saw in the best teams, that they had the highest performance, the highest engagement levels. The first was that managers really did understand there were differences in the generations that they were managing, and they learned that they had to manage, say, Millennials different than Boomers, different than Gen X. So we talked about that, but it was very data-driven, and we’ll talk about that in a moment, I’m sure.
The second idea was that while we do worry about the generational differences, the best leaders are managing to the one, especially helping people drive their career development. That’s one of the biggest differentiators today, is helping me as an employee grow and learn and develop.
The third was that they’re much faster. Great team leaders really speed productivity – they get new people and teams up to speed a lot faster than their peers.
The fourth idea was that these great teams that we studied really were challenging everything. They had amazing debate within their organizations, and almost we call it “discord”, where they were really challenging each other and ideas.
And the final thing we found was that great teams had a focus on the customer that was laser. Now, there’s probably not a team in America or wherever you’re listening, who doesn’t believe that we’re customer-focused, but these teams truly were. Every decision, every debate revolved around what really would be the benefit to the customer. So, at a high-level those are the five disciplines we found in the research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yes, thank you for that preview there. And I would like to dig into each of these a touch. So, yeah, let’s talk first about these generational differences. And thank you for being data-driven – that’s what we love here. So, I’m a Millennial, I guess just barely, although most Millennials don’t like to be called Millennials. And that median listener – their age, according to my last survey… Maybe I need to get 850,000 data points, that’s awesome – is also in the Millennial age zone. So tell us – what are the “for real” differences amongst generations, versus sort of the “hype myth” differences between the generations?

Adrian Gostick
That’s a really good point, because a lot of people start tuning out once you start talking about entire generations. It’s a little like saying, “Everybody in Costa Rica does this” or, “Every left-hander is this way.” Of course, that’s just ridiculous. But what we can find in the data are there are some big changes happening in the workforce that we need to be aware of as leaders.
So for instance, autonomy has long been heralded as one of the biggest drivers of human behavior. Dan Pink wrote a book called Drive where he said autonomy was the most important factor driving engagement and motivation for people. Well, what we find is actually that’s true if you’re a Boomer, it’s true if you’re a Gen X, but it actually is not true for the vast majority of Millennials. Most Millennials coming into the workplace – 80% in our data – really want to be coached and managed, and part of a productive team.
They value teamwork a lot more than my generation – Gen X did. We much more valued the cowboy – being able to do things autonomously and independently. Well, this is a new generation. It really does value working in a team, they found that they’re more productive that way, better things are accomplished that way. Well, that’s a big overall finding that as leaders we should at least be aware of, and it may change how we manage. Another thing that came out of the data…

Pete Mockaitis
If I could jump on that in a little bit more detail, please. That’s intriguing. So yes, I too have heard autonomy is the thing we all want. And so then, maybe I just want to get clear on definitions a bit. So, I think of autonomy as sort of the ability to do your work the way you want to and with the time horizon more or less that you want to, in the location that you want to. But how are you defining and viewing autonomy in your investigations?

Adrian Gostick
That’s a great question. And one of the things we’re finding is that of course, nobody likes to be micro-managed, do they? What we really think about with autonomy as we study this, is that if I am driven by autonomy, I typically prefer to be my own boss and I like to have a degree of freedom … I typically prefer working alone more than working in a team. I’m giving you the definitions in our survey of people. I typically feel I get more done when I work more independently.
Now, as I mentioned though, almost nobody likes to be micro-managed. What we’re looking at with autonomy are people who like to work more independently. What we look at though and what we’re finding is indeed, out of the 23 human motivators we found autonomy ranks 4th highest for Boomers, it ranks 22nd out of 23 for Millennials.
So that’s a huge data shift. Now that’s something we need to look at that says whether it’s because of where I am in my career, or because of the generation that I grew up in, where teams were more important – something is happening here, where people prefer now to work more collaboratively. And so as a manager, whether I’m managing Millennials or anybody coming into the workforce, I’ve got to find ways to help people work together more effectively, if that’s making some sense.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. And so, I suppose there is a natural tension. I guess as I’m thinking about myself, it’s like I want my autonomy, but I also want to collaborate. But in a given hour of work, it’s somewhat binary, in the sense that, of course none of us like to be micro-managed or be in crazy, pointless, time-wasting meetings. But I think you’re right – it’s like you’re either doing your thing your way or you are having a back-and-forth and doing something in, I don’t know, kind of like a compromise, or a jointly agreed-upon way, as opposed to any way you care to roll.

Adrian Gostick
Exactly. And by the way, nobody of course is one-dimensional, just as you say. Actually autonomy is one of my strongest drivers. As a Gen Xer, that is really one of my strongest drivers. I love to work more independently, but other times… Yesterday I went down to work with our little 12-person team, and it was invigorating and it was wonderful. And today I’m working alone in my office. You’re right – we’re all a mixed bag, but again, we’re talking about trends right now and what we can do with them.
One of the other trends we found, which was fascinating, is that Millennial-age people, especially those in their 20s right now, are about three times more likely to be driven by external drivers like recognition than older workers. And yet, where do most organizations spend their time recognizing people? It’s people who’ve typically been there a little longer, who achieve big things for the organization. Where, who needs the recognition? People who are newer in the organization, those who may be a little bit more even insecure about their role. Recognition helps them understand really what they’re accomplishing and how valued they are to the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, recognition here – we’re talking about kind of public. Is that fair to say? In terms of, “Hey everyone, we’re presenting the Rockstars of the Year awards. So come up on stage and we’ll clap for you as we say something cool you did this year that was meaningful for us.”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. And really, when we look at recognition though – those are nice, but that’s once a year and maybe it’s once every five years. Those really don’t drive that individual performance. What we’re finding with recognition, especially with younger employees – that it’s it’s got to happen frequently, it’s got to be specific though. It can’t just be, “Boy, Pete, you sure do good work.” No, no. It’s, “Pete, I listened to your podcast last week. Insightful questions…” You can see already, I know what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m motivated, Adrian. You’ve got me motivated.

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. So what we’re finding is recognition has to be much more frequent, specific and timely than it’s ever been, as we sort of think about managing a new generation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So that’s a top tip there for the Millennials. Anything that you would say in terms of a top driver for the other generations?

Adrian Gostick
Well, one of the things we find, and again this kind of leads us into our next idea of, while we’re being sort of generic here, what we do find is there are certain things that happen as we age. One is that we become a lot more interested in ideas like variety in our work. The worst thing you can do if you’ve got somebody who’s in their 50s working for you, the worst thing typically you can do is make their job rote – just the same thing day after day. We become much more interested in variety as we age, much more interested in ideas like developing others, leaving a legacy, creativity becomes actually even more important as we age, to challenge ourselves.
What we also found is that there are some things that are really quite similar though, in our DNA, no matter what age we are. We all want to make an impact. Or I shouldn’t say “all”, but really the vast majority of us have “impact” as a top driver. Another is learning. And what was fascinating to us is that it didn’t matter if somebody was in their 20s or 70s – learning typically fell as a top driver for the vast majority of people. So a couple of really interesting findings – we’re more similar than we may think, and there are also some interesting little differences we found.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And so you were getting at, rather than going into broad groups of people, manage to the one, in terms of the particular drivers for an individual. And so, I’d love to get your take on, how do you elicit some of those drivers and then play to them effectively?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, that’s a great question because I may be sounding like I’m talking out of both sides of my face, because I’m saying in one way you’ve got to understand generations, and that does help us understand from a mass perspective who’s working for us. But really the best leaders that we’ve studied over the last three or four years as we’ve been writing this book, really do get to know their individuals too.
And in the book we have a lot of ideas about how you figure out the specific drivers of your people, but this all leads to an idea we call “job sculpting”, where really you’re going to sit down with each of your people, and many of the great organizations we’ve been studying, they do this as often as monthly with their people, and they have career development discussions every single month with their people: “Where are you going? Are you having the right training, the right opportunities, the right challenges to get you where you want to go in your career, even if you may leave us one day?”
What we’re finding is organizations that worry about their people’s careers are cutting turnover dramatically, and they’re increasing engagement levels. And this is something that’s well within the control of every manager. I might not be able to give you a huge raise at the end of the year, I certainly can’t impact probably your bonus structure too much, or your benefits, but what I can do is meet with you and talk about your career and how I can help you with that, as a manager.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the sculpting then is kind of like, “Okay, now that I know that you’re interested in analytics, I’m going to be on the lookout for some analyticky pieces of work that are coming up and try to get that flowing your way.” Is that what you mean there?

Adrian Gostick
Exactly, yeah. And what we do is we give people the structure to be able to talk about this, because in many cases they really don’t know what gives them that skip in their step every day. And so we give them a series of questions they can go through, and then they can begin having these conversations with their managers that they can sculpt their jobs and say if it is analytics that drives you…
Unfortunately sometimes we as leaders sort of peg people into, “Well, Pete – he’s the creative guy, so he always wants to be creative” or, “Susan – she’s the behind-the-scenes, detail person. I always give her those assignments.” Well, maybe Susan wants to work with some clients and challenge herself and push herself. So really, this is a two-way conversation, to be able to understand what drives our people, and also if there’s a chance, to be able to give them a few things that’ll motivate them. In many cases people will actually even work harder if you take the time to work with them in that way.

Pete Mockaitis
So then, I’d love to hear some of those excellent questions that help surface the stuff that people like and gets them going.

Adrian Gostick
Well, a few of the things we really challenge people to think about in this case, is, “What is it exactly that you’re doing on those days when the day really flies by? What are the activities that really you are undertaking?” And also, “What are the activities that frustrate your work, that on those days when you have to do them, you hit the Snooze button? What exactly is it about those activities that demotivate you?”
So we just start driving down. You’re using the Socratic method of saying, “Why?” “Why does that demotivate you? What is it about it that’s frustrating you?” So very simple questions that we’re pushing there. And what you do is you start near-term and then you move farther-term. So you start with the day-to-day – what’s motivating, what’s demotivating – and then you go bigger picture.
For example, “If you had three wishes for your career, what would they be?” Because then people typically are thinking a little further out – 5, 10 years. And then you can sort of talk about educational, skills, opportunities that’ll be needed, different things that’ll help you get to that point. And of course too, as a leader, you’re also helping temper expectations and say, “To get there, this is what you’re going to have to do” or, “You may not be ready to get there yet”, and just be able to have those honest conversations with people.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I think is so powerful about this is not only sort of the content that flows from it for job sculpting; it’s also the content that flows from it from an organizational perspective. It’s like, “Oh, we’ve got a process that’s just broken. You hate it because it really does not make any sense that we do this dumb thing.” Or, “Oh, in this certain area the decision-making roles are just wildly unclear. Well, no wonder that just sucks. So let’s see if we can clean that up.”
So I guess it helps them both in terms of the assignments they’re taking on, as well as cleaning up little messes all around, as well as just conveying that, “We care about you.” Because I don’t know, maybe you’ve got some data on this – how many organizations take the time to have these conversations? And I guess it can vary even leader by leader inside an organization, but if you had to give a rough guesstimate here, what proportion of leaders are having conversations like this on a regular basis, versus aren’t right now?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I don’t have the specific data; we just know what we’re showing is this is what the best leaders that we found were doing, those that had the highest engagement scores. But also, when we would go into an organization to study them, we would… For instance we went into Danaher, which is a 70,000-person technology company and we said, “Okay, give us your best manager.” And they would send us to XYZ person and we would interview that person.
So typically we’re getting the best of the best, and this is what we’re finding the best were doing. And they were having these sort of career discussions, these job sculpting discussions, as well as regular weekly updates with each of their people about what was happening in their jobs. So really, this is what the best of the best are doing. If I had to guess, probably 10% of managers, I would say, are probably really good at these types of things, but those 10% are blowing the doors off of performance.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess now I’m wondering if someone’s listening and you’re in an organization like, “Dang, I wish my boss did that, and we just don’t.” Do you have any pro tips on trying to do a little bit of steering the change or starting the shift within, if you don’t have sort of a big power title authority from a positional perspective?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, a couple of things you can do. The Best Team Wins really is a book for anybody who leads a team, but also anybody who aspires to or anybody who tries to influence others around them. And so there are lots of sort of hacks for all of us to help us become better at this. If you find yourself as a member of a team and maybe your manager isn’t as good at this as perhaps he or she should be, you can always hopefully set them up for success, to be able to give them a few of these ideas, to be able to say, for instance on this idea of job sculpting, “Hey, here’s what I read in this book. This is what some great leaders are doing.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Buy it!”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah, buy them a copy of the book. But that besides, “This is what some of the great leaders are doing. They’re having regular career discussions with their people. Doesn’t cost them anything. It’s a 15 to 30-minute conversation once a month and it helps them sculpt jobs, find out what’s frustrating them, helps them give direction. I’d love to do that with you. Is that something that you feel like you could commit to, just for a few months to see how it goes?” There are some simple things you can do to help your manager see the power in some of these very simple ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So, I want to hear maybe just a quick bit about speed productivity, because I want to go into some depth on healthy discord and challenging things. So, how does one get productivity flowing all the faster?

Adrian Gostick
Well, what we find is there are a couple of things here. One is that we have to help people understand this idea – it’s security, if you will – it’s overcoming the fear factor and understanding that, “Look, you now belong on this team. You may be a new employee, you may be brand new to our team, but here’s why you were invited, here’s why you are important, and here’s the role that you play.” Clarity is so huge in this process.
The second part – and I’m giving you very fast here – is context. It’s helping your new people understand not only where they fit in the team, but where the team fits into the entire organization. You think about it as you’re in the mall and there’s the red dot that says, “You are here.” Well, I know it sounds odd, but we are so poor in most organizations at helping people understand not only the big picture, but how the widget I’m making or the thing I’m selling or the customer I’m speaking with, really impacts the big picture, and giving me that context.
And the last one may sound really warm and fuzzy, but in great teams that speed productivity there’s a greater level of affiliation, which basically means friendships: “I feel like I’m accepted here, I’m valued as a human being.” We found one bank in our study – it was a call center – that simply had everybody go on break at the same time, versus the old system, where people would sporadically go when they could.
The entire team went on break for 15 minutes. It was a silly little thing, but they had to do a lot of work to send the phones elsewhere, but all of a sudden productivity soared, and people started looking out for each other. And why? Because they knew each other’s families, they started talking about things. All of a sudden they became a tighter team. So there’s lots of little things you can do to build these ideas of affiliation and context and security to help build a great team, and fast.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. And that notion of security, I think really does help enable folks who feel capable of engaging in some healthy discord and to do some challenges. And so, I think that you had a great turn of a phrase about “disagreeing without causing offense”. And boy, what a skill for our time and place right now, and I think that it’s huge. And so, I’m a believer and I’m so curious on your take on this. Any sort of data-driven insights, and particularly how do you get there, especially whether it’s sort of changing from within: “When people disagree with me, I feel offended.” I know you can’t change people exactly, but influencing others to adopt that same kind of a mindset, where they too can be challenged and not think, “Well, this person’s dead to me” or, “They’re an enemy of mine.”

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. It’s unfortunate, but how often do we… Probably most of us have worked at some place or other over the years where debate is just quashed, whether overtly or covertly. I had boss who stormed into my office once after I debated with him in one meeting and he told me, “You’ll never do that to me again.” Do you think anybody was giving their best ideas in an environment like that?
So really, what we found, and we do have quantitative data that says those environments that are more about the debate, are more innovative, etcetera… But this is more on the qualitative side, that when we went into these great organizations, we would ask them, “Okay, how do you create this discord without it turning into a … and it turning into, as you said, where feelings are hurt, etcetera?”
So typically they have some sort of ground rules – things like, “You challenge the position but never the person, you don’t make things personal.” And again, the ground rules come up and the leader of the debate may say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I think we’re crossing over the line there. You remember our rule is…” For instance, another one: “Seek to gather facts and don’t jump to conclusions.” Okay, so another rule we heard in another team. Another one was, “Remember, you’re in a competition to win. The best ideas win. You’re not here to ram home your points.”
And so, I could go on with the rules, but really that’s the “A-ha” from this, is that there are rules, and that there are some rules to make sure the debate is lively. All of us want to argue out things. You think of your last family event. Did you guys sit around and just make small talk or did you start debating politics and sports and all the things you’re passionate about? Of course, we do it in our personal lives. We want to debate in our work lives; we want to make things better, but there do have to be rules that help keep us positive and focused on the right things.

Pete Mockaitis
You said we could go on about the rules, and I really would. I’d love for you to go on about the rules. Could you share a couple more?

Adrian Gostick
Yeah. Another one is – and this is an interesting one – is that one other word we heard quite often was, “Look, after the team makes a decision collaboratively, we’re going to support it, even if it wasn’t our own idea.” Now that’s huge, because you may not agree with it after you leave. And it doesn’t mean we all have to be automatons and robots here walking around, but the point is if we are a team, we’re going to support the team.
And one of the things we heard, one great CEO that we interviewed for the book said typically 98% of the time he says, “My team as they’re debating, is able to come up with consensus.” He says, “I really don’t have to make a decision as a leader, because it’s so obvious by the time we get there.” And there are a couple of things he says you’ve got to do though. He says typically you may have somebody on the team who hasn’t spoken up, and you’ve got to make sure they’re really bought in, because they could leave and sort of undermine everything.
So he may say, “Cindy, you really haven’t said anything. I need to hear from you. What are you thinking? Do you feel like we’re on the right track or not?” And he says, “There are times where I do have to make a decision, I do have to say…” But he says you can still be very respectful about that as well. So for instance he may say, “Boy, this has been great debate on both sides of this issue. A reasonable person could go either way. I feel like we’ve got to make this decision and go this direction this time, but thank you so much for this excellent debate.”
Now, really simple, right? He says by doing that, next time people feel free to speak up, and when they leave the meeting they don’t feel like they’ve been quashed. They feel like their voice has been heard. So just some really simple little things we can do to create this environment, where we lead debate and we help steer it toward a great conclusion, where people are still respectful but the best ideas emerge.

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

Adrian Gostick
One of the other things I guess I would say with this is – and it’s always fun to hear – is that now and then after we put out a book… And I think this will be the same way – our book’s coming out February 13th. So typically I get some emails afterwards about different things and how people are using this in their work situations. But what’s been really fun is that people will send me an email and they’ll say, “I’ve now tried this at home and it actually does work.”
Some of these different ideas about debating healthily, or the ideas about understanding what drives each person, or figuring out what our collective challenges are, what our purpose is within our families or our relationships. So it’s fun to see this work at work, but it’s really quite heartening to see these also work in our homes lives too, in our personal lives. So there’s just one little thought.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good, thank you. Cool. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Adrian Gostick
One of the things Maya Angelou once said was that people don’t care or they won’t remember what you say or they won’t remember what they do, but they’ll always remember how you make them feel. And really, what our whole career has been about is helping leaders and managers and people who want to become leaders of others succeed.
And one of the things that really we have to remember as a leader is that we don’t know where people have been their other 16 hours they’re not with you during their day, but the 8 hours they’re with you can be the best hours of their day. But really it’s a sacred charge; we’ve got to realize these people in our care are literally in our care. And how do we motivate them, how do we engage them, how do we challenge them to do more than they ever thought possible? That’s our charge.

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

Adrian Gostick
Let’s see. Well, we do so many research studies ourselves. One of the bits of data from The Best Team Wins actually is – and this really shocked us, but we found it over and over again – was that how much time people typically spend today in working collaboratively. Deloitte has found that 80% of an average employee’s day is spent working collaboratively. Now, that is definitely a change from even just a few years ago. We’re moving at light speed toward a world where we no longer work alone. We work with others, and we really have to figure out how we work best with each other, and in many cases change our thinking about this.

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

Adrian Gostick
Let’s see. I just finished a terrific book called Beneath a Scarlet Sky, I believe it’s called. It’s about during the Second World War an Italian young man who helped Jews escape across the mountains, the Alps, during the Second World War. And it was one of the best reads that I’ve read in a long time.

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

Adrian Gostick
I travel a lot, so I’m always on the Weather Channel app, I’m always sort of surfing blogs. Really, it’d be hard to nail it down because I really do believe whether I’m reading The Wall Street Journal online or the Harvard Business Review blogs, that there are so many great ideas out there, and unfortunately so much of it can start sounding the same.
And what I really look for, and as a team, our little company is called The Culture Works – we’re firing things back and forth every day using Slack actually – one of the tools we use – and, “Hey, did you read this article?” Like yesterday there was an article from ESPN on the Patriots and sort of the dysfunction that’s going on right now via communication in their team.
And we started talking about what’s falling apart for a franchise that’s done so many amazing things for so many years. And we started talking about that idea – it’s communication, is Belichick having problem with generations, and this, that and the other. We just started bouncing ideas around; it was a really fascinating discussion. And so, I think that’s one of the things we have to do, is keep pushing ourselves and our teams to learn and to grow and to think about problems from different perspectives.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, something you do that helps you flourish at work?

Adrian Gostick
Well, one of the things, every day I’ll probably put in three or four hours of writing. Sometimes I’ll be out working with a client, but if I’m in my office probably half a day will be spent writing, but the other half will be spent reading. So, I think it’s so important, whether you’re reading a new business book or articles in journals or publications, or blogs, or listening to podcasts like yours – whatever we do; I think that one of the things I try to do is make sure I’m learning and growing and I’m not stagnating.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget or a piece that you tend to share with clients or audiences or readers that you find is often repeated back to you? An Adrian original that’s really resonating?

Adrian Gostick
One of the things we try to help people understand is, because everybody is so focused on the customer, and we let them know the customer experience will never exceed the employee experience, that you’ve got to start the service profit chain with your people, because if you care about them, they will care about what you want to care about. But they’ve got to know you care first.

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

Adrian Gostick
TheCultureWorks.com. We’ve also got a website at CarrotGuys.com, so we’d love to connect with you. Send us a note, pick up the new book The Best Team Wins, and we would love to hear if it’s working for you and your organization.

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

Adrian Gostick
I think probably the most important thing is really every day you’ve got to be focused on… If you are a leader of people or you’re a leader of projects or teams, the little things really do make a big difference. And what we’re saying from all of this – I’ve thrown out lots of ideas and talked about a lot of stuff today – really, try one thing at a time, and don’t try to eat the elephant.
Is there one thing you can add tomorrow to your management style, your leadership style, the way that you are part of the team or operating the team, that may make you more effective, that may make you more valuable to your people and to those around you? Don’t try to do everything. In the back of our book we’ve got 101 ideas for real team leaders. Grab one of those and see if it makes your team better. That’s what I would recommend, is don’t try to do everything. Just try one thing and see if it works.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. Well, Adrian, thank you so much for taking this time and sharing these perspectives. I think this is so powerful and has the opportunity to be transformational in many ways for many work places. So, I wish you tons of luck with this book and all the things you’re up to!

Adrian Gostick
Hey, thanks, Pete, and thanks so much for your great questions. Appreciate it.

Jan 31
0

256: Science-based Solutions for Delivering Tough Truth at Work with Mark Murphy

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Mark Murphy says: "The real goal of a difficult conversation... is to create some change, to come to some resolution."

Author & trainer Mark Murphy explores the intersections of diplomacy, truthfulness, and difficult conversations at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Top reasons why people don’t tell the truth at work
  2. Common phrases that create defensiveness
  3. Why having a difficult conversation is better than just fixing the problem yourself

About Mark 

Mark Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author, weekly contributor to Forbes, ranked as a Top 30 Leadership Guru and the Founder of Leadership IQ. He’s trained leaders at the United Nations, Harvard Business School, the Clinton Foundation, Microsoft, MasterCard, SHRM, and hundreds more organizations. He has written several award-winning books on leadership and been featured in many premiere media outlets.

 

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Mark Murphy Interview Transcript

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

Mark Murphy
Oh, Pete, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, I am intrigued by so much of what you have to say here, so I think this will be a great one. And I wanted to start, though, I learned a bit about you that you once addressed the United Nations. What’s that story?

Mark Murphy
Well, yeah, that was a pretty cool experience. So, for several years, I was a faculty at the UN. They essentially developed an academy to develop leaders within the UN, and so their focus is on really teaching all the people that are working in diplomacy how to, (a) lead more effectively, but, (b) how to communicate, how to be diplomatic, how to deal with difficult conversations, tough situations. And it was part of a program that they have put together to really develop the leaders within the United Nations.

And so, it’s a pretty exceptional program they had going, and they would bring in experts, like myself, to come in and talk about particular aspects. So, I talked to them about different kinds of tough conversations and why people resist tough messages. And you can imagine, given the kinds of situations we face across the globe, that, yeah, the United Nations has a little bit of experience in dealing with tough conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s awesome. Yeah. Well, I was a loyal Model United Nations Secretary General when I was in college so I keep a little bit of an eye as to what’s going on with the real one. And so, I guess, now I’m thinking, if you are teaching diplomats how to be more diplomatic, well, you must be quite a master diplomacy yourself.

Mark Murphy
Well, you know one of the things I have discovered that it’s not always perfect, right?  We can go into conversations with the best of intentions, and that’s part of handling tough conversations and difficult situations is, (a) knowing what to do but then, (b) making sure that you have some handy reminders in place that you can pull on it any moment, because the reality is that most difficult conversations don’t take place on your schedule.

Most of the time, whey they happen, you get blindsided and that’s it’s so important, no matter how sophisticated your methods are, to have something that you can fall back on quickly. And that’s really one of the essential lessons, is distill it down, get something you can fall back on because that difficult conversation is not going to come most of the time when you’re fresh and you’ve just had a nice cup of coffee. It’s usually going to come at the end of a long day when you’re wiped out and this is the last conversation you want to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Cool. Well, I’m excited to dig into some of these. And it’s so funny that we talk about diplomacy and difficult conversations, I have this weirdest temptation just to be super rude to you to see how you’ll respond, but I’m going to reel it in because that’s not how I am. It’s just a kind of a silly cartoon-like fantasy of mine which I’m going to put it aside for now. You jerk. Okay, that’s it. That’s it.

Okay. So, then, now you lay out some of these things to fall back on in your book Truth at Work. So, tell us, what’s that about? And kind of what’s the alternative? Are we all just lying at work?

Mark Murphy
So, one of the things that I found in doing research for this and some of my own studies is that it’s not so much that we lie in that we walk in every day and are telling blatant falsehoods, but rather we’re avoiding telling the truth. When I ask leaders or employees, “Do you avoid having difficult conversations with people?” And somewhere between eight out of ten, or nine out of ten, depending on who you ask, of people, say, “Yeah, I avoid telling my boss tough things. I avoid telling my colleagues tough things. I avoid telling my employees because I’m just afraid of how they’re going to react.”

And that’s the real reason we avoid difficult conversations. It’s not so much that we are afraid of letting the words come out of our mouths, rather we’re afraid what’s going to happen when this person hears what it is we have to say. And that’s the coming up with techniques for mitigating some of those bad reactions and calming people down, and creating conversations rather than confrontations is ultimately what we’re after in this.

And that’s really what the book is about, how to tone down some of those negative reactions and deliver messages that would, otherwise, be tough to hear in a way that the recipient will actually engage with you and talk to you about this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so I want to dig into these tactics and your great acronyms and such to those ends. But, first, I’m thinking, when it comes to that fear, we’re concerned about how the other person is going to react and what will become of it, I’d love if we could sort of take a bull’s eye aim at that one right up front. And, say, when it comes to the fear what are some perspectives that folks should bear in mind in terms of managing that right before we even begin to say a word?

Mark Murphy
So, there’s a number of things. So, one of the things we discovered is that there’s these things we call truth killers, and they’re really the reasons why people resist the truth. And there are four big ones that we really identified in this and there’s a thousand reasons why people won’t listen to tough messages. But if you kind of clump them all together – the big four. Number one, there’s what I call confident unawareness. Sometimes it’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

And what this means is, essentially, people think they’re right, they think they know what they’re doing, they think they know what they’re talking about, but in reality they’re absolutely clueless. So, I think about it like this, if I grew up on an island with no other humans around me, I might think that I’m a fast runner. I might run across the beach on this little deserted desert island and think, “Wow, I’m really fast,” because I’ve never seen another fast runner.

But that’s not my life, and I’m married to a woman who is a significantly better runner than me, I’m incredibly slow. And so, I watch her run and now I don’t have confident unawareness. I watch her run, and I say, “Oh, yeah, that’s what fast looks like. Oh, I’m really slow.” But there are lots of people walking around the planet who think that they’re really fast, or think that they’re really smart, or think that they have high emotional intelligence.

And if you’ve ever seen somebody that talks with great confidence that they know exactly what they’re doing, and in reality they’re an idiot, that would be confident unawareness. And that’s a tough one to overcome. And sometimes when you give somebody feedback, like, “Listen, you’re not doing such a great job with our customers over there. You’re not doing such a great job advancing your career.” They’re like, “I’m awesome. I’m fantastic.” “Well, okay, we’ve got to…” That’s a tough one to overcome.

Another reason that people resist hearing tough messages is what we call psychological resistance. And this one of the things that happens when you have a tough conversation with somebody whether it’s a friend, a spouse, a colleague, a boss, whoever. Oftentimes you’re telling them something that is at odds with their self-image, with how they view themselves.

If you came to me, Pete, and said, “You know, Mark, I think you’re kind of dumb and I think you’re not a very nice person,” well, that’s at odds with my self-image and so I’m likely to turn around and attack you, or attack your message, “Well, Pete doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Pete, how does he know that? He didn’t hear that last conversation I had before I hopped on the phone with him. What does he know? He’s a jerk. I’ll bet you he’s real nasty in his life.”

And it’s this, whenever somebody tells us something that is at odds with our self-image, it is just by human nature it’s going to engender what’s either psychological resistance or cognitive dissonance. It causes us to attack the message and the messenger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s powerful. And so, you zeroed in on it there. It’s like, what is it that’s likely to trip a wire or an explosion versus not, and I think that’s interesting when it comes to the running. It’s like I think folks could criticize any number of things about me, like, “Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I don’t know anything about that. Yeah, you’re true, true, true, true, true.” And then there are a few things, it’s like, “Hold up right there, sir.” And so, it’ll spark a different reaction.

So, I loved it when you talked about, you have zeroed in, in fact, on seven key phrases that are sort of actual scripts or verbiage that create defensiveness within people. So, could you lay those out for us in terms of what are some of those phrases that we should not say? And what do we say instead of those?

Mark Murphy
So, one of the things that was interesting is that when we talk about having difficult conversations is that oftentimes having a tough conversation is as much about listening as it is talking. And a lot of conversations go off the rails before we ever say anything, we issue a command, a directive or anything like that. It begins with how we listen or rather don’t listen.

So, a friend of ours comes up and says, “Oh, I’m having such a tough time at work. My boss is such a jerk and I think there might be layoffs at the company.” And when they say that, what we’re trying to do, if we do it correctly in that moment, is build some empathy. Take their perspective so that we can give them some guidance, we can just listen, we can be empathic, we can do whatever we need to do.

But there’s seven things that humans generally say to each other that basically tell this other person, “No, I don’t really want to help you out here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Perfect.

Mark Murphy
So, things like, “Well, you know, listen, griping about it is not going to make it any better.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Mark Murphy
Or, “You know, you just need to suck it up,” or one of my favorites, “Well, life is unfair. You know, sometimes crap happens. It’s just bad stuff,” or one that we’ve been seeing a lot more lately is, “Well, you know what, maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe this is all for the best. There’s a reason for everything and you don’t worry about it. It’s just that all those concerns, they’re not important. This is all going to work out just great.”

Then there are the classics, “Oh, don’t worry, you’ll get over it,” or, “Well, you think you’ve got problems. Let me stop listening to you and tell you about what’s going on in my life because mine is a lot worse than yours is,” and it becomes a competition of who’s got it worse. And then, of course, there’s the classic, “Well, yeah, but.”

And it’s funny because the word “but” gets used constantly but – there it is – it’s an absolute conversation killer when it’s used in this kind of a scenario, in a difficult situation where somebody is opening up, they either want a sounding board, they want somebody to listen to them, maybe, down the road, want somebody to give them some guidance.

But these are all phrases – and you can come up with a hundred variations on these – that people say that just tell, whoever you’re talking to, “I don’t want to hear any more. What you said is stupid. I’m not really paying attention to you and, you know what, I don’t want to listen to you. I want to talk. I just want to tell you stuff.” And that’s a quick way to end any conversation, let alone a difficult one.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I like that. Okay. So, quit griping, suck it up, life is not fair, stuff happens, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise, don’t worry, you’ll get over it, you think you got problems, well, yeah, but. And so that is the theme, it’s like any of these is just sort of like dismissive, like, “Okay. Well, yeah, no need to really hear any more of what you have to say. We’re moving on.” And it sort of conveys, “What you’ve said is not really consequential or does not really matter to me. I don’t take it all that seriously or it doesn’t have much weight or importance to me.”

So, I could see that theme coming clear. And it’s funny, I’m thinking about my wife right now. I’ve said a couple of times what I thought was reassuring, that’s really what my intention was in my heart, it’s like, “Oh, honey, we’re going to make it through this just fine.” And so, she interpreted it in that kind of a way which is, “I don’t care to talk more about this. I am sort of not proactively encouraging you to tell me more about what you think and feel with regard to this scenario in so far as I’m trying to kind of move on.”

And I wasn’t trying to move on, I’m in big belief that we were going to get through it just fine, and I thought a show of confidence and support would be the thing, but it wasn’t the thing in that moment.

Mark Murphy
It happens a lot. And there are kind of two things I think go on with this a lot whether it’s at home or at work, is that, one, we’re taught to be solution-oriented, so, “Just solve it. I don’t want problem-bringers around me. I want problem-solvers. Just solve it. Just get right to it.” And, too often, what happens is, in trying to skip to the solving stage, we basically kill off the empathy stage which is a problem.

The other thing that happens, and this is a fairly recent phenomenon, is that you think about social media, and what social media is training us to do; social media is not encouraging us to respond with additional questions, it does not encourage us to respond with empathy. It basically says, whenever somebody shares an issue, what does Facebook want? What does Twitter want? They want reactions. They want you to jump in.

And if somebody says they give a little soliloquy, they want you to match that with a soliloquy, and they want it emotional, intense, and everything else. They don’t want dialogue because that’s calming and that takes longer. What they want is quick reactions because that’s what gets eyeballs. And it’s interesting that social media has essentially trained us to respond the exact wrong way to difficult conversations.

And the next time one of your friends post something a little sketchy on Facebook, and you’re tempted to jump in with what I would call reciprocated diatribe, that is one person makes a speech and you make a speech back. Instead, try just asking a question, “Well, tell me more about that. I’m interested as to how you came to that conclusion. Tell me what data backs that up. I’m just looking. Or are there any facts that underlie your assertion here?” Something that engages them in more conversation rather than shutting down the debate instantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Reciprocated diatribe is a great turn of a phrase. Is this a Mark Murphy original?

Mark Murphy
It’s one that I came up with and then as I was doing research, I discovered that it had actually been coined about 30 years ago, and so I actually can’t take ownership. Yeah, there were some sociologists actually talking about it about 30 years ago, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those sociologists had no idea the amount of reciprocated diatribe that was to be unleashed in the decades to come.

Mark Murphy
Oh, yeah, they had no idea what was headed our way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so now, I’m thinking a little bit now and talk about don’t do reciprocated diatribe, and you have a couple other kind of tools or techniques. One is called de-layering a conversation into multiple parts. Can you walk us through what’s that about, what’s the value of doing so, and how is it done?

Mark Murphy
So, this I think is actually probably the most important part of having difficult conversations. So, if you think about it, most conversations have really four components to them, there are four layers to them. There are facts, that’s sort of the initial objective reality; somebody said something or somebody did something. You could videotape it, you could audiotape it, that’s a fact, it’s verifiable.

But that’s not what gets us into trouble. What gets us into trouble is that based on that fact we, then, make an interpretation. The human brain is very much an interpretation engine. We do not look outside our window, and say, “My, isn’t that interesting? Today the weather is 39 degrees and 60% cloudy.” No, we look outside the window and say, “Ugh, I’m so sick of it being gray. Oh, my gosh, it’s so cold outside.”

And we’re making a judgment about it. We’re interpreting it. The fact is it’s 39 degrees Fahrenheit. Our interpretation though is, “That’s cold,” or, “That’s hot,” or, “That’s better than I thought,” or, “That’s worse than I thought.” Based on that interpretation we then have an emotional reaction, “I’m happy to go outside,” “I’m disappointed,” “I’m feeling depressed now because I haven’t seen the sun in a few days.” And then based on that emotional reaction we have this desired end. We want something to happen, “I want to move to Hawaii. That’ll be so much better.”

And so, I think of this as this four-part model. I call it the FIRE model; it’s facts, interpretations, reactions, and ends. Now, here’s the thing, when we’re having a difficult conversation, it is the first step, before we do anything else, the first thing we want to do is strip away anything that is not a fact. So, let’s say, for example, that one of my colleagues, I asked them to work on part of a report, and they bring me the report, and I noticed there’s a couple of typos and a mis-formatted chart.

And so, if I’m dealing just with the facts, I might look at this and say, “Hmm, isn’t that interesting? There’s three typos on the first page, and there’s a chart that’s incorrectly formatted.” Now, my natural human reaction is to say, is to interpret that, and say, “You know what, it’s like they didn’t listen to anything I asked them to do.” Now, my emotional reaction is, “You know, that’s just so irritating. Like, I can’t trust you.”

And now my desired end is, “You know what, I’m not going to ask you to do anything in the future. I’m just going to avoid you entirely. I’m going to ask Bob or Sally instead because you clearly can’t do this correctly.” So, that’s my normal kind of human reaction. So, what I want to do is, as soon as I feel myself starting to head down that path, what I like to do is literally write a little “T” on a piece of paper. Just make myself a little grid, and basically four boxes, right? So, put an “F” in one, an “I” and an “R” and an “E”, and I write down everything I want to say.

What I want to say is, “There’s two typos in the memo,” or, “Three typos in this thing and the chart is not formatted.” Now, my interpretation is that, “You didn’t listen to anything I asked you to do.” My emotional reaction is, “I’m irritated and angry.” And my desired end is, “I don’t want to give you any more work to do.”

What I’m going to do is, after I write these all down and put everything into its respective little box, I then want to draw a big “X” through the “I”, the “R”, and the “E” because essentially, if I go into a conversation and I start out with, “You know, Pete, I just have to say I’m pretty disappointed in the work I got back from you because it’s like you didn’t listen to anything I said. And when you don’t pay attention to my request, it makes me feel like you’re disrespecting me, and that makes me feel like I don’t want to work with you anymore.”

That’s the worst conversation we can have because two things have happened.

Pete Mockaitis
I was hoping that was the bad example because, I don’t know, he’s using a lot of “I” statements and emotions, so I felt it was bad because it feels very bad to me. Okay. Good. We’re on the same page.

Mark Murphy
Yeah, exactly. And two things, two big things happened. One is we are now going to have a conversation about hurt feelings and judgments, and judgments that could easily be wrong, and so we’re completely into this ugly emotional hard-to-manage territory. But the other thing that happens is that we’re no longer talking about the typos. I mean, honestly, all we want to get fixed here is we just want a memo without typos and a good-looking chart. That’s it. There’s nothing else we really need to discuss at the moment.

And that’s the very first thing that I encourage people to think about when they’re going into a difficult conversation, is before you open your mouth, strip out all of this stuff that is going to cause you problems in this conversation. And that stuff is the interpretations, reactions, and ends. You want to talk about the facts; those are safe. We can problem-solve like grownup adults and without ever having a raised voice if we talk about the facts.

But the whole “I” statement and “making me feel like this,” oh, there’s two bad “F” words in tough conversations. One is the obvious one, but the other bad “F” word is feel. If you’re saying the word “feel” in a difficult conversation, we’ve probably gotten off track because now we’re not talking about stuff that we can easily fix. Now we’re into a deep emotional ripping off some scabs, and that’s just not going to help us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And so, now I’m thinking a little bit about, okay, the fact, interpretation, reaction, and ends, I just want to make sure I get this dead on in terms of distinctions amongst them. So, fact is the thing that happened, we could all agree, we can see this; interpretation is the meaning I affix to it, like, “You are lazy”; and then reaction is my emotion about it, like, “I am enraged at this person who’s ignoring me,”; and then ends is the desired outcome or decisions, like, “Therefore, I plan to no longer assign any important work to him.”

Mark Murphy
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, I got that clear. And so, then, all right, noted. So, if that’s the wrong way to go in terms of just laying it out there, in terms of your feelings and what you think all of this means, what is the model pathway to engage in that conversation well?

Mark Murphy
So, once we’ve stripped away all the other stuff and we’re left with the facts, so now I want to go talk to you about these three typos, let’s say. So, I have essentially two approaches. If, let’s say we worked together for 20 years and we have a good relationship, I could walk up to you and go, “Hey, Pete, two typos.” And then you’d go, “Okay. Oh, dang it, all right. All right, man. I missed those but let me go fix those.” And that’s, honestly, all we need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Facts alone. That does it.

Mark Murphy
Exactly. It’s there, pretty easy to take. Now, that’s not always the case, right? That’s not always the case, you’re having this conversation with a buddy, and you can just go up and say the facts and call it a day. So, when we need to do a little bit more, we created what’s called, what we call the idea script. And it’s essentially five parts that it takes about 12 seconds to do and it’s essentially a preamble to having a tough conversation.

And it goes like this. Step one, just invite them to partner, so basically that means just say, “Hey, Pete, would you be willing to have a conversation with me about that memo you wrote the other day?” That’s step one.

Pete Mockaitis
“No, Mark. You’re not my real dad.” I don’t know. How can you say no? Okay.

Mark Murphy
Exactly. That’s the thing, you know, people will say, “Well, what happens if somebody says no?” If, in once in a blue moon, somebody will, when they say no you just say, “Well, do you mind if I ask why?” And now we’re going to get to the heart of why they don’t want to talk to us but most of the time people will go, “Okay, fine.”

And then, step two, I’m just going to disarm myself, I’m just going to throw the guns down, raise my hands and say, “Listen, I just want to review this situation, make sure I’m on the same page as you.” Step three, I’m going to say, “And if we have different perspectives, well, we can talk about those and figure out a plan for moving forward.” Step four, I’m going to say, “Does that sound okay?” And then, step five, “Do you want to talk now or do you want to talk this afternoon?”

So, in essence, what I’m doing is a couple of things. Number one, I’m coming to them in a gentler way. I’m opening the door to talk about whatever these facts are, but what I’m communicating to this person is that I want an honest-to-goodness conversation. And, here’s the thing, most conversations have a mix of statements and questions.

And so, just in this little quick script, “Would you be willing to have a conversation with me about that memo you wrote yesterday? I’d just like to review the situation, make sure I’m on the same page as you. And, listen, if we have different perspectives, we can talk about those and figure out a plan for moving forward. Does that sound okay?”

Essentially, I’ve got two questions, two statements, so I got a good 50-50 mix, and in doing that, what I’m communicating to them, is, “This is not a me talking to you like you’re a child. I’m not coming to yell at you. I’m not looking for a fight because they only way we’re ultimately going to solve this is if we come to this as equals and hash this out, and both get to some level of agreement about how we’re going to move forward and fix this issue.”

Because if all I do is say to you, “You know, Pete, the memo stunk. Fix it.” Well, you may go fix it but our relationship, even if it’s subtle, has just taken a little bit of a hit because, now, you’re buy-in isn’t all that high. You’re walking away at some level thinking, “Ah, boy, he’s kind of a jerk. He could’ve said that nicer, and disrespected me a little bit. I have taken away some of your agency.”

But if, instead, I come to you, one adult to another, and I say, “Hey, would you be willing to talk with me about this?” Well, now, you’re going to have to ante up and actually participate in this. And that’s what I’m after.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I like it. And so, then, thinking through the framework again, I was following with, okay, we invite, that’s the “I”; we discern, or disarm the self, “D”; and the last one, I guess, is schedule, “S.” But the “E” and the “A” what are the words you’re using for those?

Mark Murphy
So, it’s invite them to partner, eliminate blame is the “E” and is, “I just want to review,” and then affirming their choices. So, that’s basically the, “Does that sound okay to you?” And, again, some of this is incredibly subtle in that I want them, because even if they begrudgingly say, “Yeah, okay,” I’ve at least gotten them to say, “Yeah, okay.”

I’ve gotten them at some level to agree to participate in this with me. And, one of the models I think about it is if you have a, let’s take a football example, if you have a superstar coach and a superstar quarterback. If the quarterback makes a bad throw, throws an intersection, comes over to the sideline, the coach and the quarterback, the coach does not come over to the superstar quarterback and say, “Hey, that was a really stupid throw,” because the quarterback is going to go, “Yeah, I know. I saw it.” “Well, no, I mean, I need to make sure you know that was a stupid throw.” “No, I get it. That was a stupid throw.”

Instead, what they do is, it may be a little terse, but they’re going into a conversation of the form, “All right, how do we fix this? How do we not do that again? What needs to change?” And they’re actually having a dialogue because the thing that they’ve each realized is they can’t solve the problem without the other person. The coach cannot win the game without the quarterback, and the quarterback cannot win the game without the coach.

And, in this case, if we apply this to work case, or a relationship with our spouses, I can’t fix this issue if, let’s say, you know, one of our kids is doing something, I can’t do this without my wife. We have to, even if we have different perspectives on this at first, it’s going to take both of us to figure out what to do next. If I have a problem with that memo you wrote, I can’t fix the memo without you.

And one of the big kind of a-ha moments about difficult conversations is that it’s not something you can fix by yelling at people. These are not issues where one person can fix it. It takes both parties to actually have a dialogue come together and hash it out to come up with a workable solution. Otherwise, I’m just yelling at you, and that’s not going to get us anywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I want to address, if any listener is challenging that in his or her own mind, like, “Well, I could just fix their mistake for them, and just do it myself.” What’s your reply to that?

Mark Murphy
You can. And the problem is you haven’t actually resolved the issue. You’ve just taken their issue over and put it on yourself. And, listen, if you do that, ultimately what’s going to end up happening is you’re going to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders, and that’s problem one. Problem two is that the people around you aren’t growing and developing.

So, imagine if every time your kid has an issue, you jump in and solve it for them. Okay, well, that may get them through this week’s problem. But what happens – not to get morbid here – when you’re dead? Now, all of a sudden, we have a kid who is ill-equipped to live on their own, to go out and survive the world.

We’ve taught them nothing because every time this happens, even if it’s an employee, if every time one of my employees has an issue, say, and I jump in and I do it for them, I’ve pretty much guaranteed that they will never grow and develop beyond where they’re at. And whether it’s my role as a parent, or my role as a leader, or just in my role as a friend, I haven’t helped this person. And so, it’s not until they own 50% of this issue, and partner with me on it, it’s not until they do that have I actually given them some real tools to do better out in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Appreciated. That makes sense. You talked a lot about how to say things but you said a huge part of this game is the listening so I want to make sure we give a little bit of airtime to that. Tell us about your take on structured listening.

Mark Murphy
So, the first part of, of course, structured listening is basically not to say all those things we talked about earlier, the “suck it up” “life is unfair.” That’s the what-not-to-do. The what-to-do, structured listening, think of it as a step beyond what we were all taught years ago as active listening. And active listening sort of became a bit of a cliché where you nod your head and go, “Mm-hmm,” and, “Oh,” “Yes,” “Oh, wow,” “Mm-hmm, interesting.” You know, we grunt a little bit and we furrow our brow, and that’s supposed to mean we’re there.

And what we found is that that’s just insufficient. So, structured listening really involves, e-listening, so encouraging this person to talk so saying something to them like, “Well, I’d really like to understand your perspective here. Can we just review this and I’d like to learn more so I can get on the same page as you?”

And so, when I talk about Facebook, when one of your friends says something a little bit provocative, going back to them and say, “Well, I’d like to understand your perspective a bit more. I’m not sure I totally get it. Would you share a little bit more about them?” Get them to reveal where their head is at, that’s step one of listening.

Step two of listening is to actually just listen. Now, one of the things that we have found is when people sit there and they furrow their brow, that’s usually insufficient to make them truly present. And while it is a dying art, honest to goodness, especially, and it sounds weird. I know this sounds hokey, but when you’re having a tough conversation, even with your spouse, saying something to them, like, “Listen, do you mind if I just jot some notes down? Because I want to make sure I actually get everything you’re saying.”

And what’s interesting about this is not only does jotting some notes down, and again I know it sounds weird if you’re like talking to your wife about X, Y, Z, “Like, do you mind if I take some notes?” It sounds weird. But it puts you in the moment, because when you take notes it forces you to pay more attention than just sitting there does.

The second thing that happens, though, is, even though it’s weird, it communicates to the other person, “I, honest to goodness, want to understand your perspective here because I’m paying attention. I’m paying so much attention that I actually want to write this stuff down. That’s how important what you have to say to me is.”

And then the third step is to confirm. And confirming means we want to spit back to them what they said. Now, this is a little bit different than the old paraphrasing that we used to be taught, “So, what you’re really saying is…” No, no, I don’t want to do that. Because if I do that I run the risk that I’ve completely miss the point.

So, I want to go back to my little FIRE model, and what I want to say to them is, “Okay, I just want to make sure I got this. The facts as you saw them are this. You, then, interpreted that to mean blah, blah, blah. Based on that you had the following emotional reaction, and because of that you now want this outcome, this desired end. Did I get that right?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so good. It’s like even as you’re saying this, I imagine if someone says something just like outrageous, and you like play it back for them, they may very well say, “You know, I’m sorry, Mark. Never mind, it’s fine.”

Mark Murphy
And, honestly, Pete, that is a huge part of it, and that’s where structure comes from. Because when you spit this back to somebody, and you force them to listen, so many people do not listen to the words that come out of their mouth. When you spit it back to them, and you’re not passing any judgment, you’re just restating it with a little bit of structure, half the time they look and they go, “Ugh, that doesn’t sound good. That’s, yeah, no. As you say, I’m sorry. No, let me retract. Just forget I said anything.”

And, it’s funny, so much of these difficult conversations are about holding a mirror up to the person who sparked this in the first place. Now, if we have a legit disagreement maybe about the typos, we disagree on phrasing, whatever, okay, well, let’s just, like adults, come together and hash that out. But if something does something where it’s nasty or it was emotional, and in the heat of anger they said something bad, when we hold up the mirror we’re essentially saying, “This is what you just said. Is this what you want to go with?”

And quite oftentimes when they look at it, they go, “Ah, no. Nope, I would rather not have that on the record because I can see that that was just bad.” And just the repeating back solves half the issues with this.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Now, Mark, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mark Murphy
The one other thing that I would just share in the context of difficult conversations is whenever you’re going into it, it is always a good idea to pause for a second and ask yourself one simple question, “What do I really want to accomplish with this?” And I tell you that a lot of people go into difficult conversations, and what they want to have happen is they want people to apologize, they want people to feel bad for what they said.

And I can tell you that in looking at these conversations, all the research I’ve done on this, that that almost never ends well. That the real goal of a difficult conversation, of a true talk, is to create some change, to come to some resolution so we can both move forward into a better place. And if my goal is to just make you feel terrible for that thing you said, all of it is going to end up as hurt feelings on both sides. Whereas, I don’t care if you apologize or don’t apologize. What I do care is that we’re able to move together, move forward together better.

And if we can do that, eh, I don’t want to make anybody lose face by having to give an apology because that’s just going to make them angry and drag this thing out. Let’s just fix it and life gets better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Thank you. Well, so now, can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Murphy
You know, there are a number of things that I have found incredibly helpful as going through this. And I should back up for a second because one of the things, one of the books that was an influence on me early on was Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive, and this is an old, old book, this is 40 years. And one of the things that came out of this book is that some of the simplest things are the things that make us most successful.

Things like, “Where does my time go?” and, “How am I spending my life?” and, “What am I doing?” and, “Who should I be talking to?” And when I think about this, sometimes there is a tendency to overcomplicate everything. And, honestly, that is a big a problem in difficult conversations as it is anywhere else.

And one of the things that we’re trying to help people do is essentially simplify it, is just say, “Listen, you know what, this doesn’t have to be super complicated. If we just focus on some basic issues, if we focus on some simple things, let’s talk about facts. Let’s not muddle this up.” One of the things that I found is that a lot of people seem to make their career off of making things more complicated than they need to be.

And, you know what, honestly, if we can avoid doing that, we’re going to be in much better shape. So, in terms of where some of the inspiration for this, Peter Drucker died years ago, but that was one of the great things he did for anybody that we’re essentially we’re trying to have any kind of conversation or be a better person, be a better leader, whatever, is just focus on some of the simple things. So, that’s a very long answer to your question.

But given all of that, one of my favorite quotes is actually not even a leadership quote. So, Peter Drucker has a million and one great concepts, but there’s another one that actually comes from Kurt Vonnegut, and he said – I’m trying to get this right – he said, “We are what we pretend to be, so you need to be careful about what you pretend to be.”

And I may have missed that slightly, but, in essence, it’s, listen, you turn into what you’re pretending, so be careful about what you’re pretending. So, going back to the Peter Drucker concept for a second, where you put your time, how you talk to people, all of it ultimately informs who you really are. So, if you have jerky conversations, it’s not just a jerky conversation, that’s actually turning you into a jerk. If you’re spending your time all day not actually helping people become better, well, you’re turning into somebody who’s not helping other people become better.

And this idea that the words that come out of your mouth, they turn you into who you are. The actions you take on a daily basis, they turn you into what you are. I think the Vonnegut quote is sort of a cautionary message for all of us that, at the end of the day, and I’d mentioned this with having difficult conversations, if I’m somebody that goes into a tough conversation and I just want to make you feel bad, well, I’m becoming somebody who just makes other people feel bad.

If I’m somebody who goes into a conversation to try and make the world better for both of us, well, then I start to turn into that. And these words, these actions, where we spend our time, how we have conversations, all of this ultimately turns us into what we are, and they’re not separate things. The words you say and who you are, they’re not separate. They ultimately become the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Mark Murphy
So, there’s a number, but it’d probably be the one that is the single most effective, the one that I do no matter what day of the week it is. It’s, one, I don’t check my email before I do this. So, technology stays off until I’ve done this one thing. And the one thing is I ask myself the question, every morning, “What do I need to accomplish today for this to be a successful day?”

And the reason I ask that question is my to-do list can become a mess, but my to-do list is not necessarily a barometer of what drives my success. My success is going to be driven by one or two things. At any given day there’s one or two areas where I can really make a difference. Now, I may do 30 other things, but those are, eh, they’re not giant inflection points, they’re not bending the curve, they’re not making me more or less successful; they’re just kind of checking things off a list.

But asking that one question, not only does it help me focus my energy for the day but, I will tell you, if you’ve ever had that experience of waking up in the morning and the first thought you have is all the work you didn’t get done yesterday, and you know how awful that feeling is, I hate that feeling. By asking myself, “What’s the thing I need to do today for this to be a successful day?” I do that one thing and, even if I didn’t kill off the rest of my to-do list, I can still go to bed with a feeling of accomplishment that, “You know what, I did that one thing today. That, I got that done.”

And that allows me to sleep better at night and wake up in the morning, and my first thought is not, “Ugh, I didn’t get so many things done yesterday. Yesterday was such a waste.” I don’t have that feeling because I know that, yeah, I may have 30 other things I still got to do today, but I did the big one. I did that one thing and so yesterday was a successful day because of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And is there a particular nugget that you share that you tend to hear back often as being super helpful and transformational for folks?

Mark Murphy
One of the big ones actually is the FIRE model, the idea that just strip out the interpretations, reactions, and ends, write it all down. That’s fine. Get it out on paper. Make yourself feel better. But then draw a big giant “X” through it and say, “I am not allowed to say that stuff because it is going to cause me problems.” It forces us to dial down our conversations, to de-layer them so that anytime you speak, you’re speaking factually.

And not only does it reduce angst, and anger, and vitriol in conversations but, from a career perspective, man, it makes you look smart because you’re somebody that isn’t walking around making hairbrained interpretations and saying stupid things because you’re forcing yourself to be calmer and more rational and more factual.

It ends up building up your expert power, and you become more of a person that people turn to simply because not only do you sound more intelligent but you end up becoming more intelligent because you’re forcing yourself to stay away from all of the stupid rush to judgments that humans generally make.

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

Mark Murphy
Our website is one big place at LeadershipIQ.com. And there’s a section on our website called Quizzes and Research, and there are a whole bunch of free tests and quizzes on this and other leadership topics, and a whole bunch of research, over a hundred articles there. It’s a good source where we’ve stuffed a lot of tools and expansion on all of these topics we’ve discussed today.

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

Mark Murphy
The one big challenge would be to identify a conversation that you’ve been putting off, and map it out for yourself. Think of what we talked about today, take that FIRE model, write down what you want to say to this person, and challenge yourself. Listen, I’m not saying you have to do it the day before a major holiday, but force yourself, within the next week or two, to actually sit down and have that conversation.

Pretty much every one of us has a conversation that we’ve been postponing because we don’t feel comfortable that we can pull it off successfully, but we need to. Make yourself have that conversation and simplify it. As I said, keep it simple, just focus on the facts and see if you can’t start a dialogue with this person. It doesn’t have to be a confrontation, just a conversation about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Mark, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing this wisdom. I wish you tons of luck with all your conversations, tough and fun, and anything in between.

Mark Murphy
Pete, thank you so much. This was a blast.

Jan 15
0

249: Leading When You’re Not in Charge with Clay Scroggins

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

 

 

Clay Scroggins says: "We feel like we've got to be in charge in order to lead, and it's just not true."

Clay Scroggins discusses how to lead without being in the top position.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Three simple questions to help you collaborate better
  2. The equation for powerful leadership
  3. How to have difficult conversations with your boss

About Clay 

Clay Scroggins is the lead pastor of North Point Community Church, providing visionary and directional leadership for all the local church staff and congregation. Clay understands firsthand how to manage the tension of leading when you’re not in charge. Clay holds a degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech, as well as a master’s degree and doctorate from Dallas Theological Seminary. Clay and his wife Jenny live in Forsyth County, Georgia, with their four children.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Clay Scroggins Interview Transcript

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

Clay Scroggins
Oh, Pete, I am excited and honored to be a part of this. I have listened to a few episodes and I’m a big fan, so thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, I’m so glad to have you. I think we’re really going to enjoy this chat because one episode we had before, Dodie, Gomer, talked about leading without authority. It was a hit. And you had a whole book on this subject so I think we’ll have some fun digging into it. But, first, I want to hear, we had to reschedule you because you had a new baby to welcome into the family. How is that going?

Clay Scroggins
Oh, my goodness. I should’ve asked you earlier. Do you have kids?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, we are expecting our first in a couple of weeks.

Clay Scroggins
No kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, or maybe he’ll already be here by the time this airs. We’ll see. It’s any day now, yeah.

Clay Scroggins
Well, it is our fifth, and so I don’t know. How is it going? I know the drill and it is, I’ll be honest with you, I love kids. I don’t really like infants.

Pete Mockaitis
Speaking about men, in general, because they don’t do anything.

Clay Scroggins
That does feel like, I don’t know, more of a guy thing to say, but I’m not against infants. Yeah, kind of like, like you said, they don’t do a lot. And then they’re just kind of you just kind of get through the first three months, so I’m trying not do that. I’m trying to be present and enjoy the little moments. And the great news is he’s healthy and everything is great, I mean, that’s a huge deal. And birth really is like this crazy amazing miracle to get to experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah. What is the name of your newest addition?

Clay Scroggins
His name is Whit.

Pete Mockaitis
Wit? Nice. How do we spell Wit?

Clay Scroggins
Whit Aries Scroggins, and at some point I’ll stop enunciating Whit so strongly but for now like it’s appropriate.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it W-I-T?

Clay Scroggins
W-H-I-T.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Oh, yeah, like Whitman or Whitney, okay.

Clay Scroggins
Or Whitney, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I got you.

Clay Scroggins
Or Whitney, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and you said your name is a little bit fun. So, tell us, what is Clay short for? And what’s the origin of this?

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, I’m Robert Clayton Scroggins, Jr. and, yeah, my parents grabbed the middle name and they call me Clay. My wife is so funny because when we had our first child, Regus, the first child was a girl, second child boy. I said, “Okay, we’re going to go Robert Clayton Scroggins, III,” and she was like, “I’m carrying this child for nine months. I really would like to have a say in the name of this child,” which I loved, and so we don’t have a third.

But, anyway, yeah, she’s also a big fan of naming the child what you’re going to call the child. And so, it does create some complications but it helps me. Whenever someone calls me, and they say, “Hey, is Robert there,” I realize, “Oh, this is a person that doesn’t know me.” So, it helps me screen the call.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I had read that somewhere online that it was short for Claytonius.

Clay Scroggins
Oh, my gosh. So, I had this guy write some copy for this website I did. He’s a good friend of mine, he’s very funny, and he did make that joke. Or, in college, I’m a big OutKast fan there in Atlanta, rap, going to college in Atlanta. They had an album.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright Alright Alright.

Clay Scroggins
That’s right. Alright Alright Alright Alright. They had an album that were released called Stankonia and they called me Claytonia in college quite a bit, but, no, it’s just short for Clayton.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I thought you’d say, “Yes, it’s short for Claytonius,” so, yeah, I thought it was going to go into an interesting Roman emperor sort of vibe. It’s just a gag.

Clay Scroggins
Like, I’ve never been asked that. I wonder what it means by that, but, yeah, it does say Claytonius or something. I don’t know. That was a joke.

Pete Mockaitis
Claytonius Maximus Claudius Brusus, you know.

Clay Scroggins
That’s right. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, now we know. Now that’s settled, to set the record straight once and for all. So, I want to chat about your book How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge. But maybe, first, we could get sort of the quicker version of your backstory. You know a thing or two about leading when you’re not in charge. So, could you give us a quick overview of that tale?

Clay Scroggins
Sure. I moved to Atlanta in 1998. I grew up in Alabama – Tuscaloosa, Alabama, home of the University of Alabama, they play a lot of football there, and I went to Georgia Tech in Atlanta to major in industrial engineering. I studied engineering there. It’s a great engineering school and it made me realize very quickly that I am not cut out to be an engineer, but I stuck with it, finished school.

While I was in Atlanta, I got connected to this church called North Point Community Church which is in kind of the northern suburbs of Atlanta, and I volunteered there while I was in college. I was kind of a mentor to high school students, and just found a lot of purpose in that, really enjoyed it. It was really a great way for me to try to give back and try to help some people in a way that I felt like I had been helped in my life.

And so, anyway, I graduated from school with this engineering degree, and committed to never use it because I really felt like I wanted to find, I don’t know, purpose is a big deal to me. I really want to be able to find what I do to have a lot of meaning. Anyway, so I went to seminary to get a Masters in Theology, and ended up becoming a pastor at this same church in Atlanta called North Point Community Church.

So, now I lead, we’re a multisite church, so we have six campuses or six churches in the Atlanta area, and I lead our original campus in Alpharetta, Georgia. And, yeah, that’s what I do. It’s a pretty young vibrant church, it’s fairly large. On a Sunday we’ll have, I don’t know, anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 people here, and I manage our staff here that’s about 110 people. But, in a way, I kind of lead a franchise, like a local franchise.

Pete Mockaitis
Can I have fries with that?

Clay Scroggins
That’s right. I do the burgers not the fries. And I have loads of bosses. So, yes, I do manage a good amount but I still have, I don’t know, there’s probably four or five people technically that are my bosses. But the whole process of, I don’t know, the kind of franchise multisite, you’ve got a central headquarters, and you’ve got these churches that are out trying to kind of do similar things, that’s really where I bumped into these principles of influence and authority is through my own professional story.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Understood. Thank you. So, then, well, could you unpack a little bit of sort of the key sort of theme or principles or messages inside your book there in terms of how does one go about leading from a spot of influence as opposed to authority like, “I am the boss who is in charge because of my title or position”?

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, I think what happened to me was I got a few promotions. The first job right out of graduate school, for me, was to manage one of our high school ministries at one of our campuses. And, I don’t know, I had dreams, I had aspirations, I had things I wanted to do, I had ideas, and then you quickly kind of get, I don’t know, you feel a little stuck, you feel a little frustrated, and kind of the reality of the way the working world works where you realize, “Oh, I can’t do all that I want to do because I don’t have enough authority. If only I had my boss’ job, if only I had all of the authority that my boss has.”

So I kind of started bumping into that, then I got a promotion and started managing more and, in a sense, I had a bigger job but still had the same feeling of, “Oh, no, I can’t do all that I want to do.” Then I became what we call the lead pastor of this one location and that’s when it really set it that, “Oh, my goodness, I’ve got a lot more authority than I ever have had but I still feel kind of hamstrung by what I don’t have,” and I think I was focusing on or feeling victim to the authority that I didn’t have at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, most interesting.

Clay Scroggins
And I started realizing and, honestly, I wrote this book thinking no one would read it. But the more I’ve gotten to be able to go into organizations and a lot of businesses and speak to teams and companies about this topic the more I realize this really, it does connect with people that a lot of people feel the same way. They feel like, “Yeah, I’m on the team and I sit in the meetings but, man, if I were in charge this is what I would do.” Or, “If I had more authority this is how I would handle it.”

And so, we end up, what happens is I found that I became passive and I would sit on my hands and I felt like I was waiting until someone put me in charge of more to be able to really step out and try to make a difference, try to bring some progress or some change. And so, honestly, it was through a few promotions that I bumped into this myth about leadership that we feel like we’ve got to be in charge in order to lead, and it’s just not true.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that’s so interesting when you say, “It’s like I need more authority in order to do the thing that I want to do,” and then you got some more authority, it’s like, “Oh, wait a second.” And I think that there may be any number of resources, I guess you might call it, in the course of life and work in terms of, “If I only had more budget, if I only had sort of more personal income, if I only had more ‘free time’ then I’d really be able to do,” you know, whatever.

And so, it seems like it may be is sort of a theme or pattern in terms of similar lies or deceptions that we’re entertaining for ourselves. So, maybe, you could get at that sort of what do you think is at the root of the lie and why we buy into it in the first place?

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, you know, Jim Carrey is not necessarily the source for How To Be Awesome At Your Job, but here’s a Jim Carrey quote. I don’t know where he said it or when he said it, but he said, “I really hope that everyone could everything they ever wanted in life so they realize that it doesn’t meet all their needs or it doesn’t fulfill them.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Clay Scroggins
It’s a great statement and it’s kind of what you’re saying that maybe one of the most disappointing things in life is thinking you need more and then getting it, and then realizing that didn’t do it. and I would imagine there’s a lot of people listening today who feel that way about a promotion or about, to your point, “If only I had more income,” or, I’m single. I wish I was in a relationship,” or, “I’m in a relationship, I wish we could get married,” or, “We’re married, I wish we could have kids,” or, “We have kids, I wish they would leave the house.”

And then you get there and you go, “Huh, this wasn’t it.” So, I think part of what is in that for all of us is to try to figure out, “How can I not be a victim to my circumstances? But how can I use the circumstances I have to own the moment, and to say, ‘Hey, what do I have? What’s unique to the situation that I have?’” And there’s some power to bringing some ownership to the situation that you currently have and not be victim to it but instead try to leverage what you have to help make somebody else’s day better, to help make somebody else’s world better. So that may be is at the root of what I was experiencing.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, and as you’re speaking I’ve got this lyric in my head, it’s from a song by The Avett Brothers, and the song is called Ill With Want, and the lyric goes, “I’m sick with wanting and it’s evil how it’s got me, and everyday is worse than the one before. The more I have the more I think I’m almost where I need to be, if only I could get a little more.”

Clay Scroggins
Wow.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that song is powerful, and it’s a good tune. I mean, check it out. But I think it really plays into that notion, it’s like, “Oh, you know, I’m almost there. A little more authority would do it. Oh, well, maybe not quite. A little more.” And so, then you wake up, the Jim Carrey realization so, then, very cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Clay Scroggins
Real quick one about that. You know, one of the things I’ve loved about writing this book was getting to interview a number of leaders who have experienced being in a role where they’re not the senior point leader. One of the people that I talked to was a guy named Frank Blake, Frank from, I think like maybe, 2007-2014, he was the CEO of the Home Depot, an Atlanta-based company, it’s maybe, I don’t know, fourth or fifth largest retailer.

Frank is a fascinating individual because he has worked or a lot of great leaders. He worked for Jack Welch for a long time at GE and worked for both Bushes in different parts of the government. Worked at the Home Depot for Bob Nardelli, the CEO. But he’s always been in a kind of a second or third-chair position, he was never the senior leader until he became president of Home Depot, the CEO of the Home Depot.

And I asked him about this, I said, “So, Frank, I’m sure once you got in charge then you could finally lead like you wanted to lead.” And he kind of laughed, and he said, “No, that’s a very true point that even when you get to be the CEO you still don’t have all the authority that you feel like you need.” He said, “I remember the first week I was CEO of Home Depot, and I’d sent this memo out to everyone of our employees, saying, ‘Hey, from here on out this is something we’re going to do,’” and he said, “I walked down the hallway not 20, 30 minutes later and I see the memo in the trash can.”

And he said, “It made me realized, ‘Oh, there it is, authority alone doesn’t create great leadership.’” Which that’s one of the major tenets of this book, is that we all know leaders who have a lot of authority and they’re not leading well. And we know people who don’t have a lot of authority who are getting a lot done and are making a pretty significant difference in their world. And I would just rather be the one that is not using my lack of authority as an excuse. And so that’s what I hoped to help people with through this process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Awesome. Cool. Well, let’s get into it. Let’s say, hey, here you are in the middle of a professional career, and you want to exercise some more leadership and getting some results, make some things happen, and you got to lean upon influence instead of authority. How do we make that happen? What are some key principles or action steps to do it?

Clay Scroggins
Sure. Well, I think the first thing anyone could do, I would imagine maybe if you’re listening to this and you’re running on a treadmill or driving then I wouldn’t write this down, please. But if you are at a place where you could, I think just jotting down the question, “How would someone cultivate influence?” I think that basic question is worth everyone of us answering.

And maybe even flipping the question of, “Hey, the people that I look to that have influence over me, what have they done that has cultivated influence in my life? Why do I want to listen to them? If they called me, and said, ‘Hey, here’s an idea,’ why would I be willing to try it? What makes me give them my ear when they talk?” I think that alone is really that’s where I started. It’s just saying, “Hey, if I’m not in charge, which I’m not, how do I begin to cultivate more influence with my boss, with the people around me, and the people that work even for me?

And so, what I did was I wrote down, “Here’s four things I want to do. Here’s four behaviors, I don’t care if anybody else does this, this is for me. I’m not trying to prescribe this. I’m no John Maxwell leadership guru. I’m just a guy. So, what can I do?” And that’s where I started. And then, for me, they really are behaviors that I’m trying to do.

The first one is to lead yourself well, and I know that seems, you know, there’s been so much written on self-leadership, so much content about self-leadership, but that really is where it begins, is to go, “You know what, we’re all so apt to blame our boss for how are boss is or isn’t leading us. And the truth is we have an opportunity, and maybe even a responsibility, to lead ourselves well. And the great news is if you lead yourself well you will ensure that you’re always well-led.”

And so, you can always start there, going, “Okay, what does it look like to lead me really well?” For me, self-leadership is all about knowing where I am right now, that’s the hardest part, because I think a lot of us have an idea of where we want to go, where we want to be, but you can’t get where you want to be until you know exactly where you are.

And I have tried to have a ruthless curiosity about my own strengths and weaknesses, my own blind spots so that I can be more aware of where I am right now so that I can lead myself out of where I am to, ultimately, where I want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, now, you said knowing yourself and where you stand right here, now, in the moment is the hardest part, and you try to be ruthlessly curious. So, I’d be curious to – I’m curious about your curiosity – specifically in terms of what were the processes by which you came to find the answers to those questions?

Clay Scroggins
I do a lot of live communication in front of groups and audiences, and I love asking that question, Pete, to a crowd, is just say, “Hey, what is the easiest way to find out when you don’t know?” And it’s usually peoples gut-level response which is great, you know, “Well, you ask somebody. How do you know what you can’t see in the mirror?” Because none of us can really see ourselves clearly in the mirror. We’re all biased towards ourselves, and the easiest way to find out, “What do I really look like?”

This is one of the hardest things about getting married or being in a meaningful relationship is that other person oftentimes is a mirror to ourselves, which is hard, you’re like, “Wow, I never knew my breath smelled as bad as you say it smells,” or, “I never knew I had that little tick that you say I have whenever I meet someone new,” or whatever it is. But asking someone is the greatest way.

So, for me, my last job change, I left one of our campuses that has about 50 people that work there, and I just sent three simple questions, I just made a Google Form and asked three questions to all 50 people. And not everybody filled it out, but maybe, I don’t know, half of them did. I said, “Hey, here’s three questions. Number one, what do you feel like I’m good at? What do I do that inspires you?” to say it in another way.

“Second question, what am I not good at? What bothered you about me?” I think actually is what I said. “What bothered you about working with me? And then, number three, what are my blind spots? What do I not see about myself?” And it was amazing how basic and simple that process was but it was, I mean, to say it was life-changing might be a little strong, but it was genuinely I felt some significant breakthroughs in my own life that things about myself that I knew but I was hoping no one else saw.

People said, I mean, one of the themes was, “We feel like whenever you’re leading a meeting we don’t really feel like you’re prepared for the meeting.” And I was like, “Well, you’re right. I’m not usually prepared because I can think off my feet pretty quickly and when you can you rely on that too much which is not always great.” So that really changed me, it made me go, “Okay, I can be more prepared for meetings.”

A number of people said, “Hey, when we’re on one-on-ones with you it feels like you’re not always listening.” And it’s true, I have a hard time focusing listening. So, one of the things I did is I started spacing my meetings out. I pull a little space in between them to give myself a chance to have a breather.

Pete Mockaitis
Makes all the difference too. You listen better I found. I’m with you there.

Clay Scroggins
It was so helpful because it allowed me to take a little walk around the building and then walk back in the next meeting, and I had a little more mental clarity. And then the other thing was they said was, “It feels like you’ve moved ahead. You’re thinking about the next thing,” which is very common. But, anyway, all of those things just helped me identify things in my life that I wouldn’t have identified if I hadn’t asked. And now that I know where I am I can know how to lead myself better. But I would’ve never have chosen to lead those areas until I identified them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s perfect. Now, on this Google Forum, was it anonymous?

Clay Scroggins
Oh, I’m sorry. I had a friend execute it essentially. So, I had a friend send it out. I say, “Hey, I think I sent an email to a number of people so you’re going to get an email from so and so, and I’ve asked them to send this form and they’re going to compile the results.” Yeah, just to make it anonymous because you spend half the time trying to figure who said what which is not good.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Clay Scroggins
You go, “Yeah, that sounds like Johnny.”

Pete Mockaitis
I wonder if there’s like a piece of software that is just like, “Okay, paraphrase this paragraph so they can’t tell it’s from me.”

Clay Scroggins
Right, because, like you said it, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But I know that it’s great. Especially if they know that you mean it and you care about it, and I think it’s so cool to offer an example. Like, “For example, someone so gave me this feedback which is very helpful because I’ve been trying to work on that and I found some improvement.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, he means it.” And I’ve noticed that thing, too, now that you mentioned it. Okay. Very cool. So, leading yourself is where it starts. And where do we go from there?

Clay Scroggins
So, I saw recently, I still haven’t got a chance to listen to it but I’ve meant to, but you had a podcast on positivity. That was my second behavior that I tried to, you know, I just decided, “Hey, I want to choose positivity. I want to be a person that drops the negativity and the cynicism,” which, it’s crazy, but I don’t know. I can lean there very easily.

And I just decided that more important than my education, my ideas, whatever talent I may have, my energy is the best thing that I bring to the team that I work on. And we’ve all seen this. You’ve seen people that you work with that can change the climate of a room because of their energy. And if that’s true of them then it can be true of us as well, that we all have that potential.

The hardest thing about working, to me, is having to bring it every single day. I remember being in my 20s thinking, “Good grief, when do we get spring break? When does summer happen? Have we taken summer off?” Because it’s exhausting to have to bring it every single day. But the truth is that’s the best thing I have to bring, is the energy that I have.

So, instead of being a 40-watt bulb, I’ve really tried to be a 100-watt bulb. And the hardest time to choose positivity, to me, is when you’re being handed a decision that you didn’t get to weigh in on but you’re being asked to buy into it. Patrick Lencioni, a quote from The Advantage, he says, “People are more likely to buy in when you allow them to weigh in,” which I think is so true. It’s a great truth and axiom about the way we should lead other people.

The problem is most of us who are not in charge are being handed decisions all the time that we didn’t get to weigh in on, and we’re like, “What idiot made this decision and asking me to make it work? This is terrible. It’s a dumb process. It doesn’t work.” But what I’ve just learned is that it’s in that moment that I have a decision to make, “Am I going to take this and make it better and actually make it work? Or am I going to sit on my hands and be angry and sit back and watch this fail?”

And more important than making the right decision is owning the decision and making it right. I really believe that’s possible, that you own a decision that you don’t even agree with fully but you can own it with such positivity that you can make it work, and we’ve all seen that. The best companies in the world aren’t the best companies because they have the best ideas; it’s because everybody is leaning into the same idea. And I think that’s possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that metaphor, the 40-watt bulb and the 100-watt bulb. I was curious with your cover. It’s got these three light bulbs, and one of them is illuminated. It’s not the one in the front. Is that the metaphor you’re going with?

Clay Scroggins
That is, yeah. And it’s a little bit like how the Counting Crows got their name. It’s like one little lyric from one of their B-side songs or something. But that was the attempt, was just to give a little nod to the light bulb metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I dig it. And so, when you say it’s exhausting to bring it every day, so how is it that you are expending energy to be positive? Sort about smiling and such. So, like what are those sort of little choices that you’re making over the course of the day to choose and exude and radiant the positivity?

Clay Scroggins
Well, here’s something that just has helped me, is it hit me one day that I’ve got days where I love my job and I’ve got days where I don’t love my job. And I think I was in one of those days where I wasn’t loving it, and I had the thought, “Am I going to be in this job forever?” And I started realizing, “Well, of course not.” I’m 37 years old, there’s no way I’m going to be in this job forever, and neither will you.

In fact, I bet 98% of people listening to this podcast, you’re not in the last job you’ll ever have. If you don’t like your job that’s good news, you know. But I think, on the flipside, recognizing that if this were the last job you ever have, can you be content enough with this job to enjoy it, to choose to enjoy it? Most of us are fairly fortunate to be able to earn a living and support ourselves and help out other people.

I think it’s a great place to be and to go, “I’m content enough in this job that if it is the last job I ever have I’m going to give it all that I got because when I leave this job I want people to be surprised. I want them to go, ‘Wow, we had no clue that you were thinking about leaving. You were so bought in.’” But what’s the alternative? “Oh, he was half in, half out. We kind of always thought he was about to leave.” That’s not going to cultivate influence.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Clay Scroggins
And, on the flipside, I think there’s a lot of hope just to know that if you don’t like your situation today you’re not going to be in it forever. There will be a shelf life to the job that you’re in. And so, you can be hopeful knowing that there’s a better future that there’s something else in your future, but you may as well buy in today because it’ll help your future if you choose to be positive about what you’re doing today.

And if you can figure out how to do that, it’s a skill that will help you the rest of your life, “How can I choose to believe the best about the people that I work around? How can I believe the best about my boss? How can I go into this with good intentions not accusing other people of trying to ruin my world? But, instead, he’s trying to do the best he can do. She’s trying to do the best she can do, and I’m going to choose to be positive about this situation. And it will, ultimately, cultivate influence for you if you choose to do that.

Pete, I was speaking to a group of virtual assistants. It’s an amazing company. You can hire somebody for 10 hours a week to be a virtual assistant for you.

Pete Mockaitis
May you drop the name. I’ve used several of these companies.

Clay Scroggins
Sure, yeah. It’s called BELAY, B-E-L-A-Y.

Pete Mockaitis
I haven’t used that one. Okay. Cool. Cool. Continue.

Clay Scroggins
Anyway, so I’m in the middle of talking about choosing positivity, and this lady – I’ll never forget this moment – she’s over on the side, and she just blurts out, she goes, “That’s so inauthentic!” And, honestly, it caught me off guard, and I was like, “Dang! She’s kind of right. Like that is inauthentic,” because you can’t just walk around being positive about things that you’re not positive about, that you don’t feel great about.

But, then, fortunately, in the moment, I had the thought, “Well, hang on a second, we’re not talking about how to be true to yourself right now. We’re talking about how to cultivate influence, and you can get excited about something that you’re not actually that excited about without being dis-ingenuine. We’ve all done it. And your boss, I guarantee you, your boss wants you to be excited about what you’re working on.”

“And when you become a boss, or maybe you currently are a boss, you want the people on your team to be excited about what they’re working on. And if they’re not, you want them to talk to you about it so you can at least help them understand why you’re excited about it.” And I think that’s a better way to cultivate influence.

Now, there might come a time where you go, “You know what, I just can’t fake this any longer,” but I do think there are times where when I choose to be excited about something and see the best in it, I end up finding the best in it and I end up actually getting excited about it, and it’s amazing how we can lead ourselves to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Yeah, inauthentic, you know, it’s interesting because that word is both so heavy and so loaded.

Clay Scroggins
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
And, I mean, in a sense, I guess, there is a measure of inauthenticity in terms of, “I don’t feel like this but I’m going to try to dig it.” Well, hey, you have an infant now, another one in your life. I imagine there are times you don’t feel like tending to…

Clay Scroggins
You’re exactly right, Pete. That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
… to the sweet angel’s needs.

Clay Scroggins
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
But does changing a diaper or whatever make you inauthentic? I’d say, my hunch is, I guess my interpretation on that point, it’s about in terms of faking it.

Clay Scroggins
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess you’re being authentic to a higher value of yours which is to be a loving father or a compassionate human being, a disciple of Jesus, a lover of neighbor, whatever your role or identity is. So, you’re authentic in that realm and what are you is a higher authenticity than being “true to your desire,” yeah, in the moment.

Clay Scroggins
That’s right. That’s a great way to put it.

Pete Mockaitis
But I guess I’d wrestle with the same question myself in terms of, “Yeah, I don’t really feel like talking to this person because I think they’re kind of weird, and I would have a whole lot more fun talking to this other person over there. So, am I being inauthentic by like pretending to be interested?” And I think, in one way, yeah, I don’t actually care what this person has to say, that happens. I care about what all my podcast guests have to say profoundly, by the way, that’s why I’ve chosen them, so, Clay, you’re off the hook.

Clay Scroggins
Right. You’re playing solitaire as well while I’m talking.

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, let’s check out Belay, huh? Let’s click around.” But, in a higher sense, you know, “Hey, I’m being authentic to the person that I’m trying to be in terms of a generous kind, loving human being.” So, anyway, that’s how I have navigated that tension. But, yeah, I feel the concern is real and it’s cool that you have some candid audience members who will get you real good.

Clay Scroggins
I did appreciate that, you know. I was like, “Thank you for your honesty.” As opposed to just giving me a kind head nod, you know. So, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. So, after leading yourself and choosing positivity, where do we go from there?

Clay Scroggins
So, I love the combo of these middle two behaviors because there are a lot of people listening right now that you’re not wired for positivity. You’re wired for results. You’re wired for progress.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah.

Clay Scroggins
You come to a meeting and you see all the things that we need to do that aren’t getting done. In my world, I sit in a lot of evaluation meetings because Sunday happens every seven days, every week, and so on Monday we sit there and evaluate, “How did it go yesterday? Did we like what happened? Did good things happen?”

And we have a lot of people that want to talk about all the good things, and then there’s a lot of people that sit there and go, “Okay, let’s move on from the good things. Let’s talk about how to change this and make it better,” because of just the way you’re wired. A lot of people, when you hear about choosing positivity, it kind of makes you, I don’t know, sick to your stomach, because you think, “Oh, come on. Like am I supposed to walk around like with my head in the clouds going, ‘Oh, this is so great. Everything is so awesome’? Like those Legos in the Lego Movie.”

You don’t have kids just yet, Pete. But have you seen the movie?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I haven’t but we had a podcast guest talk about the creation of the Lego Movie, Jennifer Riel and about how they agonized over how to get that made.

Clay Scroggins
There’s this little song in the movie that they sing over and over again, “Because everything is awesome,” because they’re trying to basically brainwash the Legos. And I think a lot of people think, when they hear that point of choose positivity, they’re supposed to walk around just everything is awesome all the time, as if that alone cultivates influence. And it does in and of itself, but when you combine it with the skill of thinking critically I think it creates a really powerful leader with or without authority.

I know, for me, someone passed me this article one time about millennials, which I hate all the articles being written about millennials, but it says, “Millennials – are they misguided optimists or rainbow-puking unicorns?” I thought, “What a great word picture! A rainbow-puking unicorn.” And that’s the way people see positive people sometimes.

But the truth is that is if you can combine the posture of choosing positivity with the skill of thinking critically, you can really become a powerful synergistic leader who’s making a significant difference in a really positive way wherever you find yourself, whatever seat you’re in. So, thinking critically really is a powerful skill. I think it’s really simply the ability to notice things, question things, and connect things.

To observe things, to be curious and question things, to figure out how they work, and then to make connections between variables that are being changed and the outcome that you’re looking for. And everyone of us can get better at this skill. That’s the great thing about skills; skills are things that we can improve upon but we have to practice in order to do that.

And so, I think part of the reason why, in my own life, I have a harder time sometimes thinking critically is because I’m not practicing it because I’m either too busy, I either haven’t given myself enough space, mental space to be able to step back and think about my job, or I’ve squeezed out those opportunities. I think the phone is probably the greatest competitor.

The smartphone is probably the greatest thief of critical thought that there is because in the moments when we used to sit back and think about how to make things better, now we just aimlessly scroll through random Wikipedia articles about how rockets are made or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a little more productive than some options on your smartphone – Wikipedia.

Clay Scroggins
That’s good, yeah, than playing something.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I think I was kind of stuck when you mentioned, okay, every Monday you have a chat about how things went at church services on a prior Sunday. And I was like, “Well, maybe that’s part of how you were ranked the largest church in America in 2014, 12,000 people?” Hotdog! I thought, “Well, how does that happen?” And I guess that’s part of how it happens in a way.

I don’t know of many people in many organizations who are putting that much regular thought and iterative repetition on making something better. Like, do it, reflect upon it, then do it again, reflect upon it, do it again. I think that’s a pretty powerful formula for excellence right there. Could you share maybe some of those questions that you ask, that you drill into when you’re thinking critically to surface these insights and how to do better?

Clay Scroggins
Well, that’s interesting, Pete, to hear that because I’ve never thought about that being odd.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s culture for you.

Clay Scroggins
It really is, I know. It’s so much a part of our culture that I’ve never even noticed it. But we are so passionate about one of our values as a team is make it better. I mean, that’s really what we’re looking for in employees at every level. It doesn’t matter if you’re an intern, we want you to walk in, in fact, we ask interns a lot of questions because they’re walking in with fresh eyes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Clay Scroggins
And they represent future generations, and so we want to know from them, “Hey, what did you see that we’re doing that’s kind of weird?” Because it’s so easy to just get so inundated with your own world that you don’t see kind of like the fact that I fail to even realize that evaluation meetings every week might be a bit much perhaps, or maybe a good thing. I don’t know.

But, yeah, the key to learning to think more critically, I think, is to figure out, as basic as this is, “What are we trying to do? What’s the goal here?” And then to start there and go, “Okay. Well, in our case, what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get people to take steps. We want everybody who watches a message, or sits in a room for one of our church services, to take some kind of step metaphorically, figuratively-speaking, toward being a better person, toward helping someone else, toward looking more like Jesus, toward a growing relationship with God.

And so, when we step back and go, “Okay. Well, that’s what we’re trying to do,” then to try to be mentally present in the environment and go, “Okay. How is this going? What did we do that became an obstacle? What did we do that helped with that?” And then just trying to be as curious as possible in trying to notice things, question things, and connect things.

But, honestly, the greatest enemy is time. We just don’t, we very rarely do this. I ask people usually and in live environments, “Hey, when do you have your best ideas?” Do you know what the number one answer is, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Shower.

Clay Scroggins
A hundred times out of a hundred, people say, “The shower.” It’s crazy. And so, because I’ve Googled it, I’m an expert on this, evidently there is research that says that is the number one answer, and that it’s actually true. There’s something about the mundane task of the shower that actually allows our brain to function well and actually think things.

But, honestly, a lot of people say, after the shower, they’ll say, “Oh, driving to work,” “Laying awake at night,” “Doing yard work,” “Working out of the gym,” all of these kind of mundane physical tasks that we do that kind of free up our minds to be able to work. Well, here’s what I’m trying to do in my own life, is I’m trying to go, “Okay. Well, instead of having to wait until tomorrow morning when I take another shower, or instead of having to go try take a shower in the middle of a work day to have a great idea, like surely there’s some practice that I can learn something from it and put those in place.”

And so, for me, it really is about time and space, it’s about creating some space in my calendar to think about how to make what I’m doing better. And so, for me, it’s been waking up earlier in the morning, giving myself more time in the morning to actually just sit at my desk in front of an open notebook, or an open Word document, or an open Evernote file, and say, “What’s on my schedule today? What’s on my calendar? How can I make it better? How can I help the person that I’m going to interact with? How can I help solve the problem that we’re facing? How can I help fix this situation that’s in front of us?”

I really believe that if you can try to do that in a positive hope-filled “I’m trying to help other people” kind of way, it really can create some influence for you wherever you are, whatever seat you’re in. So, I think it’s a powerful behavior to try.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I dig it. Well, Clay, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Clay Scroggins
You know, where I land the book is I got done with a lot of the content, I thought, “You know what, I just envision someone sitting there reading this going, ‘I need to go have a hard conversation with my boss because I see things that I think need to change, or I have ideas that I’ve been holding onto, or I feel like I’ve been sitting back and not engaging as much as I want, and there’s some reasons why.’”

And so, I wrote a couple chapters on having a hard conversation with your boss which, to me, that’s one of the most difficult things to do, is, “How do you setup a time or walk in your boss’ office and have a challenging conversation?” So, that was a lot of fun to write about and, as people have read the book, it’s been one of the things that people have commented on most, is, “Hey, that was super helpful.”

Because I’ve tried to give just, “Here’s a game plan. Before you just walk in there and say, ‘This sucks. You’re stupid. I hate this,’ like let’s put a little thought into it, let’s get a little game plan on how to do that well.” So, I really hope that that’s helpful for people as they process how to challenge up because that’s not as easy to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I can’t let that go. If you give us a quick tip or two associated with how to challenge up well and effectively, let’s hear it.

Clay Scroggins
I mean, the first thing I try to do is I try to declare my intentions right up front. We’ve all read books on conversations, I would imagine. One of the most crucial ingredient to a difficult conversation is safety. People got to feel safe. And so, if you walk in, and it’s crazy to think, “Why would my boss be threatened by me?” But your boss is human, and maybe you intimidate your boss, or maybe you bother your boss. Who knows?

But if you can, right up front, declare your intentions, and say, “Hey, whatever you can say that’s most true, I really appreciate what we’re working on here, and I can tell that you really care about it. And I just want to let you know that no matter what we talk about here, I just want to let you know that I think you’re a really great leader,” or a great person, or, “You’re a nice person,” or, “I appreciate how hard you work.”

Anything we can do to try to declare our intentions, and say, “I don’t want to ruin your day. I’m not trying to tear this thing apart. I just had a couple ideas on how maybe we can make it better.” I think it goes a long way to help the relationship what I have found. And it’s something that I would want people to do for me because you can’t catch people off guard with some challenging conversation, I think, unless you state it up front, “Hey, I’m for you. I want you to win in life. I want you to do well. I want you to do good things in life.” I think it’s just a helpful thing to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that. Cool. Okay. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, I don’t know where I read this, but I read this awhile ago, and it’s been sitting near my desk. But Thomas Watson, former CEO of IBM in the mid-20th century, said, “Nothing so conclusively proves your ability to lead other people as what you do on day-to-day basis to lead yourself,” which is so actionable and helpful to me because I just think, “You know, instead of being frustrated at what the opportunities I’m not getting or how I’m getting passed over, or whatever I don’t have, I’m going to pick up the mantle to lead myself well today. And if I do that, then it will conclusively prove that I have the ability to lead more.” So, I love that quote.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite book?

Clay Scroggins
Favorite book. Well, I’m obligated to say the Bible, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Clay Scroggins
Kidding. Kidding. Kidding. No, I would say probably Leadership and Self-Deception.

Clay Scroggins
It’s a little book. It’s a short read. It’s kind of like Lencioni, kind of written like a fable a little bit, like a lot of his books are. But it’s terrific and it helps you create better relationships with people that you work with which, ultimately, I think is going to create more success for anyone of us in our careers. But it’s a fantastic little read. We read it recently with our leadership team here, and it was very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Excellent. Perfect. And how about a favorite tool?

Clay Scroggins
I mean, Evernote is probably what I use more than anything. It’s amazing how, I mean, I have a number of different screens that I use, so just to be able to pick up any screen and have what you need is terrific, so I’ll go with Evernote.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And how about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Clay Scroggins
You know, stating out loud what I’m grateful for has been something I’ve been trying recently, which I really enjoy. I heard recently someone say that, “Suffering ends when gratitude begins,” which I think is so true, and it is amazing the power of just being grateful. It’s hard to be unhappy in life and be a really grateful person. Joy and gratitude usually go hand in hand. They’re like peanut butter and jelly sandwich kind of thing. So, I try to start my day by just saying, “Hey, here’s a couple things I’m grateful for,” which feels weird to do in the car by myself but no one else is around, so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s all good. And is there a particular nugget, a piece that you share that seems to really resonate, connect with folks, a Clay original quotable gem?

Clay Scroggins
Gosh, my favorite statement or, I don’t know, kind of the big idea of the book is that influence always outpaces authority. I really believe that. I believe that instead of waiting on authority or instead of leveraging authority, influence is just far more powerful. So, I really hope that whoever is listening, wherever you’re sitting today, whatever you’re doing, that you can allow yourself to cultivate more influence.

Because it will allow you to help someone else today and create more progress and try to make somebody else’s life better. And I think that, ultimately, is what anyone of us are wanting to do is to try to help somebody else. It’s the greatest joy in life. And so, if you can figure out how to cultivate more influence, it outpaces authority all day, every day.

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

Clay Scroggins
I’m on Instagram and Twitter @clayscroggins, and then I have a website ClayScroggins.com that has a weekly newsletter or weekly email that I send out that really has got some great interviews that I’ve done with some terrific leaders both in business world and also the non-profit world on this topic. So, I’d love to keep in touch, say hello. I love this idea of this podcast, Pete, and I love the name because I’m a big fan of How-To names, How To Be Awesome At Your Job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you, yeah. And I think it makes it clear like this is what we’re trying to do here.

Clay Scroggins
Sure. That’s right.

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

Clay Scroggins
Yeah, I would just say, hey, there’s a lot of people today that probably don’t like their boss. I don’t know, I’ve just interacted with a lot of people because of this whole process, who say, “Hey, that sounds great, but I just don’t like my boss at all.” But I just want to encourage you today that just because you don’t like your boss doesn’t mean you can’t get anything done, that people for centuries and centuries have gotten a lot done working for awful people.

And one of the great things, one of the hard things, but great things working for a boss you don’t like is learning to take notes of things that you don’t want to replicate when you become a boss. And maybe the very reason why you’re in the position you’re in is to learn some really difficult lessons, and that’s hard when you’re in the moment, but it’s just the way life works that resistance is what creates strength.

And so, if you feel resistance from a terrible boss, just know that there’s an opportunity for you to create even more strength because that’s the way the world works. And that might not be fun but I hope that’s encouraging to whoever is listening that if you don’t like your boss it doesn’t mean that you can’t learn anything and it doesn’t mean you can’t get anything done today.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Clay, thank you so much for taking the time to chat. This has been powerful stuff. I wish you all the best, and that your Sundays keep getting better and better and better with all the thoughts that you put into them.

Clay Scroggins
Thank you.