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Jun 29
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878: Saying No Masterfully to Reclaim your Life with Vanessa Patrick

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Vanessa Patrick shares the science behind why we struggle to say no—and what you can do to get better at refusing.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three competencies of empowered refusal.
  2. What to do when someone’s being pushy.
  3. Why it’s better for your reputation to say no.

About Vanessa

Vanessa Patrick, PhD. is the Associate Dean for Research, the Bauer Professor of Marketing, and lead faculty of the Executive Women in Leadership Program at the Bauer School of Business at the University of Houston. She has a PhD in business from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No that Puts you in Charge of your Life.

Resources Mentioned

Vanessa Patrick Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Vanessa, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Vanessa Patrick
Hey, Pete, lovely to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your book, The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No that Puts You in Charge of Your Life. This has been a challenge that many of our listeners are facing so I think this is going to be so cool to get into it. But, first, I wanted to start with is there a particularly memorable no-story you could share with us to kick things off?

Vanessa Patrick
Well, I start the book with a didn’t-say-no story that motivated this whole stream of work. I’m happy to tell you about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it.

Vanessa Patrick
Well, it all began when I spent my 24th birthday staring at a fax machine, and it was a memorable day because I spent the evening at the office waiting for a fax. It wasn’t even an important fax. It was just a fax, which said that the client had received a fax that we had sent earlier. And I spent the whole evening waiting for the fax because my boss told me to do so.

And it was a moment where I realized that we very often, in work and life, get stuck doing very trivial things, pretty meaningless things some of the time, that we could easily say no to. And that moment made me realize the importance of learning to say no when the situation merits it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell me, how late was it when you left?

Vanessa Patrick
So, I wanted to leave at 5:00 o’clock. It was a Tuesday. The fax arrived at 9:30 in the evening. And so, I basically spent four and a half hours just staring at a fax machine waiting for that white paper to spew out of the machine, and all that white paper said when it arrived, was, “Received with thanks.” And I remember my 24th birthday and that crinkly white paper so distinctly because it was so trivial.

And, Pete, if I had to redo this all over again, if I were me when I was 24, if I was me, the me now, when I was 24, I would’ve negotiated that ask. I would’ve said something like, “Can I come early tomorrow morning and pick up the fax and put it on your desk? Or, can I ask a friend to please stay back and do it if it was that important?” It didn’t have to be me, and I did not have to spend my time doing that, and yet I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, I’m sorry. You said you were 24 years old, and then you said birthday. This was, in fact, your 24th birthday?

Vanessa Patrick
And I missed the birthday party.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, my goodness.

Vanessa Patrick
It was quite sad. I’ve recovered. Don’t worry.

Pete Mockaitis
But it is definitely seared. We could tell that memory was really seared into you because you remember it was a Tuesday and the exact text of the fax, and the time that it arrived. Now, these are some details.

Vanessa Patrick
Yes, because when you’re sitting over there for four and a half hours, knowing that everyone in your house is having a party, people are coming and going, people are eating dinner, they’re leaving, you think about these things and you realize, “Why am I doing this? Is this worth it?” And those are the feelings that we need to kind of capture and memorize so that we don’t make those same mistakes again.

So, I talk about, in the book, the importance of learning from our mistakes, and the fact that when we say yes when we want to say no, we sometimes have to pause and actually let ourselves feel bad about that because we naturally, as human beings, have this coping mechanism, something called the psychological immune system, which jumps in as soon as we feel bad and tries to repair the situation, trying to find the silver lining, trying to look for something good out of that bad situation.

And that is why we don’t learn very well from bad situations. We need to stop, embrace that horrible feeling so that we learn from it, so the next time we’re in that situation, we can manage it a little bit better.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And what’s interesting is because of the drama of this particular instance, like it’s a task that is so trivial, I don’t know, maybe there’s lives on the line associated with this fax.

Vanessa Patrick
There were not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there weren’t. So, it seems super trivial, and it’s four and a half unnecessary hours in which you’re not actively engaged, and you’re missing out on something really cool, all really come together. So, in a weird way, I like the notion, the psychological immune system, this was kind of a blessing because you had an epiphany that, I believe, has served you well over the subsequent years, and now you’re enriching many thousands with this work. So, indirectly, I guess we can thank that boss for this request.

Vanessa Patrick
Yes, I do think that it did kind of change the trajectory of my life. You start questioning. It was my first job, you start questioning, “Is this the kind of job that I want? Is there something more meaningful and important I could do?” And, also, the curiosity about “Why do people do this? Why do people behave in certain ways?” which has shaped my career as a consumer psychologist.

Pete Mockaitis
And for many of us, when we say yes when we should’ve said no, the pain we experience is more minor. It may not be enough for us to really rewind, evaluate, and make some changes.

Vanessa Patrick
But we do feel resentful very often. A lot of the people in my studies often talk about the fact that they’ve said yes when they want to say no, and they feel very resentful towards the other person, and really wished they did not do that. And so, in many ways, but we also search for reasons as to why we said yes and come up with the fact that it might be a growth opportunity. It could open doors. It could lead to a promotion. So, we make up these things to make ourselves feel better but sometimes we need to just see it for what it is and not make the mistake again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s interesting how we resent them, and, though, I guess we’ve got at least 50% responsibility as to having said yes.

Vanessa Patrick
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you’ve done a lot of studies, you’ve engaged a lot of people here. Any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made here when it comes to us humans and our relationships saying no?

Vanessa Patrick
Yes. It’s no surprise that, of course, human beings have trouble saying no, but one of the things that come out consistently in my research is the fact that no is a gendered issue, that women struggle way more to say no than men do. Women are more likely to say yes to a workplace request than men are. Women are more likely to be asked to do unpromotable work, or unpaid work, or the office housework, but they’re also more likely to take those things on.

One of the most interesting things in my studies is something that I call the spotlight effect. And the spotlight effect is this feeling of being in the spotlight when someone makes their ask of you. So, in a study, I put people in different conditions. In one condition, I told them that they were asked to do something that they didn’t want to do, and there was a crowd of people who had already agreed to do it.

And based on the research of social psychology, we know that we are more likely to conform to that ask. The spotlight is going to shine way more brightly on us when we know that other people are watching and expecting us to say yes. So, of course, both men and women are more likely to say yes when there are lots of people watching even if they want to say no.

I also do another scenario where that request is an interpersonal request. There’s no crowd, it’s just one person versus another person, the asker and the askee. And in that situation, you find that men are significantly more likely to say, “No, this is not going to work,” if it’s a one on one, but women still respond at the same level as if there was a crowd watching.

So, women, it’s almost like women have conjured up this imaginary crowd that is watching them, and the spotlight shines brightly on them, whether it’s a one-on-one interaction or whether it’s a group. I, personally, think that’s a super interesting finding, and it’s fascinating to think about why that is, and why women feel that pressure to say yes, feel more intense spotlight regardless of whether it’s a one-on-one ask or it’s a crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share with us a rough sense of these figures here, the crowd effect versus the one-on-one effect, that is at stake here? Is it a smidgen more pressure and probability of saying yes, or is it like double, triple, quadruple?

Vanessa Patrick
So, when it was a social ask, and when both men and women responded equivalently, so about five on a scale of one to seven, on, “How much attention did you feel was on you?” That drops to four for men, which was significantly different, statistically significantly lower compared to women who remained at around 4.5.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you. And I guess I’m curious about the percentage of percent of time said yes and didn’t want to.

Vanessa Patrick
The number of times they said yes, so we don’t have that. In the experiment, we didn’t look at that. The scenario required everyone to say yes or no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you.

Vanessa Patrick
So, everyone wanted to say no. It was a clear scenario when no one wanted to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
What is our scenario?

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah, so it was something like spending your spring break doing some volunteer work for a friend who just caught you. So, it was the first day of spring break and someone pulled you aside, and said, “No, you need to help me with this volunteer work, and spend your entire spring break doing this, making calls on my behalf,” which is something we pre-tested no one wanted to do, no one wanted to spend their spring break doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it would have to be some pretty, meaningfully interesting, powerful calls. It’s hard to dream up the scenario where that would be a win, like, “Oh, yeah.” Okay. Cool. Thank you. All right. So, there we have it, interesting tidbits there. So, then, overall, what would you say is sort of the main thesis or big idea behind the book The Power of Saying No?

Vanessa Patrick
So, a lot of people, successful people, and, in general, most people know that it’s a good thing to say no to the things that you don’t want to do. The question is how. So, the big idea behind the book is the way in which you communicate your refusal and something called empowered refusal, which is the basis of my research.

Empowered refusal is a super skill of being able to say no in a way that’s effective. And what effective, essentially, means is that you are able to communicate a no response while maintaining your relationship with the other person and securing your reputation.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds perfect.

Vanessa Patrick
It does.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we do that?

Vanessa Patrick
So, I talk about the fact that you need to develop three competencies to develop the skill of empowered refusal but, essentially, empowered refusal requires you to say no by looking inwards. You need to say no by giving voice to your values, priorities, preferences, and beliefs. So, it’s a no that stems from your identity. And when you say no that stems from your identity, giving voice to what you believe, the way you believe things should be, people are less likely to give you pushback and more likely to be persuaded by your no.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, what are the three competencies and how do we develop them?

Vanessa Patrick
Right. So, the three competencies, I call the ART of empowered refusal, A-R-T, awareness, rules not decisions, and totality of self. So, your empowered refusal begins with self-awareness. It begins with you looking inwards and developing a sense of what you uniquely bring to the table, what you care about, what do you value, how do you want to find meaning in your life.

So, an awareness of your preferences, your beliefs, your values, forms the foundation of step number two, which is setting up a system of rules, and not having to make decisions all the time. So, once you understand yourself, then you can set yourself up with a set of personal policies or simple rules that guide your actions and decisions. So, if you have rules in place, or policies in place, it’s much easier for you to say no because you already have a very firm stance on what you believe and how you want things to be.

And the final piece of the puzzle is the way you communicate your empowered refusal, which is using your whole self, using not only your language but also your nonverbal cues. Nonverbal cues that both convey empowerment but also secure your relationship with the other person. So, I can give you a few examples.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Vanessa Patrick
Let’s imagine that someone asked you to fly somewhere. Unprepared, unannounced, you’ve got fly over the weekend to do something that is not part of your job, and you don’t want to do it because you do not work on weekends, or weekends are family time as far as you’re concerned. So, you have a personal policy in place about how you’d like to spend your weekends, and you are able to better communicate your refusal based on that stance.

What usually happens when people ask you for something that you want to say no to is that we grasp for the first available excuse. And excuses are much less effective than policies. Policies reflect a long-standing stance which stem from something that’s important to you, something that you value. And when you use a policy, you are more likely to get compliance than if you use an excuse.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. You say compliance, as in the requestor just overrides you.

Vanessa Patrick
No, the requestor will either push back or they will respect your refusal. Those are the two main options. So, when someone asks you something, they typically expect a yes. It is societally expected that an invitation, an ask, a favor, is going to garner a yes response. There’s a ton of research that shows that we say yes to the most ridiculous requests because we are socialized and hardwired to help.

We are conditioned to be cooperative. We are psychologically poised in many ways to say yes than to say no. And because of that psychological makeup and that socialization, when we say no, we often get pushback from the asker.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing on so many levels. One, I’m thinking that’s kind of absurd that that’s in us humans. Two, I’m thinking I guess there’s probably a set of contexts that make that true versus not true. So, the majority of my emails are pitches from publicists and authors, etc. to want to be on my podcast, maybe the plurality of emails.

And so, I would imagine they don’t really expect that I will say yes because, in their own experience of any sort of recruiting, sales, business development activity, the majority of people say no. And I find it a little funny when they say, “I’m just making sure you got my email. Like, this is the weirdest thing that you didn’t reply.”

Like, in some ways, I find that a little bit irksome because there seems to be, like, almost dishonesty there. It’s, like, “You don’t really expect a response. Of course, you would like one.” So, I guess that’s what I’m thinking. Like, in the context of a stranger who’s asking hundreds of thousands of people the same thing via an impersonal platform, email, I don’t imagine they expect a yes. But you tell me, maybe they really do.

Vanessa Patrick
You hit the nail on the head in terms of the impersonal platform. So, we are 34 times more likely to say yes to a face-to-face request.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-four.

Vanessa Patrick
So, email is actually the best way to say no to people because it’s impersonal, as you just mentioned. You take away that face-to-face concern. I also think that if you think about the studies that people have done, like Vanessa Bohns, for example. She has people ask people to do the craziest things: defile library books, “Can I play in your backyard?” “Can you mail this for me?” completely crazy things, and she finds that people are much more likely to say yes, even to those completely ridiculous requests than say no.

And there’s a lot of evidence out there that people do struggle with saying no, and so it’s just easier to say yes. And so, I talk about it in terms of the fact that society favors the asker. So, if you’re the asker, you get to ask and then everybody feels really terrible about saying no. But we have to remember that an ask is just an ask. We don’t have to say yes to every ask that comes our way. And for a lot of people, they struggle with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-four times. Well, now I’m intrigued. Do we know where phone calls stack up, because in a way it’s live and real time, but there’s not a face? So, I imagine it’d be in the middle. Do you have the numbers on that?

Vanessa Patrick
No, I do not. But I’d imagine that it’s somewhere in between the face-to-face and the email. But I think, because it’s technology-mediated, it becomes easier to say no even on a phone call compared to a face-to-face request.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s powerful right there.

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah. So, one of the things that I mentioned is the importance of putting technology in between you and the asker when it becomes a very difficult ask, or when you’re dealing with a very pushy asker. Convert the conversation to a digital medium or put some technology between you. It’s easier to text, it’s easier to phone, a phone call converted to an email than to handle people face to face.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m reminded of I’ve got a buddy who’s a priest. He tells me that after church, there’s crowds of people, and they shake hands and say hello. Well, it’s a good way for people to have a little bit of a relationship exchange, community-building there. And he said that he was inundated with requests, like, “Oh, you should come over have dinner. We should hang out in this way or that way.” And he used to say yes all the time, immediately, and schedule, he’s like, “Oh, my gosh, my calendar is out of control.”

And so, he decided his new policy was, when they make an invitation, assuming he doesn’t want to immediately do it, he says, “You know, that sounds great. Please call the office on Monday and talk to Debra, or whomever, and she owns my calendar, and she’ll find a good time for us.” And he said, invariably, like way over 90%, he told me, of the incoming requests just disappear because it’s quite a difference to say, “Hey, I had this fun idea. Why the heck not?” versus, “Okay, I’m going to actually have to remember to put into my calendar, to call the administrative assistant, and get that sorted out.”

So, I thought that was brilliant in that you’re continuing to show interest and it’s not blowing them off.

Vanessa Patrick
I think your priest friend has got two principles right in the book, that I talk about in the book. Never say yes in the moment, like always buy time. And second is, if you have the opportunity to delegate to someone, and that person says no on your behalf, it’s a win. So, Debra from the office, if she says no to the person, it’s not going to feel as bad as when your friend has to say no.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And just the dramatic reduction in terms of folks who even do that is huge.

Vanessa Patrick
Will follow up, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, now, tell me, when it comes to the rules, I don’t know who, if this is from a TV show or a movie somewhere, but someone was hiring a nanny or a housekeeper, and they just laid it like, “I don’t do dishes, I don’t do laundry, I don’t do cooking, I don’t do diapers.” And it’s sort of like, “Okay. Well, this isn’t going to work, is it?”

And so, I think that emotional side of us, in terms of a rule, that sounds like, “Ooh, that sounds awesome.” Like, you can communicate a rule, you have some extra conviction, they understand not to ask again, so that has a lot going for it. But it can feel a little more scary, “I’m not just saying no once. I’m saying no to a potential hundreds of future requests in one fell swoop.” And that’s even scarier to say, Vanessa, so how do you think about the articulation of rules?

Vanessa Patrick
So, these rules are just simple rules that you set up for yourself to increase things like your productivity, to enhance the quality of your decision-making, to make your relationships better, to advance yourself in your career. These are things that all of us care about in working life, and these are all the things that we need to think about, setting small rules.

It is not this rule, like the nanny you were talking about, not to do the job that you were hired to do. It’s about doing the job the best possible way you can. And sometimes you have to protect your time to be able to do that job. I think one of the things that we see in the workplace right now is the tyranny of the number of meetings that you’re dragged into. You don’t actually have time to do what you were hired to do.

And so, sometimes just setting up rules around when you meet and when you work, or when you can take some time to do some deep work that needs to be done and protect that time, these are simple rules that just enhance your productivity and actually make you a more valuable member of the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Now that sounds awesome. Do you actually articulate some of that stuff if you were to, say, have this conversation with a manager?

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah. So, think about what your priorities are, what the job is, what do you need to do? So, one of the conceptualizations that I really love that I use in the book is this notion of, “What is good work?” And Howard Gardner from Harvard University, he’s an educational psychologist, comes up with a lovely definition of what is good work, good work that is meaningful.

Good work has three main dimensions, kind of like a DNA strand. It is excellent, it is emotional or engaging, and it is ethical. And so, when we do good work, we are essentially devoting ourselves to work that brings out the best of us, that leverages our strengths, that showcases what we bring to the table. When we do good work, it is emotionally gratifying. It feels good to do. We feel as if we’ve achieved something meaningful. And, finally, is that it does good, like it has an ethical dimension. It makes the world better. You leave the place better than you found it.

And so, when you think about work, and when we think about work, if we can think about this framework of work, and then try and achieve on a daily basis that sort of quality work, and in order to do that, we do need to set up these personal policies that facilitate that sort of activity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, to tackle the fears head on, if we fear that, “Oh, I’m going to be perceived as not a team player, or I’m lazy, I’m not manager or executive material because I’m not truly committed with my rules and my no’s,” do you have an answer, or even better, some real data on what it’s like on the receiving end?

Vanessa Patrick
So, this is the concern for reputation. So, there are two main concerns for why we say yes when we want to say no. One is we want to be liked. So, one is a concern for relationships, and the other is a concern for reputation. The concern for relationships deals with the need to be liked, to be included in a social group, to have friends, to be part of something.

And our reputation is the other thing that we’re really concerned about, the notion that we want to be seen as competent, on the ball, a team player. Reputation is, essentially, what people say about us when we leave the room, and we want people to say good things.

And so, these are two key drivers for why we say yes when we want to say no. So, your point about, “Oh, I’m concerned about these things that people will say,” is the reputation concern. And I always say, of course, you should take on things that you can handle and that you can fit into your schedule, but I call it the house of cards trap.

Essentially, if you think about every ask that comes your way, and if your goal is to be a team player and to be seen as competent, and you just keep saying yes to that stuff, you’re essentially adding more and more cards to an increasingly fragile house of cards that is going to collapse if you do not, at some point, essentially.

And so, thinking about your reputation in the short term, like, “If I say yes right now, they will like me, they will think I’m competent,” as opposed to thinking about your reputation in the long term. If you keep taking more stuff, you’re going to drop the ball, you’re not going to be able to deliver, you’re not going to be able to deliver quality.

And so, I always argue, “Is it better to say no up front, because it is just something that is not in your wheelhouse or doesn’t leverage your strengths, or you simply just don’t have the time to do it? Say no now or drop the ball later, and have your reputation take a hit, or a bigger hit perhaps.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you give us some example articulations of the no that is artful and it’s an empowered refusal? And I say, “Hey, Vanessa, I would love it if you could stay late. We got this really big client presentation coming up on Friday, and I think we’re behind, and there’s really a lot at stake. So, could you stick it out for a few hours?”

Vanessa Patrick
That may not be the best time to say no.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Vanessa Patrick
So, one of the things I talk about is deciphering the ask, like, “How do you decipher to say yes to and what to say no to?” If it’s a high stakes, really important thing that you need to pitch in for, it may not be the best thing to say no to. But if someone asks you, “Hey, can you organize the retirement party because someone is retiring?” That is something that is not urgent, not terribly important, and anybody can do it. That may be the thing to be saying no to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good. Well, I was going to ask, in terms of we’ve got our rules, how do we think about bending rules and under what circumstances?

Vanessa Patrick
I think they are your rules and they are meant to be meant. But if you bend them every single day then it’s not a rule. You need to have rules, and you need to have contingencies, and you need to have a sense of, let’s say, “I never work in the evenings because 6:00 to 8:00 is family time.” Assume that that’s my rule. But as you just said, if someone says, “Hey, Vanessa, can you pitch in because we have this really important thing, and can you make an exception and come just this Thursday evening because Friday is this big deadline?” By all means, you can break your own rule if you choose to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you recommend articulating that in a special way?

Vanessa Patrick
So, I often talk about saying things in terms of using very absolute words, “I don’t,” “I always,” “I never,” “It’s my policy.” These are words that communicate that you are speaking from a place of power, so they are empowered language. They also reflect your stance on the matter. So, “I don’t,” “I never.” So, one of the research studies that we did was compared words like, “I don’t” versus “I can’t.”

So, whenever you frame a refusal, you can always say, “I’m really sorry, I can’t do this,” or, “I’m sorry, I don’t do this.” So, let’s imagine you’re at a party and someone is offering you chocolate cake. You can say, “I’m sorry I can’t eat the chocolate cake.” It comes across as disempowered and you’re most likely going to get someone saying, “Why not? It’s just a piece of cake. Go ahead and eat it.” You’re going to get the pushback.

Imagine that you say, “I’m sorry, I don’t eat chocolate cake.” No one pushes back. This is your rule, “I’m not a chocolate cake-eating person.” It implicates the identity. And using language that implicates the identity is less likely to get pushback.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. It takes an extra level of courage and curiosity to dig into that. And I think most people probably wouldn’t feel comfortable saying, “Well, why not?” but rather is just, like, it’s almost you have to do more mental work to think about how I engage that conversation further if I were going to, such as, “Oh, that’s interesting. What led you to adopt this policy?”

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah, and most often you don’t get that conversation continuing. Most people accept a refusal when it stems from your identity because that’s who you are, that’s the kind of person you are, right?

Pete Mockaitis
I remember when I was at a party, and someone said, it was a husband and wife, and she said, “Oh, Ricky doesn’t drink anymore.” And so, I’m so full of curiosity, I was like, “Well, now I really want to know what happened with Ricky’s historical drinking.” It’s like, “I’m not going to.” I just met the dude and he’s friendly and cool. I hope we get to maybe have that conversation later. But not the time or the place for me to dig into his history of his relationship with alcohol, though I’m so curious now.

All right. So, I hope Ricky is doing great. Now, you also recommend that we frame our refusal using more nouns instead of verbs. What’s the thinking here?

Vanessa Patrick
So, research shows that nouns, again, implicate your identity. When you say, “I am a writer,” “I am a teacher,” “I am a mom,” these are nouns. They describe your stable stance. Whereas, verbs, like, “I write,” “I teach,” lots of people write, lots of people teach, you are just one of them. And so, verbs, essentially, describe an activity, whereas nouns describe who you are, again, implicating the identity.

And so, if you have to talk about yourself, and there’s research that shows that when we talk about ourselves in terms of nouns, we come across as more authentic and, like, stable individuals who can communicate what they do. And so, there’s some work that talks about how we should talk about these things in our resumes and in job interviews by using more nouns than verbs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now, Vanessa, we didn’t quite do a demo because you wisely mentioned, “Maybe this is not the time to say no,” but now let’s say it is the time to say no, and I’m saying, “Hey, Vanessa, could you pick up my drycleaning this afternoon? It looks like I’m not going to be able to make it there after all.”

Vanessa Patrick
“I’m sorry, I go to the gym every afternoon between 3:00 and 5:00.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and that’s that. There’s no elaboration.

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah, know it’s a complete sentence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. Let’s try again. “Vanessa, could you scan these documents and email them to me?”

Vanessa Patrick
“I believe we have someone who does those kinds of things. I’m not the person.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this is fun. I can do this for a while.

Vanessa Patrick
Are you just going to do this all day?

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe. Maybe. I don’t know. Okay. “Vanessa, could you look over this proposal and make sure I didn’t make any silly mistakes?”

Vanessa Patrick
“Sure, absolutely. I’m really good at looking at proposals, and it leverages my unique strength, and I’m happy to strengthen your proposal for you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s a yes, and that’s cool?

Vanessa Patrick
Yeah. And so, when you’re talking about this, the deciphering the asks, it’s really, I come up with this framework where you can use this mental model to help you to figure out what you say yes to and what you say no to. So, all the things you asked me, I, essentially, looked at them through that framework, and said, “What is the cost to me and what is the benefit to the other person?”

So, there are some things that are low cost to me but huge benefits to you. Like, looking over a two-page proposal and scanning it and making it better, that’s my strength. I’m good at it. I can make it better. I know it’s not a huge deal. I’m going to say yes because it’ll benefit you. But this, “Pick up my drycleaning,” and, “Check the weather and do this rubbish,” that is stuff, no, you shouldn’t be asking anyone to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do we know, from the person who makes a request, and they received a no done artfully, do we have a sense in terms of their thought about you, like the relationship and the liking that we’re worried about that’s at risk? To what extent is that a boogeyman of our minds versus that’s real?

Vanessa Patrick
I think we exaggerate the impact that our no’s will have on others. Most often, when you say no to somebody, they simply go ahead and ask the next person. If it’s something that anyone can do, they just go down the list. We do that ourselves. If someone says no to us about something, we just find somebody else to do it. You don’t really think that much about it.

If it’s something that is meaningful and important to you, then, by all means, think about taking it on after you’ve asked the necessary questions, “Is it important? When does it need to get done? How can I contribute? Why did you ask me? Is there something unique that I can do?” By asking questions, we can figure out what to say yes to.

So, I call these the hero’s journey asks. The hero’s journey asks are the ones that are high effort on our part but hugely beneficial to others. And so, we should say yes to those hero’s journey asks because those hero’s journey asks is what makes work life meaningful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Vanessa, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Vanessa Patrick
I have this concept in the book that most people seem to like, which is called the walnut trees.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Vanessa Patrick
And so, there are some people, despite your artful no, will not take no for an answer. And so, we need to figure out how to deal with these pushy askers. And in my book, I talk about these pushy askers as walnut trees. There are several descriptors of these kind of people in the literature – pushy people, bullies, etc. – but I choose to call them walnut trees, and I can tell you why.

A walnut tree is, essentially, this big tree with a luxuriant canopy, and it has a root system that spreads out 50 feet. But what it does is that it exudes in the soil a chemical called juglone and it stems the growth of everything around them, and so that’s why I call it that. It’s easier to deal with people when you can recognize walnut tree behavior, and say, “Oh, that’s walnut tree behavior,” when someone is being an exceptionally pushy asker. And there are strategies that you can develop to deal with walnut trees when they are being pushy, including, like we talked about, bringing in technology, delegating the ask, etc.

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

Vanessa Patrick
My favorite quote, and one I say to myself almost every day, is, “Be in demand. Stay in control.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Vanessa Patrick
I read a lot, so it’s hard to choose. But my favorite book of recent time has been Lessons in Chemistry.

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

Vanessa Patrick
QuillBot.

Pete Mockaitis
And what does that do?

Vanessa Patrick
It’s an AI-writing tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Vanessa Patrick
I wake up every morning at 5:15 so that I have some alone time. I thrive on the solitude of the morning and the serenity of the morning.

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

Vanessa Patrick
“It goes the way you say.”

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

Vanessa Patrick
I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Twitter @vpatrick23, and on Instagram vanpat23, and my website is VanessaPatrick.net.

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

Vanessa Patrick
Yes, don’t be afraid to say no. Invest in the art of empowered refusal and say no to the things that don’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Vanessa, this has been a treat. Thank you and I wish you much luck and fun in all of your refusals.

Vanessa Patrick
Thank you. You, too.

Jun 15
0

874: The Five Questions that Build the Best Possible Relationships with Michael Bungay Stanier

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Michael Bungay Stanier reveals the simple secret to forging better relationships at work and in life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key factor that builds and ruins relationships
  2. The way to mend damaged relationships
  3. The simple question that helps maintain your relationships

About Michael

Michael Bungay Stanier helps people know they’re awesome and they’re doing great. He’s best known for The Coaching Habit, the best-selling coaching book of the century and already recognized as a classic. His new book, How to Work with (Almost) Anyone, does what it says on the label. Michael was a Rhodes scholar and dabbles in the ukulele. He’s Australian, and lives in Toronto, Canada.

Resources Mentioned

Michael Bungay Stanier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Hey, I’m grateful that you’ve got a short memory and you keep inviting me back. I am thrilled to be back. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Well, you don’t give yourself enough credit. You just keep generating more groundbreaking intellectual insights that the world must hear.

Michael Bungay Stanier
You know, I do better when the expectations are lowered at the start of the conversation rather than raised, but I’ll do what I can to kind of rise to the challenge. But, thanks for saying that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s try again. Well, you threw together some words, half of it is probably AI but let’s see if we can muddle through this.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thank you. That’s perfect. I can do that. I can crush that.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it. Well, so you’ve always got a lot of fun stories. I’m curious to hear the last year, two or three, any really cool coaching moments, or relationships transformed, or highlights for you?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Oh, man. Well, the biggest one for me, and that plays a role in this new book, was, and this is only going to go deep and maybe slightly really dark really quickly, but my dad died a couple of years ago. And I had flown back to Australia, I was living in the house with mom and dad, and dad had made it out of the hospital, and he had about two months living at home before he finally died.

And it was a miserable stressful time for everybody, mom and dad in particular, and they’d been a really good couple for 55 years, like they’re really tight, they loved each other, they supported each other, they were just like a role model in terms of how you wanted a married couple to be. And they were kind of a bit snippy with each other.

Dad’s stuck in a bed, he can’t do the stuff he normally does, he’s a little bit, “Hey, Rosie, get me this,” “Hey, Rosie, can I have that, please?” and mom was like, A, stressed that her life partner was dying, B, stressed a bit, going to being the servant, all of a sudden, in the household, in a household where chores had always been shared pretty equally.

And I kind of plucked up my courage and suggested that they have a conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in the remaining weeks or months of dad’s life together because I really didn’t want, mom in particular, to go, “I wasn’t the best version I could be in a stressful time in the last time I have with my husband.”

And so, we facilitated this conversation, mom was like, “This sounds like the worst thing on earth.” My dad was like, “This sounds bad but we should give it a go,” and we just had that conversation about how they wanted to be with each other in this final time. And they did so well, I was so proud of them and thrilled for them, and it just took a little bit of an edge off those last days together.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that really is beautiful. And did your mom talk to you about that conversation later?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, when I first suggested it, my mom was like, “Absolutely not. That sounds terrible.” And then the third time I suggested it, she’s like, “Well, maybe but do I have to be there?” And I’m like, “I think you do have to be there.” And we have talked about it since then in terms of just talking through those last days and talking about my memory of my dad, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that really is beautiful in terms of just positioning the richness, the value, all that is really wrapped up in our relationships and the conversations we have with those people. It’s big. And it does take some courage to have a conversation about your conversations, and yet really cool things are on the other side of them.

Michael Bungay Stanier
That’s right. As I’ve been kind of teaching some of the content from this book, I often ask a group, “Think of a really miserable working relationship you’ve had, or even just one that wasn’t terrible but just was kind of diminishing in a way, and think of what was said and done, and then think of the impact on you.” And then when you see what people put in the chat, it’s like, “I felt belittled. I felt shrunk. I lost my courage. I lost my sense of self. I did poor work.”

And then when you flip it, and you go, “Think of a really great working relationship you had, you might remember that, remember that back and forth, now what was the impact on you?” It’s like, “I feel braver. I feel more courageous. I did better work. I took bigger risks. I kind of expanded into the next version of who I am so I grew and I learned about myself.” And it’s like such a determinant of your work success and happiness in terms of the health of your working relationships.

But so often, we just cross our fingers and leave it to chance and hope for the best because it is an unusual and somewhat courageous conversation to say, “Hey, Pete, before we start working on the stuff, I think you and I have a conversation about how we do this best together so that we can not screw each other up and we can bring out the best in each other at the same time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m a huge believer in this, and this has come up, I think, with my conversation with Mary Abbajay about how to manage your manager. She had a book about managing up, which is excellent. And she said that she surveyed folks, her audiences, and she said less than 1% of folks really have such a conversation.

And so, when I spread the gospel at different trainings and events that I’ve been at, and folks are like, “Oh, no, that seems kind of weird.” It’s like that’s how their fear gets articulated or manifests, “Oh, that just seems sort of weird. I don’t know about that,” as opposed to, “Pete, I’m terrified of engaging in those words.” They don’t say that, they’re like, “Oh, it just seems weird.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it is a bit weird. At least, if not weird, it’s unusual. And your statistics point to it, less than 1%. It’s a rare thing somebody says, “Let’s talk about how we work together before we talk about what we work on.” But I love the point you’re making, I hope people heard that, which is, this isn’t just for the people you manage and lead.

It’s for the working relationships, so you can do that with your best customers, and you can do that actually with your prospects, and you can do that with your colleagues you have to collaborate with, and you can do it with your boss. So, there’s all sorts of ways that you can enrich and strengthen and make safe and vital and repairable these key working relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the book is called How to Work with (Almost) Anyone: Five Questions for Building the Best Possible Relationships. As you were putting this together and researching it, did you have any surprising moments of discovery along the way?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Part of it was trying to figure out what the goal was in these conversations, and it felt helpful to realize that it wasn’t to create the best working relationship but the best possible working relationship. If you think of your working relationships you have, it’ll be a Bell curve. You have a few at one end where you’re like, “I love this person. I love how we work together, and it’s just thrilling.” And you have a few at the other end where you’re like, “This is sand in the gears. This is kind of a miserable experience kind of working through it.”

And it’s not always that because they’re nuts or a psycho or whatever. It’s just that sometimes you just can’t figure it out with the other person. And then there’s a bunch of people in the middle where it’s good enough, and it’s solid, and it’s great sometimes, but less than great some other times. And each one of those different categories has the potential to be better than it is now, make the bad ones trending towards good or less bad, make the ones in the middle better than just average, and make the ones at the top end sustainable so that they stay sparkly and powerful as long as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, then that’s the notion of a best possible relationship, I suppose, is knowing that not every relationship is going to feel magical no matter what conversation you have but there is untapped potential that we can get after with some of these questions. So, shall we jump right into the questions, or how would you frame how we start getting into such a conversation where we engage these questions?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I want to get into that conversation and those questions but maybe a moment just to talk about the three attributes of a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, I’ve mentioned them but let me say them again. It should be safe and it should be vital and should be repairable. I think one of the interesting things that I’ve learned is these aren’t A + B + C, they’re not additive. They’re actually in a dance with each other. They’re actually in tension with each other. The place to start is safe. And everybody who’s listening to this podcast will have talked about it and heard about psychological safety as a kind of key attribute for success.

Google Oxygen and Google Aristotle, all those projects alike, it’s safety that allows people to grow. Amy Edmondson, kind of the OG in this area, kind of championing and helping us understand what psychological safety means. And that is, a sense, to kind of move away from fear, and say, “I say what I need to say. I can show up as who I am without that fear.”

Pete Mockaitis
It’s kind of ironic that Amy Edmondson is researching and teaching about safety and yet she’s a gangster.

Michael Bungay Stanier
I hadn’t thought of that.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I love the verbiage. I’m just joshing with you. We had her on the show, she’s great, and that’s fair. It’s a fair assessment. You could call her the grandfather/grandmother as well but OG hits me in my Danville, Illinois roots.

Michael Bungay Stanier
There we go. But she blurbed the book, and I said, “Amy, can I call you the OG of psychological safety?” And she’s like, “I don’t know what that means.” I’m like, “I’m not sure what that means. I think it means original gangster. I think that’s what it means.” Then she’s like, “Maybe you can call me Harvard Business professor.” And I’m like, “Sure. Okay, we’ll go with that. I totally get that.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Michael Bungay Stanier
But in balance with safety is vitality. Every relationship needs to be vital. And I like the kind of play on the words there, Pete. Vital meaning essential, but vital also meaning alive. And there’s a way that you want a relationship to push, and provoke, and challenge, and take you to the edge of your competence and your confidence, and what you can, and who you are so that you can…you want it to be fun and exciting.

And I think safe and vital are often in this kind of play with each other. There’s a way that you can make a relationship so safe that, actually, it loses some of its sparkle. There’s a way that you can make it so dangerous that it becomes unsafe. So, with whoever it is you’re talking to, you’re trying to find the right balance between safe and vital for you and that other person.

And then the third element is repairable. And as part of writing the book and reading around the book, I was reading people like Esther Perel, and Terry Real, and Dan Siegel, and John Gottman, some of the really big names who’ve written about the dynamics of marriage and romantic relationships. And one of the recurring themes across all of their work is how bad we all are at repairing damaged relationships.

Mostly, “Ah, I’ll pretend it didn’t happen,” or, “I’ll be sad and sulk about it,” or hopefully the fabric will just repair itself. But actually, it’s rare that people more actively say, “How do we fix this thing that got dented or cracked or banged up in some way?” But you can bet that any working relationship is going to go off the rails at some stage. And the ability to say, “How do we get it back on the rails? How do we get back to where we were before?” is a really powerful one, and the key contribution to a best possible relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what are some common best and worst practices in the realms of safety, vitality, and repairability?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Good question. In some ways, that question takes me back to my roots, and it makes me think about questions, and it makes me think about not asking questions. I think that the act of remaining uncurious is one of the ways that damages safety and vitality. If you have a certainty about how right you are, how your point of view is all you need, how you should be the one who solves it, fixes it, comes up with the idea, explains a problem, sets the team going, there’s a way that that is a diminishing act for the people around you.

And I think part of one of the other things that’s diminishing or can detract from vitality is… it is an inability to see them for who they are and be curious about who they are. The question I suspect that could be most powerful for unlocking a sense of what vitality might mean is, “What do you want?” “What do you want?” is one way of coming at “Who are you? Who are you over there?”

Human beings are these messy, complicated, amazing, obscure, unpredictable people who we have to work with. And so, asking, “What’s your best? What makes you alive? Who are you? What do you want?” you’re using curiosity as a way of unlocking their humanity, the person in front of you. And when you unlock their humanity, when you see them more completely, you have a better chance of both creating safety and vitality.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Okay. So, when it comes to a relationship being repairable, I could think it’d probably be good to say, “I apologize” from time to time when you screw up, and to maybe just acknowledge and not ignore, or hope, or pretend that things are just going to get all better. Any other pro tips in that repairable world?

Michael Bungay Stanier
The fifth question of the keystone conversation, the fifth and final question, is “How will we fix it when it goes wrong?” because it will go wrong. And there’s something really powerful about having a conversation about “How will we get around to fix this even before anything bad has happened?” And what’s interesting is less, actually, the answers to the question. What’s powerful is a recognition that, at some stage, something is going to go wrong, something is going to be dented, somebody is going to be disappointed. How will we go about fixing that?

And if you and I were having a conversation, like, “Okay, Pete, you and I are working together. We’re going to do a joint podcast. It’s going to be amazing. You’re the lead guy because you’re smart and you’re handsome and you’ve got a voice for radio. I’m the tall guy because I’m taller than you. I’ll change the lightbulbs and make the lighting work but we’re going to work together.”

And if I go, “All right. Look, how will we screw this up?” And you’ll go, “I’ve worked with people like you, here’s where it goes wrong, and here’s what I do, and here’s what you do.” And I’m like, “I get that.” And I’ll go, “Pete, when I’ve worked with people like you, prima donnas behind the mic, let me tell you how it all goes wrong.” And you’re like, “Okay, I get that.”

I’m like, “Okay. So, how do we fix that?” And I might say, “Look, for me, if you just come up and say, ‘Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry,’ that’s it. That’s all I need. I don’t need an explanation. I don’t need to work it through. I don’t need to workshop it. I just need that.” With a former boss of mine, we agreed that we’d have what we call an off-your-chest session.

So, if I came up to Dave because he’d done something annoying, I’d say, “Dave, I’ve just got I need to have it off my chest with you,” and I just get a chance to rant a bit. And we both knew that his job was to sit there and listen. He didn’t even have to apologize particularly. He didn’t have to fix it or justify. He just had to listen to it. And it’s the negotiation to say, “How will we try and tackle this?” that makes repairability more likely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s really cool. All right. Well, so how do we kick off such a conversation in terms of I imagine we probably won’t just launch into some questions, like, “So, what’s your best”? Or, what do we do?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Well, I think it depends on who you’re talking to and what the setup is. I think you almost, in an early conversation with some people, you can kind of launch into it. And as an example, when I’m working with a vendor, somebody who’s supporting my small business in a way, in that first call, all I can say is, “Hey, I want to tell you about this project but before I tell you about the project and we get into too much detail about it, what is a good working relationship with somebody like me look like? Tell me what makes for a really good client. And then let me tell you what makes for a really good vendor.”

“And then, when we disappoint each other, and then how will you screw up this relationship? Now, let me tell you how I’ll screw up this relationship. So, how will we fix it?” So, there is a way that you can kind of plunge into it. I will you tell that when I do this with vendors, you can see their eyes widening a bit, they’re like, “What the…? What’s going on here?” But it allows me to have an interaction, a transaction, that has a chance of being the best version that it can be.

But if you’re working, say, with somebody on your team, you might choose to do this in a slightly different way. You might provide a little bit of setup. And I think it’s as simple as dropping them a note on Slack or email or something, and say, “Hey, I’d like a conversation about how we can best work together. Are you up for that?” It’s hard to say no to that invitation, because it’s like, “Yeah, I’d like to know how we can best work together as well.”

You can go deeper than that if you want. You could say, “Look, here are the five questions I think could be useful. I’m going to do some thinking about it in preparing my answer for that. If you have a chance to do that as well, so much the better.” Because it is true that everybody will have some first answers to the five questions. It’s also true that if you’ve thought about it, and you do some of the exercises that are in the book that will deepen and make more subtle and more nuance to your answers, that’s going to make for a better conversation as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let us discuss these five questions. Lay it on us.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the first one is the amplify question, and the way it’s written in the book is, “What’s your best?” I’ve been thinking about it since the book has been written and created, I’m like, “Not sure that’s exactly the best phrasing of it.” But I’ll tell you what’s behind it, Pete. I didn’t go want to go, “What do you do best?” I didn’t want to ask, “What are your strengths?” I wanted a more general holistic sense of, “Who are you at your best? Tell me what you look like when you’re in full flow, when you’re working to your strengths, when you’re loving the work, the way you contribute best? What does that look like?”

And one of the nuances within that is, for instance, teasing apart, “What are you good at?” versus “What are you fulfilled by?” Because there’s also a way that what happens in our organizational life is we collapse thinking that just because somebody is good at it, they must enjoy doing it. And as we all know, we’ve all got something in our kit bag where we’re like, “I’m pretty confident that, man, this task sucks the life out of me. I don’t want to do that.”

But that’s a really powerful start, “Let’s just talk about what’s our best. What’s your best, Pete? What’s my best, Michael?” Now, we know the best version of each other, the strengths that we should be living with.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And I’ve heard, I think we had Dan Cable, won some awards for a rock and scientific paper for a very simple intervention that involved just that, new employee sharing that, and then unlocked all kinds of things, like, “Wow, that’s a pretty good ROI for a little exchange of information.”

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. The second question after that is about your patterns and your preferences. It’s a steady question. Because, over the time, we’ve all built up the ways we work and the ways we like to work. And that is everything from the rhythm of our days, “I’m a morning person,” “I’m an afternoon person,” “I’m not a lunch person.” It’s the technology that we tend to default to, like, “I’m not a Slack person,” “I am a Slack person.” “Don’t ever leave me a voicemail.”

It’s right down to our kind of identity stuff around, “What’s my name? What’s not my name?” Like, “My name is Michael Bungay Stanier.” It’s a real mouthful. When I got married, I took my wife’s name, and it became Bungay Stanier. It doesn’t have a hyphen in it, which only complicates it. So, people are like, “Are you Michael Stanier? Are you MBS? Does that mean that you’re running Saudi Arabia?” I was like, “That’s a different MBS?” “Are you Mike?” I’m like, “I’m never Mike. There are only four people in the world that call me Mike, and it’s my brothers and their wives. That’s it.”

So, I’m best as Michael. And, in fact, before we hit record, you’re like, “What shall I call you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Even though we’ve interviewed before.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Exactly. And I really appreciated that because there was this little moment around, “What are your practices? And what are your preferences?” It’s like we’re having that conversation now to set this up. Because, just imagine, we’re halfway through this interview, you’ve been calling me Mike the whole time, I’m like, “Dude, this is a mic.”

Pete Mockaitis
M Sizzle.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What up?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, that I can go with. If you live with that, I’d be like, “This is the best interview I’ve ever had.” It’d be perfect. So, that’s the second one, which is like, let’s exchange information about how we best work so that we can just start spotting the stuff where we’re well-synced on that, and the stuff where, “Well, we’re kind of out of sync on this. How do we want to manage this between us?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s a steady question, “What are your practices and preferences, time of day, communication, technology?” All right, let’s hear the next.

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, the third and the fourth questions are kind of a matching pair – dark side and light side, and they’re called the good-day and the bad-day question. The good-day question is, “What can we learn from past successful relationships?” because here’s the thing to take away. Your past relationships are a predictor of your future relationships. Even though I know your past relationships are in a certain context with a certain person, with a certain thing going on, a lot of the patterns that play out will play out again, dollars to donuts.

So, the first thing to talk about is like, “What has been really great? What happened? What did you do? What did you say? What did you not do and not say? What did they do and say, and not do and not say? What were the things that made this flourish?” And then you answer it, and then they answer it, or vice versa, but what a gift to know that this is the context, this is the way to make this person really flourish. This is all the things that can contribute to something working really well.

And then the pairing question is the flipside of that, which is like, “What can we learn from past frustrating working relationships?” because we’ve all had those, and we’re like, “Man, that sucked.” And even though it would’ve felt personal and individual at that time, there are patterns there, there are stuff happening there that if you can explain it to the other person, they’re like, “We should avoid that. We should avoid doing as much of that as possible.”

And so, the more that you can communicate what’s happened in the past that is both amplifying the best of you and shutting you down and making your life miserable, the more you’re able to go, “Hey, why don’t we try and avoid what we don’t like, and amplify what we do like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then the repair question?

Michael Bungay Stanier
And then the repair question, which we’ve touched on already, but it’s like, “How will we fix this when things go wrong because things will go wrong?” It’s just there’s no way of sustaining a perfectly undented amazing working relationship forever. Somebody will screw up, somebody will break a promise, something will be misunderstood, something will be missed, some damage will happen. So, when there’s a tear in the fabric, what are we going to do about that?

And the power of that, and we said it before but I want to say it again, it gives you permission to keep talking about the health of the relationship. That’s where the magic happens with all of this. It’s the answers themselves but it’s, really, we can now keep saying, “Hey, we’re trying to build the best possible relationship here. How are we doing? Is this good enough? Do we want to tweak anything? Do we want to adjust anything? Do we need to say something that hasn’t yet been said? Do we need to clear the tables, reset, get ourselves back on track? What needs to be done?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I’d love now, could you share with us some of the more interesting answers to each of these questions that you’ve bumped into in your travels?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it’s everything, really. So, if the people who are listening to this think of their own answers, you can imagine people saying exactly the same as you, and exactly the opposite to you as well. So, when people say, “Michael, what’s your best? Who are you at your best?” I’m like, “You know what, I’m best when I’ve got something to create, I’ve got a way of trying to, what my friend Shannon says, to thingify stuff, to try and make     abstract ideas feel more real tangible and more real.

I’m at my best at designing experiences. I’m at my best at trying to understand what a reader or a participant is looking for, and trying to design to their real and actual needs. That’s some of the stuff that’s at my best. It’s like having ideas, I’m great at having ideas. That’s some of the best stuff for me.” But I’ll talk to my wife, who I work with for many years, and she’d say none of that.

She’d say I’m at my best when I get all my emails answered; I’m at my best where I get to have conversations with people and work with people one-to-one and kind of champion them and coach them on; I’m at my best where I get to kind of push back against authority and kind of point out that the emperor has no clothes. This is why we no longer work together because I’m the so-called emperor in this business, and I’m like, “You know what, I know you want your…you’re not necessarily for the man but I’m the man. You’ve got to be kind to me. We’re married.”

So, you get all sorts of different answers. That’s really the point, in some ways, which is it is very easy to assume you know what the answers are going to be. And when you assume you know what the answers are going to be, you’re kind of like, “I think I already know who you are,” and you actually stop that moment of engaging with them as a full human being, and you’re like, “Seeing you as I kind of I’ve boxed you in, giving you a Myers-Briggs label, and I’ve given you a this, and I’ve given you a that.”

And what this does is actually say, “Your answers are going to be different and unique. My answers are going to be different and unique. And then how we bring them together to build the best possible relationship is where things get really interesting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so now we’ve had the conversation, we’re doing this stuff, can you chat with us a little bit in terms of maintenance? How do we keep that rocking over the long haul?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, it’d be lovely if this was a one and done thing. You have the courage, you have the conversation, and you’re like, “We nailed it. Now we can just go about our business and, like, never need to bring this up again.” But, as with all living things, maintenance is required. So, there is a way to say, “How do I best stay present and active in this relationship? How do I stay open to doing what I can to keep it alive?”

And for us to name a single thing to do around this, Pete, it would be to ask the question, “Hey, how are we doing?” It’s to actually just move out of the hurly burly of all the everyday stuff that needs to get done, say, before we plunge into all of the tasks and all the to-do’s, because there’s always an endless amount of work to be done, let’s just have a conversation and check in on how we’re doing, “What’s working for you? Here’s what’s working for me. What’s not working for you? Here’s what’s not working for me. What’s one thing we can do differently to improve the way we’re working right now?”

And one of the questions, Pete, that I ask, and I think it’s particularly powerful if you happen to be the more senior person to hold more of the positional power of the conversation, the question is, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” I started a company 20 years ago, and about four years ago, stepped aside from that for Shannon to become the CEO of that company, but I still own it so she and I are in conversation all the time and kind of, I guess, calling me a board member would make it big hat, no cattle, but kind of that type of conversation.

And there’s a power dynamic between us because I’m the owner and she’s the CEO trying to run the company as best we can. And we ask each other that question all the time, “What needs to be said that hasn’t yet been said?” because it’s that little nudge give us permission to talk about the needly stuff, or the stuff that might feel too small, or the stuff where it’s felt, “I just haven’t found the moment to mention this awkward thing.” It really clears the space, and says, “Now is a chance to mention anything that you’ve got just lingering there so that we can make sure that we clean it all up, if that’s what needs to be done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Michael, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Michael Bungay Stanier
I’d say one of the unexpected benefits of doing this work and, perhaps, creating this book is that you deepen your own knowledge of yourself. It was very much about the relationship but, actually, there are exercises in the book. For each of the five questions, there’s three different exercises to help you deepen and enrich and make more subtle and more nuanced your answers to that.

And even if you’ve never had a best possible relationship, and you never had a keystone conversation, if you do the work and you come to understand in a more nuanced, more grounded way, “This is actually who I am. This is actually how I work. This is actually how I thrive. This is actually what shuts me down,” you’re better able to control and manage your work so that you can thrive and be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael Bungay Stanier
So, Pete, I might’ve mentioned this the last time we talked, and so forgive me for coming back, but it’s a favorite quote, so it’s still my favorite quote. There’s a poem by the poet Rilke, it’s called “The Man Watching,” that’s the English translation. And it tells a story of wrestling with an angel, so it’s an allusion or a nod to kind of the Bible, and Jacob wrestling with the angel.

And it talks about being ambitious for the bigger things, the bigger things that open us up and challenge us, and bring out the very best of us. And there’s a couple of lines in that poem which I think are extraordinary. I actually keep a little printout on my desk. And the quote is this, “Winning does not tempt him. His growth is to be the deeply defeated by ever-greater things.”

And this idea of hoping, I hope this for me, and I hope it for others, but I hope I still have the courage to seek ever-greater things and be deeply defeated by that. That’s what I’m hungry for.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
There’s a book I’m reading at the moment by Ed Young, and it is about how animals experience the world. And so, this is a little bit kind of a sideways angle into this, but we, as human beings, tend to assume that animals mostly experience the world kind of like we do. We tend to project the way we kind of embodied in this world onto all the animals around us. And nothing could be further from the truth.

As a very kind of slightly pedestrian way of talking about it, if you think of zebras, hey, however you want to pronounce that, in their black and white stripes, when you ask most people, “Why are zebras black and white striped?” they’ll go, “Well, it’s camouflage. It helps them blend in so they can hide from the predators.” But actually, lions have eyesight that is so shortsighted that they can’t see the stripes in a zebra. They just see it as a kind of a grey donkey. And, in fact, the stripes of a zebra are there to confuse a tsetse fly so that they don’t get bitten by these flies.

And as I’ve been reading this book in bed at night, every three pages I’ll say to my wife, “Oh, my God, did you know…?” “Oh, my God, did you know…?” as I keep hearing about how animals just experience so much more of the world than we do in a way that we can barely even imagine it. And why I bring it up is because, even on a human-to-human level, the person across the table from you experiences the world in a way that you don’t fully understand. And it’s so easy for us to just kind of think, “Ah, I know who they are, and I know how they’re feeling, and I know what they think because that’s who I am and how I feel and how I think.”

And this ability to stay curious about who is that other person, and how do they see and feel the world, opens up that ability for a more human-to-human connection and relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. And a favorite book?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Nonfiction, my favorite book is Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, as a writer about science, he has this ability to make the world feel miraculous because not only does he kind of make science less dusty, less boring, and kind of have the life gets sucked out of it in high school for us, but Bryson has this ability to say, “Look, this is amazing. And look what these people are discovering about our world.”

And then on a fiction level, there’s an Australian author called David Malouf. And one of his very first books is called An Imaginary Life. It tells a story of Ovid, the Roman poet, getting exiled to the shores of the Black Sea, as it is now. And it talks about him unlearning his urban ways and finding a new language and new way of being on the edge of civilization. And this integration between head, and heart, and the mind, and the senses is a really powerful journey.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
I love the pens from Baron Fig. I’ve got one on my desk here made out of copper, I’ve got one other one on my other desk over there where I write, and I’ve got one in the little leather sheet. And I was home recently in Australia, and my mom has basically hundreds of cheap pens shoved in jars and cups all over the house. I have three pens and I only have three pens, and I love them. But writing is such an integral part of how I interact with the world, not just writing my books but kind of checking in my journal most mornings, that having a pen that brings me joy is an essential tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Michael Bungay Stanier
Making my wife coffee in the morning. And we both like coffee. I have espresso, she has an oak milk flat white but it’s the joy of the taste and the smell of really good coffee, but also the joy of being of service to my wife.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
In The Coaching Habit book, I said, “Look, you can sum up this whole book as a haiku.” And I’m going to misquote it slightly, which is ironic, but it says something like, “Stay curious longer. Your advice is not as good as you think it is.” And “Your advice is not as good as you think it is,” is what I hear often from people.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
You can find more about me, in general, at my website MBS.works. And if you’re interested in the book, BestPossibleRelationship.com.

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

Michael Bungay Stanier
Yeah, it can feel a little overwhelming to listen to what I’ve been talking about with you, Pete, and go, “How do I do that with all these people?” But if you can be the person who reaches out, who says, “I’ll take responsibility for starting to build the best possible relationship,” that is a great gift you and to them, and to your organization. So, don’t try and do it all, but perhaps pick one person, one key relationship that matters, pick one question of the five, and start a conversation where it says, “How do we work better together?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and great conversation.

Michael Bungay Stanier
Thanks, Pete. You are a gracious host.

Jun 05
0

871: How to Lead More Powerfully by Being Human with Minette Norman

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Minette Norman says: "Leaders tend to believe that they need to have all the answers and that they cannot show emotion. It’s time to set aside these limiting beliefs."

Minette Norman discusses what it takes to foster psychological safety for your team.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret to high-performing and high-engagement teams
  2. How to increase psychological safety in five steps
  3. What you should stop doing

About Minette

Minette Norman is an author, speaker, and consultant focused on developing transformational leaders who create inclusive working environments. Before starting her own business, Minette spent three decades in the software industry.

Minette is the co-author of The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human. Her second book, The Boldly Inclusive Leader, will be published in August 2023.

Resources Mentioned

Minette Norman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Minette, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Minette Norman
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to talk about your book The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human. Could you maybe tell us, first of all, what does that term psychological safety mean?

Minette Norman
I’m happy to, and I just want to say, first of all, that it is not only my book. I co-wrote it with a wonderful co-author, Karolin Helbig, so it was a 50-50 collaboration, and I want to say that upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Minette Norman
Yeah. And let me explain psychological safety because it does sound like an academic geeky term, people throw it around a lot without always understanding what it means. So, I will ground it in the idea that it’s a belief or a feeling that, in a group setting, I am safe to share my idea, to ask a question if I don’t understand something, to disagree with someone else in the room, and to show up the way I want to show up, not trying to conform to the norms of the group, without fear that if I do any of those things, I’ll be rejected, I’ll be excluded, or I’ll be seen as that troublesome person.

So, it’s really this deep feeling that we have as parts of a group, whether we’re in or out, whether our ideas are welcome, or whether they’re not. And if we think about it, we probably have all experienced both having psychological safety, like being in a team where I speak up, or I can share my ideas, or I feel like myself, and times where we’ve been in groups where we sit back, and we’re very cautious, and we don’t speak up because we think we’re going to be shot down, or we’re going be embarrassed if we say something here. So, that’s basically what it means.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a sense for, in the United States workplace in 2023-ish, roughly what proportion of professionals generally have it and don’t?

Minette Norman
I don’t have a good metric to tell you so I’m just going to go on anecdotal evidence, which is that it’s less common than we would hope. So, I would guess that probably less than 50% of team environments would consider themselves to be really psychologically safe. And I’ll tell you, I worked 30 years in the tech industry, and I got interested in this work specifically because I would often be in meetings where even though I was pretty senior – when I left I was a VP of engineering at a large company – and I still would sit in meetings and go, “Do I dare speak? Do I not? I have something to say but I don’t think it’s welcome here.”

So, my own experience, and the experience of so many people I worked with, was that they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up, or they didn’t feel that they could be less than perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talked about being yourself, I think it’s interesting in terms of just, like, the political climate. It seems like in most mixed rooms, if you were to share a deeply held belief that was on one side or the other of the political continuum, there’s a good chance that won’t go so well for you. So, is that sort of included within the umbrella of what counts as being psychologically safe?

Minette Norman
Well, you have to also know these situations you’re in. So, if you’re in a professional setting, our book is focused on the workplace so I’m not talking about the world at large, in general, about how to have a conversation about politics with your family, but in the workplace, let’s just ground us there for now. In the workplace.

You have to know what is maybe just going to be a taboo topic in the moment and not go there. Like, you’re not going to say if someone’s a Trump supporter and someone’s a Liberal, like, that’s probably not a good discussion in a team meeting about how the project is going. This is just going to go badly and devolve.

So, I think that if we are talking about work, there’s this idea of showing up as your authentic self, so maybe let’s go back to that. Now, people bring as much of themselves as they’re comfortable bringing to the workplace, and it doesn’t mean you show up with your ugly colors if you don’t want to show those ugly colors at work.

And it means that, also, when you think about women having to prove themselves in different ways than men, or people of color having only certain aspects of their experiences that they’re willing to show in the workplace, we all have to decide for ourselves what we’re willing to share. But what I’ll say is that, in a psychologically safe environment, you may be someone who has a very different viewpoint than the rest of the room, and you’ll know that that viewpoint is welcome. And I’m not talking politics, so we’re talking work. But let’s say, and this has happened in groups that I’d been a part of.

We have all agreed that this is going to be our strategy moving forward. And then you see someone in the corner of the room who’s got some odd body language. They’re kind of sitting back in their chair, their arms are crossed, and you think you’ve all agreed. And then you, as the leader, you can say, “Hey, Alice, over there in the corner, you’re looking like you’re not quite with us. Is there something else you want to add to this conversation?”

Depending on the level of safety in that room, Alice may say, “No, no, I’m all good,” even though you can tell that she’s not, or she may say, “I’m seeing a risk that we haven’t even talked about. What if we…” and then she can share her thought, and then, suddenly, we may have a whole different discussion, “No one has brought this other thought up. It’s really important for us to consider what Alice just contributed,” but she wasn’t quite sure her idea was welcome until she was called upon and invited to offer an alternate perspective.

That, unfortunately, doesn’t happen enough. And what I see happen a lot, this is both in teams I’ve been a part of and teams I’ve worked with, is that you have a meeting, for example, and everyone ostensibly agrees in the room, “Here’s our strategy, here’s what we’re going to do, here’s how we’re going to proceed.”

Then you leave the room, whether it’s a virtual room or a physical room, and then there are the side conversations, the meeting after the meeting where people say, “You know, that’s just never going to work,” or, “I totally disagree,” but they didn’t feel comfortable speaking up in the room. There’s something about those team dynamics that are not healthy enough to invite the dissent or to invite the “Have you thought about this?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. I guess as I’m thinking about this, it seems like the authentic-self component of the definition is, I guess, it seems to be, like, a higher bar in terms of that, or at least maybe I’m projecting my own viewpoint on things in terms of saying, “There’s a risk I don’t think we’ve considered,” seems perhaps less risky, to me, than sharing any number of, I don’t know, things about one’s self.

Like, I remember someone shared, let’s just say, any number of self-disclosure things in terms of, “I went to Burning Man,” or, “I went to an eight-day silent Jesuit prayer retreat,” or it’s like they’re sharing sort of their lived experiences associated with what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re passionate about, in bringing their authentic self. I guess, depending on the context and the group, it may seem more or less risky to reveal either a work concern or a personal bit of life.

Minette Norman
Yes, that is so true. And you only reveal, generally, someone has to go first also with revealing. And so, for example, if you’re a manager or a leader, if you reveal nothing of yourself, if you’re very guarded, and we talk about this in our book, like taking off that mask of perfection as a leader, if you come across as, “I am just this powerful leader. I know everything. I don’t have a life outside of work,” well, no one else in your organization is going to share who they are outside of work either, and it’s going to be this very stilted artificial environment where people just show sort of a mask of who they want to appear as.

But if you, in a position of any kind of leadership or authority, you show up in a more human way, and it doesn’t mean…this is where I think people get confused when we talk even about vulnerability. Like, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have to share your deepest darkest secrets, but to share something about who you are as a human being, or even that you’ve had failures in your life, you’ve had setbacks, you’ve had hardships, you have emotions, then you are more likely to invite others to do the same.

And that usually does have to start with someone who is either seen as a leader or as a dominant person in the group, that if they can let down their guard a little bit, then others will start to feel more comfortable doing the same. But if you feel marginalized, whether you feel you’re from an underrepresented group, and you just don’t feel like you’re a part of the in crowd, you are not going to be the first one to probably share who you are fully.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so psychological safety, we’ve defined it, we got a vibe for what that looks, sounds, feels like in practice, and it sure seems pleasant. I’d like to be in rooms where there’s psychological safety for folks. Can you unpack a little bit, associated with the performance, team effectiveness correlates to having versus not having psychological safety? Just how much of a difference does it make?

Minette Norman
Yeah, and there is a lot of research on it. I just want to unpack one word you said, which was it sounds pleasant. And I want to just say that it isn’t always, like, “Kumbaya, we all love each other all the time, and there’s never disagreement.” In a psychologically safe environment, you can have debate and dissent and it’s safe to do so. So, you may not always feel like it’s pleasant. It can be challenging, but it’s challenging in a constructive way. So, I just want to pick apart that word a little bit before I went further.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So, it might feel uncomfortable but it’s not, like, terrifying, like, “I’m unsafe. I’m an outcast. I should polish up my resume now based on how that conversation went down.”

Minette Norman
Exactly. It can be, like, sometimes when you have a debate, it can be very energizing because you feel, like, “Pete, I’m not attacking you, personally. I disagree with your idea but let’s make this better together.” That’s actually really energizing as opposed to, like, “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and you should be looking for a new job.” So, those are different ways to engage in dissent and disagreements.

So, yeah, it definitely enables you to have those hard conversations that may not always be comfortable but they’re more comfortable than they would be if we didn’t feel safe with one another. So, coming back to the question now of performance, there’s lots of research, and certainly Amy Edmondson, who has done decades of research on the topic, has uncovered that performance is directly correlated to having a higher degree of psychological safety.

And why that is is because, first of all, people openly discuss risk and failure so that they can learn from mistakes more rapidly rather than being doomed to repeat the same thing over and over. If there’s this stigma that we never talk about failure and we don’t talk about risk, what happens is that we go dark on that and we hide from one another when things have gone badly, and then we’ll probably just repeat those mistakes and failures over and over.

And her original research, which I don’t know if you’ve read her book, The Fearless Organization, but in her book, she shares that in her research in the medical field, that teams that had a higher degree of psychological safety had better patient outcomes because those medical teams were actually willing to talk about mistakes.

And, for example, in a medical setting, someone at a lower hierarchical level than, let’s say, the surgeon, could actually question, “I think that we’re risking something here. Like, is this the right medication? Is this the right dosage?” and they could question the surgeon or the doctor even if they were not at the same level. Whereas, in teams where there was sort this huge hierarchical difference between doctor and nurse, the nurse would never challenge, and, therefore, there would actually be worse patient outcomes.

In the world of other kinds of business, what we see with a higher level of psychological safety is we see more innovation. And why that is is because, in an environment where you’re trying to innovate and come up with new ideas, that will only happen if people are willing to share maybe a crazy idea, maybe an idea that seems like completely impossible. And that happens when people feel that, “My idea is welcome here. All ideas are welcome.”

And then we can refine them together, we can debate them, we can take the best nuggets from everyone’s thinking, and we can shape that into something that’s really greater than the sum of the parts. And that’s the way I see a psychologically safe team, is that if you can really tap into that genius that is there, because everyone has their own way of thinking and their own experiences, then you can get something that is bigger and better than the individuals in the room could do, but only if everyone’s ideas can come forth, and everyone’s voice is welcome, and everyone is really valued in a group.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, now could you perhaps share a story of a team that really upgraded their psychological safety and the cool things that came about from it?

Minette Norman
Yes. So, I want to talk about a team that had a high degree of psychological safety that I worked with early in my career before I knew that term, and then I want to talk about how I actually tried to do that in a team that I led. Is that okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Minette Norman
Okay. So, early in my career, I was in the software industry in Silicon Valley, and I was in a company, and we were a cross-functional team, there were about eight or ten of us on the team. We all had a different function, and we just somehow, without ever talking about these terms or anything, we listened to one another in a really important way, and that everyone’s voice was equally weighted.

And we took turns doing things like administrative work. Like, in a team meeting, we would take turns who took the notes, because when you take the notes, you don’t participate as much. We got to know each other. So, to your point about your authentic self, over time, because we worked together and we met daily, working on our project, we got to know our little quirks, we got to know who did what, and who was strong at this, and who was weak at this.

We even got to the point where we could joke with one another about our little quirks because we knew each other enough that it was okay. Like, humor can be very dangerous when you don’t trust someone, but it can be very bonding when you do. So, we were this amazing team, we put out the best product that division had ever put out ahead of schedule, customers loved it.

That was early in my career, and I didn’t know that that was, like, a particularly psychologically safe team until I’ve discovered the research on it much later. But then I was leading teams, and what I found in my group was that people all stayed in their lane. I had a bunch of leaders who reported to me, and they all had their area of responsibility, and they were kind of guarded with one another. And it took us actually bringing someone in, an outside facilitator, to start getting us to talk about what was it we could do together, how we were stronger together, how we could help each other.

And it really wasn’t until we shared more about ourselves, like our whole career journey, or what was important to us in our lives when we got to know each other, then we started to care about each other as individuals, and not just as, like, “Okay, this is the head of engineering, this is the head of agile practice, and this is the head of training.” Instead of our functions, we got to know each other as individuals and we knew, like, “Okay, so-and-so grew up here, and this is what he loved to do, and this is what’s important to him and his wife.” And somehow then we could have the more difficult conversations.

We could actually disagree with one another instead of this sort of false harmony, and we became a much stronger team together, but we had to consciously get to know each other as individuals instead of just, like, “Okay, we’re showing up at work, we’re our perfect selves at work, and we’re going to be a gelled team together.” It didn’t work until we actually invested the time to get to know each other on a different level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, within your playbook here, you mentioned five essential tools. Could you walk us through each one and tell us some best practices for using those effectively?

Minette Norman
Sure. So, yeah, we wanted our book to be, first of all, as short as possible because we know that business leaders are busy people, and, if you’re like me, you have lots of business books on your shelf that you haven’t finished. So, we wrote this book as short as possible, and we have these five plays, and underneath them are five moves, and they can each be used individually so you don’t have to read the book sequentially.

But the way we started our first play is called communicate courageously. And for a leader, like, the very first thing that we advise you to do as a leader, if you want to be a more courageous communicator, is to embrace the idea that you don’t know everything, and to invite other people to help you with your thinking.

So, if you get up, for example, and you give a presentation, a powerful question you can ask is, “What am I missing?” because when you do that, what you’re doing is you’re inviting others to add on, or even to dissent with something you’ve said, but you’re saying, “I am a human being like everybody else. I can’t possibly think of everything there is to think of. And I am inviting you to contribute.”

And then, of course, it’s really important that then you welcome other perspectives if someone does say, “Well, Minette, did you think about this? Like, this seems to contradict your thinking,” that you welcome the other viewpoints and that you get comfortable with, “I am imperfect. I don’t know everything.” So, that’s a starting point. And, of course, that was just one of five moves under communicate courageously, but I thought I would just start with that one. So, that’s the first.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that, yeah.

Minette Norman
“What am I missing?” “What have I not thought of?” That’s another way of saying that. You can find your own language, but I think what’s really interesting is I said that to a leader once, and they said, “Okay, I’m going to ask if that was clear.” And I said, “No, no, because if you say, ‘Was that clear?’ what happens is everyone says, ‘Hmm-mm, yeah that was very clear,” because you’re the leader in the room.”

It’s not so inviting as saying, “What am I missing?” Then you’re asking someone to contribute something back as opposed to a yes-no. It’s really hard to say to your leader, “No, you were completely unclear just now. I didn’t understand you.” So, that’s our first play.

Our second one is about listening because we really believe that listening is something that we think we all know how to do well as human beings. Just forget about even being a leader, or a manager, or anyone in the workplace. We think, as human beings, we all know how to listen, that it’s an innate skill. But what happens is there are so many things that get in the way of us listening to one another well, and it’s a critical skill for everyone because, first of all, as human beings, we need to be heard. We want to be heard. We want to be valued.

And if you are sitting in front of me and, first of all, you’re distracted by something else, I know you’re not listening. But what also happens, and this is so hard to overcome, is that we, instead of listening, we are preparing our response. So, as soon as you start talking, Pete, I’ve heard the first thing you said, and I’m already reflecting on what I’m going to say next. But instead, the powerful thing to do is to truly stay with the person and just, like, listen, maybe ask a clarifying question to make sure you really understood them, and then only when you’ve fully heard them, then you can say, “Okay, maybe I’ll share my perspective now,” instead of this need to just come up with our response right away.

And then this leads into the third play, which is managing our reaction. So, let’s say we’re listening, and you challenged me, you may say something to me that feels like you just disagreed with me, or you dissed me, or you made me feel stupid for something, and I get defensive. And that is, again, this is human biology, every human being will get defensive because this is our brain’s way of keeping us alive and safe, and we don’t differentiate between a physical threat, like I’m about to get hit by a bicycle on the road, and I jump back, and my boss just criticized me in public.

So, to our brains, what just happened then is a threat, and what happens then is that our amygdala fires and kicks in with the fight, flight, or freeze reaction to keep us safe. This doesn’t serve us well in a work setting because, when we get defensive, what do we usually do? We lash out at the other person, or we freeze because we just don’t know what to say, and we can actually practice. And we talk about this in book, we can practice. We can’t stop ourselves from getting defensive, but we can practice how we respond.

And one of the most powerful things we can do is to just pause. So, if someone says to you, “You know, that is just a ridiculous idea. That’s never going to work,” you’re about to get angry with them, and then, instead, you go, “Oh, okay. Let me take a moment, let me come back, and let me say, ‘Can you say more about that? I really want to understand what you just said.’” It wasn’t very long. Like, I just took a little breath, I took a little pause, in that moment, I calmed my brain, and I was able to continue in a more constructive way.

So, that, listening, not letting the defensiveness take over, and responding productively, I will tell you, this was something I had to work on so much in a professional setting, and I’ll probably be working on this the rest of my life, it’s a hard skill to learn, to remember to pause, but it can change your relationships at work in such a positive way because, instead of it being this battle of who’s right and who’s wrong, it becomes a collaborative conversation and a real dialogue.

So, that’s our third one, is managing our reactions, and becoming more self-aware that we all have emotions, we all have reactions, and in order to handle ourselves better in a business setting, no matter what level we are in the organization, we can benefit from greater self-awareness and greater regulation of our response. So, that’s the third play.

The fourth play in the book is about embracing risk and failure. And it’s one of the things that turns out to be so critical in psychological safety that we can openly discuss the failures. And I mentioned in the medical setting, but it’s really in any setting. And that one of the best ways you can do it is just to openly share your failures as a regular practice, like what went well. Of course, we want to learn from what went well, and we want to replicate as much as possible; what didn’t go well, what can we learn from that.

And to make that a regular thing, and thinking a little bit more like scientists. Scientists experiment and go in the lab, and they know they’re going to have a lot of failures before they’re going to have success. And if we can think more like a scientist in any setting, and realize that failure is going to help us get to the big breakthrough, and if we’re not having any failures, we’re probably not pushing the envelope enough, we’re probably not reaching as far as we could go with new ideas and innovation.

And so, de-stigmatizing the topic of failure, and not making it like a finger-pointing blame game of “Who did that?” and “Why was that wrong?” but instead, “What can we learn from this? What did we do that we want to do differently moving forward?” So, that’s a really big topic. And one of the things we share in the playbook is that it’s something that came out of the software industry, that teams that I worked with use, and it can be used in any setting, and it’s called the blameless postmortem.

And the idea is that, like after you’ve had a failure, like in the software industry it’s often an outage. Let’s say you’re on Zoom, and Zoom has a big worldwide outage. The Zoom team would go back, and they would have a blameless postmortem to say, “What led up to that? What happened? What can we do differently to prevent that going forward?”

That can be applied in any setting. And it’s a great way for team members to not point any fingers but instead say, “What are we collectively going to learn from this? And how are we going to be better going forward?” So, talking about failure is not something, honestly, that I was used to in the workplace, and it’s something that you have to get accustomed to doing and practicing. So, that’s our fourth play in the book.

And then the last one is actually a really big topic, and it’s the topic I focus most of my work on, it’s about inclusivity. So, we call the play using inclusive rituals. And what we’re talking about there is creating an inclusive culture, and psychological safety is truly the foundation for inclusion. So, if you think about there’s so much talk, of course, about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the world today and in the workplace. And it’s often focused on hiring a diverse workforce.

And if it stops at that, you will not actually, as an organization, benefit from the diversity that you have on your teams because, without a safe culture, and without an inclusive culture, people who feel different will just conform to the group norms, and they won’t even show up with any differences. They won’t share their opinions. They won’t share their experiences.

So, we introduced the idea of inclusive rituals, and we start with how you run your meetings because meetings is how…we spend so much of our time in meetings, and meetings are often a very much sort of an expression of organizational culture. Like, how we show up in meetings, often what you see is that in a meeting of eight or ten people, there are two people who do most of the talking, and the other six or eight people who sit back and are fairly quiet.

And if you want to truly create an inclusive environment, you have to find a way to bring in those other quiet voices, and there are different techniques for doing it. So, we share some examples of taking turns, like doing actually a very deliberate turn-taking rule, pointing someone as a facilitator, and taking turns playing that role so that you make sure you hear and invite all the voices. And then, very deliberately, inviting dissenting viewpoints as opposed to quickly converging on agreements which don’t usually lead to great outcomes or thinking things through all the way.

So, that’s the fifth, and each one of these five plays with their five moves could be as complex as you want it to be, or as simple as you want it to be, and we try to make it very simple in that we give you ideas of what to put into practice right away. And then we offer, for the reading material, if you want to go deeper on any of these topics, because they’re all quite big topics, but we want to make it accessible and actionable.

Like, if I want to run a more inclusive meeting tomorrow, I’m going to use this rule “No one speaks twice until everyone speaks once.” Try that out. See how it works. And if that works, then maybe the next thing is you ask someone to play devil’s advocate in the room, and then that brings dissent into the room.

So, just trying out things, experimenting with them, see what sticks, see what doesn’t, see how you want to refine things, and that’s how we really want people to think about this material, is that this is a toolkit for you to use one bit of it, some bits of it, and find what works for you but then keep consistently trying other things, and trying to go deeper on this work because it can transform how people feel about being at work every day, and how they contribute, and how much they feel they can do their best work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Okay, so we heard about the five plays. I guess I’m curious to hear the opposite in terms of common mistakes, things that many professionals do that are harmful to psychological safety. They might not even know they’re doing it, but it can have a really damaging impact. Are there a few don’ts you would also highlight for us?

Minette Norman
Yeah, that’s probably a very long list so I’ll come up with a few don’ts. So, let me just start with meetings since we were just on meetings, and then I’ll work my way backward. Don’t in meetings. You know one of the ones that can really destroy psychological safety is someone is speaking, and you interrupt them, and you don’t let them finish.

I’ve read research about this, I felt this myself as a woman in a very male-dominated field. Women are interrupted three times more frequently than men in business settings, and actually in all settings. So, when you interrupt people, they start to feel that their voice isn’t welcome, and then they go quieter because it’s not worth the effort.

So, pay attention to interruptions, and it may be a very, very inadvertent and accidental interruption. So, I just talked over you, Pete, and someone, either I or someone else can say, “Oh, I’m really sorry I interrupted you. Please finish your thought and then I’ll come back to my thought.” And just that really the small correction can make all the difference because then I’ve just said to you, “I do care what you say,” as opposed to just talking over you and continuing, and then we never come back to your thought, and you feel minimized, and you feel excluded, and you feel like you don’t count. So, that’s one.

I will say a really important one, and that is when someone asks you a challenging question, and especially if you’re anywhere in a management or leadership position, it is so important that you not shoot them down, and that’s when we get defensive. But I mentioned it before, it’s one of the worst most destructive things I’ve seen happen in a business context is that someone asked a question, and maybe it wasn’t even meant to be a challenging question.

They’re brave enough to ask a question, and the person at the front of the room who’s holding a Q&A session, for example, makes them feel stupid in the moment, like, “I’m not going to answer that question,” or, “That’s a ridiculous question.” I’ve heard an executive say that, “That’s a ridiculous question.”

So, this is what happens. First of all, the person feels humiliated in front of their peers. But, second of all, everyone else who witnessed that interaction suddenly feels like, “Oh, it’s not okay to ask this person questions. They’re not going to respond well.” So, you basically just shut down the people in the room. So, be really careful with your responses that may embarrass people, or that make people feel less than.

And if you get a question that you can’t answer, just say, “Oh, I’m not prepared to answer that question. Can you give me a minute? Or, I’d like to come back to you on that. And thank you for the question.” So, there are ways to handle it that are going to increase the psychological safety, and there are ways to handle it like, “That’s a ridiculous question. I’m not even going to answer it.” That’s going to be pretty destructive. So, that’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Minette Norman
Well, if anyone wants to learn more about the book, I will just say that we have a website, you can get some sample content, it’s just ThePsychologicalSafetyPlaybook.com. And what we’re finding is that there are so much interest in the book in all different industries. And that was maybe what was really surprising to us and fun to find out.

We’ve been finding out about people in the automotive industry, in law, in HR, in insurance, in tech, and the food industry, and they’re all finding value in this book. So, what I want to say is that psychological safety is important no matter where you are, no matter what you do. It’s any time you’re dealing with teams of people, it matters.

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

Minette Norman
Yes, and it’s hard to pick because I have my selection of quotes around my office, but I’m going to pick one. And this is from Madeleine Albright, and it was something that I kind of heard later in my career, and it feels right to me today, and it is, “It took me quite a long time to develop a voice. And now that I have it, I am not going to be silent.”

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

Minette Norman
Yes. So, this one comes out of UCLA, and I discovered it when I read a book called Social by Matthew Lieberman. It’s about the brain, and it has to do with our brains recognizing pain. So, they did these functional MRI studies on people, and they discovered that what they call, so the researchers from UCLA, call social pain.

When you are excluded, when you are left out, and when you feel hurt, you’re not part of this group, our brains register pain in exactly the same way they register physical pain. So, why is this so important? Because when we are feeling excluded at work, when we feel that our voice is not welcome, our brains are experiencing pain.

And so, I always say, like, we need to minimize the pain we are going through at work. People are suffering. And so, that’s why I think it’s so important to create a culture of psychological safety and inclusion so we can minimize that pain that human beings are going through every day in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Minette Norman
My favorite recent book, as I read constantly, but my favorite recent book is actually a novel that I think applies to the workplace as well, and it’s the novel called Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Have you read it, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Minette Norman
Okay. It’s a great book. It came out in the last year, and it’s about a woman who’s a chemist in the late ‘50s, 1960s, and how she just plows through this male-dominated industry, and does things on her own terms and with her integrity. And I think it’s about speaking up and staying true to yourself. I think it really applies to the workplace everywhere today in 2023, and it’s a great read.

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

Minette Norman
Lots of software, a simple software, but I will say the one thing I probably couldn’t live without, what tool I couldn’t live without is Evernote, or any note taking tool, because I’m constantly reading and collecting ideas, and things I want to come back to, so I put everything in Evernote so I don’t lose it, because if I write it in my physical notebook, I can’t read my handwriting afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Minette Norman
I’m a big walker. I’d love to exercise, in general, but I think walking is the best way that I clear my head, and I often get my best ideas and my clearest thinking when I’m just out for a walk.

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

Minette Norman
There’s a quote from the book that comes back a lot, that we’ve seen people quoting, so I’ll just share it. It was, “Leaders tend to believe that they need to have all the answers and that they cannot show emotion. It’s time to set aside these limiting beliefs.”

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

Minette Norman
If they want to get in touch with me, they can find me on LinkedIn or my website MinetteNorman.com, and I already mentioned the book site, ThePsychologicalSafetyPlaybook.com.

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

Minette Norman
I would say that small actions and small behavior changes can make a hugely positive impact. So, my call to action is just commit to trying one new behavior in your next interaction with a human being, in your next meeting, and it could be just commit to listening fully, or taking a pause before responding. And you may be amazed by the changes you’ll see in your relationships in the workplace and your relationships in real life. So, just try one small thing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Minette, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and psychological safety.

Minette Norman
Thank you. You, too, Pete.

May 25
0

868: Fostering the Sense of Community at Work with Christine Porath

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Christine Porath says: "Too many people don’t feel any sense of community."

Christine Porath discusses why community is critical to well-being and shares powerful examples of how to build it in the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The astounding benefits of a sense of community
  2. The one thing to avoid with community-building activities
  3. How vulnerability leads to richer communities

About Christine

Christine Porath is a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. She’s the author of Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace and co-author of The Cost of Bad Behavior. Christine is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and has written articles for New York Times, Wall Street Journal, McKinsey Quarterly, and Washington Post. She frequently delivers talks and has taught in various Executive programs at Harvard, Georgetown, and USC. Prior to her position at Georgetown, she was a faculty member at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

Christine’s work has been featured worldwide in over 1500 television, radio and print outlets. It has appeared on 20/20, Today, FoxNews, CNN, BBC, NBC, msnbc, CBS, ABC, and NPR. It has also been included in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Fortune, Forbes, NY Times, The Washington Post, and L.A. Times.

Resources Mentioned

Christine Porath Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Christine, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Christine Porath
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and hear some juicy tidbits from your latest Mastering Community: The Surprising Ways Coming Together Moves Us from Surviving to Thriving. So, for starters, could you maybe share with us a really cool story that has some nifty surprises that illustrates what’s up with community, like what’s at stake and what’s possible and what’s the goodness that we might want to be able to tap into?

Christine Porath
Sure. So, it really was inspired by my brother and sister-in-law’s story. So, in 2008, my brother, Mike, and his wife, Sarah, had a truly terrible life changing day. In the morning, a doctor informed them that their unborn child was missing a kidney, and possibly other organs. And then in the afternoon, they returned home and there was even more devastating news. They had learned from their doctor that their two-year-old daughter, Annabelle, had a rare chromosome disorder, Dup15q, and her mind would probably not develop beyond that of a five-year-old.

And so, feeling lost and scared, my brother turned to Google to try to learn more about this diagnosis, and most of the guidance he found online wasn’t that helpful, but he clicked an old PDF file containing six stories from parents whose children experienced similar disabilities. And the stories contained joy and humor, and they offered reason for hope. And if these parents could cope with these disabilities and even find some joy in the process, maybe Mike and his wife figured they could, too.

And after conquering another parenting challenge with Annabelle, just a couple of months later, Mike realized that solutions could be simple because he had, again, posted online to try to get answers, and that’s where he found them. There was a woman who posted how to teach a child a pincer grasp, how to pick up food, which Annabelle was struggling with. And what Mike realized after trying what she suggested, which was cutting two holes, a sock for her forefinger, a sock for her thumb, and putting Annabelle’s favorite food in the tray, that it didn’t take very long, less than a month, for Annabelle to master that.

And so, through those instances, Mike realized that, oftentimes, lived experience rather than professional expertise can go a long way. And wasn’t it wonderful that communities, in this case of parents suffering with similar disabilities or diagnoses, were helping each other? And so, in 2014, Mike and Sarah bootstrapped a new venture called The Mighty, which is a digital media company connecting people facing disease, disabilities, disorders.

And since then, The Mighty has grown from just a tiny tribe of people to several million people that connect online to help each other, lift each other up. And one of the things that I learned from Mike was that, while groups under The Mighty work created to address specific needs, beyond that they were really solving for the problem of isolation and loneliness.

And I think too many people, I realized, even in the workplace, feel like Mike did, alone or disconnected and suffering, and it was just really inspiring to me to see how they were able to build community from the ground up, and how it’s helped so many people. And since I study stuff in the workplace and I got a frontline seat to see how that evolved, I just was seeing data saying too many people don’t feel any sense of community, about 65%, at work. And this was all pre-pandemic, of course.

And so, I just felt like we could and should do better. And what could we learn from The Mighty and other places like it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so a couple quick clarifiers, 65% don’t feel any sense of community anywhere or at work?

Christine Porath
At work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you. And this pincer grasp, not that it’s a parenting podcast but I got to know. So, I get a sock and I cut two holes in it, and then that’s the trick, it’s like we got two fingers to work with?

Christine Porath
That’s the trick. And you put a sock on the other hand so there’s no cheating involved, and then you have at it. You put favorite food in a tray and, apparently, that’s the way to get at this. So, it was pretty interesting given that so many physicians and experts and others were trying to help them and nothing was working. And so, it was one of those things where maybe some parents that were facing similar situations knew best.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that a lot, and I guess I’m discovering that nowadays that when it comes to doing research, what turns up when you ask a friend versus Reddit, versus a Facebook group, versus Google, versus ChatGPT, are quite different. And sometimes with the search engines, I don’t know how to articulate it, but it seems like the top results are often the ones that have put a lot of effort into becoming the top results in terms of their budgets and their search engine optimizers and all that stuff. And the sock pincer insight is not all that monetizable, and so there’s a good chance it’ll not find its way onto the front page of search engine results.

Christine Porath
Yeah. And so, I think one of the things that they learned was just how helpful community can be around similar issues or struggles or that kind of thing. And so, I think we could learn the same from workplace situations as well. What if we had other people to lean on and glean information from who cared about us or cared about our situation?

Pete Mockaitis
And so then in workplaces, how does that often materialize? Is it within one workplace, like the employer, like Microsoft or Google? Or is it sort of a community, like an association across many employers? How do you see those things working?

Christine Porath
Well, I think it could be either but, really, I was looking to try within organizations, try to build communities. So, at a Microsoft, or at a Motley Fool, or at a small company that people might be able to really feel a sense of belonging and feel like they matter, that they cared, that others around them cared about them, and how that could make a real difference on things like engagement. So, there was incentives for leaders to pay attention to were they building communities where people feel connected also?

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s talk about some of these metrics. Any particularly eye-popping statistics or findings from research? Like, what is the difference that having a great community versus not so much of a community really makes at work?

Christine Porath
Well, we found, when people feel connected with their colleagues, they’re 74% more engaged and 81% more likely to stay with the organization. They’re also far more likely to thrive at work, which we know is connected to performance and things like that. And this was data from over 20,000 people that Tony Schwartz and I collected. So, it ranged across different organizations, across different industries, it was global, so fairly generalizable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Tony Schwartz from The Power of Full Engagement?

Christine Porath
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful.

Christine Porath
Yeah, and The Energy Project where he founded that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we’ve had him on and he’s swell. Okay. So, then could you paint a picture for us, inside a work context, do we have a nice illustration of what a great community story looks, sounds, and feels like in practice?

Christine Porath
Well, I think one that is from a smaller organization that I’m pretty familiar with now is Motley Fool, and they’re a best place to work. And one of the things that they do, they have lots of fitness challenges, which are fun, and that kind of thing, but they organize a lot of events where they show up for each other. One of the things that they did, I know, through the pandemic was they realized that people liked to actually teach one another things that they care about, like hobbies.

And so, even on Zoom, they might sign up for something that they felt like they could teach people about. And it ranged anywhere from how to knit, to butchery-type stuff, to all different sorts of things. And what they found is that it really created a sense of community, both the person teaching as well as the person learning. And so, it was a way to increase engagement driven solely by people and what they wanted to connect with others about. So, I like that because it was, really, doesn’t require a lot of resources, and both the learner and teacher benefit. So, that was one that popped.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. Can you share another example?

Christine Porath
Sure. The book is full of examples. I think one that comes to mind is Marriott has a TakeCare program, and they’re global. After their merger, they have over 700,000 employees, and yet on the ground, locally, they have what are called TakeCare ambassadors. And those folks in a particular location, let’s say Thailand, on the beach there, they would organize activities that they felt like would contribute to the wellbeing of their employees but also the wellbeing of the community.

So, they might do something around protection of sea turtles, or cleaning up the beach, or painting schools that needed that kind of care. But the idea was that they were often doing something for the local community or that would benefit people. They would have painting bike helmets for kids, and so host these events for local citizens and things like that.

So, I think I’ve seen a lot of doing good for the outside community, which generates a sense of thriving and pride and feeling connected to their coworkers and their organization in a meaningful way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I’m curious, in practice, when leaders, either very senior or mid level in terms of managing a team, hear this stuff, and think, “Ooh, that’s cool. We should do that,” what are some of the key differentiators that make community-building efforts meaningful and enriching and impactful in the ways we’re going for versus some that kind of miss the mark or feel fake or off?

Christine Porath
Well, I think one that’s gone over well is at Traeger, eating together or cooking together, and they really looked to, with a new headquarters, they cook together six days a week. And I think it’s different from, necessarily, having food on site to try to keep people there for a lot of hours and things like that. But it’s, literally, they’ll make breakfast, I believe, it’s on Monday, and then lunches all the other days together.

And so, from all data and anecdotes shared, that’s a really nice value that they benefit from and enjoy each other’s company. And there’s research behind the fact that cooking together and eating together is a way to form collaboration, get to know each other better, and ends up helping things like performance and so forth. And some of that research was done with firefighters but I think I’ve really seen it take root in different organizations in meaningful ways.

One differentiator at Traeger might also be the fact that the leaders, including the CEO, Jeremy Andrus, participates and is involved in the Monday meetings that they have, which incorporate a lot of peer awards for living the values and things like that. So, I think that that can make a difference, like leaders not only encouraging certain aspects of, let’s say, sustainability or things like that, sustainable work practices, but role-model it as well.

And so, I think that with Tony Schwartz, that was another finding that we had among that large dataset was it’s really important when leaders not only encourage these practices but live them as well, setting the tone for it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then do you have some examples of attempts at community gone wrong where this wasn’t landing with folks, like, “Yeah, this is kind of lame, or awkward, or uncomfortable, or unnatural, and we don’t like this”?

Christine Porath
I think, generally speaking, it’s when they’re forced and mandatory.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “We’re all having fun now.”

Christine Porath
Yeah, exactly. That you have to participate, that these are after-hour events that you feel like if you’re not there, it’s punishable kind of thing, but those are the ones that come to mind. It’s almost like the forced workplace, you have to do work from the office versus having some flexibility. So, similarly, I think around community events, like, ideally, people have some choice around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I remember one time at work, we went golfing, and so I made it very clear that I, straight up, don’t know how to play golf, and that when I’ve attempted, it went very poorly in terms of, like, divots everywhere, so, like, “Just so we’re clear.” And so then, they’re like, “Oh, you’ll be fine.” I was like, “Well, okay, if you say so. I’ve told you sort of what’s going to happen.”

And then I did it and then they were very frustrated with me, and then they’re like, “We’ve got to let them play through. You’re slowing us down.” I was like, “Well, I kind of told you that was how this was going to go.” And so, I found that very uncomfortable and unpleasant in terms of that experience, as opposed to, I don’t know, either choosing a different activity that everyone likes, or just say, “Okay. Well, hey, check this out. Well, you can hang out on the golf cart and goof around and have some drinks, I don’t know, whatever, and enjoy things that way even if the actual swinging of the club isn’t in the cards for the day.”

So, yeah, that’s a good point. So, there’s a choice, it’s not mandatory. And it seems like with the cooking example, and it’s come up before. It’s like folks are doing stuff collaboratively, and so I think there’s probably some magic there. I’m thinking now about Bob Cialdini and his stuff about singing and/or dancing in unison does cool stuff. That might be harder, I don’t know, depending on the vibe of your workplace. Folks might be really into that or not at all.

And so, I guess that’s maybe one of the themes, is that this will be very individualistic for individuals and teams based on what vibes for them.

Christine Porath
Yeah, I think I really like your example of having some choice around different activities, for example. I’ve seen that go over really well. Or, even if you plan an event, like I attended one at a major league baseball park that they rented out the area where you can eat together and so forth, then you could tour the field. This was an evening activity. The batting cages were open so it was really fun for those of us that wanted to take a crack at swinging against some pitchers, but you didn’t have to.

You could hang out and eat or drink with others. You could walk around and tour the facilities. So, it could be a number of different things that you could do even though there was a large room together where people could hang out. So, it provided a little bit of choose your own path depending on your interests and your abilities and so forth that seem to go over really well as far as most people being happy with the choices and that kind of things.

So, I think that that choice element that you highlighted is really key, if possible. And I know for offsites, oftentimes what they’ll do is just people can choose out of three, four, five activities. And I think that’s a really nice way to promote inclusivity as well, the idea that, depending on your capabilities, cultural differences, interests, those kinds of things, you’re providing a number of different paths for people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, beyond the activities or the outings, are there any other key ingredients in the mix for having great communities at work?

Christine Porath
I think anytime that you can promote healthier living and provide some sense of, whether it’s recovery or rejuvenation or things like that, those are wins as well. I think of Kelly McGonigal’s The Joy of Movement and the idea of that that’s a nice thing for people that are interested in that, but they’re amplifiers, like doing it together, doing it nature, doing it to music, things like that.

And so, one of the examples that I shared was a woman who actually started a program at Dell at the time around just because people were gaining a lot of weight, they weren’t feeling very good, she started covering them for working out an hour each day. And it ended up becoming, Thrive was the program, but people couldn’t wait to be a part of it.

And I think that part of it was it also broke down barriers, she said, of you might have a leader running next to someone that was in the call center, and it tended to break down silos in the organization, and build, cultivate relationships among people that might not have, otherwise, known each other or gotten to meet one another, and so that was a real positive as well as people became far healthier in terms of practices and things like that.

So, that was a nice example that I liked a lot. It doesn’t work for everyone but I think it, overall, had a lot of positive effects for various individuals, and team performance shot up and things like that. So, even though that they were working less or had the capability to work less, given time off to take a break, to work out, things like that, then, overall, it was a real win for the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
And you also mentioned radical candor. We had Kim Scott on the show, and she was swell. But what role does that play in building community? And could you give us some examples?

Christine Porath
Yeah, I love Kim Scott’s work on radical candor, and some of the examples that I share in the book actually tie to Kelly Leonard, who’s at Second City. And he and Kim partnered to teach people radical candor through improvisation and the idea that we’re all a work in progress. But I think radical candor, when people know that you care personally, there’s more liberty to challenge directly.

And I think that that’s a positive as far as we want people sharing feedback, we want people, basically, coaching each other up, like helping people improve. And a great way to do that is through radical candor, given how negative feedback is often awkward for a lot of us. And so, if you can develop a spirit of radical candor, it really helps quite a bit.

And one of the examples that I liked in the book came from Christa Quarles, who, at the time, was CEO of OpenTable. And one of the things that she shared was she learned she had to give it to get it. In other words, she had to be vulnerable and share when she has messed up or needed feedback, and that kind of broke down some of the barriers, such that people were able to see, “Okay, she can handle that kind of criticism or direct feedback. And what happens if we use it?”

But I think she also had to encourage it along the way, suggesting that, “Listen, failure is okay. Like, through failure, we will learn. So, some of that criticism is actually welcome because it’s going to get us to a better place more quickly.” And so, I thought she handled things really well. And if folks were not comfortable speaking up, one of the things that she did was pulled them aside.

Like, this very talented woman who just was reluctant to speak up in a group, and she coached her effectively, and she just let her know, “Listen, if I need to, I’ll tee you up for this, but we need you. We need your voice. We need you involved,” and it really went a long way to developing her but, more importantly at the time, also what the team and the organization needed.

And so, I thought it was an excellent example of leaders as a coach, and getting involved to kind of get the ball rolling for people to be radically candid in ways that maybe didn’t come naturally, but they needed to break out of what Christa Quarles called ruinous empathy, or this idea of not speaking up because you don’t want to hurt someone, which is the most common mistake. And I think Kim says that about 85% of the mistakes are in that arena.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And speaking of mistakes, we talked about not having the forced fun. Is there any other top do’s and don’ts you’d highlight if folks are thinking, “Yeah, I would like to kick up some community at work”? What do you recommend as being some of the very first things they do do and they don’t do?

Christine Porath
Well, I think the idea of uniting people and providing a safe space for people to communicate is huge, and leaders can set the tone for that by being vulnerable, admitting mistakes, admitting failures, things like that. But one of the examples that I used at the beginning of the book is just an example of Phil Jackson, who, you may know, coaching the Chicago Bulls for all those years and winning so many championships.

But Steve Kerr talked about one of the things that brought them to be such a tight knit team was the idea that every day they met in Phil’s kind of film room, so to speak, but they wouldn’t talk about basketball or the X’s and O’s. It was all about connecting. And so, I think that idea of, “Are you providing a safe space where people are communicating and getting to know each other in different ways?”

That could be around activities. It could be around cooking like we talked about. There are so many different ideas behind that, but I think bringing people together and trying to create a place where people can be vulnerable is really huge. So, I liked that example for the idea that just get people talking, sharing information, and that kind of thing.

Another example that I liked was Chuck Robbins at Cisco, and the idea of having a conscious culture. And one of the things that they did, again, well before the pandemic, was they had a program called Love and Load. And the idea was that people would be providing how they were doing, so just a quick full survey, and the leader would get that data and could really quickly address it.

So, if someone was kind of struggling or not having a good week, a leader could check in really quickly around that. And so, I think it’s helping to create touchpoints between leaders and their direct reports, or even peers for that matter, but the idea of being, I think, people need those kinds of little lifts. And so, the more that the leader can create these touchpoints through the day, which Doug Conant talks about quite a bit and has a book on touchpoints, and really turned an organization, Campbell Soup, around with touchpoints. That would be a really good mode to kind of jumpstart things.

It doesn’t take a lot of time. These were moments that Doug talked about in the hallways, in meetings, in the cafeteria, and it was all about connecting with people, and you listen attentively. He would often try to leverage his expertise and then close with, “How can I help?” And those kinds of moments really made a difference.

Another one that Doug talked about, which I love, was he ended up sending 30,000 thank you notes while CEO of Campbell’s. And I think that’s something that, especially nowadays where people may be feeling a little beat down, or a little negative, or just struggling coming off of the pandemic, well, even before that, this was important, but the point is that these thank you notes made a huge difference in making people feel valued.

And so, those small things can make a huge difference in employees’ lives, and get them engaged, get them, retain them in organizations. And it was kind of fun. I had a friend that a few months ago was traveling on a plane and sat behind a gentleman who was raving about where he worked, at Campbell’s, and the fact that 15 years ago, a CEO had written this lowly salesperson a thank you note.

And so, again, 15 years later, someone is still talking about this, still proud of the company, the connections, the sense of community that he felt because of this action. So, I think that small actions can make a huge difference, and you don’t have to be a leader for that to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, Christine, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Christine Porath
I think the idea of ubuntu, and, “I am who I am because of who we all are.” I like that idea a lot. And as you may be able to tell, I like sports examples a lot. So, I shared an example of Doc Rivers turning around the Boston Celtics at the time with this rallying cry. But I also love the example, and it was actually the woman, Carla Peñarosa Blatt, who I shared the Dell story about, who found that by taking time out and traveling with her family, not wired into technology and things like that, she and her family really felt a much greater sense of connectedness.

And I think, for her, it was kind of putting away the technology even for short periods of time and really trying to connect with people. And, again, it could be short, over coffee, over a meal. It could be in the backyard, over campfire, what have you. But the point being that the importance of maybe disconnecting from all of our tasks, the technology, so that we can connect better and feel a sense of community.

So, again, I think that that’s something that doesn’t necessarily require huge resources but is an action that could make a big difference in our lives as far as the quality of connection and community that we feel.

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

Christine Porath
I have one quote at the beginning of the book that I like a lot that’s actually from Brene Brown, and it’s just the idea of unlocking our potential. So, I believe it is, “You can’t unlock potential if you cannot unlock people.” So, she’s written about this, which I love.

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

Christine Porath
I think you hit all on the radical candor part that I talk a lot about with respect to respect. The other bit is just how rudeness or incivility is contagious. And so, I often cite that but the good news is civility is contagious as well. And so, again, kind of pointing to small actions and how, for better or worse, they have a lot of different ripple effects and can change how our communities feel. So, I hope that’s empowering for people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Christine Porath
Man’s Search for Meaning.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Christine Porath
I like Tony Schwartz’s Energy Audit, or, more generally, just checking in to see how you feel throughout the day, and making adjustments accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Christine Porath
For me, it’s probably working out, ideally, in the morning to get a jumpstart and feeling good.

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

Christine Porath
I use an example of the 10-5 way which was if people were within 10 feet, they smiled and made eye contact. If they were within five feet, they said hello. And what OSHA healthcare system found is that people felt a stronger sense of civility but also patient satisfaction scores rose as did patient referrals. And so, I just like the idea that it kinda shows how contagion happens even outside of the organization in ways that really help people within and outside organizations to kind of lift them up.

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

Christine Porath
Probably LinkedIn, so just Christine Porath. And I’m on Twitter @PorathC.

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

Christine Porath
I think the idea of think about, “Who do you want to be in different moments?” and just what can we do to lift others up throughout our day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Christine, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and good community.

Christine Porath
Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be on your show.

Apr 24
0

859: How to Be a Leader–Instead of a Boss with Todd Dewett

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Todd Dewett says: "Collaborate, don't dictate."

Todd Dewett shares how to harness you and your team’s true power.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why and how to collaborate–not dictate
  2. Why you should go for candor over kindness
  3. The low-cost way to optimize your team

About Todd

Dr. Todd Dewett is a globally recognized leadership educator, author, and speaker. After working with Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young, he completed his PhD at Texas A&M University in Organizational Behavior as well as a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship.

He was an award-winning professor at Wright State University for ten years, teaching leadership-related courses to MBA students and publishing research. His activities grew to encompass speaking, training, consulting, and eventually online educational courses.

To date, Todd has delivered over 1,000 speeches around the world (including several TEDx talks) and created a library of courses enjoyed by millions of professionals. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, Pepsi, ExxonMobil, Boeing, MD Anderson, State Farm, and hundreds more.

Resources Mentioned

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Todd Dewett Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Todd, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Todd Dewett
Hey, great to see. I’m hoping this time, I, in fact, will figure out how to be awesome at my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think you’ve been awesome for, well, at least these last seven years. It has been seven years. Wow!

Todd Dewett
Crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me, any remarkably transformational discoveries you’ve made over the last seven years?

Todd Dewett
Discoveries? I would say two, very briefly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s quick.

Todd Dewett
One is that the online world for education continues to surprise me, and surprise me, and surprise me with its ability to innovate and improve, and its ability to grow. And I didn’t ask for it but, somehow, I’ve got to be a part of that through LinkedIn. So, that continues to blow my mind on what they’re able to do. Just 15 years ago, people were saying, “You can’t learn online. You need a person in the room, right?” So, that’s blowing my mind.

And the other big discovery is, and this is the truth, and it’s a segue to our conversation we’ll have about this book I’m about to put out, but I now know, Pete, I now know with great confidence that I cannot write novels. And here’s how I know that. I’ve tried three times over 15 years, around 15 years, and each of those three times, I’ve ended up with a pile of words that was not useful.

And then the most recent time is the final time. I’m done trying to scratch that itch. I’m comfortable that I tried, but the idea that I was working on the story, then led to the book that we’ll talk about a little bit today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, indeed, let’s do just that. Your book Dancing with Monsters, what’s the big idea here?

Todd Dewett
Well, like I said, I wrote this novel, I was trying to write a lighthearted take on a vampire going through office shenanigans, as we’ve seen in many television shows, I just was intrigued by the combination of those components, and I had fun writing it, as I always do. When I determined it was not good, and my beta reader or two determined it was not good, I sat there licking my wounds, and I thought, “Can I use this idea some other way?”

And for years, I had been interested in the business fable book market. Many years ago, I read Who Moved My Cheese. I read many of the Pat Lencioni books, etc., and I thought, “Well, maybe I can do that. I’d been thinking about that. Maybe that’s a style that fits me.” And so, I just got all passionate one day, maybe it was too much caffeine, and sat down with that idea, a rough small idea from the failed novel, and, out of me came this 18,000-word quick fable in six hours. It’s been edited, thank goodness, since then, but that’s why I had an idea. I had a market, a fable market, and I decided to see if I could write that style, and I think the answer is yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And so, what is the fable here?

Todd Dewett
Well, we got a premise of a monster, he’s the main protagonist, is Joe Vampire, and he’s kind of cocky and full of himself, but not performing well lately, doing the one thing all monsters want to do across many genres for the last few hundred years, of course, which is to scare children. And he’s pulled into a meeting with an HR-type person, which is a witch in the character, in the book, and told, “Look, you’re basically in trouble. We’re going to ask you to prove yourself by leading a team of other monsters who are having issues, and you’ve got a big goal. You’ve got to solve together to figure out whether or not we’re going to let you continue with your monster status,” so to speak.

And so, there is a mummy, and a zombie, and a ghost, and a werewolf, all having huge issues being themselves. The werewolf can’t turn into a werewolf. She’s just the human that’s not able to transform. Issues of that nature. So, Joe fumbles around trying to lead these misfits and does terrible at first and fails before he realized that he’s doing it the wrong way.

And he remembers some amazing advice from his grandfather who was quite capable as a leader, and he starts to humble himself, and he has some epiphanies about what it means to think through empathy and build rapport, and to use kindness as a means of connecting with people and getting them to really try harder for the first time.

And his efforts to humble himself and be a facilitator instead of a dictator really pay off as these monsters discover their inner awesomeness. At the end of the book, they actually…well, I won’t spoil the end. I’ll just say they become a much, much more interesting version of themselves. And along the way, you’ll learn some stuff about leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I was going to ask, when it comes to fables, yup, there are some lessons, some takeaways, some wisdom, hopefully, that readers walk away with. Could you share with us, is there maybe a key quote or excerpt from the book that you think really delivers some of these in spades?

Todd Dewett
Wow! I’m in love with the book. To be honest with you, I’ve never said that about anything I’ve created, so I’ll choose one because it’s personal to me. As I thought about these characters in this short fun tale, yes, some of them reminded me of archetypes of people I’ve written about or seen in consulting, coaching, and so on. And one of them really is reflective of me, to answer your question.

Joe Vampire, the protagonist, had a moment after failing for a while, where he thought to himself, “Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s me. And maybe if I get authentic with them about my imperfections and insecurities and fears, which we all have, and I show them something about myself that they’re not going to see coming, which will tell them how sincere I am about trying to reboot our relationship and our efforts toward making progress, that that will work for us.” And he did that.

That came from my life. The fact that he did that in one of the pivotal scenes in this little book came from my life. And I’ll tell you what it is because it mattered enough to center this story in a book. I used to work for Ernst & Young many years ago before I did a PhD and became a professor for years, and I didn’t fit well at all, to be frank with you.

Great job. Prestigious. Everyone thought I should be happy. Look at the young successful professional. Didn’t fit at all. And I knew that, and I didn’t know what to do because I thought I knew where I wanted to go, which was to get a PhD but that was risky and I was scared, “Was I smart enough that I want to go broke?” For all the years, you’ve got to go broke to do that much grad school, etc.

And I was in my loft in Atlanta, Georgia where I used to live, and my mom called, checking up on me one day, she lived in a different city. And I was, in my voice, giving it away that I wasn’t in a good place. And she said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” True story. “What’s wrong with you?” And I just broke down, I started crying. I think I was 28 at the time. I started crying, and my mom, not something I normally did at that stage in life, but it happened.

And she said, “What is going on?” And I told her, “I’m very unhappy and I think I know the answer but I don’t know if I should do it.” She said, “Well, why?” I told her what it was, PhD, all that, and she said, “Well, why wouldn’t you? What are you really scared of?” She said it to me kindly and firmly just like that. And I sit there blubbering at my mom, I realized the obvious.

There wasn’t anything to be scared of. I didn’t have kids. What are you scared of? There was nothing to be scared of but I needed someone to smack me with those words and wake me up and push me in a new direction. And that made a huge impression, and that’s why Joe Vampire stepped up and made a huge impression on these other misfit monsters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is powerful. Thank you. And so then, can we dig into a few of the core takeaway messages then in terms of there are some rules of leadership in the book, such as collaborate, don’t dictate? Can you share with us a couple of the most you think are transformational, and need to be heard by the world, takeaways?

Todd Dewett
Well, I got to tell you, I loved the way you set up these questions, but the truth is most people to do what I do, there’s different ways that we do it from speaking to writing to what have you. There’s not much new under the sun. Sometimes there are new ideas but mostly it’s about finding new vehicles to help us convey well-known useful ideas that people have yet to focus on in the proper way or the proper amount.

The one you just mentioned, actually, is a spectacular example – collaborate, don’t dictate. What Joe and many other real managers have to figure out is that even though they’ve been vested with authority to do stuff at work, they have the legitimate power as a holder of a position in a hierarchy, that does not mean they should use that power just because they have it.

The truth is, a team is optimized not when they receive dictates from a boss but when they feel that they are being facilitated and collaborated with by a person who’s on the team with them, not looking down on them. Now, that sounds terribly simple, and I’m here to tell you the reason this book, and many others, really do focus on a few simple rules that make teams better is because busy people forget them at work every single day.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had leaders just kind of whip out a dictate, “A think I need you to do,” no explanation. It just sounds like an order being given. Now, you don’t need me, Pete, to tell you that adult humans do not like to be treated like children. So, when I thought about the small number of business leadership maxims I want to put in this book, definitely collaborate, don’t dictate, be a partner, not a boss is a different way to say it, was one of the first that came to mind, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then it sounds pretty simple in terms of just do that, just collaborate and don’t dictate. Is there any sort of best practices or do’s and don’ts to following that?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. The book is simple on purpose. And later, if I’m lucky with a variety of companies, I’ll deep dive on exploring what you just asked, but I’ll give you a preview, for example, that you’d see in a deeper training course. There are different types of decisions people face at work. And the question is, if you believe in this collaborate, don’t dictate idea that many of us talk about, is, “Well, what kind of decision are you facing? And when should I be a boss using authority versus a quiet person listening and trying to get input long before I make a decision?”

Well, there’s decisions, frankly, that you have to own with no input. That’s part of the managerial burden that anyone in the leadership structure faces. Things about strategy, things about compensation, who to hire and fire, ultimately, is not for the team to make. Team can have inputs sometimes on those but they don’t own those decisions, and that’s probably proper.

Then there’s decisions where you absolutely are going to own the decision as the leader but you absolutely should spend time, as much as you can, given how busy you are, finding their voice, listening to them, understanding their view, and allowing that to shape your decision because you believe this particular decision is going to feel, they’re going to feel it. There’s going to be an impact on them. That’s a second type.

A third type, and this is most common, I won’t say an unimportant decision but there are a variety of decisions that have to be made all the time where it’s really best to let go completely and allow teams to own it. For example, “To get this work done, do we work a day that everyone’s going to be having a day off? Or, do we work extra hours three days in a row? There are different ways to get the same outcome. What do you prefer?” Let them own the answer to that question.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself as a leader, or as a decision-maker, “What’s the reality here about my need to use the authority versus the benefit, the smart wisdom of gaining their input before a decision is made?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a bit about some of the other rules: the candor, not kindness; the opportunities, not obstacles; the authenticity, not acting; the be the change, not the boss?

Todd Dewett
Man, we don’t have all day. I love this. So, here’s one that probably is my favorite – candor not just kindness. I want to say that carefully – candor not just kindness. I didn’t say candor and no kindness. What we have right now, and I explore this a little bit, here’s the truth. We have so much love in forward-thinking organizations today for positivity, for kindness, for congeniality. These are things I absolutely value and preach, for sure.

But sometimes we’re so uncritical and so passionate about pursuing those types of ideals that this thing gets created, which some thinkers and scholars have now started calling toxic positivity. That’s the idea that we’re so wanting to be kind, so wanting to not offend others, that we will refrain all kinds of things. We’re really over-shape and resist. Why? “Because I don’t want to really ruffle feathers or cause tension, etc.” That’s a problem.

So, what I like to remind people is that kindness and all of its little brothers and sisters that go with it are immensely important, and that’s a foundation that gives you then the ability to use the other thing that pushes us towards finite needed conversations that are to the point, and that’s candor. Candor, which is just no beating around the bush, saying what needs to be said, this is important, ready, can be done positively. Candor does not imply brusque to the point of negative or mean. It just means you’re saying what needs to be said instead of beating around the bush.

So, here’s the truth, a lot of candor in an environment that doesn’t have a lot of positivity as its foundation, part of its culture, can be damaging quickly. But in a workplace, defined by a lot of positivity and congeniality and helpfulness and kindness, well, then candor is a thing that becomes directive and useful and digestible. That’s the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a bit about the opportunities, not obstacles?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. So, I was talking to a boss the other day somewhere. I still say that word because I’m old. Supervisor is what I’m supposed to say now. And they were lamenting the lack of resources and budget they had for something, “And what should I do about this?” So, I say, “Well, don’t lie about it, don’t hem and haw, don’t tell them there might be more coming later. Own it and be honest, and then try and shape without BS’ing in any way. Try and shape how they feel about the situation.”

Opportunities is about perspective. That’s the whole point of the book. It’s about perspective. We all face challenges, budget-related, people-related, market-related, customer, etc. We all face them. That’s inevitable. That’s a daily if not weekly, we face big ones. How we feel about them, however, is a choice, and that starts with the person who has the most status and the most power in a group, which is the group leader, the supervisor.

There’s great science here that says when you help people see, forgive the cliché, the glass half full, the silver lining, call it what you want to, they will, on average, over time, tend to think about those issues more productively, more positively, and, thus, tackle them more effectively. For no other reason than choosing to think about them in a more productive way.

I’ve said this many times over the years, the greatest things we know about you optimizing you, and you optimizing a team really don’t cost a dime, or they’re low cost, but they usually don’t cost a dime. It just requires you to be a little more thoughtful about how you’re thinking about yourself and others and how you relate.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, no, I think in terms of leadership, this is a really fun 101 dose wrapped in a story that is emotional, fun, and memorable.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, there was something near the end where the HR person, embodied by the character of a witch, I love my HR brothers and sisters, by the way, if you’re listening. The HR person said to Joe, “I’m not sure if your performance, basically, was good enough for you to be saved or not. The committee,” it’s another reference to kind of management or bureaucracy, “The committee is still on whether or not they’d agree but they do know that they love what you had done today and want to offer you a job.” And he says no.

And that’s a big deal. I love that because fit matters and passion matters, and he doesn’t want to go, become the bureaucrat he’s battling against. He actually wants to stay where he is because he’s discovered now, that he’d figured out how to do it, that he loves being a manager. And what he said to her, and I’m misquoting myself because I don’t remember that clearly, what he said was, “One monster who believes in themselves is spectacular. But a monster squad who believes in themselves is truly formidable,” because that’s what he created. And I think that’s true, and that’s the power of a team.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Todd Dewett
Well, there’s tons of research. For example, why do people, this is classic stuff, why do people stay with certain jobs over the long term? Is it because of their immense fit with the role? No, although I wish that were true. Is it because of the love of the high pay at this particular job where they’re staying? No, I wish that were true.

The best answer, by far, is that they have a quality relationship with their manager. The number one reason people voluntarily leave, this has been a true finding, a known finding, for 30 years, jobs that they have voluntary turnovers is because of bad boss relationships. So, I loved, in this book, trying to bring that research to life by modelling what bad leadership looks like, by then having that person go through something of an epiphany, and then finding how to do it correctly.

So, there is good research to back this up. What do we know about, for example, perspective that we were just talking about? There’s tons of studies and psych cogs, social sites, org studies, etc. that talk about how we frame decisions and how people react. And when you take the time, and that is always the thing that trips us up at work because we’re so darn busy putting out fires, I respect that, but when you take the time to think, at least the important issues, and think about them first and how you’re going to package them effectively to be understood, and maybe even to motivate people, no matter how challenging they might be, you tend to deliver a better message. That’s powerful research.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you name a favorite book?

Todd Dewett
A favorite book. I’ll go with Please Understand Me by Keirsey. One of the classics on personalities, because I’m a huge believer, I actually posted about this today, a huge believer that talent is awesomely important but often overrated. And what I mean by that is what ultimately matters is chemistry. And great teams with chemistry that have less talent than teams over here with great talent and no chemistry often outperform teams with loaded talent.

So, how do you achieve chemistry? Well, you get along by first understanding yourself and then others. And one of the first books that really pushed people effectively to start thinking about personality types and how to understand others who are different than you, was Please Understand Me by Keirsey.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, I would say any kind of feedback tool. One in particular that’s on my mind lately people might check out, there’s a new company using AI called Yoodli. I think it’s Y-O-O-D-L-Y or D-L-I, Yoodli. And they’re trying to help people in terms of presentation and conversational speech. Look into a camera, open their app, speak, have it analyzed six ways from Sunday, using AI, and also attach, using feedback mechanisms, to people that you supply emails for so you can bring in that feedback, try again, and then have the program once again assess how you’re doing on a variety of ways.

I think AI, in terms of helping people study their interpersonal communication is a host of tools emerging there that people are going to enjoy in the coming years.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And do you have a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Todd Dewett
Yeah, I’m into humility because I’ve got plenty of go-go power in me, plenty of ego. And if you are like that, then you’re going to fail eventually. We all do. And so, I like to remind myself on a regular basis that I don’t know it all. And I like to remind myself of my favorite failures, no joke, because those are the things that make me think through what I’m doing now a little more thoughtfully, which is terribly, terribly useful.

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

Todd Dewett
In general, yeah, outside of this book, I have a few that always stick with me that I love to share. Probably the most common is that “More is always possible,” which sounds like a motivational speaker, which is one of my hats, would say. The science actually backs it up. One of my favorite stories ever involves my ex-wife/one of my best friends, who had asthma yet somehow learned how to train for a marathon.

And when she was done, we’re having a conversation, and I said to her, “Wow, can you imagine what more you could possibly accomplish?” She never even dreamed of this because she didn’t think it was possible, and it blew her mind, and she’s been thinking about it and excelling ever since. More is always possible.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, thanks for asking. There are two obvious places. One is my website DrDewett.com, that’s D-R-D-E-W-E-T-T.com and the other is my favorite social media platform, which is LinkedIn. I would love to chat if this brings up questions from anyone listening. Find me on LinkedIn and connect. I’d love to chat.

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

Todd Dewett
I would say just don’t assume you know it all and stop blaming others, which is so easy and sometimes justified but never productive, and ask yourself what you can do differently to continue improving.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Todd, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with Dancing with Monsters and all your adventures.

Todd Dewett
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.