The Leadership Habit

Moral Courage in Leadership with Jon Mertz Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I got to sit down with a very special guest. His name is Jon Mertz, and we’re going to talk about the importance of moral courage in leadership. He’s well known in his area of research, and I’m just excited to bring him to you. Jon is a speaker, he’s a collaborative strategist, a thought entrepreneur, a professor, and a researcher of moral courage. You’ll learn a little bit more about that on today’s podcast. His work examines the tension-filled intersections of profit and purpose, business and society, and stability and change using a model of moral courage to guide thinking, decision making, and action. Leaders of today and tomorrow can engage with challenge, face change, resolve conflict, and activate the next era of business ethics, impact and purpose. I hope you enjoyed Jon and I’s conversation as we talk about moral courage, which is, I believe, an essential characteristic, a mindset and attitude or way of being that all of us can learn and will likely need throughout the next phase of our careers. Enjoy the conversation. Meet Jon Mertz, Researcher, Speaker and Thought Entrepreneur Jenn DeWall (01:31): Jon Mertz, who I would like to introduce you to, the audience. I am so excited to have you here. For those that are active listeners to The Leadership Habit, this is the first time that I’ve ever actually had family on the show. We have Jon Mertz joining us, and this is my husband’s uncle, but he is a, you are just a dominant perspective in the leadership space, so I love that I married into getting to know you, and I love that you’re gonna be joining us today on the podcast to talk about moral courage. But Jon, for those that may not know you the way that I do, would you go ahead and introduce yourself to The Leadership Habit audience? Jon Mertz (02:16):  Sure. First of all, thanks so much for inviting me to join your podcast. I’m really excited to have the conversation here today. Yeah, so my background, I kind of look at my life in three chapters, I guess, at this point. So the first chapter, I was involved in politics. I worked in Washington, DC, for about eight years for a senator for my home state in South Dakota, and after two administrations decided that that wasn’t the career path I wanted to remain on. So went back to school and got my MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. And after graduating from there, my second chapter kind of unfolded, which was about 25 years in tech technology, both startups and large enterprise companies leading marketing and business development initiatives for them. My last company was a healthcare software startup, that I spent a little over 10 years leading the marketing strategy and other initiatives for the company. Chapter three started by moving to Santa Fe and also starting a doctorate program through Creighton University, which I just completed. Jenn DeWall (03:31): Congratulations. Jon Mertz (03:32): Yeah, I successfully defended my dissertation. And I’m also teaching two leadership development classes at the University of New Mexico Anderson School for Management. One is an undergrad class, and new this year, I’m teaching an executive MBA class as well. So that’s kind of my three chapters as they currently stand. I’m still in the third chapter! Jenn DeWall (03:55):  I mean, I love it, and I’m excited to see how the third chapter unfolds. You know, you’ve been able to watch leadership from the sidelines in different industries, right? Politics, then going into tech and looking at it through that lens, anything that you feel like you noticed was a successful tried and true leadership principle as you walked and observed, I guess, your time throughout those three chapters? Tried and True Leadership Principles Everyone Should Know Jon Mertz (04:23):  Yeah, I mean, when last in DC, one thing that was ingrained in the US <laugh>, or during my time in different roles, there was don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want your mom to read about in the Washington Post the next day.<Laugh>. And I think that’s a good rule of thumb from an ethical perspective. So it keeps you on the right path as far as when people are watching you, but also when people aren’t watching you make sure you’re trying to make the best decisions and choices possible. Jon Mertz (04:53):  I think the other element, you know, it’s kind of funny when I went into business, and the initial reaction before I got my MBA was, you know, you spent eight years in government when you know about business. But the reality is that process orientation and the collaboration through government applies extremely well to business. Whether you’re large or small, you’ve gotta work with diverse groups if you wanna move things forward in a successful way to achieve the outcomes that, that that you’re desired as a business or as a government entity. So collaboration, consensus building, I think is a key leadership skill that’s always been a part of my life, I guess, as well. What Inspired You to Explore the Topic of Moral Courage? Jenn DeWall (05:34):  Yeah. And I feel like learning that at a younger age, in the form of government, is probably one of the bigger ways for anyone to learn that. How do you unite opposing views or listen and stop and slow down to consider a different perspective? Jon, I’m excited to talk about the dissertation that you recently defended on the topic of moral courage! Out of curiosity, what inspired you to pursue that topic for your research? Jon Mertz (06:02):  Yeah, it, it kind of evolved, you know, through the program, I guess, and so through some of the writing, I guess I’ve done through the years as well, I was very intrigued, well, intrigued first of all, I guess with kind of the generational shift that was happening back well, a while ago now. But as millennials were beginning to enter the workforce, there was a lot of negative articles about that generation. A. And when I was vice president of marketing for this healthcare startup, you know, I was hiring millennials, and I wasn’t seeing what all the articles were saying, and I seemed like everybody was being more negative than usual as a younger generation was coming into the workplace. And what I saw was kind of the opposite, was not only the diligence in work but also the attitude that it’s more than just profit or making money. There’s a higher degree of purpose embedded in their lives and in their work. And I found that encouraging. So that kind of kicked it off. And then it evolved also to looking at how CEO activism and employee activism was taking root where businesses and employees were, you know, raising their voices to try to correct or prevent issues from harming stakeholders, whether that be employees, customers, or others. And I thought that was also an encouraging sign. So that kind of, you know, evolved into looking at stakeholder capitalism and, in my opinion, social enterprises are kind of the best representation of stakeholder capitalism. I mean, they’re for-profit entities that have an embedded purpose, whether it’s social or environmental, as part of their business model, so companies like Patagonia or Toms and others, you know, those two are bigger name ones that people recognize. But, you know, so that kind of centered my research and then adding had the, had this interest in virtues <laugh> and how virtues played a role within leadership. So adding the moral courage element just seemed to make a lot of sense, or it was kind of a good interdisciplinary look that I wanted to, wanted to explore. What Does it Mean to Have Moral Courage? Jenn DeWall (08:15):  I love that. And I feel like even just virtues, like you really probably see that in action probably in the earlier part of your career in government, of how we make decisions based on our values or obviously the impact to our stakeholders or those that elected us. So let’s, you know, let’s level set. I love the inspiration. We, and I also love that you drew some inspiration around that shift that millennials brought into the workplace towards a little bit more purpose-driven work and how we can use that. But let’s look at, let’s start with the basics of your dissertation. How do you define moral courage? What is moral courage? What does it mean to have moral courage? Jon Mertz (08:53):  Yeah, there’s, you know, various academic elements to it, but my research kind of validated or made it more practical, but it really is looking at when there’s impending values or emotions involved in the decision but being willing to act on those with a connection to what the outcome is, a compassionate connection to that and being willing to engage and make those tough decisions. And it really became kind of more than that, I guess, through the research and that if you’re gonna do it right, you have to be unafraid to embrace different perspectives and, and experiences especially those that may be impacted by the decision that you’re about to make. So I think, you know, kind of the key words, I guess are the willingness to make <laugh> those tough choices. But it’s embracing those tensions around the, you know, the virtues or the emotions that are part of that decision. Jenn DeWall (09:52):  Yeah. Well, and that’s tough, right? Talking about how do we make decisions or how do we amplify our voice, especially if it’s not the loudest voice in the room, or the most popular perspective. Where do you see either leaders, where do you see leaders struggle with moral courage? Are there any particular areas that you notice that they tend to exhibit more or less moral courage? Moral Courage and Stakeholder Capitalism Jon Mertz (10:14):  Yeah, I mean, the lines I looked at was mostly, I guess, through stakeholder capitalism. So you know, the social enterprise leaders that I interviewed, they definitely exemplify using moral courage almost every day as far as embracing the tensions of profit and purpose and finding, you know, the right path forward or, you know, the business and societal issues that need to be addressed. I think one of the things that maybe to look ahead a little bit more that will be more interesting of how moral courage is exhibited, it’ll be today we read articles about bold capitalism or pushback against environmental, social and governance or ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) type issues. So I think more than ever business leaders are gonna need to find that moral courage to be able to speak up and, and discuss why they’re focusing on E S G or why they’re focusing on stakeholder capitalism and not get pushback by shallow and narrow arguments of just calling something “woke”. Jenn DeWall (11:18):  Yeah. Oh my gosh. And I feel like that’s out there. It’s such an easy thing. What, but let’s talk about the consequence. What if they don’t, right? What if they’re like, I’m still nervous, I’m still afraid. I don’t want to go against this popular view or the view of this loud voice. What do you think are potential consequences that organizations or business leaders might face if they don’t lean into this moral courage? What are the Consequences of Not Leaning into Moral Courage? Jon Mertz (11:42):  Yeah, it’s more of, you know, looking at our society <laugh> and the outcomes there. So if business leaders don’t stand up, and political leaders too, you know, there’s gotta, you know, some a, it’s a mix, it’s a community effort. But if, you know, the things that are happening, our world are real, you know, whether it’s the, you know, the climate shifts or, you know, taking care of our environment, I mean, it never used to be that political of an issue, you know, when the National Park system started and things of that nature, you know, taking care of the planet that we live on seems like it should be a no-brainer. But in today’s world, there’s pushback on that. So, you know, it’s really looking at that, that societal benefit. I mean, it’s interesting because, you know, one of the reasons I’d like, you know, more focus on virtues is it’s more than just about yourself. So values, you know, we, we kind of, you know, unfortunately, kind of mixed definitions of values and virtues, but values really are what’s important to me, you know, what’s important to an individual. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but we kind of become dogmatic in that, and that my values are right and yours are wrong kind of a thing. And that’s not healthy. Whereas virtues are more about, you know, nature or higher self, higher purpose. So it’s about us. It’s not about, you know, an individual. So I think, you know, kind of rambling off here a little bit, but I guess the relationship is that, you know, to make these decisions that impact our society, they do have moral implications and business leaders need to embrace that and understand that and be able, willing to stand up for those underpinnings of capitalism. You know, not to get off too much off track, but you know, Adam Smith is really misunderstood. In that he wrote two books and one of ’em, the first one was The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And there’s a big moral philosophy that underpins an economic system. And we need to bring that more front and center into our business conversations and being able to promote more stand up for these issues that are important not only just for the business, but also for our society. What Does It Look Like When Organizations Lead With Purpose? Jenn DeWall (13:53):  Okay. I love this. And I was gonna say, like, what would it look like if you did bring that to the forefront? What would that look like if we were able to make that shift in organizations? Jon Mertz (14:04):  Well, leading with purpose would be the first place. So the social enterprise leaders that I interviewed, they definitely lead with purpose first. And they understand, obviously the role of profit and every business leader does. And it’s important because that’s what funds and salaries and training and everything else, right? But, you know, purpose is first. And without with all of the leaders I interviewed, they really led with that. And so it is that purpose-first mentality. You know, one case, just to tell one story from one of the interviewees he, this individual came in to a situation where the company was never profitable. But previous CEOs had focused primarily on the financial and economic side of the business and a little bit, bit less on the purpose. And so, as he took over in that role, he focused on the purpose first throughout working with employees, their customer base, other stakeholders and partners. And over time the company became possible for the first time. So it just kind of exemplifies that, the power of purpose that, you know, if you’re willing to make those tough choices, siding more on purpose than profit, that the profit will come and probably the longevity of your organization will too. Plus, you’ll probably have more engaged customers and engaged employees and other stakeholders to carry your business forward. Beyond that point as well. Stakeholder Capitalism and the Next Generation of Leaders Jenn DeWall (15:29):  I, you know, I love, I love that perspective because even 20 years ago, I don’t think there was a high emphasis on purpose. It was kind of, you know, do the job, help the company do what’s right for the company. It’s not about the impact that has happened. What do you think has caused maybe this shift where, I mean, and not to say that you’ve studied this, but in terms of millennials curiosity, why do you think that we have shifted into this place of wanting purpose? Is it because we want to create better communities and we wanna be more connected? Is it because of watching the recession and noticing that there’s a shift in loyalty to what companies are that now we want them to mean more? From your perspective and the work that you’ve seen and those that you’ve interfaced with, what do you think drew this interest in this, this new change in virtue? I guess because it’s not a value of like thinking about how organizations actually commit to a purpose of serving. Jon Mertz (16:24):  Yeah, I think, you know, it’s Millennials and Gen Z both I think are embracing both those traits. You know, I think, you know, some, some of the things I’ve read, I guess that, you know, it’s definitely, you know, they’ve seen their parents go through <laugh> these challenges, right? You know, from nine 11 to the technology shifts to companies not being as loyal to their employees that they have in the past and, and obviously, now vice versa. So there’s more movement I guess, but I think there’s a greater, there’s just a greater awareness, I guess, that there’s more to life than just the pursuit of, of money. Obviously that, you know, not belittling that cause it’s important to yeah, provide for your family and, and your life and, and those types of things. And you need to get to a point, I guess, where you can do that. But then, but there’s a balance. And so I think that’s the interesting thing. You know, even just with social enterprise leaders, right? It’s more about balance. It’s about, it’s not an either-or between profit and purpose or business and society or change in stability. It’s a, it’s really looking at it from a duality perspective in the sense that it’s an and so looking at both at the same time and then trying to figure out the best path forward. And so I think the younger generations are doing the same thing, right? They need to make money on the one hand, but they also want to have a better life beyond just that. So it’s taking both of those and figuring out the and path, you know, how can they achieve that you know, happy balance, I guess between making a decent living but also having a decent life. And that’s a, sorry, one more thing I guess maybe on that., Jenn DeWall (18:06):  I love it. Keep going. <Laugh>, The Virtue of Living Well and Doing Well Jon Mertz (18:09):  What I love about kind of the virtue, you know, aspect of it, it’s about living well and doing well, and that’s the kind of balance I see this those two younger generations really right. Embrace, you know, I think for, for me, you know, the older generation, you know, I probably, you know, didn’t have that balance younger in my life. But I think, you know, unfortunately, maybe as we, we’ve gotten older, we realize that, that the value of having living well and doing well is part of our life. And credit to Gen Z and Millennials, you know, they are mu realizing that much earlier in their career than I did. Jenn DeWall (18:49):  Yeah. Well, and I feel like part of the reason that we realized it is just because we were almost forced to, the stability just wasn’t there in the same way that it maybe was for your generation. That’s one speculation, but yes, I, I mean, I, I should have also included Gen Z, but I, I love this shift because I just led a class for Crestcom two days ago, two days ago, and we were talking about even choosing who to work for. How do you choose who to work for? Because the majority of people in the class, and I know that I myself, have taken a pay cut to work for an organization that I better aligned with its purpose and passion and mission. And I know that I’m not alone. I am not, I am one of many that are willing to make these concessions. Like, of course I need to make a living wage to pay off my student loan debt, wish we didn’t have it. But I also want to make sure that I’m working for a company that I align with their values. And I think organizations, I think for some people, that’s probably a head-scratching moment because we still may not understand why some people would be willing to trade off an extra percentage of money if they have the ability to do that, just to align with someone with purpose. But I do feel like your generation, we just, times were just different in like, the times were different that we were raised in. I don’t, because I feel like, what if I grew up maybe 20 years before I could see my dad’s pension? I could see, and I can understand the value of why you would stay, because you get that. I just never even had that potential offering. And the companies that even offer that today are very few and far between. I mean, I guess I could probably rattle off a few that even might have pensions anymore. But do you, like, do you feel like that’s true? I do think that Baby Boomers, Gen Xers might have chosen differently, but the world was just a different place. Jon Mertz (20:39):  Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, there’s always gonna be, you know, obviously change you know, as much as some may wanna keep things the same, you know, it’s very challenging to, to <laugh> to realize that, I guess, or achieve that in any sense. So I think it’s. Hopefully, there’s a great awareness now just of how to embrace the change in a more positive way beyond just, you know, a self-interested way by looking at that bigger benefit of, for society. You know, it’s kinda interesting. I don’t know, in my view, I guess that you know, I’m not a generational expert per se, but you know, if you go back to, you know, even the sitcoms of the fifties <laugh> and the sixties, right? It was, you know, coming home at five o’clock, having dinner and spending time with the family, you know, that kind of thing. And you know, during my generation, and yours as well, probably that, you know, it wasn’t eight to five, it was, you know, more like seven to seven <laugh> Yeah. On a good day, right? And I think, you know, in some ways we’re kind of returning back to that balance, I guess maybe of, of what was experienced in the fifties. I’m not, I’m not definitely, you know, not looking to turn back the clock at all, but just from a pure looking at a balance perspective and how to keep that not only about what you need to provide for yourself and your family, but then also what you need to give back to your community as well. Jenn DeWall (22:05):  Yeah, no, and I love, and it’s turning back the clock in the sense of looking at how we can make different choices to support the communities that we live in, to show up for the families and the people that we care about in our lives. Because I think we did get a little out of whack where we weren’t paying attention to those things that are really important for a healthy society, for a happy family. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. How Can Leaders Embrace Moral Courage? Jenn DeWall (23:32):  Jon. Okay. So I have to ask, how do you think if you’re a leader that’s sitting there and maybe, you know, it’s a particular organizational challenge or a business de decision that needs to be made, what would be the starting point to even start to flex the muscle of moral courage? How do we develop that? Jon Mertz (23:52):  Yeah, again, for my research, it really begins with that sense of mission of the organization. So if they’ve spent the time to really define what that mission is, then center the decision-making process from there. And so if you don’t have that well defined and well communicated within the organization, you’re gonna start off from a, with a weak foundation. So that, that’s the, the, the starting point. And then I think it’s, you know, the really the next step then is really to kind of enhance our, our moral senses. And the way a lot of the leaders do that is by running to the edges. And by that means embracing perspectives and experiences that are different from yours and not being afraid to do that, you know, oftentimes we Jenn DeWall (24:40):  So by running to the edges. So is that just saying, like running to one side of like, who might have a counterpoint or how do you define running to the edges? Just the opposite sides of views that you have? Jon Mertz (24:52):  Exactly. Yeah. It’s kind of that edge perspective, I guess if you will. So it’s not the, you know, the, you know, the common ones that, you know, people would normally relate to. You know, one of the people I interviewed talked about you know, the words they used were a relevant colleague. What they meant by that was if somebody that’s impacted by the decision is not involved in the decision-making process, then the process is broken, go get them and bring them into the process. And so that’s part of the edge perspective is that we have to think about, you know, who’s going to be impacted by the outcome, you know and not just, you know, what we know but really seeking out what we may not know and embrace and really going out and talking to those individuals, understanding their story understanding the potential impact, and then bringing that in as part of the decision-making process. So, you know, we have more, you know, heightened moral senses, but hopefully a, a more enlightened view than of the, again, talking about that compassionate connection to the outcomes. At least then we can begin to balance and understand those outcomes of our decisions. And so that’s really kind of the next step then is just, you know, we all know scenario planning, right? Think thinking through the different options and how things could unfold. But this is adding a moral lens to it and looking at the more outcomes of the different options and the different scenarios. And then, you know, like in, you know, most would do then is then looking at holding those differing outcomes, differing perspectives, imbalance at the same time, and then trying to find the common ground or the best path forward, and then being willing to make that choice in moving that decision forward. But in all cases, even after that choice is made, as new information becomes available again, they’re unafraid to make adjustments to that choice and, and based on the new information that’s becoming available. So being adaptive is a key part of the, there’s just the decision making process centered in moral courage. All that come comes into play. Are There Difficult Tradeoffs When Leaders Embrace Moral Courage? Jenn DeWall (27:08):  Everything that you’ve said is relevant to how we need to show up for the future of work. Even in terms of, I love how you talked about scenario planning, because historically it might have been, here’s the scenario, make more money <laugh>, and that would just be it. It’s like, what scenario makes more money? But in today’s world, if we’re applying moral courage, would that be, maybe we make less money, but we serve this community in a different way. We preserve and protect our, you know, workforce and not making a layoff or not making an increase here. Tell me an example of how scenarios might look a little bit different. I don’t know if you know any trade offs from your research that people have been making. Jon Mertz (27:48):  Yeah, there wasn’t any specific, I guess, that we dive into, but it is about, you know, all, you know, part of it, what a social enterprise leader does is embrace change, right? They’re through their business, and they’re trying to drive some sys systematic change, whether it’s environmental, you know, you know, the product that they offer helps a population that’s underserved or whatever the case may be. So I think, you know it’s looking at that environmental or societal impact of those decisions because it’s a part of their business model. And so yeah, it may mean taking whatever, a percent less in profit or whatever, but if it’s returning 10% more in inter in positive environmental impact, then that’s worth the trade-off. You know, there’s larger companies that are, you know, aren’t necessarily social enterprises, but have a corporate social responsibility part of it. You know, as they focus more on some of the environmental or green packagings or focusing on their manufacturing processes in a more environmentally sensitive way, there actually are realizing a financial result, a positive one by taking those actions. And so, you know, we can learn both from the social enterprise leaders that are have that embedded as part of their business. But we also can learn from some of the larger corporations that are receiving an economic benefit by adopting more environmentally friendly practices as well. The Importance of Compassionate Connection Jenn DeWall (29:21):  Right. Well, and I feel like more and more people will vote with that. They’ll vote using their money towards the organizations that are willing to support sustainability or to give back. Okay. I want to go back to compassionate connection. What does that mean? What does that mean? What does compassionate connection mean? <Laugh>? Jon Mertz (29:40):  Well, it really goes to understanding the outcome, you know, and the, and who it’s impacting, who it’s affecting. Again, one of the people I interviewed talked about open heart protected, and what they meant by that was, again, kind of that edge perspective type of thing that we’ve gotta be open to understanding those different perspectives and different experiences and what, who’s gonna be impacted by the outcomes of whatever decision that we make. And so that’s the open heart part of it, the protective part was not becoming self-defensive in that interaction which is so key. So it’s, part of it is honoring the current system that’s in place, but also with an eye towards how can we change it or evolve it to have a more positive impact. So I love that, you know, kind of phrasing, I guess, of open heart protected. Because I think that kind of exemplifies, I guess that compassionate connection. So it’s that openness, willingness to embrace different differing perspectives, honoring the current system with an eye toward how can we build capacity to change it to be better in the future. Jenn DeWall (30:52):  I like the notion that you make towards honoring the current system because I think it, it pays respect for the business decisions, the choices, the methodologies of how people got to where they were. The world was different back then. There are different considerations now. And so it’s not about tearing that completely down or like maybe heavily criticizing and scrutinizing that it’s respecting what it was, what it was designed to do, and maybe saying, Hey, we can do something different. What do you, like, if you could go out and I guess, paint the world and give everyone moral courage, what would your world look like? What would the world look like if we made decisions with a stronger moral courage? Is it like, you know, coming at that local perspective, is it the global, like, would we be waving and like helping each other on the streets? What would that look like? What Would the World Look Like if All Decisions Were Made with Moral Courage Jon Mertz (31:45):  Yeah I’ve got two answers I guess for it. But one would look like we would get out of our self painted in corners of, of of how we view the world or, or putting ourselves in the corner that everybody looks like us or talks like us and has same similar experiences. So it’d be people getting outta their corners and, and getting out into the world and, and actively engaging and asking questions. One of the key phrases I heard over and over again was, tell me more. That was almost a, not just a question, it was almost like a mission. So it’s really that seeking that, that understanding. You know, my other kind of cheeky answer would be that, you know, growing up on a farm in South Dakota, when a neighbor needed help, everybody showed up. Jon Mertz (32:30):  You know, I remember one of our neighbors his wife was having cancer and was struggling through that. The family was, and you know six or eight farmers showed up, up and harvested all their crops in one day. And so, you know, it’s that empathy, it’s that compassionate connection to somebody that’s, you know, could look like us, but also somebody that doesn’t look like us and jumping in and willing to help and try to improve someone else’s life in the best way that we can and are capable of within either what we do individually or, or what we do as a business. Jenn DeWall (33:04):  Well, I love that example because I do feel like we missed that to some extent. We’re we’re, do you think it’s just because we have so much going on that we, for a method of self-protection, that we’re just, you know, heads down thinking about only how things impact us? How do you think we got here where maybe we’re not doing some of the things that we used to do? Leverage the Power of “Tell Me More” Jon Mertz (33:25):  Yeah, I think, again, it goes back, I think to a lot what I heard is that just really being unafraid to get involved in groups that are different than us. And, you know, we’ve gotta get out of our social media channels, <laugh> because all they’re just designed to heighten and keep us in our separate corners, if you will, and, and bicker back and forth. But when you get out into the real community and engage with real people, you know, that kind of dissipates. And by asking that question, tell me more, and leaning into their, you know, really developing an understanding of their story and more important than that, then if you are making a decision that’s gonna impact them and their story, you know, really understanding that rather than thinking you understand it. I mean, imagining you understanding it and actually hearing it and developing that narrative is very different. So getting out and engaging with those different than us is so critical to enhancing our moral courage capacity. Jenn DeWall (34:24):  I love that! Cl that’s a perfect place to end and like wrap as a closing call to action. Get out there and seek to build connections with those that are different. Seek to understand or learn. And then of course, I love that recommendation, you know, just leveraging the power of those three words. Tell me more, Jon, how could our audience get in touch with you? I mean, I know how to get in touch with you, I know where you live but how could our audience get in touch with you? You’re, I know that you, you know, down the line you’re gonna have potentially different offerings that you’ll have, but how can they get in touch with you if they wanted to have a greater conversation and moral courage? Where to Find More from Jon Mertz Jon Mertz (35:00):  Yeah, probably the best way is my personal website, which is JonMertz.com. You know, I post, you know, not that often, but a little bit on LinkedIn, some thoughts on current events or news. So that would be following me on LinkedIn. We’d probably be a second way to do that as well. Sure. On Twitter, although not as much, it’s gotten a little messy here lately, so not on it as as much as I used to be, but anyway, hopefully, they’ll get it in better shape than what it is today, in my opinion. <Laugh>. Jenn DeWall (35:36):  Well, Jon, thank you so much. Honestly, really thank you for coming on the show. I know we’ve been talking about this for a while and I think, you know, moral courage is an important topic that all of us need to lean into, and I love the utopic future of all of us coming together again. So thank you for inspiring that call to action for our listeners because it’s truly what leadership is. It’s building the communities that we live in and treating people like our neighbors and being kind. And so I just appreciate you sharing your message with our audience today. Thank you for coming by. Jon Mertz (36:06):  Well, thank you, Jenn. Appreciate you hosting conversations like this with different people and and at all to helps make the world a little better as well. Jenn DeWall (36:14):  Thank you so much for listening to you this week’s episode with Jon Mertz. I love the concept of moral courage and just even thinking through ways that I might be able to make greater impact. I hope that you are inspired too. And if you want to learn a little bit more about Jon and Jon’s work, you can of course head on over to his website. JonMertz.com, or you can connect with them on LinkedIn. You can reach out to ’em, get to know more about his research. Congratulations, Jon, too, on your recent accomplishment of your E D D. I’m so proud of you. And hey, thank you so much for listening everyone. If we can serve you in any way with your leadership development needs, head on over to Crestcom.com, we can offer our complimentary leadership skills workshop there. You can find out about our monthly complimentary webinars, and of course, download our white papers and free eBooks. Until next time, have a great day everyone.   The post The Need for Moral Courage in Leadership with Thought Entrepreneur, Jon Mertz appeared first on Crestcom International.

Latino Leadership in the Multicultural Future with Diversity and Inclusivity Pioneer, Dr. Juana Bordas Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and on this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast, I sat down with Dr. Juana Bordas to talk about the power of Latino leadership. We are the multicultural future! That is the focus of the podcast today, understanding that, from the perspective of Juana Bordas, who is the author of Salsa, Soul, and Spirit: Leadership for a Multicultural Age and The Power of Latino Leadership: ¡Ahora! Both books received the International Latino Book Award for her breakthrough work in the multicultural leadership field. Her new edition of The Power of Latino Leadership: ¡Ahora! Is being released March 28th and can be ordered on Amazon. But let me tell you a little bit more about Juana. Juana served as an advisor to Harvard’s Hispanic Journal, the Kellogg National Fellows as trustee of Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership and International Leadership Association, the ILA. She was the first Latino to receive ILA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. And as a founder and Executive Director for Colorado’s Mi Casa Resource Center, founding president of the National Hispanic Leadership Institute and the Circle of Latina Leadership, she was commended by Latina Style magazine for creating a nation of Latina leaders. I hope you enjoy our conversation as we talk about the power of Latino leadership. Meet Dr. Juana Bordas, President of Mestiza Leadership International Jenn DeWall (01:31):  Happy International Women’s Day! I am so excited to be joined today on the podcast to talk about the power of Latino leadership with you, the beautiful Dr. Juana Bordas, and I’ll call you Juana, thank you so much for coming on The Leadership Habit today, and especially to share your insights and your experience on this important topic. I feel so lucky. I said to you earlier, and of course our audience just heard your reputation is profound. So many awards, so many different,I guess just recommendations and accolades. And I just feel lucky to have you on the show today. So thank you so much for being here. Dr. Juana Bordas (02:11):  Thank you for having me and for having a strong and powerful woman at the helm of this podcast. You know, we’re gonna do this. Jenn DeWall (02:19):  Yes, we are. Well, let’s go ahead. They heard a little bit about you through that opening introduction bumper, but could you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell our audience a little bit more about who you are, how you came to be, what you focus on, and what you’re passionate about, anything you feel to share. Dr. Juana Bordas (02:34):  Oh, great. Well, I am an immigrant. I came to this country when I was a little girl, three years old. And my family immigrated from Nicaragua. There had been a tsunami that had really wiped out the coast where my family was from. And so they had this vision and this dream. Now I come from a large family of eight. So my dad and my two older sisters came to the United States and worked and saved money to bring their family to America. And that’s my first boat. I’m in the hull of a banana boat, believe it or not, crossing the Gulf of Mexico. And I remember my brother asking me if I wanted a banana <laugh>. So we must have been eating a lot of bananas. There was just a series of bunk beds in the bottom of the, of the boat. But here’s the thing, you know, I think when we look at my experience as an immigrant, we can look across not only our own country and our history as an immigrant nation, but the incredible contributions that immigrants have made to America. Dr. Juana Bordas (03:34):  For example, all four of my brothers served in the military and you know, my sister served in the waves in World War II, so out of the eight of us, five were in the military, and I served in the USP score in Chile. So, I mean, when you look at immigrants, we’re just here to find opportunity to get a better life. And my parents sacrificed everything so I could become an educated woman. So when people ask me why I’m so driven, I’m like, well, my family poured everything into me so I could become the one that opened the door for others in our family to become educated. And we all are. My three daughters have advanced degrees now. One’s a teacher, one’s a professor, and one’s a lawyer. And so I love to tell my story just because today there’s some tension around immigration. And yet, well, we have to look at the history of our great country and what happened here. Jenn DeWall (04:27):  Oh my gosh. Juana! You came to America in the hull of a boat Dr. Juana Bordas (04:32): The hull of a banana boat! Yeah, they had a room in the back with bunk beds. Oh my. And that’s where my mother and five of her children were. And you know, I do a lot of work with people about, about their purpose. And because I was the youngest daughter and because I had these parents, like my mother went to the, to the priest at the Catholic church, and she sat in her humble way, I can cook, I can clean, I can take care of children. But then she said, give me a job because I came here to educate my children so they could have a better life. And of course, who’s gonna refuse a selfless soul like that? So when you look at your parents, and all of us know that our parents and those that came before us, that we stand on their shoulders. When you look at what they sacrificed, I have a deep desire to give back and, and to make sure other people have the same opportunities I had. Jenn DeWall (05:22):  Oh my gosh. And Juana, like you, I feel that. And every part of my body, just your desire to take what your parents gave you to pour everything into it. And today we’re gonna be talking about, you know, the power of Latino leadership and advancing that understanding that. And I will tell you that as, as our audience might know, like I am not Latina, so I’m going to be learning so much from you, Juana, and I am so excited to just have you here to talk about this and to share your story and to give highlights, but also, gosh, tap into that passion that you have! Because we all could use a little bit, little bit more Juana in our days. Lemme just tell you! Dr. Juana Bordas (05:59):  Oh, that’s very kind of you. Now I think, you know, the fact is, is that, that most of us have a sort of a vision or a passion or a purpose. And part of life is, is is stoking that up, right. And, and keeping that fire alive. And so when I teach leadership, that’s one of the main things I do with people. You know, I believe that every one of us is unique. We are, there’ll never be another person like you, Jenn, or a person like me or anybody who’s listening. We’re one of a kind design. And so we have some natural abilities, some assets where we were born, our interest, all of that that leads us to make a unique contribution with our life. And studies show that when you have that sense of purpose, you lead a fulfilled life. You know? So, so that’s, that’s why it’s so great. Who are Latinos and Where are They From? Jenn DeWall (06:46):  Well, let’s step into your purpose. Let’s talk a little bit more about the power of Latino leadership. And we had captured the phrase that we are, and meaning Latinos are the multicultural future, but let’s level set for people because Latino is a broader term and if someone maybe is, you know, like me and unfamiliar or doesn’t know as much, that can be a confusing who falls under that classification. Yeah. Well, and so who, who are Latinos anyway? I know we have like, I’m not like who, who are Latinos? Dr. Juana Bordas (07:15):  You kinda hit the nail on the head, you know, because so first of all, there’s Latino and Hispanic, Latino refers to Latin America, and it’s more inclusive because it also includes Brazil and Portugal. It’s the Latin countries, you know. But it’s kind of funny because Hispanic and Latino both go back to the Roman occupation of Spain. <Laugh>, that’s the Romans called Spain Hispania. But in any case, Latinos are a blended culture. They’re mainly the Spanish conquistadors or, they are called conquistadors, and the indigenous people of this hemisphere you know, there was kind of a merger unlike North America. And so when you look at the population in south and Central America, it’s called mestizo or mixed people. And then when you add, for example, my father’s father was French, so I’m actually French, Nicaraguan, Spanish and Indian. And so we have this mixture, it’s called the Mezcla, the mixture. And that’s part of our DNA and that’s one of the reasons Latinos love inclusion so much. And we come from 26 countries and yet we were all colonized by the Spanish and have the Spanish language, common values that hold our culture together. So it’s really kind of a new phenomena, this population that is mixed. And today, if you look at studies 42% of Latinos say we have European blood. Sure. Because of the Spanish. A fourth of us are Afro-Latinos, a another 25% claim their indigenous roots. So even in the way we identify is mixed. And what’s so beautiful about that is that half the children in in today’s America claim that they’re mixed or multicultural. It’s what’s coming. And they’re very excited about living in a world where the best of each culture is available to all of us. And where we can learn and have cultural affinity for all the cultures around us. Like St. Patrick’s Day is coming up next week, and I’m gonna be celebrating that <laugh>. What does the Multicultural Future Look Like? Jenn DeWall (09:20):  I love it. But you’re talking about the future where we can appreciate the multicultural country countries that many of us live in. So let’s talk about what a multicultural future looks like here in the US. What is today’s dominant culture and how do you think that’s going to evolve over the next few decades? Dr. Juana Bordas (09:38):  Well, we know that our, our culture’s changing. You know, an interesting thing to me was there was an a thousand percent increase in the last census, you know, 2020 census where people who had originally identified as white, checked white and other races. Well, you know, I think that’s interesting. Then there was a 250% increase in people who actually claimed they were multicultural. And now with people checking their DNA and, and and you know, marrying into different cultures and their children having friends and adopting the music and the culture of other people, this multicultural age is coming. And you have to marry that with the global age as well because we have people from so many different countries now, you know, one out of five people in America move every year. And so here we are, this mixture of people from different places and different countries and different ethnic groups and different races. And I think that cultural mix is gonna be so dynamic. You know, nature loves a hybrid. Jenn DeWall (10:39):  <Laugh>. Yes. Dr. Juana Bordas (10:40):  Know, Latinos have hybrid vigor. That’s what I always tell ’em. That’s why we’re so, you know, you look at Latinos and they’re running around, our music has an extra beat. We love color and, and you know, we’re hybrids. And so that opportunity, I mean, there’s no downside to diversity. You know, there’s all these people that go like, oh, this, no, this is an opportunity finally for humanity to come together and tap into the best of every, every culture, every nationality. Jenn DeWall (11:06):  Oh My, I love this. Like, I have tears in my eyes just thinking about a future where we can all come together and just appreciate the different, like values and experiences, the cultures, like all that, the contributions that people can make, really ex expressing those differences. And I love that you said that there’s no downside to diversity, cuz I totally believe that. Like, Multicultural Leadership and an Inclusive Future Dr. Juana Bordas (11:27):  It’s, it’s about growth. It’s about growth, right? It’s an add-on process. Yes. I think we have to do some healing. You know, all of us, all of us may have things that don’t serve us now. But but that’s true. In, in, in, in any, anything you do. You know, they always say that growth is two things. One is doing a little pruning and the other one’s feeding and growing and expanding. Right. And so this is an opportunity I think for all of us, us to come together and we need to do it. We need to do it not only because our children are already there, right, right. Our children are already there. But also because there has been so much conflict in the world about differences and you know, we need to stop that. We need to get over that. We need to look at a future that includes everybody. Jenn DeWall (12:12):  Gosh. And just find the love. Like find our common humanity. Exactly. Find the love, like find the peace. And I know there’s obviously a lot of things that go and be that, but wouldn’t it just be so great? But let’s talk about like what are the benefits if we move towards, I mean, I love your enthusiasm cause we’re gonna get a ton on what you’re going to say because I feel from where I sit, there are tremendous benefits. But again, I know that there are some, there’s a little bit of fear or uncertainty or whatnot. But let’s talk about the benefits when we actually embrace this approach Dr. Juana Bordas (12:40):  Yeah, well let me give you a little, a little Latino thing on this. Ready? Yeah. Latinos have the highest participation of any group in the workplace. We love to work. And whether you’re talking about getting your roof put on or, or having your grandmother taken care of, you know, or or having your food served or your food grown for you. I mean, Latinos are essential workers across this country. And work is dignified to us. If we can work, we’re contributing, which our culture is all about. Everybody contributing their share, doing their part. Work is about dignity, you know? And work is about supporting my family. So, you know, it’s an important thing. And so Latinos have this other thing about work and it’s called Go for the Gusto. Some people have heard that. Right? Go for the gusto. Jenn DeWall (13:26):  Go for the gusto. I love that Latino Entrepreneurship Dr. Juana Bordas (13:27):  Gusto. So that means about passion. Don’t just do your job like, you know, a job. No, do it with some passion. You know, do it with some, some some give it that extra shot. You know, try to do your best work. And then the third one, which I really love about work and and about the Latino culture is that we celebrate life. We have the highest participation in the labor market. Give us a job, we’ll do it. But it we also celebrate life. We spend more money on food going out to eat. We invented the word fiesta. We have celebrations. We love music. We’re higher technology users because we wanna connect with each other. So it’s that whole idea of enjoying life, contributing through work, doing a great job, but at the same time enjoying your family, enjoying your community, and knowing that that life really is a celebration as well. You know? So so the Latino culture has so much to offer people we’re also totally entrepreneurial. 80% of the small businesses in the last decade according to the census, were started by Latinos. Well sure. Because a third of us are immigrants and we’ve got that immigrant can-do, let’s get it done, innovative, risk-taking spirit. And and so I think Latinos are here to revitalize America where we are going to revitalize the American dream. Jenn DeWall (14:45):  Oh my gosh. I feel like I’ve learned so much. And even just thinking about what and how I can learn. I mean, one of the things, things that really stands out about what you just shared is even just that coming back to our purpose of enjoying our lives, of finding joy and enjoying our community or giving back to our community, helping others, supporting our family. I mean, so many of those things that I think we’ve for some reason have kind of let slip or maybe not focused on in the same way. Like just knowing that we’ve gotta come back together. The Multicultural Future is “We” Oriented Dr. Juana Bordas (15:12):  Yeah. Well, you know because it’s International Women’s Day, we should take a look at the fact that women, in all cultures are “we” oriented. You know, they care about the family about the community. Women built our schools, they built our nonprofits. And so Latinos are a “we” culture, they’re a people-centered culture as are most cultures. You know, the African-American culture, the American Indian culture and cultures across the world. And that means that you don’t just think about you, you think about we, you think about the collective, you think about people, you think about building a society that takes care of its people. And I think women have done that traditionally throughout history. And so we’re at a crossroads, really. Are we really gonna continue with this gap where they say that three people in America, we won’t name any names, own half the wealth? You know, in our culture, you don’t take more than your share. Yes. You know, I have a nice house and and you can be comfortable and you could even have a little vacation home if you want that. But you don’t need to be so filthy rich that it damages the other. And so in collective cultures, it was always understood that if somebody took or they had a few that took too much, it would damage the whole. And that’s where we are in society today with, you know, 47% of Latinos not even earning $15 an hour. And the fact is, you know, a good economy where people are making a good wage is good for everybody. Right? Right. And so we need to get back to that. Our constitution starts with, We the people! Jenn DeWall (16:47):  <Laugh>. Yes. I love it. Bring it back to that. Dr. Juana Bordas (16:49):  We need to get back to that. Yes. Yeah. Jenn DeWall (16:51):  And, and I feel like yes, paying people a living wage, giving people the tools or access to the things that they need to be able to live a quality life. Like I just think that’s so important for all of our missions to give that back to humanity. Dr. Juana Bordas (17:04):  Right. Jenn DeWall (17:05):  Right. Why would we not? A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com Latino Leadership is Creating a Better Future Jenn DeWall (18:10):  And bringing it back into leadership. So I, I, again, I love this cause I feel like, did I get this right? I wanna make sure I got this right. So do did you say Latinos represent 26 countries? Was that what you said earlier? Yeah, 26. Yeah. Holy cow. I did not know that. Right, right. And I’m already just learning and I’m absorbing and I processing and then trying to ask questions and I’m sure our audience is following along thinking too. What do you think as it relates to really creating this like better future where we are embracing, you know, the multicultural future that we’re headed towards, what are the skillsets that you think that leaders need today to be ready to unite these individuals and to help everyone work better together? Dr. Juana Bordas (18:51):  Well two principles of leadership that I think are very helpful. The first one is the leader as equal. You know, and if you talk to people that are trying to create a more equitable society, they will tell you that one of the biggest problems is dominance. Or before it was patriarchy. It’s like one group being, you know, or the leaders being you know, on top in a sense, you know? Yeah. And the leader is equal, defines the leader as someone who treats everybody with respect. And we know it’s true. If, if you ha, you know, if you’re working in an office, the people that keep the office nice for you so that you can go in the IT people that make your, your your IT work, the people who do the payroll and get you paid or whatever, every single person has something to contribute. The Power of Leadership by Many, and Leaders as Equals Dr. Juana Bordas (19:34):  And the leader, their job or our job is to develop those people. It’s to let them know that they contribute. It’s to let them know that they have value. And we do that by our own actions and our own character by treating people with respect. Whether you clean the place or you’re the CEO! And then, and then not, you know, not breaking the rules, you know, following the rules and showing people this is how you lead. And so that’s very important. Now, if you do that, a second thing happens, and that’s called leadership by the many. And that means you begin to get people that believe that they are leaders too, and that they can be leaders. And that’s what we need, you know, in a democracy we need everybody to participate. I mean, we need people engaged. We need people engaged in our schools and our nonprofits and Yeah. And, you know, and, and really engaged in business. I mean, when you hire somebody that they should really give it their best shot. And so these two principles, leadership by the many and leadership as equal, the leader is equal, really can create an organization where people step up and believe I too can make a contribution. So those are two fabulous principles that people can begin using that I, that I really outline in in, in the books I’ve written. Jenn DeWall (20:50):  I have to ask, I have to ask the governor point. And I, I love that of thinking perfect. How can I show people that, you know, Hey, I appreciate you, I respect your contributions. I want to give you that recognition from where you sit. What do you think are the biggest challenges that people run into as it relates to either of those principles or philosophies? Dr. Juana Bordas (21:10):  Well, I do think it is hard. I, I mean, it does mean you have to train people and you have to invest in people, right? People can’t do a good job if, if, if, if they haven’t been shown how to do that, and also been giving the coaching or the mentoring or whatever they need to be able to be high contributors and high performers. So it, it is intense in that way. But I, I, I had a, a leader ask me, well, how do you lead a big team? I say, well, if you really work with people, if you have a shared vision, if you have participatory leadership, if you have a plan that’s step by step so that each time they take a step, they’re moving forward towards that vision. You don’t have to manage that big team because they’re gonna manage themselves <laugh>, you know? Building a Collective Culture of Accountability Dr. Juana Bordas (21:53):  So the real goal is to get people to accept that commitment and that responsibility, that I’m an important part of this. And the other thing in collective cultures, if I don’t do my job, I let everybody down. And so if you can, you know, if you can establish that sense of, “we”, we’re in this together, this is our organization, this is our team, then people aren’t gonna let other people down because when they don’t do their job, other people can’t do theirs. You see what I mean? So I have to kind of imbue that spirit in them. And I have to say that when you look at leadership for Latinos or communities of color for 500 years, our leaders had to inspire people with the knowledge that they would never see the success or progress in their lifetime with the knowledge that they had to do this as volunteers, you know, as people who were just had a vision that, that someday their children would finally go to college, their children would finally have a good job in a good home, right? That’s what my mother would say to me. I want you to have a good home. I want you to have a good job. I don’t want you to work like I’ve had to work. And that’s such a motivator for people, you know, when people invest that way. But the leadership that we’ve had in the past has been really an inspirational inclusive type leadership. Jenn DeWall (23:10):  And how do you feel? I mean, I love that and it’s, it is interesting, right? When we recall our own resilience, we can come back to that purpose, but sometimes, yeah, it can be difficult if, you know, you’re not going to actualize in the way that you wish you could, that it’s just smaller steps to get that message, the influence to grow the, the, I guess the purpose and getting it there. What do you think, so if that was the leadership quality, then what do you think is the leadership quality today? Is it more of like, going back to that understanding and how we create that “we”? Dr. Juana Bordas (23:42):  Yes. Well, actually the, I I, I think there’s, first of all, one of the things that I think is real important, particularly for people who don’t know their ancestors the first principle in my, in my multicultural book is, is remember the past, know the past, connect to your past, learn from the past. You know that’s such an important thing for us to do because we live in a society where there’s sound bites and we go from one thing to the other, and people don’t even remember the struggles we’ve had. That’s why I was so happy today when I did my International Woman’s Day post to say, Hey, women have had the vote for a hundred years now. We’ve taken that step. Where are we going next? Do you see what I mean? But to really embrace the fact that, that women have been on this journey for, for over a hundred years and we’re just getting there. Multicultural Leadership Must Look to the Future Dr. Juana Bordas (24:28):  So these things do take a long time, but the true leader is not looking at the present, they’re looking at the future. They’re looking at what’s coming. They’re looking at the fact that, you know, when you look at studies on women as leaders, people would rather work for a woman because women also have that relational aspect that we’re talking about that’s in the Latino culture where people come first, children come, first, families, you know, so anyway, so it, it’s really important for us to be able to look at the past. Then the second shift is from I to WE, this whole thing about Numa and the individualism or our few people being leaders, that that really, and especially for millennials and Zs, if you do some research into the younger generation, they want allies. They want partners. They wanna be part of the, the, the organization. And they don’t like top-down leadership. And so we need to make that shift to we leadership, leadership that really inspires people. And that doesn’t mean you don’t have some, some hierarchy or positions, but those people, you know, it should be kind of hard to tell when they’re walking down the hall. Who’s the CEO <laugh>, Jenn DeWall (25:33):  Right! Dr. Juana Bordas (25:35):  I’ve met some CEOs like that, by the way, who are right there, right? And and you know, so they should be, they should be able to roll up their sleeves and, and, and, and be on the ground as well. And then the third shift is this shift to a more generous society where you don’t have such a gap in, in wealth. You know, I’m old enough to remember the fifties, and for those of us that can remember that, you know, my family bought their little home for $10,000. Working class people could afford a home, you know, and the gap in wages where, where the wages haven’t risen I think that’s something we should all be concerned about. We should try to build an America where people are taken care of. And that I think is the purpose of leadership. Whether you’re taking care of your team or whether you’re taking care of your organization and your corporation. How are the people, and do they really believe that you’re there to serve them, to grow them, and to help them reach their own potential? What are Your Secrets for Success? Jenn DeWall (26:25):  Okay, why don’t I have to ask this, like, you’ve given and dropped so many insights, considerations, and perspectives, but you yourself are someone how I’ve come to know you, and I don’t even know, but you, how I would describe you as someone that’s extremely resilient and purpose driven. I know this is kind of off script, but what’s your secret? How do you, how do you stay committed? Because obviously life can get challenging. Things aren’t perfect or where we want them to be. What is one of the things that you keep in mind to allow you to keep to that purpose and keep going even when times are tough? Because I feel like you’re also someone that we can all be inspired by to keep going. If things are going difficult, that we can persevere, we can do it. What’s your, what’s your secret? Give us some tips. Tip 1: Stay Connected to Your Ancestors Dr. Juana Bordas (27:10):  <Laugh>, I’ll give you some tips. Number one, you know, I am very connected to my ancestors and so are our majority of people in the world. So I invite everybody to look at my social media during Halloween, because I do a whole thing on Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, and how you can connect to your ancestry. That’s so important in the US because people were told to change their names to forget where they came from. The truth of the matter is, there’s a lot of power in the people that came before you and whose shoulders you stand on. Tip 2: Keep Balance in Your Life Dr. Juana Bordas (27:41):  I also have a lot of balance in my life, you know I do yoga, I meditate every morning. I’m a hiker. I just went skiing. I’m very active. Your health and how you eat and all that. We all know that. But I’m 80 years old, you know? Jenn DeWall (27:59):  Wait, <laugh>, are you serious? Dr. Juana Bordas (28:02):  And to, so if you wanna go the long haul and Jenn DeWall (28:05):  You No, you’re kidding me right now. You’re not 80! <laugh>. Wait, are you kidding? Are you kidding? Right. Dr. Juana Bordas (28:10):  No, no, no, no. I’m actually 80 and a half Jenn DeWall (28:13):  <Laugh>. Okay? This is the moment where we take a pause in the podcast, and I wish everyone could go and Google Juana! There’s no way! You are 80! Tip 3: Take care of the Mind, the Body and the Spirit Dr. Juana Bordas (28:23):  80 and a half <laugh>. No, but I mean, I mean, you don’t think that way when you’re young, you know, because you do have that vibrancy and so forth. But I would encourage people to figure out, you know, whether it’s it’s the 30 minute walk or whatever, take care of the mind, the body and the spirit! Tip 4: Live with Purpose and Help Others Dr. Juana Bordas (28:38):  And then your heart, you know people say to me, well, why are you still working? I go, well, I surround myself with people who really have vision and purpose and who really wanna make a difference. And all the studies show again that a purposeful life, a life where you’re contributing is, is what’s gonna make you happy. And I kind of learned that from my mom. You know, my mother was a, a woman, a steal, this immigrant woman with a fifth grade education who had a vision and determination that I would be here today, right? And if I was moping around, she’d say, get busy and do something for somebody else, right? I mean, she was real clear that too much concentration on yourself. And that doesn’t mean you don’t do your healing work. That’s very important. I grew up at a time when I couldn’t even speak my language, you know, and, and I was, you know, discriminated against. People didn’t think I was smart because of where I came from, but so, so you have to do your healing work, but beyond that, you have to serve others. And I think the richness of my life comes because I can look across my life and see how many people, people, how many women I’ve developed when I started Mi Casa Women’s Center in the seventies, or the National Hispana Leadership Institute in the nineties, to train Latino women to be national leaders. When you have that kind of a feeling about your life, then, then the energy just flows <laugh> Jenn DeWall (30:00):  Wow! Dr. Juana Bordas (30:00):  A beautiful, but yeah. But it’s so important that you, that you keep that mind, body, spirit balance, you know? And then the other thing is, you know, I, I kid people, I go like, I’m independently wealthy, and the reason I’m independently wealthy is because I’ve paid off my home. When I worked at the Center for Creative Leadership, I bought another little house. So I paid off a rental. I paid cash for my car. I have no bills. And so, Hey, I’m Rich <laugh>. Jenn DeWall (30:27):  Yes, my gosh. Juana, I’m like tearing up because you are, and I hope our audience is getting this too, just the true example and role model of servant-based leadership practicing what you preach of giving back to the community. I’ve even talking about the principles, and I wanna, before we end, I do want to talk about your book just a little bit more so they can understand where to get that. But Juana, like your, your purpose is so inspiring to me, and I just hope that it, it invigorates or inspires our audience because you are just truly a role model of servant-based leaders. Dr. Juana Bordas (31:01):  Oh, thank you! Jenn DeWall (31:02):  I, I don’t see that all the time. Like, right, like, we don’t see that all the time. The Power of Servant Leadership in the Multicultural Future Dr. Juana Bordas (31:07):  But you have to understand it does make you happy and it does make it powerful. Servant leadership is is one of the most powerful forms of leadership because you’re not only by the way the, the test of the servant leader is our, do your people grow, become more autonomous, more likely to lead themselves. It’s not a, it’s not a, what do you call it? A it’s not you serve people and, and no, it’s, you help them become empowered, autonomous, able to serve themselves. So it’s, it’s just such a rewarding form of leadership. Juana’s Latest Book: The Power of Latino Leadership Dr. Juana Bordas (31:40):  So, but we were gonna talk about something and that was my book and what I wanna tell folks, I think that’s so important today, you know, the diversity and inclusion conversation has really not included Latinos like it should being that we’re gonna be, you know, the, we’re gonna be one out of four people in the next like 15 years, but we’re also 78% of the new entries into the labor force. So regardless of whether you’re working with somebody or you’re a manager, or you’re leading whatever, it’s important to understand the Latino contribution to America and who we are, and that we welcome people to join with us. This cultural adaptability and cultural agility that I talk about in my writing, that’s what we all need in the multicultural age. Cuz just give you an example, you’re gonna be managing people in four different generations. Yeah. That’s cultural agility. Being able to listen to the millennials and the Z’s and recognize, you know, that, that they process information different than me and building a partnership with them where I learn from them and they learn from me. You know, my name with millennials is Tia Juana or Aunt Juana, because they don’t <laugh> that way, they can relate to me as their, as their favorite Aunt! Jenn DeWall (32:52):  <Laugh>. I love it. Well, I, I wanna tell our audience your book title, the Power of Latino Leadership: ¡Ahora! Yes. When you, who is this book for? Who do you imagine reading this book or how can it help them? Dr. Juana Bordas (33:05): Yeah. Well well first of all, I think for, for Latinos it’s an opportunity for them to learn about their history, their culture, their leadership, and have a vision for the future, which I call Latino Destino, <laugh> or Latino Destiny. And I think our destiny is to help build the multicultural world and to reinfuse humanistic values into the American society. You know, values such as hard work as generosity, as community, as people come first, you know celebrating life, the values that we have, I think can re reinvigorate America. But the other thing is, I think for all people that have not had an opportunity to learn about our culture, this is really important. This is gonna prepare you for the next wave of American evolution in this society. And again, we invite you to come with us. That’s a very different form of diversity. Bienvenido! Welcome – Join Us in the Multicultural Future Dr. Juana Bordas (33:55):  You know, we have a value called bienvenido or welcome. And a lot of people can even feel that when they’re with Latinos. You know, we used to embrace each other when we said hello, but we have this whole sense of extended family, of inviting people to be part of us. And I call that Latinos by corazon or Latinos by heart. And so our inclusion is very different. We say bienvenido, we say, come with us, work with us to create this new America that’s diverse, that’s people-centered, that recognizes the contributions of all its people. And that has a vision for, for a different kind of future. Jenn DeWall (34:30):  Oh my gosh. And you’ve just painted a beautiful vision for a beautiful future. Juana thank you so much for coming on the show. I have to ask, just because I feel like you’ve given us so much, is there any less things that you would like to share with our audience before I ask you how they can get in touch with you? Dr. Juana Bordas (34:45):  Well, first of all, I wanna honor them for listening and, and, and for being part of the conversation that shows they wanna learn, that shows they’re turned on, that shows, you know, that they really want to experience differences in a, in a new way. And so thank you all for listening and and yes, it would honor me and my ancestors to, to have this book. But I really do believe to prepare for the future, you under, you need to understand the Latino experience in America today. Jenn DeWall (35:12):  Yes. And where can they get your book? How can they, how can they learn more? I already learned so much, and I, well, I don’t, I realize there’s, so I already knew I didn’t know a lot and now I’m like, I definitely don’t know a lot. And so where can they, where can they get your book? Where to Find More From Dr. Juana Bordas Dr. Juana Bordas (35:27):  They can get the book on Amazon. It, it as a pre-order. It’s gonna be out March 28th, but they can order it on Amazon, of course. Support your local bookstore, you know, but that, that’s an important thing. We wanna keep our small businesses alive and they can, they can order it, you know through Porchlight or any of the other book things. And, and I’m gonna be a best seller. So get it now while you can, cuz it’s hot! Jenn DeWall (35:51):  <Laugh>. Yes, you are. And wanna thank you for sharing your, you are a light in this space. Thank you for being a light for the people that came before you. I love how much respect you have for the people that came before, but also your passion for creating a better world for us all to live in. Come and join us. Bienvenido. Like, welcome. I just, you are a beautiful light. Thank you so much for coming on this show. Dr. Juana Bordas (36:14):  Oh no. Thank you for having this podcast. Girl. You go! <Laugh> Bueno! Thank you, Gracias, Adios! Jenn DeWall (36:22):  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode. I know that I myself learned a lot and I really enjoyed my conversation with Juana. And if you would like to get in touch with her, you can purchase her book, The Power of Latino Leadership ¡Ahora! It’s available now on Amazon. You can also head on over to her website. It’s the first book on Latino history, culture, and leadership. And will prepare you to work with, manage, and lead the fastest growing sector of the workforce and the most entrepreneurial group in America. And of course, if you know someone that could benefit or learn it, would love to hear this episode, share this with them. And finally, don’t forget to head on over to Crestcom.com. There you can request a complimentary leadership skills workshop for you and your team. You can find out about our complimentary monthly webinars as well as download our Whitepapers and eBooks. Thank you so much for listening.   The post The Power of Latino Leadership in the Multicultural Future with Dr. Juana Bordas appeared first on Crestcom International.

Attention Management is the Key to Productivity with Maura Thomas Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I sat down with Maura Thomas to talk about her newest book. Everyone Wants to Work Here, Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and Be the Leader in Your Market. In this conversation, there are so many insights that Maura shared that I think are relevant to so many of us, and we can use to be better leaders and also manage our time and attention in a different way. But before we dive into the show, let me tell you a little bit more about Maura. So with us today is Maura Nevel Thomas, an expert in productivity and work-life balance, and a pioneer in the concept of attention management, which she calls the New Path to productivity. Honestly, I love the whole concept. I know that you will too, but let me tell you a little bit more. She’s an award-winning international speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance and the most widely cited authority on attention management. She’s a TEDx speaker and founder of Regain Your Time. She’s the author of six books, including the one that we’re going to talk about today. Everyone Wants to Work Here, and she was named a top leadership speaker in Inc. Magazine. Maura is often featured in major business outlets, and she’s a regular columnist for both Forbes and Harvard Business Review, with articles there viewed over a million times. Now. I hope you enjoy your conversation. Get your pen and paper handy because she has got a lot of different insights that you can use to manage your attention to be a better leader. Here we go! Meet Maura Thomas, Author, Speaker and Productivity Expert Jenn DeWall:  Maura Nevel Thomas, welcome to the Leadership Habit. I met you a year ago, and your message stuck with me. You stuck with me. I got to watch you speak and talk about your craft, and I’m so excited that a year later, we get to introduce you to our audience because you are just a rockstar at what you do. You also are coming out with a new book, and I’m just so excited to be able to take your message and share it with our listeners so they can get to know and learn the value that you’ve been sharing with audiences from around the world. So more of a welcome to the show today. We’re so happy to have you. Maura Thomas:  Thanks, Jenn. You are so sweet, and I am excited to be here. I’m really excited about this message from my book, and I just can’t wait to talk about it with you, so thanks. Jenn DeWall:  Yes, well, I, they know the audience knows that I love just the basic origin story. I love to hear how people came to be, you know, where they are today. So if you could go ahead and just introduce yourself to our audience, tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be. Maura Thomas:  Yeah, I have worked in the productivity field for my entire professional career. I started out in the paper-based planner world, and when I worked there, it was part of my job to understand all the paper-based planners and all the productivity systems and what everybody was doing and, and selling and, and teaching. And so I went to all the trainings and I read all the books and I saw all the speakers, and the organization I worked in was global. So a couple times a year I went and sat with 42 peers in 42 from 42 other countries talking about productivity in their country and what was working and what they were teaching. And so I just got this really unique education in the productivity industry. My background is not. I’m not one of those, like, I’ve just always been good at this, so now I’m teaching other people, right? <Laugh>, It was, it was really just this immersion for years, almost a decade. So when I left and I started my business, that was the skill I had. I knew that I wanted to start a business and you know, you think about like, what do I have to offer people? And people kept telling me, you know, this stuff about productivity that most people don’t know, and you have this, you have this really rich education in it, and that’s what you should teach. And I, while I was at that company, I also got an MBA, so I got sort of the business knowledge and, and that kind of thing. And then I started blogging and as a result of my, in 2009, as a result of my blog, Wiley Publishing came to me, and asked me to write my first book on productivity. Then I got invited to do a TEDx talk, and then I got invited to write for Harvard Business Review, and then I published my second book, and then another publisher came to me when I started talking about attention management as opposed to time management as the new path to productivity. And so it just all sort of blew up from there. And now this is my sixth book. I write for both Harvard Business Review and Forbes and I travel all over the world helping leaders in teams have more days where they go home saying, oh my gosh, that was such a good day. I got so much done. And fewer days where they say, oh my gosh, I was busy all day and somehow I got nothing done. <Laugh>. Do Other Cultures Look at Work and Attention Management Differently? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, that’s the reality I feel like of so much of us. So what that feels like more your, your resume, your accolades, I, there’s so many things I wish we had four or five hours to be able to unpack even, you know, to get to the surface of like just so much knowledge that you have. But I’m curious, I love that, you know, you were able to sit and learn from people in different cultures, like you said, the 42 different people, 42 different countries. What do you think from where you sat, what are some of the, I guess the variances that you noticed across cultures? Is it that we prioritize, like our, and I’m gonna sound very uneducated asking this, like, is it that we priorit how we prioritize our family? Or is it who we’re trying to serve? What are some of the differences you notice and how we manage our time across cultures? Maura Thomas:  Yeah, I one of the biggest differences that, I mean, a lot of people talk about is that I think in in the US and in other cultures as well, we are very, very focused on work, which in some ways is not at all a bad thing. But I think people, excuse me, I think people in Europe and some other cultures are a lot better at prioritizing things outside of work and working to live instead of living to work. And I understand getting passion from your work, but I write a lot about burnout and work-life balance and and I, I help people a lot. This is the biggest challenge, primarily in the US that I see, is that people just, that they’re having the joy sucked out of their days because work is such a priority. And so that’s, I think that’s the biggest cultural difference that I saw. Jenn DeWall:  Gosh, this makes me want to almost, I wish I could have that messaging, you know, that conditioning removed out of me <laugh>, you know, where you could just, wow, find more of that peace, find more of that choice, stop the “Sunday scaries”, stop worrying about certain things or, you know, I think, and maybe, I’m not sure if you see it in a, in a particular population or like certain characteristics of people that I’m more prone and vulnerable to burnout, but as a perfectionist and someone that has a high sense of, you know, my success professionally comes back to my worth, like all the time how I feel about myself. And so yeah, there’s, how do I learn the stopping point of being like, Jenn, it’s okay. It’s okay because I will still be incredibly hard on myself and I’m sitting here at 40 and this is a message I’m intrigued by, and I know the wrong ways that I’m continuing to do, but yet it’s hard to break that habit. I wish it was never conditioned with that to some extent, just to be able to find the beautiful joys in life. And I got, I feel like your message, I mean, must help so many people just because I know so many people that are also in that spot of feeling like we’re never good enough. And I asked you just on this pre-call, so I wanna ask this and then we’re gonna dive into your book. But in terms of our ability to be, you know, effective to manage our time, I honestly feel like every week I’m like, how in the heck did people do this 20 years ago, 30 years ago? Like, how in the heck were they successful? Because it feels like I can’t do it, I don’t have enough time. What do you think is the biggest difference between maybe that judgment of thinking that people had it easier then than what we do today? Attention Management When Distractions are Literally at Your Fingertips Maura Thomas:  Oh, a hundred percent. I think people had it easier then <laugh>. When, I mean, it, it absolutely, in, in the days before the internet and internet connected smartphones, there were many fewer demands on us. I mean, now we have just dozens of communication channels and information. The biggest difference now is that information is no longer passive information is pushed to us through our technology, where 30 years ago information was passive. If you wanted to know something, you had to go seek it out. You had to go to the library. You had to find today’s paper, right? I remember even just as, as recently as like, you know, seven or 10 years ago, I was talking to my mom, and she was like, oh, oh, it’s top of the hour. I have to go. I have to go because they’re gonna put the weather on the news at the top of the hour and I have to go. And she had an iPhone. I was like, mom, just tap the button on your phone that has weather you, like, you don’t have to rearrange your life now around the news. But that’s how it used to be. We had to seek information out and now information is pushed to us whether we want it or not. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh. Whether we need it or not, because I can think of how many distractions or Yeah, I’ll, I’ll spare the audience of knowing like the distractions that I can fall prey to on the internet, but it’s so easy. Everyone Has The Same Amount of Time – We Just Get Distracted Maura Thomas:  Yeah, and that’s the thing. That’s, that’s why my 2009 when I started writing, I started shifting because everybody thinks that the path to productivity is better time management. If I just manage my time better than I can achieve more of what’s most important to me, which is how I define productivity. But the thing is, we all, everybody who has ever walked the face of the planet, gets the same 24 hours. And on the days where you say, I got so much done. And on the days where you say, oh my God, I got nothing done, it was still, you had the same 24 hours. Yeah. So it’s not that we don’t have enough time. And even if you did manage your time successfully, which is essentially calendaring, right? Planning your day, I’m gonna do this at this time and this at this time, and that’s how I’ll get everything done. It’s like a puzzle, right? I have this much room on my calendar and I’ll just stick things in until they fit, right. But how you manage your time only matters to the extent that you also devote your attention. If you book something on your calendar, you book a proposal, right? At two o’clock I’m gonna do this proposal. So the proposal comes in, but then an email pops up and, oh, let me check what that is. And then, you know, the notifications on your phone and then the phone rings and then somebody interrupts you, Hey, do you have a minute? And the time goes by with you only giving your attention to that proposal in two minute increments and getting distracted in between at the end of that hour that you set aside to do the proposal, it won’t be done. Right. Maura Thomas:  So our biggest challenge in the 21st century is not that we don’t have enough time, it’s that we have too many distractions and you can’t solve a distraction problem with a time solution. The antidote to distraction is attention. And so what is much more relevant today in the 21st century than time management is attention management. And that’s why all my productivity books have this underlying theme. If you don’t manage your managing, your attention is foundational. And you have to learn that before you can do anything else. Including my new book where I help leaders create an environment where their teams can get work done because organizations are so full of distraction and that distraction is inadvertently created usually by the leaders. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that we’re gonna bring, be bringing this in and even just thinking the working styles that we have. I had read a statistic, I don’t know, a few months ago that had said something that 85% of people have their email open in the background <laugh>. And I’m like, Maura Thomas:  Well, I bet the number’s higher than that. I bet the number’s higher than that. Yeah. Jenn DeWall:  But how, like, thank goodness that like you are here to help people focus on, you know, it’s that attention management, but how are people supposed to be, how are we supposed to learn this, right? When like, those distractions keep getting more and more, like at what point are we supposed to now introduce this at an, you know, an elementary or early education time to like get people prepared and not just say, I expect you to answer that, but I’m just more curious of like, how are we supposed to start to learn this so we can prioritize that? Or there’s just so many layers I feel like to our attention. But okay, we’re <laugh>, we’re, how, how would you say that? Like people can learn that today and then we’re gonna go into your book. You Can’t Control Time— But You Can Manage Your Attention Maura Thomas:  Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing is to raise awareness. A lot of people accept like distraction is just part of the world and this is just how the world is. And I just have to figure out how to navigate this, how to, how to get all my work done and, and live my life in spite of constant distraction. And I reject that premise because here’s, here’s the beautiful thing about attention management. Over time management, you cannot manage time. It marches on it. You can’t slow it down, you can’t back it up, you can’t bend it to your will in any way. But there is only one person who can control your attention and that is you. And so we, a lot of people, and people do this with their kids too, like, oh, this is just the world they grow up in. I think the best thing that parents can do for their children is help them learn how to be less distracted, help them learn to manage their attention. And one of the primary ways to do that, adults can do that with their kids, is to model it. So to me, attention management is the most important skill, and it’s not gonna, that’s not gonna change anytime. No, Jenn DeWall:  I mean, and I can just picture even kids or like just the TikTok or you see the attention spans dropping over the last like few decades, which like, how can they get shorter? Can they even get shorter? Like, what does that mean if they, cause I thought, and I’m sure, you know, as I thought I’d read a stat that was, it used to be 13 seconds in the early two thousands, and now it’s like five or six seconds. And honestly, can it get shorter <laugh>? I don’t know if it can, that’s a really short amount of time. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Maura Thomas:  We can’t, we, we can’t apply ourselves in, you know, 30 second, one minute, two minute increments. We can’t, we can’t, I call it unleashing your genius. We can’t muster the full range of our, not only our, our wisdom and our skills and our talents and our abilities and our knowledge, but we also can’t be our most diplomatic and our most empathetic and our most compassionate and our most kind. Right? You’re frazzled all day long. And I mean, how many times people say to me like, oh my gosh, I snapped at my kids, I snapped at my coworker. Right? I was just so stressed and so frustrated. Right? And it’s not because we are not nice people, it’s because we have stuff coming at us all day long and that is super stressful and we can’t be our best selves in one minute increments. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, Maura, I just appreciate you sharing that for everyone that needs to hear that, right? That we’re not necessarily set up for success right now and, and certain things and that. But I do, I love your message in the sense that it feels really empowering because time management feels like something that I, I can’t control, but attention does feel like something that I can control. And so it feels like you’ve given me, you know, just that, that million dollar like value and something that I actually can own, but I have to manage my distractions. But I like that it feels like I can, I can focus on that. I can get some control back or I can take that control into the situation. You can Live in Reaction and Distraction or with Intention and Choice Maura Thomas:  Absolutely no one can but you, we either live a life of reaction and distraction, or we live a life of intention and choice, and the decision is entirely ours. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, you’re hitting deep. I guarantee someone right now is like, how am I living my life? I I’m processing this real time with you. All right, let’s, I just, I’m loving this conversation already so far. And again, just giving people that space to be humans, I love that your message does that to be like, you’re not a bad person. Things are just not there. And I, I just really appreciate that. Because I think in sometimes when we do talk about it as time, there is a little bit more shame. Like you’re just not managing your time, whether you could be more, and I feel like there’s empathy in your message, which is just goes a long way given the amount of things that we have to get done. But let’s, let’s dive into, or unless, do you have a response on that? Sorry. Maura Thomas:  No. Well, not on that, but I was just thinking about what you said because I think a lot of people feel like you when you were saying like, I’m a perfectionist and I get, you know, work is what makes me feel fulfilled, fulfilled and successful and, you know, and I just wanna do a good job. And so, and, and I think so many people feel that way. We work a lot because we are driven and we’re motivated and that’s a good thing. And nobody should feel bad about that. But here is a way to think about it that might help you. I know you and probably most of your listeners, we are what, what some people call knowledge workers, right? We are people whose job outputs are brain functions, right? Our job outputs are things like relationships and thinking and critical thinking and analysis and ideas and connections, right? Among different things and innovation, right? If your job outputs come out of your brain, then you need to make sure that your brain is functioning well on a given day. And the only way that your brain functions well is if you take care of your body in your mind, right? You need physical and emotional wellbeing to be good at your job. And so the thing that I love to tell my audiences is that sometimes the best thing you can do for your work is not work. Jenn DeWall:  I want that. I wanna listen to that on a day. Like, and honestly like, cause it’s hard if I’m being hon you know, that I just got through Covid. I didn’t take a single day off like when I had Covid because it’s like, there’s just so much stuff that you have to do and like, I’m not great at that. Because it’s always that churn. I know I’m probably a poster child for burnout right now, but I love just even like saying that message because it’s to someone like me, it is a hard reality to consider. Excuse me. Like, you want me to not work? I don’t understand that messaging does not compute in my conditioning <laugh> mm-hmm. <Affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Like it’s, and it’s a good reminder, but like I just Yeah, I love that. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. What Inspired Maura’s New Book: Everyone Wants to Work Here Jenn DeWall:  Okay, let’s dive into your book. You’ve got so much knowledge to share. So your newest book, your sixth book, congratulations. Just, you know, on that too, like, that’s a huge accomplishment. Congratulations, Maura. Maura Thomas:  Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited. Jenn DeWall:  Your Sixth Book, Everyone Wants to Work Here: Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and be the leader in the market. All right. Let’s know, what inspired you to write this book, knowing it’s your sixth. What inspired you to write this story? Or not story, but this book? Productivity Issues Usually Start with the Behavior of Leaders Maura Thomas:  Yeah, so I spend a fair bit of time in my job working with– I work with whole teams, but I also work a lot with specifically leadership teams. And so I would, prior to that, I would go in and leaders would hire me and I would train their team members on how to be more productive and how to manage their attention. But what I quickly realized is that the environment that people were working in did not support the training that I was delivering. And so I realized that without addressing the root of the problem, my training was just a bandaid, right? You can, you can teach people the best practices, but if they can’t implement them in the environment in which they work, then it’s never going to help. So I realize the bottom line, usually the biggest impediment to the team’s productivity is the behavior of the leaders and the culture of the organization. And so I wrote a book about five years ago addressing this and this new book, everyone wants to work here is really building on that. We have a whole new world than we had five years ago with af, you know, post-pandemic. A lot of the principles from that book, work Without Walls, are still relevant, but this book really is my most current. My message is to address the root of this problem. It’s the most current, the most relevant, I think, solution. Because most leaders that I talk to when I bring up some of these things, it’s really an eye-opener. It’s really very, I mean, it’s not rocket science that I teach. It’s not even. It’s not even that revolutionary. It’s just something people don’t think about. And I do that a lot in my work. I talk about shining a light. We don’t think about the way we work until somebody forces us to think about the way we work. And then it’s like, oh, that’s not smart. What am I doing? <Laugh>, right? And so, so that’s what the book is about, how leaders are unintentionally creating a culture that is undermining their team’s ability to do their best work. And so when you have a workforce who goes home every day and say, oh my gosh, I worked so hard, and still I got nothing done again, that makes people really demotivated, really exhausted, really burned out. It makes them start to feel negative. It sucks the joy out of their days. And, and then if they’re unhappy at work, then they go home and they’re unhappy. And it just is this huge snowball effect. So that’s what the book is about. How Leaders Unintentionally Undermine Productivity Jenn DeWall:  Well, and it’s an important read, right? Giving us the gift of our presence and ability to be our best. Instead of feeling like every single day I’m just set up to fail in some capacity. Like either I’m, I’m not, you know, meeting or matching someone’s expectations or I just am not able to deliver. And I love that we’re gonna be talking about shining a light. And I, I again, appreciate the way that you share that because if you are doing some of these things, you know, you don’t have to shame yourself. It’s just an opportunity to reflect and think about what you could do differently. So I really appreciate you have that so much in your messages, and I just think our world needs that because we are so, again, probably my perfectionist, but we are so incredibly critical of ourselves and wanting to be the best and just creating that space to be human, I think. Is there, all right, let, let’s shine some light right now. So Maura, from your perspective, what is the single biggest issue that hampers individual and organizational success? Maura Thomas:  In a word, the single biggest issue is distraction. We are bombarded all day long with communication and information, and we have just sort of adopted this belief that everything requires an immediate response. We think that we will be providing better service if we respond immediately. We think that people expect an immediate response, and I, in some cases, people would like an immediate response. But the problem is what happens inside organizations is that we inadvertently create a culture of urgency. And when everything is urgent, nothing is urgent. And when every incoming communication, that might be some system-generated auto notification or the most important message from your biggest client or your boss or anything in between! Any communication that you receive could be any of those things. And the only way you know is to read it as it arrives. And not just email, but chat and DMs and, you know, all the, all these different communication channels that we get. The only way to know if it’s an emergency or if it’s important, or if it requires an immediate response is to check it. And so we get a message every like 30 seconds, every minute, every two minutes, we get a new message. So how do you get anything else done if you have to read every message as it arrives? And that distraction issue is infecting every corner of business operations. That’s the primary message of the book. And it in, I mean, it just, in it infects work-life balance. It infects communication. It infects personal workflow. It impacts quality. It impacts operational excellence. It impacts growth. It sabotages all of those things. And so, so seeking out the root of distraction and solving it can save organizations millions and make employees happier and more productive and less stressed. What is a Reasonable Turnaround Time for Emails? Jenn DeWall:  I want this working utopia for us! We deserve it. Right? We, because we are in that place. How do you, you know, when I even talked about that stat of like 85% of people had their email open. When I teach for Crestcom, like teaching the classes, I know that some people are multitasking in a virtual world. And when we talk about that, like there’s a lot of fear, I feel like in what if something right? At like, so how do you even approach that in our modern-day world where emails become such a big part of our jobs, which not see it in our job descriptions, right? Like that you have to manage this, but it’s such a big part of our jobs. How do you even start to approach that? Because right now, from where I listen, when I hear leaders talk about that, it’s like, well, what if I, it’s everything you just shared. Like, what if I miss something? What if I need to do this? I I have to check my email first thing in the morning or else like, and so how do you, this messaging has been such that culture of urgency, as you said, I love that. Like how the heck did we get here and why are we still, you know, kind of maybe expecting people to do a 24-hour turnaround? Okay, here’s a, here’s a straight of question. Is a 24-hour response time even feasible anymore in our world? Maura Thomas:  It is. I think that we have to set expectations, but for sure, so here’s the thing we, to answer your question, like one of the smallest ways to, to solve this that I, that I talk about in the book is that we need leaders need to create inside their organization communication guidelines. Because the problem is we keep introducing more and more and more ways to communicate, but we don’t provide any guidance about which tool do we use in which situation. And so when leaders don’t provide any guidance, what happens is it defaults to each individual’s personal preference, whether those individuals are inside the organization or whether there are clients or vendors outside their organization. Well, this client always needs an immediate response, but this client seems fine if it’s, or, or this client prefers phone call and this client seems to prefer email and this client seems to like text message or th and thi each individual person inside the organization, we all work together and Joe seems to prefer, you know, a, a, a message on our team collaboration tool. And Mary seems to prefer email and Lisa likes phone calls and, and Mark always wants to set a meeting. And so I don’t know, I’m just gonna send all the information in all the ways, right? And that way I’ll just cover everyone no matter what they like, they’ll get it the way they want it. I’m gonna send it in all the ways. And so now instead of having one communication about one issue, you have two or three or four or five communications about one issue that everybody has to clear. I ha yeah, I got it in text and I got it in email. I mean, how many times have you gotten a chat or a text that said, Hey, I just sent you an email. Go check that email. Right? Right. And then, and then have you ever gotten sucked in and you’re like, you text back and you’re like, yeah, I got it. And I responded, did you get the response right? So now you’re having a conversation about your conversation, which, so this is where the volume of communication is so much higher than it needs to be inside organizations, but the efficiency of communication is so much lower than it should be inside organizations. And every additional minute that we spend managing excess communication is a minute that we’re not spending doing our actual job. Whether it’s selling or designing or solving problems or analyzing things like the thing our genius that we were hired for is buried in an avalanche of 250 emails. Then I have to look at the minute they arrive. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh. So like so much there. I know someone’s like, this is the reality of my life right now. It feels like I’m constantly there. And I, I just lost my train of thought in what you had cheered in terms of the expression you use because I love the language and I, I know that you had, we had talked about this on the pre-call last week, can you describe or access communication is what you just said, which I love that we’re in a world where we’re just managing access communication and I’ve never thought about it like that where we do get those messages delivered in so many ways and sometimes they can be, you know, I guess the things that create that urgency of like what we actually have to do sometimes it’s just, I don’t even need to know this right now. Why was I even included on this? But you talk about the sta because I struggle with this and I didn’t realize that like you had really more talked about this and I probably did get it from you when I heard you last year. But communication debt, please tell our audience what communication debt is. Getting out of “Communication Debt” by Setting Expectations Maura Thomas:  Yes. So I borrowed with permission, I borrowed this phrase from a tech entrepreneur named Henry Poddar. Apparently, there’s like a technology debt thing in the tech world. But he applied it to communication. It’s basically just the idea that we always owe someone something, right? Some form of communication. When you look at your phone, I call it the tyranny of the little red dot, right? You look at your phone and you’ve got 17 unread email messages and three text messages and four voicemails and you missed six calls and 17 LinkedIn notifications and blah blah blah, right? All my Jenn DeWall:  Gosh, the dots Maura Thomas:  Have a little red dot on them and we feel like, oh my gosh, I, to sum up the number of all the, the numbers on all the little red dots and that’s my debt, right? I owe everybody all these stuff. Not to mention all the other stuff that I already saw that I still haven’t gotten to yet. And so it just feels like we are drowning in this avalanche of debt where we always owe someone something. And so that’s why there’s a whole chapter in the book dedicated to teaching how to create communication guidelines and set up communication guidelines in your organization. So you should never leave your, I would never advocate leaving your customers hanging if they have an emergency. But what you need to say is like routine communication. We do like this. If you have an emergency, we are there for you, but it can’t be buried in with all the other routine stuff. You have to do this if you have an emergency, whatever that is, right? I, and I have a sample chart in the book about like here, here’s an example of of how you can teach your team and then also your external stakeholders. This is how we communicate in the technology world. Technology companies have something called SLAs, service level agreements. This is how we operate. And I think every company should have a certain amount of SLAs like, this is how we do business, this is how things get done here. This is how we do our best work for you. If you are communicating for this purpose, use this tool. If you’re communicating for this purpose, use this tool. And when we create those guidelines, we unburden our team from their communication debt to a certain extent, and then they have more time to do the things that you hired them for in the first place. Jenn DeWall:  My gosh. It’s like, it’s out when you say it. I’m like, why isn’t everyone doing this? Why are we not doing this right now? <Laugh>, because it, I even think about tensions with customers, right? Of feeling like ike someone can’t respond, I can’t respond in that time that they need. But I love educating that piece of like educating your customers and your SLA or you know, just in those conversations of, in an emergency, please contact us in this way so we can respond in that way. because I think that that’s the piece is like everything is a priority. We’re not even sure we missed things that probably we shouldn’t have missed, but why are we not thinking about the communication guidelines? I just love that and I love that you do provide that as a filter in a way because you’re already just making things seem like this could actually happen. But you know what I mean? Like, this could actually happen. Like it’s not some pie in the sky. Like Yeah, if you, you know, adjust your organizational vision, if you change these group norms like everything’s there, like start here, it actually feels like you can give that nice orientation to make it a reality. And then I’m, I imagine like what ways do you recommend like educating your organization or how do you even start that as a leader? Because what if you are the problem and you’re the one that’s not adhering to the guidelines, Make Communication Guidelines Part of Organizational Culture Maura Thomas:  Right? And that is a hundred percent. So it has to start at the top because I mean, the truth is the behavior, the culture in an organization is created by the behavior of everyone in the organization, right? The way that everybody acts contributes to the culture, but the leaders have more, more influence on the culture because everybody looks to the leaders. Like you get what you tolerate to a certain extent from team members, but the people actually look to the leaders to say, well, if they’re operating this way, that’s how I should operate. And so the leaders have to create the communication guidelines with, with the, you know, to to, to the extent that it’s relevant with the participation of the team. But then once those guidelines are created, the leaders need to invite the team to help hold them accountable because change is hard– and change is hard for everyone. And so, but it just takes, you know, we don’t think about the way we work and so a leader might forget to follow the communication guidelines and now he’s been doing it, he or she has been doing it for a week and then after the week it’s like, oh man. And nobody called them out and they, it was just because they forgot and now they’ve sort of undermined all of their efforts. So we need other people to hold us accountable, but sometimes it can be scary to remind the boss, <laugh>, like you Jenn DeWall:  Oh yeah Maura Thomas: Like you said we were gonna do this and you’re not doing it right. Yeah. So creating a, a culture where people feel safe to uphold the values of the organization is really important Jenn DeWall:  From your perspective, like knowing that you have written about topics, you know, burnout, especially any advice you would have for, I don’t know if in the book, if there’s more prescriptive offerings, you know, even thinking about, hey, here’s some norms that actually might be effective to combat this burnout. Whether that’s not checking emails on the weekends or, you know, I don’t know if you have any rules of thumb or like recommendations or from your experience what you’ve seen be effective because I feel like people are very, very tethered in every single way. And so how do you even start to, I guess, have them drop that security or like that tetheredness that we have, are there recommended norms that can work to combat this burnout so we actually can give the right attention, we can be effective and successful? Don’t Underestimate the Real Cost of “Just Checking a Few Emails” Maura Thomas:  Yeah, absolutely. In the book I talk about, I don’t know, there’s maybe like eight or 10 reasons for burnout, right? It’s not an easy issue there, there are many reasons why people feel burnout, but one of the most common reasons for burnout is pretty simple and it’s just working too much. Most people really overvalue the benefit of, oh, let me just knock out some emails tonight or I’ll get caught up on Saturday or I’ll, you know, I’ll, I’ll spend the morning on Christmas, just, you know, nobody will be bothering me so I’ll be able to get some stuff done before we do family stuff, right? We overvalue how much that will help and we undervalue the cost every time you choose to work or to, and you know, scanning your email and your messages from your phone, that counts as working because it keeps your head thinking about work. And so every time we choose to do that, we fail to appreciate the cost because if you’re working, you’re not exercising, you’re not sleeping, you’re not reading a book, you’re not going out to dinner with friends, you’re not right, doing all of that other stuff that feeds you physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, right? And so one of the biggest reasons for burnout is simply working too much. And so I tell my clients, you need to define work-life balance for your team. And an easy definition is don’t work too much. And when people ask me, well what’s too much? How do you know what too much is? There’s a lot of research on what too much is and there’s a whole, there’s reams of research and I quoted in the book, the answer though is the ideal number of work hours per week on average is somewhere between 38 and 45 hours of work per week. And there are weeks for everyone, no question about it. Like, this is just a busy week, and I have to work 60 hours. Like that happens to everyone. But then you have to try to find a week soon where you can work like 30 to make up, right? So that there’s an an average on average if you look at over a month or over six weeks or two months. And if you figure like, yeah, I worked about, you know, somewhere between on average 38 to 45 hours, that seems to be the magic number. Not only what’s interesting, not only for our personal wellbeing but also for our productivity. When we work more than 45 hours a week, productivity actually starts to go down and it doesn’t feel that way. And it’s very counterintuitive, but it’s the truth. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that. Even as a closing point, No! I don’t want to wrap up by the way, I love everything that you’ve been sharing with us, but just that reminder that it, you know, check in with yourself. You might feel like you’re not doing enough because it’s going to feel counterintuitive, but your productivity drops. I think that’s a really important message to share with people that pushing yourself is not necessarily going to yield the results or the impact that you want to have. So Maura, we talked about your book today. Your book is going to be out soon. When does your book drop and how can our audience get in touch with you? Where to Learn More From Maura Thomas and Pre-Order Her Book: Maura Thomas:  Yes. So again, the book is called Everyone Wants to Work Here. So we pull those initials, E W T W H, right? So at MauraThomas.Com/EWTWH, that’s where people can pre-order the book it, it drops April 18th, so it’ll ship shortly after that. And the pre-order there, I’m offering thousands of dollars of benefits in pre-orders, but you can’t get that if you pre-order at a retail outlet, you have to come to my website and pre-order to get those benefits. So MauraThomas.com/ewtwh. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, thank you so much more for coming on the show and your teams, you, I mean, if you’re listening in this chair, like think about how much our time and our attention matters like this book is really, maybe it’s because it’s hitting me as someone that’s in burnout land right now. And I just think it’s a really, really important book that we need to all do a better job at creating better places to work and supporting or creating those communication guidelines that can actually help us enjoy a quality of life instead of just being tethered to the expectations are constantly working. Maura, thank you so much for just taking the time to share your experience, to talk about attention management, to talk about distractions, communication, debt, excess information. I mean, you dropped so many different considerations that we need to be very mindful of and I just really am grateful that we were able to have you on the show. Thank you so much for your time, your attention. We greatly appreciate it. Maura Thomas:  It was my honor. Jenn, thanks so much for having me. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of a Leadership Habit podcast. I feel like I really needed to hear Maura’s message as I often find myself getting caught up in distractions, not focusing my attention on the right things. Now of course, if you want to get her newest book, everyone wants to work here, you can pre-order that on her website, MauraThomas.com. There you get access to bonus material. You should order it for yourself, order it for your team, head on over to MauraThomas.com and there you can pick up her latest book. Everyone wants to work here. And of course, if you’re looking to develop the leadership skillsets of your team, Crestcom offers a comprehensive year-long leadership training program that’s focused on helping all of your leaders go from managers to leaders, to people that are seeing the human that have the right tools to create success. Head on over to Crestcom.com to learn more about us, our complimentary webinars, our free eBooks, white papers, and of course you can even request a complimentary two-hour leadership skills workshop just for you and your team. Until next time, thank you so much for listening and of course, if you enjoyed this, share it or leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming platform. Thank you.   The post Attention Management (Not Time Management) is the Key to Productivity with Author Maura Thomas appeared first on Crestcom International.

Improve Your Team’s Performance by Building a Competitive Edge Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I sat down with David CM Carter, David Carter for short, and him and I had a conversation on how you can improve your team’s performance and build a competitive edge on your team. Now let me tell you a little bit more about David. David is a serial entrepreneur, otherwise known as the world’s leading CEO mentor, with a 40-plus-year track record in creating innovative businesses and mentoring leaders in influencers around the globe. Entelechy Academy is the entelechy of David’s career and his legacy project, where he has gathered brilliant minds in education, coaching, and professional organizations to support millions in becoming the best version of themselves. And I hope you enjoy this conversation, as David and I talk about entelechy helping you be your best version of yourself and how you can build a competitive edge on your team. Meet David CM Carter, Founder of the Entelechy Academy Jenn DeWall:  Welcome, welcome David Carter. We are so excited to have you. You are across the pond from me over in England, and I’m excited that you’re joining us here on the Leadership Habit today to talk about how we can build that competitive edge on our teams. Welcome to the show, David. I’m so happy that you’re here. David Carter:  Thank you very much for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And now of course, I love to start off with just helping our audience understand who you are, how you came to be. I know that during our pre-call we talked about this, your story got me and it definitely was an emotional one and made me cry. And maybe the audience will be lucky enough to hear it. But David, if you could just go ahead and tell our audience a little bit more about you and how you came to be, how you came to work, withi and form. Lucky, we wanna hear it all, or maybe none of it. No, I’m kidding. I’m kidding. We wanna hear it all, but if you could go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience, we would love to hear more about you. David Carter:  Well, I don’t think we’ve got enough time for that because <laugh> I was born at, I I was born at a very young age and I’m now 64 and I’ve squeezed a lot of stuff in those last 64 years. But I think that I was born in England. I spent the early part of my life living in Australia and New Zealand with my dad’s job came back and settled in England as a school boy. I was highly dyslexic, which in those days they didn’t have a posh word like dyslexia. It was just called stupid. And of course I’m not stupid, I’m just dyslexic, which is a gift. But I decided that I didn’t want to go to college or university and I wanted to get out in the world and start earning a living. And I was fortunate that I ended up working for the first 10 years of my career for two investment banks who sent me to work in seven different countries around the world for more than a year. And what I became fascinated in was what I now call Performance X-Factor. How come those two companies started in the same town in the same year with access to the same resources? And one of them 10 years later was 27 times bigger than the other one. What did they do or have that the other one didn’t do or have? And that’s what we’re gonna call Performance X-Factor in our chat today. And after 10 years of doing that, I had a wonderful boss and a wonderful mentor who called me into his office in March of 1988 and said, well, young man, record year record bonus. I think it’s time you moved on stop consulting and advising entrepreneurs and go and be one. So my last paycheck was in June of 1988, so a long time ago now, 30 plus years. Becoming an Entrepreneur by Finding his Competitive Edge David Carter:  And I’ve been self-employed ever since then. The first 10 years of my career, I did two startups in the UK hospitality industry. The first one I built up and sold to a trade bar. The second one I built up and floated on the alternative investment stock market in London. And it was the very early days of that market. And I had the thrill and joy of being the best performing share, share on the market. And I had the ignominy or shame of being the worst performing share on the market all within a few months of each other. And so that was my first two startups. I then had a rather dramatic tectonic plate shift happen in my life. And I ended up being a single parent to a seven year old and a three year old. And I decided that the children came first. And so I resigned my job as the public company, CEO because I couldn’t juggle and do both properly. And whilst I was thinking about what I wanted to do next loads of people came to me and said, oh, can you help me decide whether to float my company or raise money, expand overseas, change my board, change our strategy, or whatever. And I ended up with half a dozen CEOwho I was mentoring on whatever the topic was they wanted some help with. And a rather funny conversation with my mother who said to me, oh, it’s going so well for you darling. And I said, well, it is going well, mum, but I’m just so, so busy with all these clients. I I haven’t got any time to think about what I’m gonna do next. And she said, oh, I thought this was what you were doing next, <laugh>. So that evening on the drive home, I remember thinking, you know, I’m actually pretty good at this. I really love doing it. It pays the bills and it makes a difference. So maybe this is what I’m doing. And 15 years later, I had event I built up an eventually became the world’s leading chief executive mentoring company with offices and clients and mentors all around the world. And that was a big success story. We were a tiny little company and we punched way above our weight having clients like McKinsey and pwc and lots and lots of major multinational companies. Which was kind of amusing because I think I, its peak. I had 68 mentors, all of whom had been former Fortune 100, FTSE 100 CEOs, and I was the only one in our midst who hadn’t been to university, didn’t have an MBA, hadn’t run a or Fortune 100 company. But I seemed to be in demand. And I then I didn’t get bored in a, in a negative sense, but I wanted to democratize what we were doing and make it available to people beyond just the C-suite. And my senior leadership team didn’t want to do that. And so I decided it was time for me to move on rather than change the whole company. How David Became “The Mentor” to CEOs and Business Leaders David Carter: I’ve been there 15 years and I was picked up by one of Britain’s leading PR gurus who decided I should be turned into a brand, the mentor. And so I worked with him and his company for a number of years, which was fantastic. He got me to write a book called Breakthrough, which became a bestseller, how to become the best version of Yourself. I did a lot of work on television with the BBC and radio and book tours, speaking to us, traveled the world. And that was when I got the idea that is now Intel about how we could democratize what we were doing with a small number of expensive fee paying clients and make it available to everybody. And that’s a long story. But the red thread throughout my life has been helping people become more, achieve more than they thought was possible for them and to help people get to that next level. What is Entelechy? David Carter:  And the word entelechy is actually my favorite word ever. And it was a word coined by Aristotle. And so the entelechy of a person is the very best version of that person with all of their potential fully actualized. It can apply to other living things too. So like the entelechy of an acorn is an oak tree. The entelechy of a caterpillar is a butterfly, but the entelechy of Jenn is the very best version of Jenn with all of her potential fully actualized. And I’ve always loved that because everybody’s capable of being more of anything, and sometimes they don’t realize how easy it is. And when they have a go and try it and it works, they’re like, wow, I didn’t think I could do that before. Well now you know, you can do it. And so what about another one? What about another one? And so this is a project which has only launched in the last few months. It’s super exciting. It’s my legacy project. I want to help the world develop their end tele. I want everyone on the planet to understand they can be more and they can develop their own leadership Performance X-Factor. And we do that through helping develop 54 character qualities. Jenn DeWall:  Okay. So I know that you said that we weren’t gonna cry on this podcast episode, but I am tearing up because what I, what I heard as you were sharing your story is an extreme story of resilience. Whether it was, you know, growing up with dyslexia, dyslexia and the labels, or the stigma, or not even the right words for that to then growing into, I didn’t go to university, but I created a ton of success, but I also have the shame of some failures and then believing that every single individual, Improve Your Team’s Performance by Looking at Failure Differently David Carter:  Sorry, can I, I just don’t, sorry. No, no, no. <Laugh> first of all, you are using two words that I want us to talk about success and failure. I, I wouldn’t describe myself as successful if, and if success is the opposite of failure. We need to define what failure is. You know, my mother gave me a great phrase once upon a time that failure isn’t falling down. Failure is staying down. I have fallen down many, many times, but I’ve picked myself up, dusted myself down, got back on the horse and carried on. And so I’ve never really failed. I’ve had lots and lots of fantastic growth opportunities. And so to me, success is about keeping going longer than anybody else. And you need to work hard and try hard. But success isn’t the opposite of failure. And you know, if you think that success means money, you can always find a million people with more money than you. And even if I had the money to buy a private island, I wouldn’t cause it’s not one of my things. So to me, success is being happy, healthy, and becoming my entelechy every day, being a better version of myself and surviving and thriving. You know, I probably do a bit better than the average person, but I think my greatest successes have been that when I’ve fallen over, I’ve stood up and had another go. So I don’t think I’ve ever failed. Jenn DeWall:  I I really love that, like, the reframe of how to look at it. And I think even knowing the level of success you have coached some of the top executive leaders in the globe or around the globe and just being able to say that, cause I know that there’s people that compare themselves that think that people maybe don’t struggle or don’t struggle as hard. And yet you’re saying that it’s all about our own resiliency and how we, you know, adapt to when things do or do not go the right way. It’s all about how we pick ourselves up. I, I love that because I think sometimes people at the top, we lose sight of the fact that failure, whatever we want to call it, missteps, mistakes, things go wrong happen, but it’s all about, again, continuing to improve and build on that. And you’re a true story of resilience in so many ways, and I just am so grateful to even have you. So to our audience, we have someone that is very, very, as we would call it successful, but they’re not here sitting and saying, well, it was so easy, let me tell you how great I am, and how I didn’t actually fail. And that didn’t happen because there is too much of that today where we see that on social media of like these kind of false realities that are presented as if people are not struggling or don’t have struggles. And I just want to say thank you for your vulnerability and even sharing that, because I think that allows us to see how can we actually build a competitive edge. It’s not by doing things without fail or without mistakes, but it’s about continuing to pick ourselves up. So let’s dive into the Performance X-Factor. What is the Performance X-Factor? What is the Performance X-Factor? David Carter:  Well, I would say this, wouldn’t I? But I really do believe it all comes down to character. Aristotle also had another wonderful phrase, which is that character determines destiny. And so we all end up where we end up in life as the direct function of our character. So two people can be born in the same town, in the same year, go to the same school, get the same grades and the same subjects, and how come one of them 20 years later as the CEO of a thriving successful business? And the other one’s a bus driver in the local bus driving depot. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if that’s their passion and their thing. So I think that Performance X-Factor is all about dialing up these 54 character qualities to their optimum level in a, in a number of different contexts. And I know that your your listeners won’t be able to see this but as we’re chatting, I’m gonna share something with you. When we sit down with companies who we talk about helping them become companies of character, I show them this page and just say, there’s 54 character qualities on here. Pick out half a dozen of the 54 that you’d like everyone in your company to be and tell me if they were, what the benefits to them and your organization would be. And they look through and think, oh, well, we’d like everyone to be adaptable and confident and curious and expressive and, and harmonious and collaborative and accountable and disciplined and organized and reliable and resilient. And, and I said, whoa, whoa, you’re only allowed half a dozen <laugh>. Oh no, no, we want all of our people to be good at all of these now. I said, okay, but which six do you want everyone to be where that takes hours? Oh, if I’ve gotta take that on, no, I don’t want to lose that one. And then I end up saying to them, what is it you are doing today to help your people become good at any of these character qualities? And they’re like, well, we, we don’t do anything at all. And it’s like, okay, so let’s start off with half a dozen. Let’s not try and boil the ocean. And so ultimately, I think Performance X-Factor is a, an understanding that these 54 character qualities exist and they underpin the development of all skills, hard skills, soft skills, technical skills, and being conscious in everything you do, that there is probably a character quality in this interview right now. In the meeting I had before this in a call with my team early on today, I needed to be analytical with them in the call just now. I needed to be, be a bit encouraging and vulnerable in a and so I think I’m aware because I’ve worked in this field for so long, now I’m aware of all of these. Improve Your Team’s Performance by Focusing on a few Characteristics at a Time David Carter: And every day I think to myself, right in this meeting, I need to probably focus on being this and that meeting this in this situation. And as a company, every Monday our week begins where Amy, our coo, holds us all to account on what we are doing to develop three company character qualities of that month. So this month they are being discerning and influential and organized, but we also have our own personal character qualities that we’re working on for the month. And we’ve worked split off into little groups of three where we talk about what we are doing to become more of the character quality that we’ve chosen for ourselves for the month. And we also have to say what we’re doing. So this Performance X-Factor starts off with an individual commitment to looking at how I can dial up any one of these character qualities and being better than I would’ve been if I hadn’t thought about it. And if everybody is doing that in sync together and coaching each other and mentoring each other, and we all commit to three company character qualities each month, then by the end of the year we’ve probably done 36 character qualities as a team for the company and a dozen, you know, for ourselves. Jenn DeWall:  I love this framework because it, and correct me if how I even understand this is different, but it’s, it’s, to me, I read it differently as it’s different than a set of operating values that a team or an organization might have because they’re not fixed. It’s asking ourselves, what do we need in this moment for our goals, both short-term and long-term in this moment? And so as what I’m seeing is different ways to look at these qualities of whether it’s you have the three different perspectives of people productivity and purpose and the qualities that then go underneath. But I really appreciate that this is something that isn’t fixed. It’s something that we connect with that we discuss. And I mean, I guess what would you say is the difference between a character quality of a team versus the values of an organization? Because I appreciate that we will need to pull forward different things given what a specific team or organization is going through at any given time. Your Teams Character Qualities are Key to Improving Performance David Carter:  I’m going to give a slightly sarcastic answer to that. Values are what organizations print in big words in a poster in their boardroom or their reception lobby, and no one pays any attention to, one of my favorite stories was many years ago when I was mentoring the CEO of a big oil and gas company in the UKk and I visited his offices up in Scotland and I was facilitating a workshop on their new strategy and plastered around the boardroom were six big posters of the company’s values. And at one particular difficult point in the conversation, I said to him, you know, how does this strategy tie up with these values that I’m reading around the wall? And the CEO said, oh, sorry David, we didn’t have time to change them before you arrived. I said, oh, why would you want to change them? And he said, oh, we’ve got two sets of values. One, when oil is above $50 a barrel and the other when it is below $50 a barrel. And I’m probably being very sarcastic and facetious, but I don’t think values, they’re very ethereal. Whereas character qualities is who you are, how you show up in the world, how your colleagues, your customers experience you. And so I can do a 180 on myself and think, okay, well I’m pretty adaptable and I’m pretty disciplined and assertive, da da da da da, and here’s what I think my strengths are. Here’s if you, I probably could work on, but if I ask 14 of my colleagues to ask me what they think they’re going to sh show me how I, they experience me. And we actually do this once a quarter and I actually had a very interesting thing, you know where probably 10 out of the 12 people who did my 360 all saw me as being visionary which I guess in my job you have to be. David Carter:  But interestingly though, and there was lots of alignment about how they saw me, but there wasn’t a lot of alignment in terms of the growth opportunities and they were scattered all over the map. And I remember thinking, oh, well that’s interesting. But then I realized, well, Amy’s written down one or two that she would like me to dial up in my relationship with her. And Rachel’s written down a few that she would like me to dial up in my relationship with her and Indi’s written a few. And I thought, okay, so it’s not that I’m not open-minded, but in a certain context, in a certain situation, Amy would like me to dial that up. And it’s not that I’m not efficient, but in a certain context, Rachel would like to see me dial that up. And so it’s the most incredibly rich feedback because you can think, it’s not that I’m not that, but with that particular person, I can dial it up and please them and improve my relationship with them. And if everyone in the entire organization is focused on dialing up their strength, converting their growth opportunities into strength and figuring out how they can support each other to do that, that’s how you achieve Performance X-Factor. Identify Growth Opportunities to Improve Your Team’s Performance Jenn DeWall:  Yes. I, I mean, I love that I’m looking at it as, it’s not that we’re not, it’s not that we’re a deficit, that we are our weakness. It’s about understanding in every unique situation with the individuals that we’re working with, how can we alter, or as you keep saying, dialing up what you know, that specific character quality to make sure that we actually are probably working better together, building trust, delivering what we need to be. But I appreciate within this that it’s not saying if you don’t have these, you’re without. It’s saying that if it’s a blind spot, let’s have those conversations. Then one question that I know that we talked about on the pre-call is, I love these character qualities, but how do you, one of my favorite things that, I’m just intrigued by is how to develop self-awareness on people. Because I think that sometimes people might think if I assess myself, I am a really great people person and I am extremely energetic and open-minded, but yet when you do those 360 s people are, they, they might see it, but yet they still don’t wanna hold on to the results and data that’s around them. So how do you even start to help people develop this self-awareness when maybe ego’s in play and we don’t want to actually identify with one of these, or we don’t like that label? David Carter:  So let, let’s take a specific example. So one member of the team might think that they are humorous and they’re always trying to add something funny to every conversation or tell a, you know, funny story about every situation. But what if no one in the team thinks that their jokes are funny, or actually their humor is often inappropriate and they get that feedback, you know, the person has an opportunity there because it’s very rich feedback to, to either grow and say, wow, I didn’t understand that about myself, that I, I don’t land with other people how I thought I did, but now I’ve got that feedback and they’ve given me the context, not just the feedback. I have a choice. I can screw it up and throw it in in the trashcan and ignore it and pay no attention to it, or I can learn to grow from it. And, you know, how do we develop ourselves and develop our entelechy? You know, feedback is the food of champions. And so you have to want to learn to be more self-aware and say, why would I want to 10 people off in my team who don’t think my humor is humorous? Why would I persevere with that? What benefit could there possibly be to me of being like that when actually they’ve been vulnerable and generous to gimme that feedback? I should be respectful and grateful and do something with it. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I feel like there’s so much there just around how we have the opportunity to process feedback and what we actually look at or how we interpret it as our opportunity for growth. You are truly demonstrating the growth mindset. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. 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To Improve Your Team’s Performance, Embrace a Growth Mindset David Carter:  What mindset is there other than a growth mindset? Jenn DeWall:  Well, I mean the fixed right, the belief that everything is, you know, innate are born with, but I feel like I do notice it. I even heard last week at a conference someone talk about how you can’t have a growth mindset and make mistakes. And I, you know, you and I could obviously probably go into a conversation on how that’s actually not, David Carter:  That’s rubbish as rubbish. You, we all make mistakes every day. And if we want to learn from those mistakes and get better and improve, that’s how we learn and develop ourselves. And so anybody, when I had my global CEO mentoring company, we had an incredible roster of people apply to join our firm. You know, after seven or eight years, we were a real little rockstar in the firm moment. And people used to turn up with, you know, their bio well, I was the CEO of this major multinational. I was the CEO of this one. We travel our share price, and I used to listen to them give their five-minute sales pitch about how brilliant and wonderful they were. And then my first question was, so tell me about the things that have gone pear-shaped and gone wrong in your life and how you’ve overcome and turned those around. And if anyone ever turned around to me and said, oh, I’ve never had anything go wrong in my life, I said, what? How on earth can you mentor someone who’s in the middle of a crisis? You know you’ll be no good to me, all my clients, so thank you for your application. Goodbye. And I remember one chap saying to me, don’t you know who I am? And I said, well, I not only know who you are, but I figured out what you are too. And you will never be a great mentor if you seriously think you’ve never ever made a mistake. And, and maybe you are right, you’ve never made one well done you, but you’ll never be a great mentor because it’s the empathy and you need to tune into what your client is going through and support them through that, which you can only really do have, you’ve been through it yourself or something that you can relate to. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I just love that you actually had the response for someone to say that that’s not reality or you’re not going to be able to help someone in any profound way if you don’t own the fact that we have limitations or we have missteps along the way. So how do you work when you’re, when your organization works with people to develop these character qualities? What’s the starting point that you have? Because it’s not values, they’re not fixed from what I’ve gathered, it’s, you know, it’s really thinking in the moment of how we can show up intentionally. And so what’s your starting point or how do you work with organizations to help them, you know, up-level and develop their teams to improve or dial up and dial down these character qualities? Improve Team Performance by Dialing up Important Characteristics David Carter:  There’s part A and a part B to that question. So first of all, with the company itself, as I explained a few minutes ago, we’d sit down and perhaps show them our framework and say to them, you know, what do you think the most important character qualities are for everyone in your organization across the board? And so we could come up with a company set of character qualities, but we also say to them, you know, we understand that people in sales might need a few that people in finance don’t need, or people in warehousing need different ones to people in logistics and supply chain or imports and exports. And so, but there will be a set of character qualities that everyone in the entire organization should be able to demonstrate. And so we’ll help them figure out what those are and then we’ll get the individual employees to do a 360 so they can see how they see themselves and versus how their colleagues see them. And then we can compare the results of that with how the organization would like everyone to be. And that’s, that can be very interesting because you can literally range from, the organization wants to see itself like this, but no one in the organization sees themselves like that or, or there’s a complete match. And it’s also very interesting cause if you asked the top three or four accountancy firms in the world who are all, you know, the big four, they will all answer the question very differently, which is a function of their culture and their style as an organization. So there’s, there’s no one answer, there’s no one right answer. But if you can then share with the employees, well here’s the half a dozen character qualities we’d like everyone to be good at and here’s why. And you know, and that can be tied into your mission and vision and values and all the rest of it. But it also an opportunity for people to say, well look, I’m really good at this one and this one, this one which clearly aligned to what the company wants. But in my 360 people have also pointed out this one and this one, which I’m not so good at, which the company would like me to be good at. So there’s two that are worth starting to work on straight away. And because you’ve just had a 360, you can ask all of your respondents, listen, if you see me in a meeting or you are working with me and you see there’s a way that I can dial up being more, whatever the character quality is, please tell me, give me feedback. If you think I’m doing something better or worse, gimme tools, tips, techniques, feel free to coach me and mentor me. It’s like, who’s not gonna respond to a request like that when you can genuinely see that someone’s trying to improve themselves and, you know, work harmoniously with you to achieve better outcome for the company? Get Feedback from Your Team Members to Improve Their Performance Jenn DeWall:  No, one of the things that I think is great is that we’re thinking about what do we do with that feedback? How do we work for it? And I know that there still might be people reluctant to say, how could I dial that up? Because it’s a scary place to be to admit that maybe we have to change. Well let’s talk about the benefits of this approach. When the organization really chooses these character qualities and lives by them, what are the benefit? But what are the benefits that you notice in your work with clients from actually helping people? Cause it sounds like you’re helping them not only understand who they are to be their best self, but then also to embrace feedback as something that’s not, you know, a fundamental foundational flaw. It’s something that’s actually a part of our role to success. What benefits do you notice when people apply your framework? How do you Dial Up Key Characteristics? David Carter:  Do I have your permission to be your mentor for a few minutes? Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, yes you can. Yes you can. This is the scary part for me. Yes, you do <laugh>. First, Pick a Characteristic to Work On David Carter:  So let’s show, don’t tell. So your listeners won’t be able to see this, but you can see the screen of the 54 categories. I’d like you to choose one that, if I were to ask your significant other or your best friend or one of your siblings or your parents or one of your coworkers and you knew they were right in choosing it, which one of these character qualities do you think you could perhaps do some work on and dial-up and improve? Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh>? I’m laughing because I’m like, when you put in all those contacts, I’m like, I feel like I know which one they would say. You know, when I look at this list, I think is, you know, even just the word expressive, how I manage my emotions is one. Or in terms of maybe even my being able to be more forgiving or practice self-compassion with myself. But those would probably be the two. And then maybe more adaptable to allow change to be there. So I picked three, but I guess if I was looking at one, it might be one to dial down would be my expressiveness. David Carter:  Okay, which one are we gonna dial-up? Jenn DeWall:  Which one would we dial-up? I think it is probably my ability to my confidence. Let’s talk about that confidence. David Carter:  Confident. Okay. So if you were to work on being more confident for the whole of March, yeah, Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. Imagine How You Want People to React to your Improvements David Carter: In the next four weeks, what would you like people to be noticing and saying to you or sending you a WhatsApp message where they clearly witnessed that improvement in confidence? What would you like them to be saying to you? Jenn DeWall:  I would like them to acknowledge me for setting boundaries around things and not to say yes to everything, but being confident in my time and my availability and saying, we respect that you did that. Even confident in sharing my voice when maybe I don’t think that something is the right thing to do instead of trying to toe the line or say what someone else maybe wants to hear. David Carter: Anything else that you’d like them to say? Jenn DeWall: You know, if I was really confident I in the truth, it would be to have less anxiety and just trust that I’m doing my best. Ask Yourself How Dialing Up that Characteristic Will Benefit You David Carter: Okay. One more thing that you’d like to say to yourself. Jenn DeWall: One more thing that I would like to say to myself is don’t give up. I think that’s probably the biggest thing is don’t give up. David Carter:  So if you were more confident, you wouldn’t give up, is that what you’re saying? Jenn DeWall: Yes. David Carter:  Okay. So you can imagine now what those various stakeholders in your life might say to you if you worked on it and you nailed it at the end of a month. Yep. And yes, you know, what you’d say to yourself. So just describe one or two real benefits to you that you would achieve if you pull that off. Jenn DeWall:  I would be less anxious and I would worry less and I would still be taking David Carter:  How, how does that be? How does that benefit you? Jenn DeWall:  I would sleep better. I would be more present in my life and not ruminating or thinking about all of the things that I’m not, I would practice more self-compassion and less judgment. David Carter:  How does that benefit you? Jenn DeWall:  It’s my mental health and it’s my time. It’s my ability to actually help people or be present for the people that I love in my life. And for me it’s just being happier. Ask Yourself Why Improving that Characteristic is Important to You David Carter:  And why is that important to you? Jenn DeWall:  Oh, well this is important because we have one short dang life here on this planet and I want to make sure that I do my best to enjoy it. Commit to One or Two Actions You Can Do EVERY DAY for a Month David Carter:  So final question. Tell me one or two things that you’re gonna do every day in March to achieve those benefits. You’ve just spelled out to me. Jenn DeWall:  You know, one thing that I am working on actively is practicing self-compassion. And that’s in the form of writing something positive about myself every single day that is not met with criticism or self-doubt. I’m now you’re making me tear up <laugh>. But that it would be honestly practicing self-compassion and letting go of worry. And so self-compassion and maybe writing and it’s journaling, but it’s writing down one thing that I like about myself in one thing that I give myself permission to let go of, or a judgment that I have that I give myself permission to let go of. David Carter:  So would you be willing today to commit to writing for no more than two or three minutes a day for the whole of March in acknowledging yourself in some positive way? Jenn DeWall:  Yes, actually yes. I’m going to commit to that right now. I am going to commit to doing that every day this month. And I love that this is the task and it makes me feel uncomfortable as I’m grabbing my coffee cup, but I, I actually want, I really do wanna commit to this. Make a Commitment and Hold Yourself Accountable David Carter:  And would you be willing to commit that we, not a podcast conversation, but you commit at the end of March that we have a half an hour video called catch up and you can tell me what happened and what the benefits turned out to be for you, how easy or difficult it was for you to do that and how you have improved your life through developing your confidence? Jenn DeWall:  I would absolutely be willing to commit to that. David Carter:  Right. Well I think you’ve just hopefully answered your own question. Jenn DeWall:  It’s with tears and you know, thank you for even asking that because I think even our listeners might assume that me, I’m a really confident person and they don’t realize that underneath I’m more of a perfectionist that never thinks I’m doing well enough. And so it is something I really have to work on and I appreciate you for, even, even though it felt real uncomfortable, David, like, I appreciate you just even I guess forcing me to really think about that in, in a way that I can take accountability. And I so thank you. To Improve Your Team’s Performance Build Awareness, and Then Take Action David Carter:  Well, there’s no point knowing that you are not as confident as you want to be or think you could be, that is not gonna help you. So acting on it with intention and dialing it up and working on it, you can learn and grow through that. And guess what, in a month’s time you’ll think, you know what, that wasn’t as hard as I thought the benefits were five times more than I said to David. And now I’m gonna look at another one over here that I think I could dial up as well. Because I chose three initially, but fo and you learn how to learn to dial up all of these innate capabilities in yourself. Jenn DeWall:  My gosh, I, and I love that this is, it feels manageable, it feels like it feels manageable. It’s not me trying to be and pick up a list of character qualities that I have to try to be all. But this feels, and you had said the two to three minutes, this feels manageable and it also is helping me be accountable because we’re talking about it instead of something that I live and don’t talk about in my head. David Carter:  And most people, Jenn, is like, if they make that commitment as you’ve done now to, you know, one character quality for the whole of March, two or three minutes a day then you are gonna go into every meeting, every conversation, every situation think, right, how can I be more confident in this meeting, in this situation right now? I could try this. Oh, that didn’t work. Oh, I’ll try something else. Oh, oh, that seems to work. And you don’t, it is not like you need to get off the bus and go on a course for a week. It’s like you’re just trying it out. Course correcting, learning as you go and grow and you’re doing it in the flow of life, in the flow of work, in the flow of studies or whatever. And just being conscious, I can be more courageous and, and I want to be, and let me experiment with it. Let me fail a few times and fall over and pick myself up and dust myself down and have another, oh look, it worked better this time. So therefore it wasn’t a failure. It was just a growth opportunity. Building Resilience to Improve Your Team’s Performance Jenn DeWall:  How I, okay, I have to ask one final question, but how do you, because my initial thought if we’re talking about confidence is that when I make a mistake, it I immediately feeds that beast of like, you’re still goofing it up. And so I’m curious if you have tips just knowing the level of resilience that you’ve demonstrated of how you can still approach yourself with compassion, even if you’re not, it feels like you’re not there. Like, I don’t know if you have words of wisdom or that you’ve used, because that’s probably my most big difficult thing is meeting myself in that moment with kindness. I’m probably begging for tips and tricks here of just like a perspective on that of like what you remind yourself or any mottoes that you remind yourself of. David Carter:  Well I said earlier on in our conversation about how I ended up being a single parent, you know, of a seven year old daughter and three year old son. And I chose to focus on being a good dad. If you were to ask my children today to gimme a score outta 10 on my parenting skills, you know, and to comment, they would say, oh my God, he hadn’t got a clue what he was doing. You know, he was so embarrassing. He was the only parent that ever wanted to do it his way rather than all the other. And if I had a dollar for every time my children called me embarrassing, I could have retired a long time ago, But they, but they will say, but he really gave it his best shot. He really tried his hardest and if he did screw up and we pointed out to him that he screw, he was decent enough to say, you know what? I think you are right. I should have done it that other way and I apologize. You know, I really, really tried my very hardest, you know, to be a great dad to my children. I try and be a great boss to everybody, a -great business partner or whatever, but I’m human and, and what, you know, would look great to me being a parent didn’t look great to my children always. And you know, they had the same love and the same discipline and the same rules and the same values, but they’re as different as chalk and cheese. So something might work for one, but not for the other one. But at the end of the day, they’re now 36 and 32 and they still come and stay with me once a month and voluntarily I don’t have to insist on it. And you know, I know we love each other very much. And, and, and, and the funny thing is now the last few years they tell me and each other, oh my God, I’m becoming more and more like dad. Now I heard myself say this the other day or doing this the other day, <laugh>, and it’s like, yay, 20 years later I’m finally validated. But I think that, you know, that’s just being human, you know? And as long as you give everything your best shot and you do learn from your errors and mistakes and you apologize to people and you put the train back on the tracks, if it falls off, that’s life. You know, the, the one in the chat, the, the chat, there were two or three over the years who came in and said, well, I’ve never made a mistake in my life. I always wonder, had the question on the tip of my tongue, oh, I’d love to hear your wife’s perspective on that Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh> <laugh> David Carter:  Or your secretary, exec assistant, you know, your secretary’s perspective like and, and give him that feedback. But you know, we are all human. Give it your best shot. Try your hardest, be kind, realize that, you know, falling over isn’t failure. Staying down is failure. Get back up, dust yourself down, have another go. Try it a different way. Do it with honesty and integrity and be kind along the way. And that is how we grow and learn. Jenn DeWall:  David, I really appreciate your words today for our audience. I know that I needed to hear that message and I know that someone else needed to hear that message. And I really appreciate Entelechy’s approach of seeing human, being human, treating human. That’s how it feels to me is like creating a better workforce where we can be our best by not magnifying only our worst, but continuing to look in small ways of how we can improve. David, how can people get in touch with you? Where to Find More From David CM Carter David Carter:  Probably the best way is via LinkedIn. And if you look up David Cm Carter, that’s David CM Carter you’ll find me on LinkedIn or you can email me at hello@entelechy.academy. But LinkedIn’s probably the best way to get ahold of me and I reply to everybody, by the way. So I was I was going to share one last little, little story with you, based on something you just said. So when you write a book where it says on the front cover, you know, learn to become the best version of yourself through the world’s leading CEO mentor, you kind of put yourself on a pedestal, you know, ready for everyone to take a shot at you. And so one of the most frequently asked questions that I was ever asked was, so, Mr. Mentor, are you the best version of yourself? And I always used to say yes, I absolutely am the best version of myself. And they were quite shocked that anyone could be so arrogant to, you know, say that they were the best version. I said, and the only reason I say that is because every day, I work to be a better version of myself, and it’s as good as it gets today, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. And so, you know, developing our entelechy, it doesn’t really all fit into place until right on the last day, but I still want to keep going and try to get there. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, every day, every day, is an opportunity for us to be our best self. I love that. I that’s a beautiful way to end it. David, thank you so much for, I don’t know, just being you and creating this space and having these conversations as it relates to, you know, being our best and how we can do that with honesty and compassion and vulnerability. Thank you so much for coming on to the Leadership Habit podcast. I, I truly loved having you on. David Carter:  It’s been a pleasure, and thank you very much for inviting me. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast. I really enjoyed my conversation with David. I was a little in my fields. It can be difficult to talk about the things that we want to work on or the things that, you know, maybe are blind spots, but I’m really grateful for my conversation with David and for helping me, and I hope that it helps you. And if you want to learn more about entelechy, you can actually download their app. You can get a free 14-day trial, the entelechy app, that’s entelechy, E N T E L E C H Y. And that app is available on both the Google Play and Apple App Store. And, of course, you can check out and learn more about entelechy by going to entelechy.academy.com. Thank you so much for listening today. If we can help you improve your team’s performance, or help to develop your leaders, please head on over to crestcom.com. We would love the opportunity to offer a complimentary leadership skills workshop, or you can head on over to crestcom.com. There, you can download our eBooks, and you can even find out more about our complimentary webinars. Until next time!   The post Improve Your Team’s Performance by Building a Competitive Edge with CEO and Business Leader Mentor, David CM Carter appeared first on Crestcom International.

Overcome Resistance to Change with Marina Field Hi everyone, it’s Jenn Dewall, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I sat down with Marina Field to talk about how to overcome resistance to change. I know that I resist it and I know that others do too. Change doesn’t always seem on the face of it like the best thing, but we also know that in the future of work, change is a part of life. But let me tell you a little bit more about Marina Field, who I sat down with for this conversation today. Meet Organizational Psychologist and Change Consultant, Marina Field Jenn DeWall:  Managing your career can sometimes feel like a maze where you constantly bump into obstacles as you’re trying to achieve your goal. That’s why Marina is passionate about providing her clients with the tools and resources that they need to navigate their careers more effectively. With a doctorate and organizational psychology from Columbia University in 20-plus years of corporate experience, she has the unique ability to provide theory-informed guidance that is both practical and actionable on any given day. You might find Marina coaching mid to senior-level women transitioning careers, consulting with organizations on talent management issues, or facilitating student learning regardless of the day. Identifying ways to help others develop and grow is always at the forefront of our minds, and let’s grow together as we talk about how to overcome resistance to change. Jenn DeWall: Hello. Hello. Hello, Marina. I am so excited to have you here today talking about change, something that not everyone really likes! I mean, and we’re gonna get into that. We’re gonna talk about what it takes to actually create change, and why people struggle with it. But before we get into our topic today, Marina, I want to welcome you to the show. Thank you so much for being here on the Leadership Habit. We are so happy to have you as a guest. Marina Field:  Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to actually be here. Jenn DeWall:  Yay. Okay. So I know that we ride your brief bio, but please if you could go ahead and just introduce yourself to our audience, tell us a little bit more about yourself, how you came to be, anything that you would choose to share is totally fine. Marina Field:  Sure. Well, my background is in organizational psychology, and that’s the study of the intersection of work and people. And while I was studying organizational psychology, I had the opportunity to get an in-depth understanding of change management from an academic and theoretical perspective. And then once I was done with school and got my PhD, I went into consulting. And while I was in consulting, then I had the opportunity to apply that knowledge that I gained in school and help organizations good go through these really large change transformations. But at the same time, when I think about change and I think about me and like trying to answer your question, I’m also a product of change. Just like everyone that’s probably listening just like you, like every, we all go through change. Like, you know, I’ve been been in, in organizations that have gone through mergers, I’ve transitioned fields, I’ve been promoted, so all these different things. And so I really love change, but what I love even more is helping individuals and organizations understand and manage change. And that’s whether I’m acting as a career coach, a consultant or university lecturer. What Happens When People Experience Change? Jenn DeWall:  I love that. And today we’re going to really focus on the resistance that people have to change. And I feel like even just sharing your background of whether it’s changing careers, that there are a lot of people that can get paralyzed by even thinking about doing that, or just the change to, excuse me, the work that we thought that we knew when there’s a merger. I know that I’ve been through a merger and acquisition and oh gosh, that brings up all the feelings. And I’m sure that there are some people right now that are seeing change in the way of the layoffs that have been happening by a lot of big companies is that they’re finding themselves maybe asking, where do I go? Or how do I adapt to this new change with all my friends that are gone? Why do you think leaders need to know how to overcome resistance? Marina Field:  So before I answer that, I wanna step back a little and talk a little bit about like, what happens when people are like, you know, going through change. So change is really about like, you know, doing something different or doing something new and people really enjoy where, what they’re doing now, the status quo, they’re really comfortable with how things are happening now. So when you come around and ask them to change, it becomes uncomfortable. Like, I don’t know about you, but every day I go to my closet, I look at all the clothes, and then I wear the exact same thing that I’ve worn the week before because it’s comfortable and I know, and I don’t have to think about it. And it’s like routine. And for, you know, you or maybe a listener maybe it’s you, you have the same coffee every day, or you, you know, you have the same lunch or you stop at the same coffee shop. We’re very comfortable. It’s routine. You don’t have to think about it. And when you ha when you, when someone asks you to change, it’s gonna push you outside of your comfort zone. And when you’re pushed outside of your comfort zone, that’s, that’s what might lead to actual resistance because then it becomes like, well, why do I need to change? Like, things are good now, I’m really comfortable. What, what? Like, no, like let’s, let’s stop the train. We need to like, just like leave things the way they are. Jenn DeWall:  Right? Like why, what if I don’t like it? What I’m thinking of even with saying that, because I know that there are many areas that I’m a creature of habit in my comfort zone, and one can even be at a restaurant if I’ve been there before, I will order the exact same thing every time out of fear that I will not like another potential thing, and then I’ll be disappointed with my menu choice. Marina Field:  <Laugh>. Exactly. Exactly. Why Should Leaders Know How to Overcome Resistance to Change? Jenn DeWall:  I, okay, so I love that. Yeah, it’s that fear, the fear asking us to do something different. And I guess if you’re a leader, you likely are like, oh gosh, this is the battle that I’m climbing every single day with some of my team. Why do you think that leaders need to know how to overcome this resistance? Like, what is the value to them? Because I think, yeah, I’ll just, I’ll turn it to you. Why do you think leaders need to know how to overcome this? Marina Field:  So leaders need to be able to overcome resistance because if they don’t address these concerns that employees are raising, the, the change initiative could fail. So when employees are resisting first, you have to understand that they’re going through an emotional reaction. There’s actually a model called the Kuba Ross model that talks about the different emotions that someone might go through as they’re going through change. So it could start off with just being shocked then you’re going to denial. Like, I can’t believe this is actually happening to me. So thinking about like, you know, again, those, those layoffs you go, you might get into anger, you might go into depression, you go through all these emotional reactions before you potentially could end up as commitment. So leaders need to understand that when they tell someone that, you know, a change is gonna happen. And if that’s not a change that people are comfortable with, employees are acting, reacting to this from an emotional perspective. And again, they wanna stay in that status quo. They wanna be comfortable. So leaders have to first step back and understand that they need to make sure they’re bringing employees along with the journey and overt in order to overcome that resistance to change. Now resistance might look like a couple of different things. Marina Field:  It could be that employees are just asking a lot of questions. So it could be, you know, again, why do we have to change? What, what’s wrong with the way we’re doing things now? We, we tried this before, if failed, then what’s, why is it gonna be different now? And sometimes those questions might actually be resistance, but some reachers researchers say that, well, maybe they’re just asking those questions because they need to understand what’s actually happening. Especially as a leader, you might have known about this change initiative for months or a year. And so for you, you might not recognize how big of an impact it might have on employees who are just learning about it now. Leaders Have to Be Ready To Answer the WHY Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. I feel like there is a lot of that they design the strategy in a vacuum. Yeah. Without understanding the emotional component, that’s going to happen. As you bring that change going forward, where do you see leaders, you know, getting this wrong? Is it strictly their not understanding that it’s emotional? Is it that we think that we can just tell them what to do? I guess I even relate to what you had just shared about asking questions because that’s one of the ways that I process things I, you know, need to understand. And so I’ll ask questions. And when I ask them, I never think it’s a sign of being resistant so much as I think it is the way that I’m trying to process and understand the why. Right. But I’ve absolutely had my hands slapped throughout my career of being like, do not ask me questions. You are trying to undermine my authority. And then that makes me a little. I feel like a bad person because I ask questions, even though that’s just the way that I process information. Marina Field:  Exactly. I imagine that you’re a leader and you have to get this initiative, so you’re getting pressure to put, put, put this initiative through. You’re telling people, okay, this is where we’re going, this is what we’re doing. And then you’re bombarded by all these questions and you might not have the answers to these questions because the change hasn’t happened yet, or everything isn’t figured out. You don’t have the answers. So you, you’re, you’re feeling stressed out because people are bombarding with questions. You don’t know how to like, what to tell them. And so you start getting frustrated, you start getting stressed out as a leader because you know, you’re getting all these questions thrown at you and you don’t know what to do and you don’t necessarily know how to act. So that’s one re that’s one way that leaders sometimes can go astray because they haven’t taken time to think through how they’re gonna address some of the questions or even to be comfortable with saying, we don’t know yet. Don’t Forget to Get Employee Input About the Change Marina Field:  We’ll get back to you. We’re still figuring things out because sometimes leaders don’t feel comfortable saying that they don’t know. The other thing that, other path that leaders take sometimes that makes things challenging for them is they make unilateral decisions. So it’s like, we’re gonna make this change and they don’t take the time to get the voice of the employee involved in, in helping to make that change. So it’s just they make this, so an example here would be, you know, some of the companies are saying, okay pandemic’s over everyone get back to the office. And they’re seeing a lot of resistance from people saying, no, I’m good. I, I wanna work hybrid, or I wanna work remote. And you know, you see this like push and pull from leaders saying, no, you have to come back and, and employees saying, no, I wanna stay hybrid or I wanna stay remote. So just making these unilateral decisions without getting participation from employees is another way that leaders can, can change to make things more effective. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I relate to that one esp especially because I’ve just been hearing so much more, I guess, stories of companies that are saying, well, I, fun time is over. It’s time to get back to the office. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, you need to come in. And people are asking why. And especially within some of the organizations where they actually are fully, you know, by nature of the last few years, they’ve likely hired in different areas where they don’t have in-person offices. And so it doesn’t even, I guess I, it makes sense to me why it doesn’t make sense to them to say, but all these other people still work remote and they get a pass and then I have to come in and it’s not, you know, I I love that you bring that one up because I think that there’s so many missing pieces, especially as it relates to that and what they’re considering. What’s the expectation that’s been set? What like what are you trying to, I guess, enforce or what’s the why? Because I think a lot of people don’t understand it beyond, you just want us back in the office for x, y, Z reasons. And they don’t necessarily see how it might benefit them. Where else might leaders get it wrong? Marina Field:  I, again, I think it goes back, so exactly what you said, leaders are not explaining why, why do you need to do this? So if leaders tick some time, time to explain the purpose and why they’re, this change is being made that would go a long way to addressing some of the concerns of employees. I think, again, like some, some researchers talk about the fact that when you’re, when you’re seeing resistance from organization, from employees within your organization, you have to think about why am I viewing this as resistance? So it goes back to what you were saying before, like you’re asking questions cuz you’re trying to understand, but you got your hand slapped because the person who’s listening didn’t perceive the question the same way you were perceiving as, I’m just trying to understand. So maybe it’s resistance, but maybe someone’s just asking a question. So, you know, take some time to think like, okay, I got a lot of questions. Is this really resistant or do I need to communicate about this a little bit more? So again, that’s another area where leaders, you know, might get things a little bit wrong in terms of how they’re interpreting employees’ reactions. Jenn DeWall:  I love that one, just the mindset. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> of embracing or giving people permission to ask questions As it relates to change. I mean, you said you shared earlier that it’s emotional, so why not give people emotional support to ask questions, to be able to weather it? I mean it seems it’s all of this can sometimes seem so obvious, but yet, you know, when I think about the work climate today, is it, are we missing these things because we just don’t know, are we missing these things because we’re going too fast? I, you know, what do you think are some of the reasons that leaders aren’t taking the time to reframe their mindset or aren’t taking the time to think through some of this? To Overcome Resistance to Change – SLOW DOWN Marina Field:  We’re living in an environment that is so fast paced. It’s like, go, go, go, go, go. We need to get things done very quickly. And organizations don’t always take the time to create a change management plan. It’s like, we ha we don’t have time to do that. We just need to push it out. And when you take that stance, it takes you longer or your change initiative ends up failing because you didn’t slow down and do things properly. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. It’s slowing down to speed up. That’s one of my favorite expressions for leadership. So when you think about why people resist change, is it predominantly just an emotional component? Are there any specifics within it that can be a little bit more triggering for people or why they might resist the change in the beginning? Marina Field:  So people, when, when people are faced with change, they’re really thinking about how is this gonna impact me? And so outside of emotions it might be, you know, am I gonna lose my job? You know, do I have to go back into the office? How is this gonna impact my life and how I go about doing things? And if they perceive it as being something negative, then they’re going to resist. Or even just like I under, you know, the process that we’re using now I understand how to do that process, I can do it with my eyes closed and now you’re asking me to change the process when I, I think this process is better, even when a new and change initiative might make the employee’s life better because it’s new and it’s different. It’s just kind of like what you, you were saying, but I’ve already tried this food, I know it’s good. You’re asking me to try something different. What if I don’t like it? <Laugh> what happens then? Jenn DeWall:  I just laugh every time. Like, I think my, my husband would absolutely be like, Jenn, can you just try one different thing? <Laugh> one different thing. I, I just, you know, it’s that fear. But I know in the pre-call we had also kind of talked about transitions that, you know, and the difficulty that many of us face when we are doing transitions. I know we just gave the a more fun example. It’s not that difficult. I mean, I could try a different food, but the stakes aren’t even that high, right? Like cost of me not trying a different food isn’t that high. But let’s talk about change as it relates to transitions and why people really can struggle with the concept of change. Why People Resist Change Marina Field:  Sure. So when you think about a change, so a change is just like I can just let’s say I’m doing a systems implementation. So one day I turn the, I flip the switch and the changes happen. It doesn’t take that long for the change to actually happen, but the transition is actually a lot longer. So the transition is the part of the process that organizations really need to think about and work on to make sure, again, that they’re bringing employees along along the way so they understand like why we’re turning on the switch, when we’re turning on the switch, what’s gonna happen after we turn off the turn on the switch so that employees can go through that transition process. It addresses the emotions that they’re going through, it addresses the concerns that they’re going through and that helps bring them along and get them more committed to the change. Jenn DeWall:  Gosh, and I can’t even, I even think about this from, you know, that coaching perspective, and I’m sure you see this with your clients too, is that sometimes when we want the change, we have the illusion that the transition is going to be so fun or so great. When I get that new job, when I move to that new city, when I insert what, and I think people are really caught off guard that they’re brain, they’re body, their feelings might actually be resisting that transition that, you know, as much as it’s fun, there’s often a point when you move somewhere and you’re like, oh my gosh, I don’t know anyone. Or you get that new job and you’re like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what I’m doing. And so transitions, I think feel can be, as it relates to change, I feel like we don’t realize the emotions that are going to come outside of enthusiasm for, you know, a self-directed change versus obviously the other emotions that can come when that change was more forced on you, I don’t know, do you see that a lot with your clients that like, it’s so excited for that next career, the next promotion and then they’re in it and they’re like, why did I want this? Marina Field:  Exactly. I see that and, but I see it in terms of, you know, they get, it’s like as it gets closer, as the opportunity gets closer, their fear goes up. It’s like, I want this, but I’m also scared of it. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, I want it, but what, what’s gonna happen to me? And is that that like, I mean mean I don’t know how you see it? And this is more of a curiosity question when we go through transitions, do you think it’s more or less that we just don’t realize how much our, of our identity was attributed to the past city or the past job that we don’t realize that we’re walking away from who we thought we knew? I don’t know, maybe that’s getting too meta, but I know that your background might be able to better that question. That’s just kind of the, the hunch that I feel like I always get is that people don’t realize you’re walking away from an identity when you’re doing these, these, even if they’re exciting changes, you’re walking away from the person that you knew to become the next version of yourself. How Fear of the Unknown Causes Resistance Marina Field:  No, that can be you’re, you’re right on target. That can be a huge reason why people have challenges with managing change or going through transitions. Going back to like, let’s say an organizational example, if I’ve identified with my business unit and I’ve been working there for 20 years and now you’re telling me because of a merger, my business unit is as going to be disbanded, then who am I? Who am I in this organization? What does it mean? Like for 20 years I’ve been doing this, you know, I’ve been coming here, I’ve said that I’m a member of this business unit and now it’s gonna go away and I don’t. And because it’s you know, because it’s a change, I might not have answers about what I will be in the future. And again, that can be really scary on a personal level, as you said as well, if I’m going through a career change and I’ve had this identity, you know, I’ve worked at, you know, XCOR X corporation for this many years and now I’m gonna go to a different industry, I don’t, you know, I don’t have the connections, I don’t know the people I’ve gotta start from scratch. Marina Field:  You know, that’s gonna, your, your identity can be impacted and it can be really hard. Jenn DeWall:  Gosh, I just feel like I wish I could tell everyone that, like when they send their resignation letter to say, okay, when you go into this new job, just know that you might, you’re gonna have a little bit or a day that you’re going to feel unnerved by this and that’s totally fine. You still made the right choice. I wish that everyone could get that disclaimer because I don’t think even my neighbor who is 50, he’s 50 and he spent his last 14 years at a career and I was just asking him how it was going and he is like, it’s been tough. I’m like, just remember like transitions are really hard. And he was like, thank you for saying that to me because I was starting to feel like I made the wrong choice <laugh>. But I think we don’t realize it cuz we get caught up in the like excitement of it. Yes. Of it that we just don’t. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com How Can Organizations Do a Better Job at Managing Change? Jenn DeWall:  So, bringing it back to the organization. I love talking to a change in general because of it. Whether it’s like how we show up as individuals and making changes in our lives or whether, you know, coming into the workplace because I feel like there are so many ways that organizations like I scratch my head at how they, you know, the return to work request, like the ill thought out like there are totally valid reasons to bring people back into the office. I absolutely get that, but it’s also, you don’t get to do it because that’s what happened before the pandemic. Like that’s no longer the logic that’s gonna get them back in, that’s actually gonna get them right into LinkedIn looking for their next job <laugh> and you wanna keep them so at least include them in the dialogue. But now let’s go into kind of that solution piece. Like how, like what are ways that a leader or an AGA organization can better anticipate or overcome resistance to change? View Resistance to Change as Valuable Feedback Marina Field:  So again, it goes back to first understanding why you are viewing these behaviors as resistance? The second question that some researchers suggest that you ask yourself is, how can I use this resistance? Or how can I view this resistance as feedback that’s gonna help me support the change initiative? So those are two questions that you can ask yourself. Another thing that you can do as a leader, and we’ve kind of hinted at this and talked a little bit about this, is make sure that you’re telling people why this is happening. So instead of just saying you’re going back to the office, talk about why like, we want you back in the office because, you know, people like to socialize at work and when you socialize, you make better connections, things are more efficient when we work that or whatever reason you have, but explain your why for why this change is actually happening because that will address some of the questions and concerns people have. Another thing is to talk about what the future’s gonna look like. So what is your vision for what’s gonna happen once this change initiative has been implemented? So what are things gonna look like? What are things gonna feel like? So again, these are, these are things that these are types of things that employees are gonna wanna know, and they’re gonna wanna understand. Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh> Now is this, oh sorry, go ahead. Like as it relates to the vision for the future, like, cuz I feel like sometimes that vision has probably set really beautifully in a strategy session, right? They had, you know, they, they spend a lot of hours doing it and then as that’s going through the organization and going down the layers, that vision might get lost. I don’t know if you, you have any insights on how to preserve the vision that was initially kind of created? Because again, what I think of, and I’ve shared this on the podcast before is when I was in my twenties I was asked to do this new process as an analyst that was going to require a lot of work and I insert the eye roll that I had with my 24 year old ego self, right? Jenn DeWall:  Insert like how I was initially like why are you asking me to do this? And my boss at the time like couldn’t really give me it as, as outside of like, that’s what everyone has to do now. And then when I listened to the quarterly earnings call and heard our CEO explaining that in our new strategy to Wall Street, it made sense. But my question then coming back to it is, is that what I have to do to understand our organizational strategy now is that I have to listen to the quarterly earnings calls or should that also be a part of every level of the organization to understand what the vision is that we’re working towards, especially the ones that are managing employees that have to make these changes. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! Marina Field:  You’re exactly on target again. So two things like, you know, cuz clearly in that instance it, the change wasn’t handled properly in terms of communicating what that vision is. You need when you’re doing, going through a change initiative in terms of like the why, the purpose, the vision, anything related to the change initiative, you need to communicate, you need to communicate, communicate, communicate. You need to use different channels. You know, because people don’t read their emails <laugh>, you know, so it, it needs to be like emails needs to be posters. You need to leverage your managers, you need to have meetings, you need to use as many different, especially depending on how large the change initiatives. You need to use as many communication as ch channels as possible. You need to communicate frequently you need to make sure that people understand what it is that you’re trying to say. You can test for that. You can send out many surveys to see are people getting the message and are they getting, are they understanding the message in the way that you want? But people think like, oh I, I did, I sent out an email, I sent a couple things you need, even if you’ve thought you’ve spoken about it till you’re blue in the face, you need to keep on talking because people are aren’t always gonna get the message. So that’s one, one way to address that situation. Identify Key Stakeholders and Create a Change Network Marina Field:  The second way is when you’re doing a change initiative is you need to identify who are your key stakeholders and that’s something you should do very early on. And make sure that you are in communication with them and you involve them in the change effort. This could also be an opportunity for you to involve the people that are actually resisting the effort and have them involved and get their buy-in because then they can turn around and help be the supporters of the change initiative if you can get them to the right level of support. But having those stakeholders and understanding their level of influence within the organization, they can help spread the word and help spread the vision. One of the things that we used to do when I was a consultant is we would create these change networks and we would identify influencers within the organization and we would send messages down to that change net network and ask them to distribute it between you know, their networks. But we’d also, the, the communication channel worked both ways. So we would ask them what are they hearing and they would send that information back to us so we could kind of get a pulse what was happening in the organization and what people were saying about the change initiative. So we could see like, okay, are people understanding what are people saying about the change effort? Do we need to create communications to address what’s actually being talked about in the organization? Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that one. But that does, okay, you were consultants, you saw this in real time. What happens when, I’m just curious because you likely have to have a very like growth mindset to be able to open up that feedback loop into it. And so how did you maybe help some of those leaders that were going to then get that be like, it’s okay that they don’t like the change. Like I don’t have to get mad or frustrated at them. Like, I can take this as open and you know, I appreciate that feedback. I’m curious because I’m, I’m guessing you likely sometimes heard cuz it happens all the time, right? Where people are like, I had no idea the employees were gonna feel like that. And then you find it out, but then sometimes you’re like, well I don’t care anyways so I’m gonna still have them do that. Not to say that’s where leaders are today, but I love that you gave that opportunity to create feedback loops because I think that sometimes with change I can, I’ve worked at organizations where it’s like, well I still said to do this so I cool, I’m glad that you don’t like it, but I don’t care <laugh>. So how did they respond if it was something where they like, hey we, would they create an additional communication strategy or how would they respond if they got, maybe because let’s be honest, it wasn’t probably like met with, oh I love this. Like, so how did they respond to that pushback? Use Negative Feedback to Inform Your Communication Strategy Marina Field:  I mean, sometimes you hear like, well the data’s wrong, <laugh>, like, you know what, what you’re hearing, no, they, they don’t know what they’re talking about. And, and so that was definitely a delicate situations where you have to sit down and explain like, no, it’s not that the data’s wrong, these are the concerns that people have and if you don’t address them, it’s going to impact the change initiative. So let’s have a conversation and you know, let’s get our people on the ground and like, let’s get you face-to-face in meetings. If you don’t believe it, why don’t we get a group of people so you can have a one-on-one conversation or have a group conversation so you can hear it for yourself or you know, things like that. But making sure that people understood like, okay, we can’t ignore this information. We have it and we have to address the concerns, so let’s do some more communication. Let’s cha let’s see, like why our current messaging may not be connecting with people or how are we not addressing the concerns of employees and what can we do to actually address them? Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I feel like I’m thinking so much now more about the role of bias that can come into play of confirmation bias and people saying, well I don’t wanna hear that people don’t like this. And so what level, I don’t know if you have any like, guidance of like do you handle, like do you go before the changes out and kind of like start to float the idea to understand the types of resistance people can have so you can communicate that before you get everyone on board? Or is it more of a, as these things come up then we’ll send an email that’s answering this. Like do they do town halls or is there kind of any best practices that you would recommend for how they can start to understand the resistance that they’re going to get and then get ahead of it instead of waiting for it and then, you know, not having a strategy for it. Marina Field:  So this goes back to the importance of your, of identifying who your key stakeholders are. Cuz your key stakeholders could be, let’s say for example you’re, you’re rolling out a change initiative and you’re gonna need a lot of money. So the, you might need to have the CFO as the key stakeholder and making sure that they’re on board and they have an understanding and having a conversation with them to find out, okay, where, what are your concerns about this project? And making sure you address those, those concerns. Or maybe your change initiative is a process and maybe it’s at very low level of your organization where someone has a wrench that they have to you know or maybe a hammer that they’re nail, you know, they have to hammer in a nail and you’re gonna ask them to not use a hammer anymore, but use some other type of equipment and they, if, if they don’t use this new equipment, it can completely screw up everything. So you have to make sure that you talk to that person and make sure that they, you understand what their concerns are and address their concerns. So it’s really about understanding who your key stakeholders are and having conversations with them and understanding their concerns so it doesn’t have to, that can happen before you do like your big launch, like this change is happening. So identifying those key stakeholders first, understanding their concerns and then creating communications that you can then later use down the road. Because if they have those concerns, then other employees are gonna have their concerns as those concerns as well. Jenn DeWall:  Right. And it’s just gonna become the meeting after the meeting if you don’t address that <laugh>. Right, which I mean, cuz that’s, what is that I, I forget what is the, like what the number one reason is that change efforts fail? Is it because we don’t give the why or we don’t communicate it where people are like, I don’t understand this. I mean I, you know, I know there’s a lot of factors or I feel like change efforts fail because I’ve worked at organizations that set strategy after strategy after strategy and they never follow through on them. So none of them seem like a priority. And then I guess I’ve taken the, the path of self-preservation, of being like, I’m not gonna do this change because you’re not gonna stick with it. Try a Closure Party to Overcome Resistance and Celebrate Change Marina Field:  Exactly. <laugh>. And, and, and so it’s really important for organization, for, for leaders to distinguish what is different about this change, why is this one going to succeed versus all the other ones that may not have succeeded in the past. And sometimes, you know, this goes back to the identity question or the identity conversation we’re having earlier. Sometimes you have to separate things out. Maybe you have a closure ceremony and you say like, okay, we’re today we’re getting together to celebrate like our previous successes and what we did in the past. And also to talk about like in to, to celebrate the new, the start of a, of a new way of doing things and start, you know, so like have an actual party or an actual meeting where you formally acknowledge the past and talk about the future. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love a closure party. I have never heard of that. And what a great way to get people like, we’re all here today, today to say, you know, goodbye to this and like know that we all get it, we all love this, but we’re so excited for what’s coming. And just feel like it’s like a pr campaign for your for your change to do a closure party. I love that idea. And it makes it feel more, we’re all talking about this, we are all gathered here today to either mourn this loss or talk about an exciting new future. I don’t I’ve never been a part of a closure party and I love that idea. Marina Field:  <Laugh> one of, so, so in addition to closure parties I, so I don’t have an example of a the example I have is not of a closure party, but it’s more of you know, a new beginning party when I was part of a employee that was part of a merger. They talked about NewCo for weeks on end and we got emails that were teasing like, you know, it’s, you know, countdown to day one, you know, this many days to day one. And then there were parties all over the country to celebrate the joining of the two organizations. So I’m based in New York City and all of the New York City employees went to Central Park and there were balloons and activities and parties and it was, it made everyone really excited to be part of this new organization and it signaled that we are no longer part of this old organization. You can leave that identity behind. We’re now part of this new organization. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that one. Never heard of either of these closure or new beginning, but I wonder if, because I, I am sure I’ve seen a lot or heard through a lot of students, participants and being through like a merger myself, just watching how much fear is created when the merger, when the word merger and acquisition is thrown out. And I feel like a new beginnings party is a really nice way to be able to soften the fear to make it seem like it is actually something to be excited about instead of something to fear and be nervous and start, you know, job searching or to try and get away from. Marina Field:  Yeah, I mean, I can tell you from my own experience, we had so much pride in being part of this new organization because they were able to generate so much excitement about this new organization. Jenn DeWall:  My gosh. So anyone that’s potentially going through a merger or acquisition, you might know it, some people might be in part of those conversations, you might want to also add in a new beginnings party or a closure party to be able to help that transition and to help soften the fear response that will happen within your organization. Marina, I have really enjoyed our conversation today. I even those last, I love those last two cause I’ve just never heard those concepts before either. But like, why don’t companies do that? Why don’t we have new beginnings or closure parties as it relates to change instead of just sending out an email. Like, I love those ideas of getting people, like using the emotions to feel the progress. Thank you so much. And before we go, hey, if you wanted to share anything else on change, happy to hear it, but also I want to know or how can our audience get in touch with you? Where to Find More from Marina Field Marina Field:  Sure. I love connecting with people and you can find me on LinkedIn and it’s linkedin.com/Marina field. Jenn DeWall:  Perfect. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Marina, Marina Field:  Thank you for having me. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode with Marina Fields. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. And if you wanna connect with her, you can head on over to linkedin.com and there you can look for Marina Field and link up that way, or you can connect by going to her website, NorthStarWorkforceSolutions.com. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with a friend. Or if you want to learn more about how you can develop your leadership skillset or the leadership skillset of those on your team, head on over to crescom.com. There you can request a two hour complimentary leadership skills workshop. Until next time.   The post Overcome Resistance to Change with Organizational Psychologist, Marina Field appeared first on Crestcom International.

Find Enlightened Leadership with  Leader, Author & Innovator, Rajeev Kapur Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and in this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, I sat down with Rajeev Kapur to discuss how to chase greatness. Now let me tell you a little bit more about Rajeev. Over his career, Rajeev has been a part of the leadership team at Dell, where he built a $1 billion-plus business in the US and managed Dell’s, China and South Asia businesses. Today, he was the CEO of 1105 Media, a leading media and marketing services company, in 2021. In 2022, Rajeev was a finalist for entrepreneur and innovator of the year from the Orange County Business Journal. He is a YPO (Young Presidents’ Organization) member and received his MBA from the USC Marshall School of Business. In 2021, Rajeev became a best-selling author when his new leadership book, Chase Greatness, became the most downloaded leadership book on Amazon in November and December. He is an accomplished keynote speaker and executive coach for companies like AT&T and Amazon, and I hope you enjoy our conversation as we talk about his newest book, Chase Greatness. Meet Rajeev Kapur, CEO of 1105 Media Jenn DeWall:  Rajeev, thank you so much for joining us on this show today. I am excited to talk about your new book. Hey, I think we could all learn a thing or two about what it takes to chase greatness. And I just want to start by saying thank you so much for donating your time. I know you are busy, but thank you for making time for the Leadership Habit audience. We are so grateful to have you on the show. Rajeev Kapur:  Oh, it’s, it’s my pleasure. So excited to be here with you guys. You know, you guys have just an amazing reputation, and I’m just glad I could be here and hopefully provide some good value. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, absolutely, I know you will. Well, I always love, and I know that every podcast starts this way, but I love a great origin story. So Rajeev, could you go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience? Tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to be where you are now, as well as your new book that we’re gonna be talking about today. Rajeev’s Path to Enlightened Leadership Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, you know, it’s funny, people always ask me about my origin story, and I always think about something funny to talk about, like, you know, He came from another planet or whatever, right? But I, I wish I had something really exciting like that, but I don’t. But I’m just a Southern California boy, born and bred, you know, I was born and raised in Southern California in the LA area and you know, kind of lived a normal life in the, in the San Fernando Valley in the eighties. And so I was a valley dude. So the kids that watched Cobra Kai today, I’m like, Hey, I was the karate kid age back then, right? <Laugh>, so, So it’s like, you know, I’m watching that show, it’s like my kids are like, Hey, you’re Daniel La Russo, Dad I’m like, yeah, I guess so. So anyway, so, but that’s kind of where I got the start. And then, you know, I did my undergrad out here in Southern California. I did my master out here. And then I think the big kind of step for me, and one of the biggest, one of the biggest lessons I learned early in my career was you have to go to the job. And so for me, it was back in 91, the economy was a little bit of a challenge down here in Southern California at the time. And I got a job working for an old computer company called Gateway 2000, which I’m sure not many people remember. And so I think we had a gateway computer. Yeah, it was the cow spotted boxes and everything. And so, but you know, but the headquarters for game was in South Dakota, Sioux City, South Dakota. And so I went from being a southern California boy and I actually had to move to Sioux City, Iowa. There’s a tri-state area. So, cause you lived in Iowa and you drove in South Dakota every day. And so I did that for a couple years. Finally, it was like 56 degrees below zero one day with the wind chill factor. It is really bad, really challenging. And so I decided that, hey, you know what, this wasn’t for me. From Michael Dell’s Assistant to General Manager of South Asia & India Rajeev Kapur: And after a couple years I got recruited to Dell,and went to Dell and started off on the phones and after about six or seven months being on the phones, I got an opportunity to work for Michael Dell, first executive assistant for a little while. And that was really exciting and that really helped propel my career. At Dell worked my way up there, eventually ran the west coast for Dell to grew that to a huge business, like a billion dollar plus business. And then, you know after after a few years of doing that, I had moved back to Southern California. Because I was spending all my time out here and I was married and preferred to be on the West Coast. And you know, Michael called one day and said, Rajeev, we’d really like you to go to China. So in 2000 packed up and went to China and went to kind of like that Beijing area for a while. And then ended up back and forth between the Dell factory and Shaman. And then there was some other challenges being in China back at that time. So ended up transferring into the Hong Kong office so it would be easier for me to fly back and forth. And it was much easier to my wife cause we were pregnant at the time. So we did that for a couple years and built that up. And that was exciting to be there at the early days of Dell China. And then was asked to go run a big part of South Asia. So I eventually became general manager and of South and BP general manager, the South Asia market, and launch Dell, India and all these other cool countries. And that was an exciting time and an absolute amazing opportunity. And then, you know, I decided to move back to Southern California. Our second son was born in Singapore, wasn’t seeing the family much. And so made that choice to spend more time with family and, you know, became a bit more entrepreneurial. I went to a really small e-commerce company, did well there, then went to a startup, anddid well there. And then went to another kind of sort of VC-funded company. Did, don’t, you know, that that went pretty good. And now for the last eight plus years I’ve been running a B2B marketing and media services company called 1105 Media and 1105 doesn’t have any meeting or anything. Like, that’s just what it, and so anyways, I’ve been doing that. And in the meantime, you know, I became an author. I sold my first movie script, just finished my second one. I’m a huge sports fan, big Laker fan. I went to the LeBron game the other night where he, when he went, I was there. And that was exciting. So that was really happy. That was cool. I took my son, cause it’s his birthday today, he turned 22 and so that was kinda birthday present for him. So yeah, about me I’m excited to here and CEO companies. I’ve had three exits and I mean that smaller, small business was called Smart Home. We got the award for the best place to work here in Orange County. Actually. Lucky enough to get that award twice, you know. So again, you know, I could go on and on and on, but it’s really a testament to the teams I’ve had the pleasure of leading. And I’m really passionate about leadership and the future of leadership and I think it has to change. I think there’s an absolute ton of disruption coming not just in the workforce, but technologically as well. I think we’ve seen that over the last couple of weeks with chat GPT and these other technologies that are coming. I think there’s massive disruption coming and I don’t think current leadership, current CEOs are ready. And so that’s what I’m trying to pontificate, that you have to get ready. And I call it, and I call it enlightened leadership is what people have to embrace. How Should Leaders Be Preparing for Leading in the Future? Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Well, you’ve shared a lot and obviously you were at Dell likely, I’m guessing. Not that we’re gonna give the years during a period of massive growth. And I mean, I think that, I remember the period even 20 years ago, like Dell was, I, I just remember it, it was everywhere and it was everything. Like what an exciting time to be with the organization. And then of course to witness LeBron, I mean, you, I love the, not only the, of course global experience that you’ve had so many different organizations, so many different leadership roles, and I really appreciate you because I know that you have so much value in insights and talking about enlightened leadership. So diving into what the future of work looks like, and I know we’re going to talk about your book, Chase Greatness. From your perspective, what do you think needs to happen or what do we need to be prepared for as it relates to leading in the future? Rajeev Kapur:  You know, so that’s a great question. So I think at the end of the day, there are two big things that are gonna be happening over the course of the next, let’s say 24 to 30 months. And we, we can go plus or minus on that. Okay? The first one is, is that you’re gonna see a lot more boomers retiring from the workforce, number one. And you’re gonna see a lot more Gen Z and Millennials moving into the workforce, right? Millennials are already here, Gen Zers are gonna be coming in. You think about, you know, the kids who are like, who are kind of just, who are now 20 years old in the next couple years, they’re gonna be 23 years old, and so they’re gonna be graduating from college. And so you’re gonna see this massive shift. And what’s, what’s happening in that, what’s happening in that is a couple things. Rise of the JEDI Leader: Justice, Environment, Diversity, Inclusion Rajeev Kapur:  Number one is, according to the statistics, women for the first time will be the majority of the workforce in the US. And I don’t mean it’s like 60 40, it’s probably, it’s, it’s a little, it’s like 51-49, so it’s like right there. But they’re gonna be the majority for the first time ever. So, because most boomers in the workforce were mostly right. So when, when that that goes out, then you have this kind of mix that’s coming in. And so that, that’s where you’re seeing that uptick of, of female representation, which I think is awesome, right? So that’s number one. Number two is what’s happening is as this group comes into the workforce, they’re, they have a much more, you know, activist kind of base mentality. You know, they’re much more into what I call the Jedi, which stands for justice, environment, diversity, inclusion. And you might say, rich Chief, well that doesn’t mean crap when I’m running a business. And, and I agree that when you think of it, that when you think of in a non-traditional way, you’re right, you know, or, or a traditional way, you’re right. It really doesn’t, right? How somebody thinks outside the walls, the business really shouldn’t matter how you treat them inside the business, right? You try to treat everybody with respect, treat them well, but what’s happening is, and you’ve seen this, and I’m sure you’re organization’s seen this and you know, the, the, the organization, the people that you guys support has seen this, is that you’ve got this great resignation happening, quiet, quitting, which to me is ridiculous because all that’s saying is, Hey, I’m doing my job. You’re not asking me to do more, so you’re not paying me for more, so I’m not doing it. So whatever. So that, so that whole term is kinda ridiculous in my opinion. But regardless with what you’re seeing though, is the, the, this group that that’s coming in is saying, Hey, you know, I want to find a company that has purpose. I wanna find a company that has a passion that’s not just solely focused on the bottom line. And, you know, obviously capitalism, and I’m a capitalism sole, three companies, so I get it right. But here’s the thing, McKinsey has said that if you do focus on purpose, passion, taking care of the employees, if you, if you focus on building an amazing culture, if you focus on treating your, your employees as an internal customer, then you’re gonna actually improve your bottom line because you’re gonna have less turnover. You’re gonna promote from within, you know, people are gonna deal with you longer. So this is a whole domino effect of doing that, and that leads to a much better bottom line, right? Deloitte came out and said, they did a survey a few years ago that said, they asked all these CEOs, what percent of you, what percent of you believe that culture is important? Well, 90% said, raised their hands and culture is the most important thing, but only 10% actually ever did anything about it. And I’m here to say that culture’s really gonna matter now for future, because you can remark, you can work anywhere in the world and still get your job done. Like I can run 95% of my company on my smartphone, right? The only thing I really don’t do on my smartphone is I don’t do my board meetings on my smartphone, I don’t do my management staff meetings, right? But even those I do on the laptop, and I can do those sitting in the malls, I can do them sitting here and my office here in Southern California, right? The First Step to Enlightened Leadership Rajeev Kapur:  So, but my point is that, so work is getting remote. I know people wanna go back in the offices and to some cases that’s important. And I think, so a hybrid work environment is probably what’s gonna win the day. But you have all these things that are coming and you have this employee set that is saying, Hey Jenn, we really wanna be with you because you have a passion and a purpose, and we’ll stay with you if you can demonstrate that. And that to me is the first step of enlightened leadership and enlightened leadership take the foundation of servant leadership that we all kind of grew up with and says, Hey Jenn, not only am I here to help you be successful in your job, I’m also gonna do whatever I can to help support you outside the walls of the business. An example of that here at 1105, what I did was we give everybody now a paid day off to go vote. Not many companies do that. So we pay for that. So that something doesn’t, so if you’re not happy with a decision that’s being made in, in government or politics, whatever, it’s great. We’re gonna ask you, I’m gonna say, look, I’m gonna pay, I’m gonna give you a day off. Don’t worry about your paycheck. I’ve got it covered and you go out there and do this. So that’s just a small example, right? That’s, you know, and so we donate money to nonprofits charities last year, we gave the last 14 months, we’ve given about $50,000 to support nonprofits and, and charities throughout the country for whether it’s funding, scholarships for underprivileged girls who wanna go to college that are in high school on the border- that sit on the Arizona Mexico border in the Nogales, Arizona to Operation Smile to Rainbow Services. So, so we’re doing those types of things. Try to try to make sure our employees understand that we wanna do what we can to, to, to really help you know, their communities be better. And that, to me is enlightened leadership. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, I love that. And yes, it’s, I mean, would you say that enlightened leadership is because the biggest thing, you know, for me as a millennial is also that need to be treated as a human, as not, you know, as a product of the bottom line, not just a means to an end. It’s part of feeling like, yeah, you actually care about me, that I’m not just someone that’s, you know, disposable, I, what’s your take on that and that shift in talking about mental health in the workplace? Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, that’s a great point because look, you know, when you get on an airplane, you know, the flight attendant says, Hey, in case of turbulence, mask is gonna fall from the ceiling. And the first thing they say is, put on your own mask, right? Before you help the other person sitting next to you. And as a CEO, as a leader of a team or a business or whatever it might be, is, you know, they, they’re your team, right? You gotta help put on their mask first before you can worry about your external customer. So that’s why I’m saying focus on your internal customer first. Put on their own mask first. That might mean helping them with mental wellness days off, you know, having a couple of those in, in their pockets so they can go do that so they don’t have to worry about being stressed out, you know, and finding in exciting, encouraging ways, you know, to, to make sure that they take their vacations. Getting Comfortable with Not Having all the Answers Rajeev Kapur:  Because a lot of people don’t take their vacations, right? It’s, and this is not all about, like, you know, you hear about the tech companies and a lot of these portrait articles, wait, I’m gonna give you free lunches and cokes and candies and all these things. That’s not what this is about. But what people want at the end of the day is they wanna know they can go to work, that they have really, that they have a boss that’s grateful, that they have people who are fully resilient, that they have the ability for people to have empathy. And the empathy thing is really important because when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties when I was gonna, when when I was working at Dell, I remember my mentor would say, if you’re ever gonna go talk to your boss, you gotta go with three solutions. And I totally got that right. That made a lot of sense. Because you’re not waste somebody’s time, they’re busy, right? But when Covid hit, I realized that that was ridiculous because no one had a solution for Covid, right? No one knew what to do. But I was a CEO for a reason. And I, I think myself, you know, if people don’t come to me with ideas and like, we have to right now throw as much spaghetti on the wall that, that they’re gonna just clam up or they’re not gonna come to me. Cause they don’t have any solutions for Covid. So I, I immediately went to them and say, look, don’t worry about it. If you don’t have solutions, we’re gonna talk about everything. And that really changed my mindset in terms of how I led. And I let people know, look, if you, because my job, I realize that, look, if I’m sitting as a ceo, I worked really hard to get where I am. Rajeev Kapur:  I have experiences that they can learn from, right? Right. And if they’re stuck, my job should be, Hey Jenn, let me help you get unstuck. Thanks. Let’s go for a walk and let’s throw some spaghetti on a wall together. Right? Maybe you just need to talk something through. Maybe you just need someone to talk to, vent, listen to, so come let that be me. You know, I’m happy to do that. So I need that big shift. So, so I started to listening big more, much more empathy, but then having a lot more accountability, but then really increasing the communication to have that transparency, right? So those were the key five attributes that really were important to me. As you look at enlightened leadership and, and as we led our way through Covid. What Was the Inspiration for Your Book, Chase Greatness? Jenn DeWall:  Well, and I love that. And so this is the great segue into your book that you recently wrote, Chase Greatness. What inspired you? Was it the pandemic that kind of made that shift in seeing like, we’ve gotta change? Or what was the inspiration? Was it, was it the pandemic? Was it just noticing, you know, some of the stuff is just not working anymore? What made you want to bring this book to reality or to real life? Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, no, so the great question. So there’s actually a couple things. So, so when Covid hit my company, look, we were doing really well. We were growing, we were doing this, you know, and all of a sudden we slammed into a wall when Covid hit because little over half my business was face to face events. And so we were no different than going to a concert or going to a movie. You know, everything was closed. We were closed. I mean, that revenue was gone. People were not coming, people were afraid. I remember hearing stories about the friends that worked as doctors who were literally writing their wills saying goodbye to their kids as they were going into work, right? So people were, people on my team. They had parents who were doctors or family that were doctors. And, and you see that and you realize you’re such a small, you’re so small in, in the world, the universe, the grand scheme of things in that there are bigger issues out there. And so, you know, so for me, me ultimately, it was a real mental cathartic thing for me because there’s about a 24 to 40 hour window where I didn’t know what to do. There was no case study for me to go read because there was no case study on how, you handle Covid, right? There was no mentor for me to call because no mentor had ever gone through this, right? So what was I gonna do? So I just kind of decided to take the, the tactic saying, you know what I want, hopefully one day Harvard will write a case study on what we did here at 1105 to navigate this storm. And so that was the mental thing I took. I decided to put on my own mask first, and I realized I needed something to do while I was sitting at home, you know, getting, you know, late at night after having chance to play a walk my dog and do whatever and, you know, and so I said, you know what, you’ve always wanted to write this book, so write the book. And I had notes everywhere. So I started writing the book, I wrote an outline. I wrote, wrote some chapters and that, and then, you know, as I mentioned to you before, I’m a member of this group called YPO, and I reached out to some YPOers and they hooked me up with a, with a, with a publishing company. And they then helped support me. And you know, it took another year or so to write it and, you know, there you go. But it was real cathartic for me to write it, to get this down because that’s when I started doing my research. I had all this free time, I had all this time to research and realize the workforce is gonna change. You know, the subheading of the book is Enlightened Leadership for the Next Generation of Disruption. And I looked at Covid as a massive disruption, but I also looked at the workforce being disrupted by the fact that you’re gonna have the majority of the workforce’s gonna be Gen Z, millennial, and that group women in the next 24 months. Workplace Disruption and Transformation Rajeev Kapur:  Well, this was three years ago I wrote it, but now it’s 24 months. And so I was then, I was talking about how IOT, robotics, even kind of AI type things were gonna be transforming the way people did their jobs. Just the way the first internet transformed the way our parents did their jobs right back in the mid nineties. And so I just kinda opine that was the case. And fast forward now to two months ago and Chat GPT rolls out and they’re now talking about how it’s gonna be as big, if not bigger than when the first internet browser came out. And that’s gonna lead to massive disruption in the workforce. So that’s what I kind of decided to do. That’s why I wrote the book, and I felt like I had something to say. And I, you know, and I really felt like, and, and I’m gonna be very blunt here and honest, that if CEOs are unwilling to change, if leadership teams are unwilling to change to this changing demographic, to the changing world around them of what’s happening with technology, they’re just gonna be left behind and their company’s gonna be outta this period. Rajeev Kapur:  So, so they have two choices to change, understand it’s coming or don’t, and be left behind. Enlightened Leaders Know You Must Adapt or Be Left Behind Jenn DeWall:  Right? And I feel, I mean, I’ve read a few different things, you know, adaptive leadership being one of the necessary skills of the future, and learning how to stand in solidarity with uncertainty. That is, you know, we no longer get the same luxury that I’m sure business leaders had 10 years ago or 20 years ago with that stability or the LY trends because everything is changing too fast. And so I love that point of emphasis that you’ve made because I think there are still a lot of people that are struggling with this. It’s a new way of approaching it. And so we naturally see the school of resistors, can we please go back to the way things were and the adopters, the people that are welcoming and, and ready for it? And I think I was probably very ready for all of this disruption because I found, as a newer employee, and I’m a 40 year old millennial, so I’m at the, I guess beginning page of that. I felt like the workplace didn’t necessarily do a great job. I actually, when I entered the workplace, I actually thought leadership was a joke. I’m like, oh. So everything that I learned, I took Dale Carnegie when I was 18, I had done a lot of different things and I was like, oh, was that just that nice little thing that they teach kids to make them play nice? Because it wasn’t well demonstrated, it was very authoritative. But I love your approach on enlightened leadership to be able to think about that next generation of disruption, because that’s the only thing that’s going to come, even though me as someone that loves stability as all of us, oh gosh, I don’t even know the ways chat, GPT, all the ways that it’s going to disrupt and what that’s going to look like. And I don’t even think they know all the ways that it will disrupt yet. Yeah, Rajeev Kapur:  I mean, it’s just like, if you go back, look at the first browser, no one realized, no one knew what social media was gonna be back in 96. No one knew what e-commerce was gonna be. I still remember being in a meeting when Michael Dell walked in the office and he had this box and it said Mosaic on it, right? And Mosaic was the first browser that eventually became Netscape, which, you know, and he said, I want you guys to figure out how to sell computers on this thing, you know? And that to me is leadership. That to me was a vision, right? And, and so my company, for example, like at, when we did a on last last Wednesday, we did our, our annual recognition event. And in that meeting, I told every every single employee, all hundred 40 million employees are all gonna have to go through training on generative AI, on Chat GPT, and these types of tools, every single one, I don’t care who, they’re everyone. And sure enough, and you know, now I’ve got employees are are into it. We’re embracing it. We’ve got ideas. You know, this one, I have this one employee who was using an example, almost like as a substitute marketer for her in doing her job. I mean, it was just amazing to see it. But this is, but you see this, right? And that’s today, imagine what this is gonna be like in 2, 3, 4 years, right? So that’s why you’ve got all these Gen Zers who are the most connected group of people in history. They’re the most technologically advanced in history, are coming into the workforce. And they’re gonna embrace this stuff. They’re gonna know all this stuff backwards and forwards, right? It’s kinda like when social media first started, but they say, you wanna learn social, social media? Go hire a young intern, right? So, so now you see what’s coming, right? So it’s coming and it’s coming and that perception is coming. And you have two choices. You can either stand on the track, not change, and get hit by the train, or you could move aside, retool your business, retool your teams, retool the fact, make sure that your IT team, your cio, your CTOs, whoever they might be, are embracing this and pushing this down in an organization or be left behind. I mean, really, you just have two choices. I love that. If you need help, call me. If you need help, call me. Hold on. Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh>, I love that. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. How do Enlightened Leaders Chase Greatness? Jenn DeWall:  Let’s talk about it. Okay? For those that are ready and thinking about, okay, I’m ready to embrace a new approach, a new way of leading, let’s talk about what it means to chase greatness. What does it mean to be great? Or what does it mean to chase? Great. Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah. So, so that’s great. I really appreciate that question because I’m gonna go back to, so when I was sitting in my home office when Covid hit, this was about a week after everything was shut down and we made the decision to we’re gonna go for it and we’re gonna fix this company. And we’re, we’re, I’m not gonna let anything happen. We’re gonna, we’re gonna take our big decision, we’re gonna take our pay cuts, we’re gonna the layoff, do everything we needed, right? And I walked into my whiteboard and I asked and wrote, whiteboard, what does it mean to be great? Whatever, A couple days go by, I’m staring at the whiteboard, where does it, so then I went up to the whiteboard a couple days later and I erased that, and I wrote the word great, you know, vertically, you know, in a g you know, G R E A T. And then I wrote Gratitude, Resilience, Empathy, Accountability, and Trust. And it just happened to be, that was the acronym I kind of came up with. And I, and I just mentioned that like 10 minutes ago though, it was exact five attributes almost. And so then a couple days go by and I erased the word trust, and I put the word transparency. And I, and the reason why I erased the word trust, cause people say, well, when you think about great, you know, rates and acronym, why’d you get rid of the word trust? I go, well, I really didn’t. I, all I’m saying is that if you wanna build that trust in an organization, you’ve gotta be really transparent with them. Like, I needed to be really transparent with my entire team. This is what Covid has done to our business. This is what we need to do. This is how I need everyone to come together. And I couldn’t just say, Hey guys, we’re gonna lay off people. Trust me. I need to tell them why I need to be transparent. I needed them to understand what was happening. So that’s what so that’s what we did. And to me, those five key attributes of gratitude, resilience, empathy, accountability, and transparency, make up the word great. And that became my north star for what enlightened leadership should be. And if I go back and I look at historically those five attributes, you see pockets of that everywhere. Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, when he took over for Steve Ballmer, he says he’s an internet interview. He says gratitude was the number one thing that he implemented that turned Microsoft around gratitude. Gratitude and the Path to Enlightened Leadership Jenn DeWall:  That’s, I love that. Let, let’s dive into that. Like as gratitude being the starting point for, you know, great, what does gratitude look like in action? Because I think that there, you know, in a traditional school of thought, maybe it was, there’s no place for gratitude or yeah, we’ve got a rewards and recognition. We’ll send you a gift card. What does gratitude look like in action? Or said in a different way? What does gratitude mean to you and how you wrote about it in this book? Rajeev Kapur:  Look, yeah, I mean, you know, the way I write about it in the book is that gratitude is a foundational integrated, like, it’s in your soul. It’s something you just do, just as, just like you breathe, just like you walk or talk– gratitude, kindness, compassion, kindness, compassion are all an outcome of gratitude, right? I am so grateful I have an opportunity to talk to you and get my message across to your audience, right? I, I am so grateful that I had a chance today to go meet with, with, with a bunch of guys this morning to talk about our personal family business and where we can become better leaders, better fathers, but better husbands. You know, better people, better persons, you know, to our communities. I had that discussion earlier today, right? So gratitude is recognizing that you have so much to grateful for, and how do you now take that and spread that message across? And what Microsoft didn’t do for a long time is they did not embrace their community. And gratitude is a hug. Gratitude is a way to embrace your community and let them know that, hey, we wouldn’t be here unless it was for you. And that’s what you need to do, is you, you need to hug your team, hug your organization, and you let them know that you as a CEO wouldn’t be here. That wasn’t for them, you know? And that, yes, there’s gonna be times when you have to make some tough decisions, but you, but you promised always be fully transparent and you’ll answer any question. And that you’re gonna do everything you can to be grateful for them and making sure that they are, have the tools they need to be successful, okay? And when you honor their dreams that way, that becomes your why. And so that, that led to my why, which is helping to honor other people’s dreams and gratitude is the enabler of that. So that’s why gratitude is so important. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I love that. I, I can think of the jobs that have stood, or, the bosses I should say, that have stood out to me. The ones that have made the greatest impact are the ones that have have said, thank you so much for your work. I really appreciate what you did. And honestly, the first time I ever heard that from a boss, I was like, who are you? Because that was not the traditional way to speak to employees. It was, you should just be happy. You have a job, aren’t you happy that you work here? And so to feel so valued by a boss felt like, what’s the catch? What, what am I waiting for here? And I’m curious, how do you, you know, you talked about it as like giving your team a hug. How do you practice gratitude or how do you personally show your employees that you’re grateful for them? Rajeev Kapur:  So it’s, to me now it’s become second nature, right? So to me, I just find myself doing it without even realize I’m doing it right. Whether it’s an atta-boy in an email, whether it’s randomly calling somebody, whether it’s realizing, Hey, it’s Jenn’s birthday today, so I’m gonna wish you a happy birthday. You know, whether it’s, you know being grateful for a customer that did something amazing, or, you know, we have something internally in the company called the High Five Award, which is a peer-to-peer recognition award. Whether it’s doing on-the-spots, you know, whether it is doing a research on figuring out a great tool for them to be able to use, you know, you know, one of the things we decided to do as a company is we didn’t take a dollar of PPP money, not $1. So all that government stimulus that came out a, we were, we had a really hard time qualifying cuz we had some private equity money in us. And so we didn’t take a dollar. So I asked the team to take pay cuts. I asked the team to do certain things and so I wanted to make sure that I could return that favor. And we did. And we, we were able to restore people’s pay back fairly quickly. We do, we do, we do like a yearly bonus for every employee. You know, we, you know, we, we we allow remote work, you know, you know, I, I tell people, you know, if you’re not feeling good, if you’re tired and it’s five o’clock in the evening, that’s okay. Go home or to turn off your computer wherever you are. You know, go to Starbucks or go go to the beach. Or go to the mountains or go for a hike because that problem you have, it’ll still be there at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning and do it when you’re refreshed. Rajeev Kapur:  I’d rather you have a clear mind to go do that way, because, or if you feel like, hey, you know what, you’ve got a appointment in the day or you gotta take care of your kids the day, but, but you can get the job done at eight o’clock at night and you need, you need to have a few hours off in the middle of the day to go do other stuff. Do I care if the job gets done at 10:00 AM or 10:00 PM Yeah, I really don’t. Right? So, so we kind of really backed off of this kind of authoritarian viewpoint saying, look, company’s doing well, we’re doing fine. Knock on wood, you know, we, we trust you because we’re fully transparent and as a two-way street, the relationship we have, you know, one thing I try to stay away from is I’m not a big fan of using that word family, you know? Instead what I like to do is I talk about the fact that there is, it’s a two-way relationship. And so, you know, it’s a relationship. And so we honor we try to honor that relationship. And so that’s, that’s what we do. Enlightened Leaders Must Have Empathy and Understanding Jenn DeWall:  I love that, I love that you make time because that’s the big piece I heard. You’re, you obviously are, you sit on multiple boards, you’re running an organization, you’ve got a lot going on and you still make the time for development. And you know, cuz I, I think that’s an important point to emphasize because there might be people that say, I don’t have time for that. But it sounds like you make the time, you take time to make that time, which is, you know, the important piece of it. And I know, and I wanna go into a few other elements of great, I know we, we will not cover them all because hey, we’re gonna get the book, but let’s talk about another one. Let’s talk about what, what empathy sounds like for you and empathy and how we’re demonstrating that. Because again, I think there’s a lot more confusion from people on the, the how, like how do you do empathy and come on, can’t they again, just be happy they have a job? You know, I know that there’s that traditional approach that comes back in, but how do you define empathy or from how did you write it? Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the big one, I think I mentioned it earlier, to me, empathy is just all about listening big. That’s it. It’s really simple. And I don’t wanna complicate this with some sort of long drawn out or attractive answer. It’s really just about listening big. Like, I think I gave the example earlier, right? That when I was growing up, when I was kinda moving up the ladder in my career, you had to go to your boss with those three solutions, otherwise you don’t go to your boss, right? And, and so that has to change. And that, that’s where I, I think that was probably of those five attributes I talked about, I thought of, of gratitude, resilience, empathy, accountability, and transparency. I think empathy was the one where I think I changed the most. And having that attitude that say, that’s okay, Jenn, you got a problem, you know, come and talk to me. Let’s, let’s work it through together. We’re in this together, it’s a relationship, right? Jenn, thank you for trusting me to come to me with a problem and not being afraid of my title. Because the more, the more I can take my experiences and give them to you, the better you’re gonna be right? And the better and the happier you’re gonna be your job. And that’s the, that’s empathy. That’s really all you gotta do, right? It’s, it’s, you know, it’s when you’re walking down the hallways of, of the office, you know, it’s stopping by and listening and saying, how’s it going? Right? Oh, it’s my son’s birthday today and it happens to be my son’s birthday today, you know, oh, happy birthday. But then going back to your office noting, oh, it’s Jenn’s son’s birthday today, put that in your calendar. So next year it pops up saying, oh, it’s Jenn’s son’s birthday today. Hey Jenn, who’s your son, Sean, a happy birthday. You know, whatever. Right? My son’s name, Sean. So anyways, so, so that’s, so those are small little things you do, right? I mean, you know, it’s, you know, it’s, you know, people get excited by those things, right? So that’s, but it’s simple. It’s that, that you don’t, overcomplicate that one. It’s a big word in business, but it’s a really easy one to implement. Jenn DeWall:  Where do you think, out of the, out of gratitude, resilience, empathy, accountability and transparency, what one, from your experience, do you think either for you was maybe the most challenging to adjust? Or do you, you think people in general might have, you know, a little bit more hurdles or complications with really adapting? Rajeev Kapur:  So I think as I mentioned, I think empathy was probably my biggest one. And I think the second one was probably transparency, because look, it’s hard to be able to really be, oh, there’s certain things you can’t talk about in a business, right? You know, obviously you wanna, you know, but you have to, when it come to time for major challenges and issues, you gotta be really transparent with your team. So you gotta tell ’em how you’re performing as a company, where you have gaps, where you have opportunities for growth, where you think the misses are where you, where, where do you think the hits are? Where, you know, where do you think the you know, the, there might be an opportunity to improve a performance, you know, whatever the case, you gotta be transparent, but you also have to be transparent the other way as well. You have to be willing to listen to that as well. And that’s where that empathy piece comes back, right? And you have to learn, you have to learn that not only can you give constructive criticism, you need to be open to receiving that constructive criticism as well. So that’s what we did. Employee surveys out there. Right. You know, one of the questions I asked, so at the, at the end, and hopefully the leaders skip the book, and at the end of the chapters I have questions of, you know, Ithought provoking questions at the end of every chapter. And I think my, somebody asked me, what is my favorite question in the book? So as a leader, as a CEO my favorite question in that book is, if you’re trying to figure out how good your culture is, the question I want you to ask your employees is, Jenn, if you were to receive an offer from a Crestcom competitor making the exact same amount of money, do the exact same thing, would you leave? So granted, these things are anonymous, right? And if the answer you get back is yes, you have a major culture problem, Transparency Creates Trust Jenn DeWall:  Right? Right. Yeah, absolutely. If they’re like, Hey, anything’s gotta be better than here. I have one final question as it relates to transparency is I think whether you’re an emerging leader or whether you’re an executive leader, it’s often really difficult to determine what is appropriate, what can I share? But the other piece is when, because when do you make the time to share this? Is it a standing meeting that you have? Because I often notice that sometimes organizations will, you know, I might have to listen to a quarterly earnings call to actually hear the update. So do you have any prescriptive advice on how to approach transparency when to, you know, communicate particular information or when it’s essential such as, hey, we just, you know, lost a big client, or, you know, here’s a crisis situation. I’m curious if you have any tips on how people can understand when they should be prompted to be more transparent. Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, no, great, great question. And so look, my, my tip is essentially is that you’ve gotta start getting it on the calendar. So, so people can start changing behavior. So for example, we do a quarterly recognition event at the end of every quarter, about three weeks after the quarter closes. So we’ll do a Q1 recognition event towards the end of April, and we talk about, Hey, who are the new employees that started the company? We’ll do, we’ll celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, we’ll celebrate, you know, the what we call the 1105 of the quarter, the manager of the quarter for the different divisions, and there’s five divisions. And so, so we do all that stuff, right? And then we talk about, you know, how are we doing in our different business lines? Are they up, are they down? Are they just kind of holding, you know, sideways, whatever the case may be. We talk about that stuff, we talk about the priorities, how are we doing against them? So we have a set of KPIs, key performance indicators, how are we doing it against our KPIs? And we make it simple stoplight format, green, yellow, red, green, hey that kpi, man. Yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re gold. That, that, that’s a good, we’re we’re going, we’re driving the car. We’re, we’ve driven, we’re we’re driving down the road so that, that, that, that KPI is going. So that’s green. So I mean that we’re on track. Yellow means, hey, you know, we’re not on track, we’re not off track. It’s just kind there. It’s kind muddling a little bit, but I think we can do it. And red means we’re off means we’re stopped. And so obviously your goal as a CEO is to take your reds, turn ’em into yellows, and take your yellows and turn ’em in greens, right? And keep your greens, greens. So that’s ultimately the goal, right? And those are your KPIs. So we share that group with people. We do that. And then that every division, so every division GM does a monthly town hall just with our specific group. Cause at my recognition events that we do quarterly, they’re very high level, right? They talk about more high levels going across all the businesses. Give Your Team Control of Their Calendars Rajeev Kapur:  And then, look, I, I only have two set standing meetings. Well, I have more than that, but you, but in terms of set, like we’ll set individual one-on-one type meetings. So I have a staff meeting every Tuesday, and then I have one-on-ones with every single one of my direct reports, which is about 10 direct reports every week. Other than that, I try not to add more meetings to people’s calendars. I get invited to meetings, which I go to, but I try not to add more meetings to other people’s calendars. I want, I want my team to be control, I want them to be controllers of their own catalog to their own calendar, to their own time. Like, so, so we, so I decided a couple years ago to decentralize all decision making and push it closest to the customer as possible. And, and we change incentives, we change bonus structures to say, okay, you’re gonna be responsible for profitability for your business. If that’s the case, I’m gonna give you the keys to the car to drive, but here’s the number you gotta hit. What decisions are you gonna make now to deliver that number? Now you can do your hiring, you can do your firing, you can do, you can decide what groups you gonna do, but, and we’ll, we’ll review that progress every week and we’ll see how that’s going. And so, so that’s that, that, that’s, that’s essentially what we do. Jenn DeWall:  I love that example, and I know that you can speak about it with competence because clearly you’ve been able to articulate this, but I also just wanted to acknowledge that that is actually one of the things that’s really hard for people, a following through on strategies and actually checking up on the KPIs or milestones or whatever that is. But then two, whoa, you’re giving people the keys to the car to drive that or letting go of that control is honestly, I mean that’s e that’s a challenge again, at every single level of leadership. And so I just want to acknowledge and hopefully reemphasize to our listeners of the value that can come if you do give away some of that control if you do allow more autonomy or decentralized decision-making. And I just, I appreciate that example because I think there’s a lot of people that have more fear with that. And it sounds like you really lean into it with a lot of trust and I, you know, and I know that that’s part of your last piece. So Rajeev, I really enjoyed our conversation. How can our audience connect with you? Where can they get the book? How can they get in touch with you? Where to Find More from Rajeev Kapur Rajeev Kapur:  Yeah, no, thank you. I appreciate that. So look, I mean the book’s obviously available on Amazon. It’s available, it’s also available, so it’s available in Kindle format. It’s now available in audiobook format through Audible. You can also buy the hard cover through Amazon and you can just search in Chase Greatness, Rajeev Kapur, last name is K A P U R, or Chase Greatness Enlightened Leadership, that will pull it all up right there. They can go on, it’s available book’s available at an audiobook on Spotify as well now. So if you go to spotify.com, you can’t go to the app, you have to go spotify.com and get it there. And over time it’ll be rolling out other places as well. So that’s where it’s available on an audiobook format. So I think through Spotify and Audible.com, You got most of those covered in terms of getting hold of me. Obviously I’m on LinkedIn. If you just want LinkedIn, type in Rajeev. My first name is spelled r a j e e v, like Victor, then, then people will find me 1105 media. It’s not that hard. You know, and then of I’m on social media fairly, I’m pretty active as mostly on Instagram. I’m not a big Twitter guy, but I like Instagram. And so my, my Instagram is at @TheRajeevKapur. But anyways so that’s kinda, those are kinda really good ways to get hold of me. Also, you know, if they can go to RajeevKapur.com and also to 1105Media.com and there’s ways to, to connect with me there. And of course they can always, I guess, get ahold of you. You can send them my way as well, so, Jenn DeWall:  Yes, absolutely. Well, Rajeev, thank you again so much for carving out the time to help us all think differently about how we might approach and actually chase greatness. Thank you so much for coming on the leadership Habit. Rajeev Kapur: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thank you so much. Proud I could be here today. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. I love the examples, and especially Rajeev just sharing even the ways that he practices what he preaches. Now, if you want to get in touch with Rajeev, you can purchase his book Chase Greatness, and you can find that on Amazon, or you can head on over to his website, RajeevKapur.com or even check out 1105 Media. And of course, if you know someone that might benefit from hearing this message, please share it. And don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.   The post Chasing Greatness to Find Enlightened Leadership with Rajeev Kapur, CEO appeared first on Crestcom International.

Intentional Communication and the Power of Words with Mihaela Berciu Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. In this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit podcast, I sat down with Mihaela Berciu, and we talked about the power of words and how to be a more intentional communicator. I love the conversation around words. It’s something that I know that intentional communication is something I can improve on, and she gave really great insights in terms of some words that I never even thought about in terms of how they could be perceived and why we want to be very intentional with making sure that myself and the person that I’m talking to have the same definition. But let me tell you a little bit more about Mihaela. Using her core values model, Mihaela works with and advises board members, top-level managers, angel investors, and senior professionals seeking to excel in their careers and improved performance to drive even greater success. Meet Mihaela Berciu, Leadership Breakthrough Specialist Jenn DeWall:  Mihaela’s client portfolio ranges from banking, financial consulting, pharmaceuticals, FMCGs, retail fashion, television, aviation services, and more. Feel like that is a ton. She received her executive coaching certification from Cambridge University and MBA from the American University in London, and studied psychology of mind and Theory of Knowledge at Oxford University. She hosted a national TV show viewed by hundreds of thousands and is the author of two best-selling books, dressed for Success and Success is in the details. Her mission is to get leaders to experience their excellence by exploring values, understanding aspirations, removing barriers, and visualizing the path to their personal and professional success. Let’s now envision a world where we can communicate better as Mihaela, and I start to talk about the power of your words and the language that you use. We’re talking about a topic that I just think is so exciting today, and I just loved your energy when we met during the pre-call. You have such a profound story, and that really demonstrates the topic that we’re going to be talking about today, and I’m so excited that you’re here. So I just wanna start by saying Mihaela, thank you so much for coming on the show, for taking the time. It’s really been a pleasure to meet you, and I’m just excited to introduce you to our guests. Mihaela Berciu:  Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. I am very, very excited to be here today. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And well, maybe tell our audience where you’re joining from today. You are across the pond for me. I am here in Colorado. Mihaela Berciu:  I’m in London, United Kingdom. So yes, we are meeting from across the waters. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. I love it. Well, we’re going to be talking to our audience about understanding the power of our words and the language, language that we use. A really important topic because, hey, it’s going to impact everything we do. Now, before we jump into the show because Mihaela has got a lot of great insights and ways that you can really strengthen your intention and how you communicate, I want her to just, you know, Mihaela, if you could just share a little bit more about yourself, talk about your story and how you came to be because I was inspired by your story, and I know that someone else will be too! Mihaela Berciu:  Thank you. So, my story is quite diverse <laugh> to put it in an interesting way. I grew up, I was born and grew up in Romania during communism, the most dire of the communisms in Eastern Europe. So that kind of showed me, oh, oh, oh, or rather it until I was about 16 when when the revolution happened. I was very much under the fear of words of what I’m saying and to whom I was saying it. So that kind of you know, it was at the beginning of this relationship romance between me and words, <laugh>, <laugh>. Jenn DeWall:  But I mean, I feel like that’s a very, you know, if I think about other people, and I, I’m sorry to interrupt your story. I don’t know if other people had that stark, like, you really need to pay attention to your words moment in their life. You know, there’s a high stake high stake consequences if you’re not doing that. And many of us have never been faced to do that, because we haven’t necessarily had those high stakes consequences of not mm-hmm. Learning About the Power of Words Mihaela Berciu:  And, sorry. Exactly. And, and I think that the moment that I was mostly sort of faced with that you know, be careful what, what you, what you say and how you say it. It was after I visited London for the first time when I was 15. And for me, it was mind blowing. It was my second trip in the, in the west. And my first one was when I was 13 in Western Germany. And I was blown away that there, that such a world exists compared to the world I was living in, there were like complete, complete opposites. But then when I was, you know, 15 and when I was 15, 16, and I traveled to London, I was more mature emotionally as well. So pacing again, and, and I was in London for longer, it was it was a month. So I, I actually had the time to experience living in, in such a place. And the abundance of everything for me was just insane because I was coming from a place where there was nothing, absolutely nothing in, in in shops. And so when I went back, you know, my mind was like on fire, and of course I was very excited, but at the same time, I was very frustrated and I was, you know, I’m a Leo, so I’m quite vocal, and I, I was vocal from, from a very young age that my parents had to sit me down and say, okay, we get it. We get the excitement, we get everything you’re going through, but you have to, to just shut up. You have to be very careful who you share that experience with. And, but mostly what you, what what you are gonna say. Because at the time if you said anything, I mean, you didn’t have to say anything against the party or against the, the beloved president. If someone thought or heard you in a way that could have been interpreted as saying something against the party and and the system my parents would’ve been, you know, in, in, in big, big trouble because I was a minor. And of course, I wouldn’t have been in, in any trouble cause I, I wouldn’t have been responsible for my words, for my actions, but my parents would’ve had to, to pay for that. And so it was, it was a real danger. It wasn’t, oh, you know, don’t show off. Don’t, you know, it’s, it’s rude to show off and you have to be, you know, modest and all of that. No, it was actually, you know, life and death kind of situation. So that’s when, you know, the, it was reinforced to me the power, you know, of, of language, the power of words, and how if you’re not careful and if you just throw words around, they can do a lot of damage instead of do do, do good, right. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, again, I cannot, you know, I can’t even picture growing up with that level of fear of how our words could be used against us, against our parents, against someone. Mm-Hmm. And, you know, I’m so intrigued by childhood brain development and early brain development, not that I’m an expert in it, but how you were able to persevere and to take that, that intentionality that you had to learn for a more of a survival purpose. And now you’re taking it into the world to help them understand that. And heck, everyone listening your words may not have these high stakes consequences, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t wanna pay attention to them because the consequences you see, they might be great in the form of turnover or lack of productivity or disengagement. The Problem with Words Jenn DeWall:  But you had mentioned at the back of it that you were talking about the problem with words. And so that’s the great, you know, the starting question. So Mihaela, what is the problem with words? What’s the problem with words? What do you mean? Like, we, we speak these all the time. I don’t, there’s a problem with them. I know the bad words we’re supposed to avoid, but what’s the problem with words? Mihaela Berciu:  Well, you’d be surprised how some words as innocent as they seem, they can actually be bad words, because you don’t know exactly how the other person hears hears them, and you don’t know the, their experience with those, those words. And in today’s world where we meet people from, you know, all, all various cultures, various languages, maybe, maybe the translation from another language means something else. But also, Jenn DeWall:  Also a laugh that I have right now. And if, if, you know, you know, I’m not gonna say it, but Kylie Jenner just named her child. I think there was a big movement on TikTok that talked about what the origin name of that was in another language. And that’s like more of a pop culture reference of not maybe paying attention to that, or even going back to another Kardashian reference, Kim Kardashian, and trying to initially use the word kimono, not paying attention to how that word is used and perceived and valued in a different culture. Mihaela Berciu:  Exactly. Exactly. And if, you know, if you think if, if you, if you take those two examples, those are people who have teams of, of marketing teams of pr people, teams of everything. And they still, you know, they still created or, or, or made, made a mistake un unaware, you know made a mistake. So, but now bring that to, you know, us, the, the rest of us, Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh> <laugh> that don’t have a team. We just have ourselves Building Trust with Intentional Communication Mihaela Berciu: We just have our own self-restraint, self-awareness and, and our minds and our vocabulary. But I also, apart from that I also, you know, strongly believe words do carry energy. So when you say something it, it will very likely, you know, it, it depends on how, how it matches theenergy of the person receiving. And if probably if I would have to give a piece of advice, and it’s actually the piece of advice that I give to my clients is when you say something, don’t say it for yourself. Say it for the other person. Don’t, you know, it’s not a conversation with yourself when it, when it’s a, when it’s a conversation, it’s about the other person. So be mindful about that. And I know it may sound, you know that you can, you can be inauthentic because you’d have to maybe change the words, but in my opinion, you become much more authentic when you start thinking how what I’m saying can affect the other person. And cause then you build a different kind of trust and the, the, the channels of communications open in magical, magical ways. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. I, and that example, it happened, you and I had the pre-call, and then I had a miscommunication with, with someone about a deadline. And we were talking about something. What I heard is that it was due, you know, yesterday. And, and what, and when we actually came to follow up this conversation, and I talked, we talked about like my friction. Cause I, I worked a really, really long day then to get this done. What then I found out is that they meant to say it was supposed to be due on Tuesday, but if it goes to next week, that’s fine, <laugh>. I didn’t hear that. So I put in a 14 hour day to get it done. Yeah. And I was frustrated because it was a surprising deadline to me, but then to find out that that actually wasn’t what they meant, Avoiding Miscommunication by Communicating Intentionally Mihaela Berciu:  And that’s why there is so much conflict out there, you know that is completely unnecessary because if, if, you know, I’m sure, I’m sure you you, you’ve heard and read and maybe some other guests spoke about it. But there, you know, when you, when you listen, if you listen to, to respond you will never understand exactly the message because you are in a rush. You are in a rush to, to, you know, spl out your opinion. So if you, if we take that in instead of listening to understand, and that’s where the power of listening is listening to understand rather than listening to, to respond or to react. And when, if, if we take that and we turn it around, if you speak, you know, to be understood, rather than if you speak to, to draw a reaction, the the interaction will be very, very different. And when, when we’re in a rush and we’re, you know way too often in a rush, we don’t listen to understand. We just hear something and that’s it. We react and we don’t hear the, the rest of the message. And we, we miss, miss out on the essence of the message. Jenn DeWall:  I wonder how much those miscommunications where we say something really quick, we all do it. I absolutely do it. And think like, did you get that? I didn’t even check to see if you got that. Hopefully you got that. Mm-Hmm. I mean, so many times I think we, I wonder, I just wonder how much that those types of miscommunications where we say something really quick, knowing that we don’t get the Face time that we necessarily used to, of how much they’ve, you know, miscommunication has increased just because we don’t have necessarily that face-to-face conversation anymore with people. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> so much of it is electronic, or it’s just that it might be a one and done. We have our virtual meeting, this is what I said, and then there’s not another time that I can see you unless there’s a meeting or something. Mihaela Berciu:  Yep, exactly. We we’re too rushed, definitely too rushed in in, in our communications. But also the other thing is where a lot of conflict and, and miscommunication, let’s say comes from is we think a lot before we actually get to the point of saying something. And we are so accustomed with everything, we have been thinking of that when we say something in a, in, in the desire to be, you know succinct to, to be quick, to, you know, not waste time, we sort of say something with the having the belief that the other person knows what we mean, because we’re so accustomed by now with our, our thoughts. And and then they get, you know, a phrase and they’re like, what the hell was that all about? You know? And you are like, well, what is so difficult to understand? You know? Cause you’ve had hours of thoughts in your head about that. Whereas this person has been thrown a phrase and with the expectation that they’ll get it like this. Well, they won’t, they won’t. First of all the, when we speak to them, their mind is somewhere else. So, you know, the first step is bring them in the room with you, you know, align them with the topic and then start talking about it. And then always, always, always ask, you know, is this, you know, did you, did you get what I meant to say? You know, what, what did I mean to say? Or if they say something, you know, I always ask, what does that mean to the most simplest things? What does that mean to you? And then they’re like, well, what do you mean what it means to me? I mean, exactly that. What does it mean to you? And then when they start explaining, I said, oh, okay. Cuz to me it means this. And they’re like, oh, really? Yeah. And then, you know, you clarify and you leave that room with a positive outcome. Un otherwise you just leave the room and you start going into overthinking because you’re are uncertain of what was that all about? And just like it happened to you, you ended up working extra hours, extra hard when maybe 30 seconds more of clarification would’ve led to a very different outcome. Jenn DeWall:  Yes, absolutely. I mean, there, I know I’m not alone. And I share that example. And, and even, I want to say this, the person that I had that conversation with is a lovely person. We just had a miscommunication. And I think that’s important to remember that, you know, assume positive intent with people. I, I didn’t assume it very well. I was very frustrated on Monday, but I did approach the follow-up conversation very objectively and just, you know, talking about what we can do differently going forward, assume Positive intent. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. The Power of Choosing Our Words to Communicate with Intention Jenn DeWall:  You talked about, and I wanna dive into this cuz why do we need to care about the power of our words? And you hit on the point of not all words are created equal, and we don’t all define them the same. When I think of that, I think of even the word success. That success is an entirely different, very personal definition of what we think success looks like. Whether, I know for me, my 20 year old self is like doing everything perfect the first time because you’re amazing. Yeah. Well, you know, obviously the ego, the like, perfection, it didn’t work. But what examples do you what examples do you kind of see where people might misuse, you know, or use one definition in one word and then someone else perceives it as the other? I mean, success is my favorite one to ask because you can kind of learn a lot about what’s your definition of success, and most people haven’t thought about it. Mihaela Berciu:  Yeah. Well, another one that is very often used with, again, you know, endless meanings and understanding is imagination. It’s, you know, imagination. You can, you can tell someone that’s your imagination saying, you are a bit crazy. I never said that. You know, that’s all in your head. Or you say, well, use your imagination, which is a positive thing, you know, learn, be be more creative, be fearless. Go with it. Or say, well, in your imagination that is gonna happen, which is like never, you know, don’t even think about it. So it goes on and on and on and on. And yes, there’s a lot of intonation, you know, that gives meaning to, to words, but it’s choosing the right words that makes the, makes the difference. And one, one example that I can give especially when I work with leaders regarding their teams and their interaction with their teams, is when they say everything is so complicated. And I say, well, it’s, is it complicated or is it complex? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. Mihaela Berciu:  And then they’re a bit like well, hmm, well what’s the difference? Well, you tell me. Is there a difference between complicated and complex? And then they realize that actually complicated is a negative word. And it’s, it’s, you know, it’s, it’s not you. You are not in a good place if something is complicated. Whereas if something is complex, it’s much more positive, it’s much more, you know much more interesting to work with. And it, it takes away a lot of heaviness in, in that in that in interaction and in how you regard whatever, you know, it was complicated but became complex. So it’s much much more lighter to deal with. Yes. Oh, Jenn DeWall:  That’s a really powerful example because even just rooting that, if you go to your team and you’re like, this is really complicated, you’re just creating a stress response for them. We have the opportunity to solve this complex challenge. You know, it’s complex, but I know if we break it down, we can figure it out. Mihaela Berciu:  Exactly. Jenn DeWall:  I feel like there’s motivation within those words and that tone of paying attention of like the right word choice and it’s framing. Mm-Hmm. Mihaela Berciu: Absolutely. <laugh> change is the whole dynamic. And it’s the same is the same. Another example would be problem versus question. If you go to someone, and, and this is something I would actually encourage, you know, your, your, your listeners our listeners to do, go to someone, anyone, whether you know them or not, it doesn’t matter. And say, I have a problem. Immediately their body, body language will change because when it’s a problem is alarm, you know, and they become alert, they become like, oh my God, what’s going on? I I don’t need your problems. You know, I I, if you say, I have a problem, well, it’s your problem. Deal with it. I don’t need your problems. Whereas if you go and say, I have a question, they open up. Because then you, they, they, they connect with you. They think, oh, well this person must really, you know, look, look up to me. If they come to me with a question, they, you know, that’s good. That’s nice. So they become curious. They wanna help you. It’s, and, and at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. Yeah. You know, but it’s, it’s just reframing it, it’s just approaching it in a, in a very different way. Jenn DeWall:  Thinking about, how can I say this in a way that doesn’t, you know, arm them up in a way that disarms them, that allows them to enter the conversation. And it’s, you know, I think we don’t take the time to slow down and do that. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, we just don’t. Mm-Hmm. We’re all way too rushed, way too busy. The expectations of what we’re supposed to accomplish in, in a day have increased and the hours are still the same. And it’s so interesting, you know, in the Crestcom, CEO we will say this, like, there’s always, you know, we obviously teach leadership, you’re in the leadership space. We’re never going to have a world where we’re not learning about communication <laugh>. Mihaela Berciu: No, no. Absolutely not. But that’s, that’s the fun of it, you know, that’s what I find very interesting and very engaging with, with communication. Cuz it’s, it’s just wonderful. You know, it’s just a a a great place to, to push yourself, to challenge yourself, to learn, to grow to. Increasing Your Awareness to Improve Intentional Communication Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. I love it. Well, let’s, let’s dive into it. Okay. Let’s think about, you know, how can we, how can we do that? Because again, and I will say this, and I, I’ve sat in this chair for a while. Self-Awareness is legitimately one of, from how I see it, one of the hardest things to build and mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And there’s a lot of different ways you can do it, but there also is a piece of ownership that needs to happen for you to actually build a self-awareness. And so as, yeah, you’re talking about what you can do, you know, be curious and gentle with yourself. If you’ve noticed some things that maybe you didn’t do well, like, it’s okay, you can do something different. But let’s talk about the how, how we can do this. How can you increase your self-awareness around language? Mihaela Berciu:  Well, first of all pay attention to what other people say and how, how they react. Because if for example, if they say, oh, I knew you were gonna say that, that it means there’s something you use regularly. So think of that, what is it? Why am I using and why are people reacting like that? Or if you think if you go towards someone with something and their reaction seems to be out of proportion with how, with how, how, you know, big or or small, the problem is or whatever issue you raised with them then you have to go back and say, okay, how did I address this? And it’s always after the fact for a while until you build, you know, that awareness to react in, in the moment and then before the moment. So you are, you are, you become in control of how, what langu language you use. But more than that, the, the, the fun part of building this awareness is just play with words. Just play with words, you know, is, and with your thoughts is going back to maybe the problem, you know, I have a problem. Well, is it really a problem? You know, what, what does the problem mean? And then you start playing around and what’s a different word? For, for problem, you know, I see, I, I love, if I see or I hear a word, I just go in, in my, you know, in my app, dictionary app. And I just look at synonyms and I just play around those words and I think, oh, maybe this one sounds better and this is more closer, you know, to what I want to, to express. And the other thing is always ask people, what do you mean by that? Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, what does this word mean to you? Even if it’s a simple word, a word like problem, what does it that mean to you? Because maybe for me and my background and the way I grew up, problem is life or death. Yeah. But for you is a mild inconvenience. So when you come to me and says, I hear the word problem coming out of your mouth, my senses go like, you know, alarm, alarm, alarm. And you’re like, what’s going on? You know, cuz it’s not a big deal. And then I think, well, maybe it’s not a big deal for you, but clearly it is a big deal if you use this word. So have, build more awareness on the fact that with curiosity that other people for, for the the same words might mean other things for other people. And also they have different intensities for different people. Intentional Communication and Understanding Triggers Jenn DeWall:  That is a really great example because I think that there are, you know, if we think about the power of words in terms of the emotional reaction that happens in your body when you hear a particular word that you might have someone that’s like, oh, I’m a problem solver. I can handle any level of problem that’s come my way. Well, yeah, it all depends on how you divide problem. If problem for someone else is life or death is a high stakes thing, they’re naturally going to have that reaction. And so kind of saying like, I’m really great cause I’m a, a problem solver. And then maybe not taking into account that someone looks at it differently based on their background. It’s not that they’re not capable, it’s not that they, you know, can’t do, do the task, but they are going to have different triggers with these words. Mm. I I love using the word problem. Like, and I think it’s important in the age where we really do need to be mindful of people’s background and experience of how they’ve come today to create a great environment for them. Like, we need to understand how people do that. And it’s not to say, I’m gonna give you a list of words and now let’s all write out our definition of that. It’s what you just said. I’m like, what does that mean to you? I love that. Mihaela Berciu:  Mm-Hmm. Yeah, exactly. And for example, I had a, a big issue with the word help. Because in, in school growing up, if you ask the question or if you ask the teacher for help, they would call you all the names in the world and you know that you are stupid, you are incapable, you didn’t pay attention. And, you know, it was, it was really, so I grew up, you know, never ever asking for help. So when I heard, even if I heard the world, the world help, I would be like, you know, no. Or if, if someone asked me, do you need help? No, I’m a stupid, you know, I’m not there. I love Jenn DeWall:  That. I’m not stupid <laugh>. Yeah, Mihaela Berciu:  Exactly. Cause that was, that was my relationship with that word. And there were people who were very kind in offering help and asking me if I needed help. But I, for me, that meant, you know, an insult. That meant they looked at me as, as a, you know, being, being stupid, being whatever I heard growing up. And it’s a very common and, and, and very yeah, very common word, you know, that you would never think twice of how would that impact someone else you, you know, even comes, right? Cause you Jenn DeWall:  Think it’s like, I’m here to help. Can you see that? I’m trying to help you, Mihaela! I just wanna help you. Mihaela Berciu:  Exactly. And then I would take that as a big insult and I would be like, who the hell does she think she is? You know, I mean, I’m not stupid. Why does she keep insisting to help me? You know? Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh> I love it. Sorry, continue on <laugh>. Mihaela Berciu:  Yeah, no, that’s, that’s how easy, you know, that’s how easy it it is to, to end up, start with a good intention and end up, you know, insulting someone or, or end up in some kind of conflict. And you, you don’t even understand why and, and what did just happened. Jenn DeWall:  My god, now I know, gosh, I’ve just really enjoyed this conversation, but I know that we have to wrap. And so maybe, you know, the other thing, if you’re a leader that’s sitting there like, okay, I need to be more intentional with my words. I, I really want to check for clarification that we’re on the same page. What are ways that we can build that self-awareness around the words and the language that we use on our teams? Can you do that? Or is it just more I’m describing the difference? Or would you have a protocol where you’re like, yeah, here are the common words that we actually use and then let’s set these almost as team norms, or how would you maybe advise a leadership? How to Encourage Intentional Communication Mihaela Berciu:  It’s, it’s just help their team open, open conversations and encourage, you know, those conversations within the team as well. Especially in today’s world where people come from such different backgrounds and such different cultures and never, ever take anything for granted. Not, not even the simplest word as help or problem or success or, you know whatever, whatever l cities and having intentional conversations. It’s, it’s not as, as hard as it sounds and it’s not as very fulfilling. And the beauty of it is, it might sound like it, it, it would take longer. It actually takes a lot less because once you understand something, you’ll know, and then the future conversations will be very different and you will avoid a lot of unnecessary you know disagreements or, or, or frustration or extra hours as it happens. So, tiredness, stress all of that, it’s, it’s just by having that awareness and intention to align, to understand, and to to speak in a way that is for the other person is not, it’s not for you. It’s not about you. Where to Find More From Mihaela Berciu Jenn DeWall:  I love this, Mihaela! Really thinking through how might this be perceived? Perception is reality. What is their perception of this word? Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> mihaela. How can people get in touch with you? Mihaela Berciu:  What’s my, my website which is mihai.com, my first name and my surname.com, or all my social, all the regular social media channels where I am. Again, Mihai, Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for taking your time. Thank you for helping us slow down to think about how we can be more effective communication or communicators by paying attention to the power of our words. I really appreciate absolutely the conversation and your time. And thank you! Mihaela Berciu: Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast. You know, I never really thought about the word problem. I never thought about that as a word and how people might arm up. I understand that it can be a trigger word, but I never until this conversation really thought about why we need to pay attention to what that might mean as it relates to someone’s experience in life. So I really appreciated a lot of the things that I could maybe adjust in my style, such as saying something is complex versus complicated. Now, if you enjoyed this conversation with Mihaela Berciu, or you know someone that could benefit from hearing this, maybe they’re a new leader. Maybe there’s someone that wants to improve their communication style. Share this podcast episode with them. And if you want to get in touch with Mihaela, you can find her at MihaelaBerciu.com. And she’s also everywhere on social, under her name, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. And in closing, if you are looking to help develop your leaders’ communication styles to help them deliver results the first time, that’s where Crestcom can help you. So head on over to Crestcom.com. We would love to come into your organization and offer a two-hour leadership skills workshop that’s fun and engaging and will leave your leaders asking for more. Until next time, everyone.   The post Intentional Communication and the Power of Words with Leadership Breakthrough Specialist, Mihaela Berciu appeared first on Crestcom International.

The Future of Learning in Leadership with Darja Gutnick, CEO of Bunch Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast. And on this week’s episode, I sat down with Darja Gutnick to talk about the future of learning. Now, before we go into the show, I just want to remind you that every single month Crestcom offers a complimentary free to the public webinar. And coming up this month in February, on February 14th, we will be talking all about building resilience and cultivating self-love for success in the workplace. Now, this is something that I feel like I need and maybe you’re going through some challenges and maybe you transition to a new leadership role or you’re kind of doubting yourself. Come on over to the webinar, let’s see if we can give you some tools to overcome some of the obstacles that you’re facing. Meet Darja Gutnick, Co-founder and CEO of Bunch Jenn DeWall: All right, now on to the show. I sat down with Darja Gutnick to talk about the future of learning. And then let me tell you a little bit more about Darja. Darja is an academic turned founder. She is the co-founder of Bunch and she works to redefine learning at work as the host of the Teams at Work podcast, the author of The Weekly Briefing, she reaches over 50,000 millennial and Gen Z professionals Weekly. And Darja and I sat down to talk about and understand what the future of work will look like, as well as the skills that we need to be learning today and the new tools that are on your horizon to being your best self. So enjoy Darja, I’m so glad that you’re here today. I am pumped to be having a conversation on the future of learning. There is so much going on. People might be listening to this from the head space of what do I need to know to be ready for the future? Or how could I educate my teams? What do I need to know for myself? Or even heck they might be part of the layoffs that we’re seeing right now. What do I need to do to make sure that I can be hire-able? We’re gonna go there and you shared our shared an article before that we’re gonna also talk about that has been trending this week. But Darja, before we jump into it, I love a great origin story. So if you could just go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience. I know they heard a little bit about you and the opener, but I love to hear it from the guests themselves. So if you could tell us a little bit about who you are and how you came to be. Darja Gutnick:  Totally and glad to be on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Jenn. And hey everyone who’s listening my name is Darja and I am a psychologist by training. But always dabbled in the like entrepreneurialism. So I grew up with an entrepreneurial mom who has a restaurant business and a real estate business. So quite like down to earth, nothing with tech and digital things whatsoever. And it was kind of pretty normal to me, I think to serve customers and to think about customer value and things like that. But I always also had an act for people and people structures, people dynamics and things like that. And so I turned out to be always between these kind of like harder business worlds as a former consultant. And and then the soft side of things like as a psychologist. And I also did the certification in org development and team building and leadership team climate development. And ended up doing that as a consultant at at the back of my first startup. And to be honest, Bunch, the company that we’re building today is and I, my co-founder I co-founded is basically kind of a result of me as a coach noticing that the formats we are offering as leadership developers on the market are not up to date to what consumers and the new generation of leaders, managers, and professionals need. We see digitalization and convenience and on-demand services kind of taking over in many parts of our lives, right? Like from Uber to Netflix, to other, other applications that are kind of like delivering what you need at the right moment in time. But when we think about org development, professional development, leadership development, we were still stuck in these like it’s workshops, webinars, long form programs, lots of time commitment and not as much on demand, not as much in the moment and not as much contextualized. And so what we basically went for with Bunch is to say we provide a like truly digital, like digital first gamified in the moment tool for managers and for professionals to scale themselves up. And the last point that I want to make is that it was also really, really important to me to serve to the individual. As someone who’s worked with businesses all my life and like kind of starting my career in HR always positioned me in on the kind of the stakeholder map with like the other business executives and employees and so on. And I always had this feeling that if we don’t focus on the individual employee enough, we’ll get a bill for that later. So like if we as service providers, if we as coaches, if we as consultants approach the business stakeholder as a company only and like don’t actually start with the needs and the psychology of each individual professional in the workplace, we’ll really cut short in the solutions and the services we provide. And I’ve seen too little on the market in the HR tech space companies and products that were really, really focused on the individual. So when we started Bunch it was really important to us to say like, we start with you as a person in the workplace with you as a human and what your needs are and what you are looking for. And then we build from that towards let’s say enterprise and business value and so on, so on. So that’s kind of how we ended up building Bunch, which is a an AI leadership coach which helps professionals particularly millennials I think, but overall professionals to upscale key skills in just two minutes a day. The Future of Learning – AI, Apps and More Jenn DeWall:  I love that. So is it kind of like the duo lingo of leadership, you know, if you want to learn new yeah. A new language, you can invest in this and do it two minutes a day, what like, exactly. So I love the short form, right? And I, I love gamification. I appreciate that as someone that, whether it’s my Apple Watch or a Peloton or other apps that I use, I am absolutely into habit tracking. It is kind of obsessive, right? Like I can get the irk if I don’t do it. I’m like, oh gosh, I have to do this. I’m gonna lose my streak. And it’s amazing exactly how 10 years ago I didn’t care what a streak was, but now I really care what a streak is. So we’re gonna be talking all about the future of learning and I love that you shared that. We’re gonna be talking a little bit more about Bunch and how you kind of entered that space because I love the service that you offer. But before we dive into it, I know you had sent an article and shared, and I think it’s a great article to talk about. There’s great dialogue. I have points of view on it, you have points of view and it’s, I think it’s just helpful for everyone to be able to hear. But we’re talking about the current state, today is February 8th, 2023. So just to know when this is recorded, we’re talking pretty real time of some of the changes that we’re seeing in the news on LinkedIn about big tech company layoffs. And do you wanna just share a little bit with our audience about the article that you sent with me? The Tech Industry, Layoffs and the Learning Landscape Darja Gutnick:  Yeah, exactly. So we obviously have been going through this like consequences of market correction as a founder in a company as, as someone who received venture funding. We’ve known about the kind of upcoming like difficult time as we might call it economically since the beginning of 2022. Actually our first conversations with our shareholders around we gotta like pre prepare for the winter. Like it’s going to be tough, we need like wrong runways in actually April, 2022. And I think a lot of companies have been kind of trying to wrap their heads around what does that mean for us? What do we need to do now? How do we protect ourselves and our workforce to get through this prices period that is up and coming in, in Amer in a more stable or foundational way. And so it’s not surprising for me as a business owner and as a founder that we see waves of layoffs because we’ve had a bull market for a long time, specifically tech companies since Covid have been hiring quite aggressively. We’ve been always on the like kind of other end of that as a small startup because we had to compete with these massive packages. Like we’ve never been able to compete with Googles and Facebook’s passages and, and it’s always like this as a small business, but I think in the last couple of years it just took a whole different like level of not only I think salaries, it’s just like the benefits and the additional kind of structures that were built around it. So it was not so surprising to me to see that companies go back to asking the question, do we really need all of this? Is it like the most efficient way to run the business? Do we, how much workforce do we actually really need? And so this isn’t surprising per se. However, what I found, interestingly, I wanted to dig into this with you when I read for the first time, I think this morning or two yesterday and morning that tech companies are speaking up about how they decide on the layoffs and who is being laid off and how the restructuring is happening behind the layoffs because it’s not small amounts of people, right? Like it’s 10, 15% in some of the companies. It’s like massive amounts of people. And sure we can talk about how tech companies want to like let go of people that are not as performing in their contexts and things like that. But I think that’s kind of really obvious to a degree. And probably most of you out there kind of know this already, but what I think was new in this conversation recently is that I think it was Mark Zuckerberg first who basically said, we want you as a middle manager to either go back to building and become an individual contributor because you’ve been a great engineer before. You’ve been a great designer before. You’ve been a great product person before and we want you to go back there or you leave. And I think this is a very new perspective that I at least don’t remember from the crisis in 2028 in 2008 and 2009 because back then it was just kind of like random layoffs, whatever, we are just getting more efficient and it stopped there. The Future of Leadership and Structural Change Darja Gutnick: But now we are seeing an actual structural change or thinking around how much structural support does an organization need? How much managerial support does an organization truly need in 2023 with all the technological development we have happening with ChatGPT, et cetera. And I’m seeing companies being more aggressive about, well maybe we want to invest in individuals and kind of like stuck tools around them, make them more performant. And maybe we wanna move away from like managerial structures as much as we’ve been building on them in the past. And I’ve found that as a psychologist and also someone who serves middle managers <laugh> effectively. Really interesting because I was wondering, wow, what does that mean for our users now? And like a whole different world? Like do these people go to other, let’s say more traditional companies that still actually rely on a lot of middle managerial structures and are looking for new talent, right? Like talent with digital skills, talent with tech skills. Or are we going to see that across the board? Is this like a tech industry only thing or not? And yeah, so the these were like the first thoughts I had and I was wondering what you think about Jenn DeWall:  It. Yeah, and we talked a little bit about this and I mean, okay, if I take out the fact that people’s jobs are being lost, like I obviously have sensitivity and empathy towards that from where I sit, like living in OD or organizational development and leadership development, I have been wanting organizations to reorg for a very long time. And I know, I know I’m not alone. Like this is not a new concept for the people that are in that space. I have been wanting that because when you have individuals that are in front of you that are doing, let’s call it forced leadership development, they don’t really want to be a leader. All they want is the paycheck that comes with it. And that’s the only way for many companies that people could actually climb and be successful. And so we, whether or not we’re capable or whether or not we even want to, which are so important to behavior change, we’re thrown into that role of people leadership. And then of course you see the turnover ramifications of that because people we know lead bad managers, not necessarily the organizations. And so I don’t necessarily, you know, I get, I I like that they’re starting to think differently. Why are we limited in how we actually exhibit or the pathways that we create for success for people? Why aren’t we allowing someone to be a great technical leader? So it’s really the difference between being a technical leader and a people leader. And yes, it’s about doing time that organizations are starting to say we value your technical expertise and we’re not gonna add the constraints and limitations and challenges of people leadership. Cause there’s often people that come into it and they’re like, Jenn, I hate this. Like I don’t wanna be, you know, everyone’s babysitter. I don’t wanna do insert all of the complaints of being a manager. That’s what leadership is. That is what it’s, and so I get that you don’t wanna do it, but also they’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place because how do you get the compensation? How do you get the title when most organizational hierarchies are very limited in how we value someone’s strengths. And as that article said, you know, we’ll we’ll promote them into people leaders, so then we lose all that institutional knowledge in productivity and speed that they have and we are then trying to do it and then they don’t even wanna develop the next people. They don’t know how to develop it if they’re not giving leadership development. So I am here for the change. I don’t, I mean I know that that article kind of attributes to Elon Musk, but I guarantee that there are organizational development professionals that are like, finally, finally, this is hitting mainstream because we see this issue every single day we go into a learning space. Middle Management Vs. Individual Contributors Darja Gutnick:  This is super interesting and I do think that it’s probably a quite a polarizing like point of view even though I to a certain degree agree with you or I can see that other side definitely. I, I had to like fight my first reaction of defensiveness when I read it because I’m like, oh no, like they’re already so squeezed. Like our whole takeaway, and this is a very biased perspective of a service provider to managers. We have over 70,000 users on the platform and like all we are hearing is that they don’t have enough support, they don’t have enough training, they don’t have enough mentorship, they don’t have enough feedback. And they’re so squeezed already, as you said, it’s their jobs. I agree with this 100%. And oftentimes our advice is kind of resulting in the same one, take charge, own your thing, it’s staff, but here are like tools you can use and so on. And now with basically, I mean we’re not gonna get rid of old management. Like this is still gonna be managers, so these managers are gonna stay, they will have more pressure <laugh>. That’s one consequence. I think obviously it’s not like there’s gonna be like 15 times more investment in their coaching and mentorship now, right? Like they probably will be left with whatever they had before. Plus they just have more direct reports right now and like kind of more organization to deal with. And then the other kind of half or however many will be looking for new jobs and will be asking themselves exactly these questions. Like do I go back into this? Was this a good step to begin with? Am I an actual manager or not? And when thinking this further, I actually thought, let’s say the majority of these people says no, I go back to ic in like Facebook’s case or whatever, just for, Jenn DeWall:  and I C – just for our audience – I C is an individual contributor. Darja Gutnick:  Yes, exactly. Exactly. So just, just I will be a team member again. Does like, I’m not sure we have the tools yet and I don’t know in detail meta set up here. I have been researching though for like selfish, like my own individual reasons because despite of us having a small team, we also have people on the team that are like brilliant technical contributors that are really genius at what they do and that are also trying to understand where it’s gonna, where’s my career going to go? Like and do I go into management after, do I stay in this space where I am right now where I’m like developing really cutting edge technology and like how does my career look like? And when I was researching this and I was finding like career ladders for engineers and from Uber and things like this, if you compare, so we have these two pathways, right? Like tech companies typically have this like individual contributor progression track for engineers in particular, not for anyone else as far as I know. By the way, just for engineers, like designers or product managers, they can only be two things. Product manager, senior product manager, or they go to management. That’s it. But for engineers, we found like staff engineer, principal engineer, like we found some other things to recognize that they’re actually like really leading their field even if they don’t have direct reports. Yeah. But I had the feeling that it’s very thin there, you know, like staff in principal engineer basically there is like a few of them in every organization. Like in Uber, I don’t know, maybe there is like five principal engineers and like 20 staff engineers or whatever. But that’s basically it. And then there is a few tech leads and then like senior and middle management middle, mid-level engineers, engineer engineers. But there is not actually that many tools to help your people understand if you are an individual contributor you are being recognized, you’re being valued, you are being respected, you have authority in your opinion. Like and I was wondering like I think to a degree those individual contributors stay around, right? Like for a long time acquire knowledge about the company, acquire context, acquire a lot of really good stuff that helps them execute on every like daily on the day-to-day. Jenn DeWall:  How do we make that visible? How do we actually make this kind of like what is the workflow component? Darja Gutnick:  Yeah. Within the organization, if I am not going to climb the management letter, which now got even more timely and there is just like not gonna be so much space because we’re flattening the organizations. How do we recognize people? How do we help them feel like they’re progressing in their careers if they’re stuck on the same levels basically? And like I think there’s a lot of exciting work to be done for OD professionals to define that. But I definitely think there isn’t that much out there right now. The Future of Learning and Leadership in the Gig Economy Jenn DeWall:  It’s, well, I think it’s because organizations just haven’t done it. They just had traditional organizational hierarchies that promote people leader, people leader. And so we all have to change our perspective and I guarantee that person that hates people leadership that just wants to go back to technical is finally like, yes, please let me focus on my strengths. Let me leverage my experience, don’t make me lead with my deficits. Which yeah, you know, sometimes when we have great technical, and this is going to sound like a very general statement and know that it’s latent with bias, but you know, some people your personality style might gravitate more towards technical R rules and that’s where you are going to be able to thrive and be your best self. And as much as we flex into different styles and we all need to do that, I can’t live there and feel fulfilled or happy or productive or successful because we’re probably struggling more than maybe the person that has that as their skillset. I love this conversation. I’m curious to see the way that organizations adapt because it’s going to require, you know, compensation analysis of how do you comp these individuals? How do you reprogram people to even be more inclusive of individual contributors because they are the loneliest ones in the workforce. 70% of individual contributors report feeling lonely. And so how do we make sure that they feel a part of something if they are not going to be a part of a team or leading a team. Like there’s so many like little things or ripple effects that are going to happen as a result of Exactly, eventually reorging it. So let’s, let’s dive in now thinking about that future, knowing that there’s going to be a shift. I mean another curiosity would be, oh my gosh, the gig economy, how’s that gonna play into it? But I know we don’t have that much time <laugh>, but going into now the future of learning, what do you think? So you alluded to this a little bit Darja Gutnick:  Actually. Wait, wait, wait. But on the gig economy part, just like, yeah, I agree. It’s a rabbit hole. Let’s not like fall into it. However, Jenn DeWall: <Laugh>, Darja Gutnick:  It makes the gig economy so much more attractive because if I am stuck in a company where I can be promoted and the management thing is like off the table right now and I am kind of like, well unless they figure out like a better comp package, unless they figure out how to make me feel seen and heard, how to make my voice in contribution, feel seen and heard, guess what I’m gonna do? I’m going to become an individual contributor, paid bigger money by my freelance clients. Which by the way, there is more than ever now again because it’s like much easier to cancel a freelance contract than it is to like, you know, get rid of an employment contract for a business. And so I will get contribution for recognition from my customers because if they love my work, they’re gonna tell me in a nice email saying, we love your work, we wanna book you again. So like these little fit feedback mechanisms that really play a massive role in how a person decides upon their career choices and how they progress through the different seasons of their career are really, I feel underestimated and under like, overlooked or have been overlooked. And now we finally have to pay attention to them. I think otherwise we will continuously to see like the migration from people from like full-time employment into, into the gig economy and like alternative ways of employment, which I’m also very supportive of for different reasons. But like, I think it would be also a bummer if we ended up with kind of everyone fighting for themselves. So we can’t like organize ourselves around mission shared missions anymore. I also don’t think gig economy is for everyone. I think a lot of people still prefer full-time employment for different reasons. And I think we really have to figure out how to recognize people beyond the usual, you know, management ladder. Jenn DeWall:  You know, it’s interesting because we’re talking about two of the major areas that are, that have been disrupted, you know, heavily within the last few years and more heavily going forward what, what work looks like and then also what education looks like. We know that, you know, universities, everything has been upended in terms of whether it’s the shift in human behavior, the resistance to pay, you know, the expense. I mean, I am 40 and I still have student loans, so there’s a reluctance for me going into a PhD to even think, well how much money do I have to spend for that? And looking for alternative ways to be able to afford it so I can acquire that knowledge. Because for me, taking on a hundred thousand dollars in debt on top of my M B A debt is a lot. But then also within work, like, okay, if I don’t get to, I think there’s this, there’s an individual that we interviewed, her name is Dr. Sarah Beth Burke, and she talks about being more than your title. And I think that her concept has a lot of legs. You’re seeing more and more people really want to lead with their strengths mm-hmm <affirmative> and want to feel seen and want to make an impact in that way. And so it’s shifting kind of what meaningful work looks like. There’s so many exciting things about how, what’s coming on the future, but I also know there’s a lot of intimidation with that stuff, right? Like cuz then it’s like how do we adapt? How do we change our organizational efforts? Like these are not small lifts, like it’s going to impact so much. A Message from Crestcom Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Crestcom is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. AI and the Future of Learning Jenn DeWall: Let’s, let’s dive into that future of learning. What do you think? So knowing, I mean I I know it where our attention spans are so small now we’re we dropped what, five seconds in the last 20 years from 13 to eight seconds or something and yeah. What, what does that look like if we’re thinking about software development, what what does the future look like? Darja Gutnick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I I think there’s a few things out there. So one we’ve been kind of already hearing about always I feel like it it, but it was kind of one of these like very niche nerd skills almost that people kind of knew is important, but it never really made the like big coming out, which was like a meta skill basically like learning how to learn new things. I remember running a study two years ago with our user base where the very first one where we were basically asking like, what do you think makes a great leader? Like list the attributes, adjectives, whatever comes to mind. And we had a lot of kind of, you know, usual suspects like emotional intelligence the ability to communicate like a vision and a direction very well, humility and so on. But what we are seeing now is actually with ChatGPT in particular, it’s so blatantly clear that things can change within a whim and it doesn’t actually make sense to kind of invest in building up really complex hard skills like they might be replaced, like that activity you need to do might be replaced or might be at least heavily kind of assisted by technology and by ai. So it’s just so, so important to understand how you can actually integrate new tools, new tooling and new technological developments into your workflows very quickly. And anything that is complex and requires creativity and trust building, especially over remote environments and like over distance is just so, so, so important. So I think what we’re seeing is the skill to learn new things is kind of leading the pack, so to say when it comes to managerial skills and competencies. And then the other important things are really like emotional intelligence and the ability to build trust, the ability to listen, the ability to communicate with conviction as well. I think this is kind of what of what we, what we see in terms of what actually is the content that people are looking for. But at the same time when we talk about formats and how people learn, I think nothing too surprising to be honest. When we started Bunch a few years back, it was already kind of visibly coming, but I think now everyone, everyone knows it. Anything that is on mobile or in any other way very conveniently accessible to you always trumps everything else. So like we see lots of e-learning and this is a very old term, we don’t actually use it in like EdTech anymore, but like the market reports <laugh>, they use it still. There’s this category of like e-learning which is basically everything digital. And I think we started with like web-based formats ude me and LinkedIn learning and these type of things, right? And now we moved beyond that and we moved into highly personalized, highly individualized, on demand, mobile first, with integrations into like teams and Slack and other things, formats that are really, really important and contextual to you. And then of course short formats still are like bite size learning is a, a very big trend that I think we are all seeing like stronger and stronger picking up with Bunch. It’s literally part of our core value proposition. Like become a better leader in two minutes a day. It’s very sticky. It’s one of the reasons why people download the app and it’s kind of scary actually how simple things have become. Not in terms of how simple or how easy it is to create content that actually teaches people things in that short amount of time. It’s very hard. But consumers are looking for highly personalized guidance that can fit into their day-to-day meaning between meetings in a break before they log into Zoom on commute and really builds around them and does not require the consumer to build around the offering. So how we learn should really follow our overall habits and be as convenient as possible. So if I kind of want to headline it, I think it’s all about convenience because those people or those services and products that really can make it as easy as possible really do kind of win with I think professionals today. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, absolutely. I mean conveniences, it’s all of us, right? We have short attention spans, we want everything fast now, which can sometimes we’re, and what they’re seeing with the younger gen generations translate into is that hard is bad, hard is bad. Darja Gutnick:  Hard is bad. Jenn DeWall:  What consequence do you think that has to how we learn if we’re like, well if it’s not easy then I don’t wanna do it. Altruistically Yeah, yeah. And I, which is great, but then what, what are blind spots that could potentially be created? The Future of Learning in the New Normal Darja Gutnick:  I totally agree with like the general, you know, I know what you mean with hardest bad or like I can relate to it a lot of course, but I don’t think it’s entirely true. So what I learned about our users and also from actually a recent market report that I read from Gartner happy to send that through and link it in the show notes. I found it really interesting actually. Everyone is extremely curious about themselves and where their journey journeys going. So the majority of people in the workplace wants to learn more about themselves and how to improve. So we actually see more adoption of a growth mindset than we’ve ever seen before. So as a society and as a humanity, we actually evolved a little like we moved forward on that scale of we are here to learn, we want to mature, we want to adopt to new environments and actually make progress overall and contribute to something meaningful. We’ve seen this with like, you know, millennial studies, like people want impact, people want purpose and so on. Like that journey continues. So I don’t know whether we are necessarily concluding people don’t wanna put in the effort, you know, it’s more that they wanna know more about themselves, they want to have meaningful journeys, they want to contribute to something bigger, but they don’t wanna do meaningless work to get there, if that makes sense. So one this report that I’m referencing actually phrased it as something like they’re so curious about all these like offerings and it’s so dramatic and tragic for this l and d market because there are so many offerings when it comes to psychometrics, when it comes to learning formats, when it comes to content. There is so much out there, but this like connection between you as a professional and this content that lies around somewhere in Google or in some book or somewhere else, it’s just too tough for you to find it. Darja Gutnick:  So you actually wanna know more about yourself and you want to learn and there is the content out there but like you don’t get together and it’s actually holding a whole industry back is how they wrote it. And I think it’s absolutely true. So I don’t want to, and I disagree with the like quiet quitting BS and things like this that we like have titled it, like I think we are misunderstanding these new generations. For them it’s really about ROI on time. It’s not that they don’t wanna do the work, they just wanna be hyper efficient in what they do and they want to really understand, maybe they understand more than we did before in previous generations. That time on earth is very, very, very limited. Everything is about to go down, right? Like there’s this wars on the horizon all the time and then there is climate change and there is pandemics and what not happened in the last five years. So I think as a young person in the professional environment, you learn one thing. It’s like you can’t trust us, this may be over any moment. So they’re really trying to understand how can I fit everything into my day? How can I fit everything into my month and my year? Because I can’t plan 10 years in advance. I can’t plan 20 years in advance so I plan a year in advance or so, and therefore within that year my like hobbies need to fit and my partnership needs to fit and my work for the purposes I believe in need to fit my whatever volunteering activities and I also want to progress in my career. So I think it’s more about being efficient rather than not wanting to put the effort, if that makes sense. Can We Learn Leadership from Artificial Intelligence? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. And I, the only reason I struggle with that is I go back to my 20 year old millennial self and there’s a little bit of ego, like I already know everything. Like I got this or I know what I don’t need to know. And like that was the initial resistance with millennials coming into the workforce in general, right? Like feeling like, oh I already know this because I have technology so I’ve already got this and I don’t have to like have the actual real life experience Yeah. To understand what this looks like in action with complex human emotions and decision making. And so I think about that of like, that was almost what got me into trouble in my twenties of feeling like, oh, like I, I don’t have to like have the actual like case study example in my life. Like cuz I can just learn it and then I know better. Jenn DeWall:  And so like that’s, I think of myself of being like Jenn, like this you’ll ha really have to be mindful of your blind spots because the information is available but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have learned it yet. And I, cuz I again as someone that loves to learn, that’s al that’s always the trap that I found myself in. It’s like getting into this like I can get really educated and then I would get a reality hit of like oh okay, but I wanna talk about how AI will or like chat ChatGPT and what that looks like. So I know that Bunch leverages the power of ChatGPT and you know, you will tell me because it’s two minutes a day and I love that. I love making learning accessible for people. Absolutely. I have some reservations only because of what I’m sharing about myself, right. And how I learn and that there are blind spots there and we only rely on one way of kind of learning this information. But let’s talk about the, for those let’s level set. ChatGPT for some people is still a, what was that now? What are those acronyms? <Laugh>? So what is ChatGPT? Darja Gutnick:  So chat ChatGPT is actually an application that OpenAI which is the company behind GPT and GPT-3 and similar applications developed to make their language model, which is GPT-3, usable, accessible and interactive for the common person on earth. So like they open it up so that we can actually interact with the AI model that lives behind it, which is called GPT-3. And that model has been in development for a few years and it basically is an algorithm that as far as I know soaked in lots and lots and lots of knowledge like everything that was there to know until 2021 end of year if I believe, if I remember correctly. So it’s actually a little bit like not up to date anymore. If you ask it like very funny questions from 2022, it won’t know and it will tell you like, I don’t know, I only go until 2021. But ChatGPT is just the actual like product that is a chat-based interface, chatbot, whatever you wanna call it that lives on top of this language machine learning model that OpenAI developed. Is Using a Chatbot Just Cheating? Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And for those that may have seen the news, I feel like, I’m not sure how it’s portrayed on the news in Germany, but here in the United States they’re showing the, oh my gosh, what’s going to happen to high school students because they can put in a prompt that’s, you know, how to, you know, discuss, I don’t know how to talk about the history of the United States or whatever that actually, that’s probably a dicey question, but like <laugh>, any general question that they have to, you know, ask about they could actually kick back and write a paper on. And so, you know, teachers are nervous, a little nervous about copying or how the effort that will happen. And so that’s I think how that’s how it’s portrayed on our media right now is this big thing for teachers to look out for and for parents to be mindful of in terms of the workarounds to actually, like sometimes doing the work. Yeah so you can do really sophisticated things. It can write blogs. Any question that you want you can put in there and it’s cool. Yeah, it’s flipping amazing. But we also have to talk about what the opportunities are still within the platform because I think, actually tell me this, why did it just blow up in the last month for the normal person and me, myself being a typical person that’s not necessarily immersed in the tech space? Because everyone is talking about it right now. Darja Gutnick:  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean GPT-3 was, this is a great question by the way because we talk about this to little, like GPT-3 was around for three, four years. I think the first time we heard about it we looked into it was 2020 beginning of the year or so. So like they’ve been working on it for a really long time and they’ve been starting to write about it in in end of 2019 I believe. So the language model isn’t like fresh, it’s actually been in development for a few years. So that, let’s put it like, let’s split it for simplicity reasons into like tech and user experience. Okay, so the tech isn’t new, in fact the tech is like from the sixties, like the idea of training language models, it’s very all like sixties probably too far. I think it’s was the eighties, it was like the, the birth period of these like language models and machine learning as an idea and so on. And that is, there is papers that go back to like 84 or so that basically describe how G PT three could work in like simple terms. So we actually work on this for a long time. This is not super new. We didn’t have the processing power so far to actually make it all work. So one important change on the tech side of things that happened in let’s say the two thousands, it’s like we just became more bullish on using more of the earth’s resources to build more processing power <laugh> and we are able to like run more powerful machines on top of that which are needed for these language models to be trained. That’s one part, but that’s not the innovation that happened in November, 2022, in November, 2022. And I think that gets recognized too little. What the team has released from OpenAI is an actual very mainstream adopted, very polished without many rough edges product that lives on that technology of ChatGPT-3. Darja Gutnick:  So when we for instance train Bunchy, which is our AI ChatGPT powered coaching assistant that interacts with our users, the majority of the development work does not go into the tech development again. Like that has been done already by other people and it’s like years of layering and layering of information intelligence. But what’s really tough is to make sure that that agent that you are developing in training responds in a way that the human doesn’t feel offended, it feels it can trust the information. It feels it’s not being biased towards one of the other specific direction and can interact with it and actually uses it in the day-to-day life. When we think about AI in like kind of let’s say 2015 till 2020 period, whether it was a big like UpSpring already, right? A lot of issues have been evolving around the UX and how clunky some of the applications were, how they, you can’t, the black box of ai, you can’t explain why it’s recommending you something, it just gives you a result. So chat ChatGPT worked a lot around those rough edges. It actually puts a lot of effort into helping you understand how it came to the conclusion. And the way they’re doing it is there is different agents for different jobs within that chat interface. So you actually just read one text, right? For you, this is one thing you interact with chatt, Jenn DeWall:  It’s the foundational piece. Where do they get the information from? Like how does it know? Like how did it start? Or get the information. Like how does that starter, like did they pick an ency? You know, not that they did Wikipedia thing, they did that do this, but it, you know, where does that start? You know, how did that information start Darja Gutnick:  This is a great question, but I assume I actually would need to look it up in to, to know in precision, this is an assumption that I’m speaking out right now, but I assume this is publicly available. Basically Googleable information around like the world that is out there. So I don’t think this is like we’re talking archives and like encyclopedias here, but like we’re definitely talking Wikipedia knowledge and other articles like anything that is accessible on the internet publicly can be scraped and accessed by anyone really in the world. And so you can actually, unless you have like, you know, like login or pay walls and other protecting mechanisms, there is a lot like majority of their internet knowledge is publicly accessible and can be actually found by anyone. And so I assume that they scooped a large part of like the world’s knowledge that is online accessible, which is why it takes a lot of time because it’s a lot of information that needs to be pre-processed and trained. But that is my assumption I would need to to look it up <laugh> Jenn DeWall:  And I love that like even with Bunch that like it’s taking all of that information that is available on the internet stuff that you don’t see because it doesn’t align with your personal algorithms and now it’s in a new place where you can access that with a highly personal prompt and then it’s iterative. Right? And you can correct me any of the ways that I don’t understand this. I am not an expert in this Darja Gutnick:  <Laugh> <laugh>. No, no. All good. This, this is actually really interesting. So chat two PT from OpenAI has one problem currently, which is what Google is trying to like bank on so to say to Outcompete. So chat two PT was first they came forward with this very like just accessible to everyone and their mom type of product like go on this like url, type in whatever you want, get response. And by the way, for everyone out there like this costs a lot of money to run. Like they are sinking tons and tons of cash into every one of us being used to it. So like I bet there is a like getting used to it period where it’s like publicly available and it’s like open and whatever. Now they’ve actually launched a premium version which is like 20 bucks a month. You can pay premium for ChatGPT and it comes with like better availability, faster responses and other benefits. But basically what the, the limitation that it has it, it doesn’t actually connect you two things online, right? Like it just tells you hey tell me about leadership podcasts out there and then it will like find Jan and compress or like other people out there but it will not link you to the show because they don’t have access to Google’s door basically. So Google is working on Sparrow, which is basically ChatGPT for Google, but that then does include all the links and it actually meshes the format so it actually talks to you but then it gives you like bum, bum bum the three hits that are most relevant for you. And there you go to Google. So we will, we, it’s really interesting this year around AI because we’ll see a bit of a fight between chat ChatGPT and Google. How Competition in Tech is Shaping the Future of Learning Darja Gutnick:  Microsoft is doing superbly well. It wins the game every time. It like watches what like other people on Google is doing and then it just like pushes them all out of the water by like doing some cool enterprise like gimmick of like everyone who has Windows now has like teams and then goodbye Slack <laugh> and things like this. So like it will be really interesting to see whose technology we really actually end up adopting long term. But the overall missing piece is really like where did these search results lead you to and coming back to the students, right? If you write this article right now, if you’re like in a good school you still need to actually find all the source information <laugh>. Yeah because it’s referencing get lot of papers and you need to go back and go to Google and like, oh my God, if you don’t find the paper you’re like oh I need to change that part now. So it’s actually not as like convenient yet. But like with the Google thing it will be super convenient. And so what we do with Bunches for us it actually solves a very particular problem. Part of the Bunch offering is that you have this 24 7 coaching hotline, it’s transactional coaching so that you typically use case, I have a meeting coming up with my boss tomorrow I need to give them feedback. I don’t know how, I’m a little bit nervous, what should I do? And then we coach them through using a few coaching frameworks. Basically rel like chat-based coaching relative straightforward. We have tons of transcripts that we use to train panchi our AI powered assistant coach to basically learn what tone of of voice we use, what questions we use and so on. And she then pulls in our tip library, she then pulls in our podcast episode, she then pulls in our content that is basically our proprietary IP to link the user back into those content pockets where they can learn more about something. And I think this is actually the really interesting use case for most like let’s say vertical or niche kind of applications. Like if you have a very topical application, let’s say you have a recipe database or something like that, the real like cool use case is to go in if you don’t wanna search for whatever reason, if you just wanna say I wanna do this like Pastor Bologne, like you get a little chat with someone and it actually just links you to the right two recipes that are like the coolest ones for you in that moment. And it just shortcuts the search, you know, going for the database, whatever. So it’s actually aux improvement mostly. Like it makes it just so more accessible to find the right information at the right time. And how people use it really kind of not only depends on this OpenAI technology, but like the UX around it, what use cases it serve, does it link into additional resources or not big difference and like how we can actually work around that and limitations there. Leaders Still Have to do the Work – Ethics and AI Jenn DeWall:  I mean I love it. And my last question, knowing that we have to add, you know, I love the, again, the information. Heck yes. We get to learn so much and it’s so personal and relevant to us and as I sit here I’m like, oh my gosh. And I, I tried to look up some of the, the other side of ChatGPT because I can see all the benefits of how it works. And then I was looking up, okay, like what, what are the unintended consequences of what that is? And there’s, you know, there’s there and there’s still working through this, there’s a ton of bias on there. I just read something about they had it right, you know, job descriptions and the job descriptions came back incredibly sexist. And so there still is that, so what would be a recommended, we have that, what else do you think someone needs to do to make sure it’s actually relevant in the, in the real world too? Because I, I think there’s still a space for that human interaction to talk about what that, you know, information means. But how do you, how would you advise someone to take that but then also make sure that they’re on the right path in terms of their own comprehension? Darja Gutnick:  Yeah, I mean I think there is no easy answer here. And I think we’re back to like ethics in AI type of conversations. Where there isn’t like any easy answers in shortcuts. And we talk about this all the time as well. Like we started of course training Bunche with our internal resources and there is limited perspectives. Like we don’t, for instance have a person of color coach and therefore we reach out to our community of authors and content creators right now, but there are people of color and our coaches and pull them in and basically say, well we now need to actually do reviews with these people because we are not otherwise we’re presenting so many points of view. And this is, I think what it will come down to. Like I actually think in some ways AI makes a case for diversity because the only thing we can do, do as humans is to offer a unique point of view. And that is really important from like not only a, you know, ethical perspective but also from a business perspective because we have a market with many people inside of it. So we will have different needs in order for us to actually keep tabs on those needs. We need to keep diversity in our points of view. And the big problem with the AI as it is today, it’s, and it all is statistically based, statistics always have regression to the mean. So it always will kind of try to hit something that is like correct for 70% of the cases we correct for 70% of the people and we’ll always have the underrepresentation problem. So we’ll we keep, we have to keep kind of course correcting constantly because we’re trying to achieve the impossible. We are training a statistically based algorithm that regresses to the meme by definition, like it is trying to hit the average and satisfy everyone and with that produce personalized services and make kind of like satisfy personalized n needs and personally different needs. So it’s an interesting kind of it requires an interesting collaboration between the algorithm, which is typically the picker. So like they pick the content, the recommendation, right? Like they choose what to present to you and one point in time and the content database, which is basically needs to be fed through diverse points of view because otherwise you’ll end up with just bias stuff and Jenn DeWall:  Confirmation bias has to live in there, right? Because I Darja Gutnick:  Exactly. Like bias Jenn DeWall:  Though every space for like the counterpoint within it of saying, okay, here’s the stuff, but now here’s something you might also want to consider. Like, is that part of the technology too to help Darja Gutnick:  Exactly understand, to give you a very specific example, like, and again, I don’t have all the answers and I’m not even an expert in the field. I think there are people that are really focused on ethics and AI and like I’m just trying to keep up with it and kind of read their content. Yeah. But what we are doing basically is we validate topic selection and strategies when we produce new content, when we add to the library in Bunch, we of course we have like this content analytics process where we go through like what is actually being read, what is being saved, what is being abandoned, what is being searched, what is actually talked about in the media, what is being searched on Google? And there’s like all these different sources. And then we kind of like synthesize, synthesize, synthesize into like what challenges our users have. And then we come up with a short list. Now that short list like almost never includes inclusion, like how to build an inclusive team is not a top of mind challenge for managers. Just just like unfortunately the truth. So every time we do this exercise, I sit there and I’m like, I’m not going to like accept that now, right? I’m going to prioritize inclusive content anyways, <laugh> and add it into the job free topics. It’s not our number three topic. Like we’re basically picked two topics that are validated by user demand plus how to build an inclusive culture and we just keep feeding it in. And you know, the funny part is sometimes those pieces of content are the most successful ones. But if you would go by the majority, like the majority of management is not looking for how to make teams more inclusive on average. Of course we have user challenges coming to us. Like how do I address this type, like racist comment, how do I deal with this bias situation? How do I deal with that? And this is like it’s a really difficult yeah, kind of moment. I think for me as a founder always where I’m like, yeah, I’m going against my customer’s needs here. I’m doing this. Yep. I’m taking a political stand, therefore you will help after race inclusive content. But I don’t, I like, I don’t have any other solution, you know, like I know there’s a bias if I don’t actually offer this topic, we’ll never like upgrade our knowledge on it. And I will continue to have users writing me about how to address racist comments and they don’t know how to give that feedback to their managers and we won’t move forward. And so that’s kind of, I think we are looking like we, we are all using pragmatic solutions in the field. There isn’t like one shortcut or kind of best ideal solution or ideal kind of playbook to deal with this overall. But I think it’s really important to have advisory boards, ethical boards, just stakeholders in your development process that represent different points of view. I think that’s like the main takeaway. If you’re developing AI technology and you are not working with diverse points of view, you are creating more problems in the world than you’re making a positive impact in my opinion. Face to Face Conversations Will Always Be a Part of Leadership Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. And if you’re a leader, you’ve got to get out there and actually have conversations with people. You can’t rely solely on one thing or check your sources, you know, do your best to make an informed decision. Check the counterpoints. Try to be aware of your own biases that might come into play and develop your own self-awareness because you know, that’s, it can, again, I’m saying this from a 20 year old self that had not great self-awareness, but a high learning desire and there is still a place where, you know, ask other people, have conversations with people, you know, there’s so much information available to us. Darja, how can people learn more about Bunch? How can they get in touch with you? Where to Find More From Darja Gutnick Darja Gutnick:  Totally easy. Actually. I am to be found on LinkedIn with my name Darja Goodnick. If you want to unplug it into the show notes, super happy to hear from everyone and just add me on LinkedIn drop a little note and I’ll, I’ll definitely respond. Super active there. And of course on the Bunch side it was really important to us that everyone can get access to this knowledge and information. We are all about democratizing leadership knowledge, therefore you can download it for free on the App Store. If you go to the app store and you just enter Bunch Coach or Bunch Leadership or Bunch Work, you’ll find us and you can download it. There is a premium plan, but you don’t have to use it. You can totally also stick to the free version and check it out and let us know what you think! Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, I love it. Go out there, learn, learn, learn, learn. I mean, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. That’s one of my favorite quotes. Darja, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciated the conversation. I know I asked questions cuz I still am learning this and I’m like, I have, I have no idea. There’s so much here to like understand. So I just appreciate you even having and bearing with my level of not comprehension and just intrigue. And I just, I really enjoyed the conversation and thanks for getting it started for people to know, hey, another tool that’s out there and b, what to be prepared for in terms of how the workforce is changing. I really appreciated your expertise and your insights and just thank you for coming on. Darja Gutnick:  Thank you so much for asking amazing questions and first principle questions are always the best ones. So thank you so much Jenn, for going all the way in and digging into it with me. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of a Leadership Habit podcast. I have so many questions about really understanding Chat. ChatGPT. I get that it’s going to give us so many great ways to learn new ideas. And then also I wonder what will that mean for human intervention? What will that mean for our relationships? What does that mean for how we even learn now? I hope you enjoyed this conversation and if you want to check out and learn more about the app that Darja and her team has created, Bunch, you can download the Bunch AI Leadership Coach for free on the app store. And of course, if you know anyone that might enjoy this conversation that’s living in the learning space and is curious about the changes that are coming down the pipeline, share this with them. And if you like this episode, don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. And of course, if we can help you with your leadership development needs to have those conversations to develop and give you the tools and skills to thrive for the future of work, head on over to Crestcom.com. We would love to have a conversation with you about how we can help develop your leaders. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time.   The post AI and the Future of Learning in Leadership with Rebel Psychologist and CEO, Darja Gutnick appeared first on Crestcom International.

Improve Your Communication Skills by Raising Your AQ with Dr. Brian Glibkowski Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. Welcome to this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast. We are going to be talking all about your AQ, which is your answer intelligence. And to have that conversation, I sat down with Brian Glibkowski, the founder, the creator of this concept, the AQ, our answer intelligence. Check Out Crestcom’s Free Monthly Webinars! Now, before we go into the show, I just want to remind you that every single month Crestcom offers a complimentary free-to-the-public webinar. And coming up this month in February, on February 14th, we will be talking all about building resilience and cultivating self-love for success in the workplace. Now, this is something that I feel like I need, and maybe you’re going through some challenges, and maybe you are transitioning to a new leadership role, or you’re kind of doubting yourself. Come on over to the webinar. Let’s see if we can give you some tools to overcome some of the obstacles that you’re facing. Meet Dr. Brian Glibkowski, Creator of Answer Intelligence (AQ) Jenn DeWall: All right, now on to the show. Let’s talk about how we can raise our AQ or our answer intelligence. Now let me tell you more about today’s guest, Brian Glibkowski. Dr. Brian Glibkowski is passionate about the role of questions and answers in business and society. His journey started with his research on questions. He authored an article on questions that has been recognized by the Association of Human Resource Development as one of 10 articles that will shape the 21st century. His new book is Answer Intelligence: Raise Your AQ. The book introduces a new science of answers and was a finalist for two major book awards in 2022. The AQ framework has been adopted by universities, including the Imperial College of London Business School. It’s a global top 20, and certified AQ partners use AQ in 14 countries around the world. Listen up, get out a pen. I am so excited to bring this conversation to you. I, myself, was fascinated by thinking through so many things that we do, whether it’s how to approach a one-on-one meeting or how to influence someone to take our idea. This framework can work for you. So listen up and enjoy as we talk about developing and improving your answer intelligence. Brian, I am so excited to talk about AQ. Ever since we met for our pre-call, I was, I don’t know, I maybe inspired is the right word of thinking. Wow, what is AQ? How can I actually improve the way that I communicate? So I’m so excited to bring forth something that, I mean, I’ve never heard this before. I guarantee you many people that are listening right now may have never heard of this concept called AQ, and we’re gonna get into that. But before we go into further, and maybe you’ll, you’ll talk about that in your origin story. I wanna give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to our audience. So love a great origin story. Brian, tell us about yourself and how you came to be on your journey to AQ. What Comes After Who, What, Why, Where, When and How? Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Thanks, Jenn. I appreciate it. You know, my background’s in academia. I was a management professor, and I, my origin story is I conducted research on questions and published that in academia. And I came to one obvious conclusion. We know a lot about questions, and you go back to grade school, you learn about the six W/H questions and open and closed questions. And it really hit me. We know a lot less about answers, and I wanted to study answers. And I interviewed and studied the top golf instructors in the world and developed this framework, which I call answer intelligence. Consists of six answer types, story metaphor, theory, concept, procedure, and action that connect to questions. And that really got me going, I wrote a book, then a TEDx and now we have partners in 14 countries that are using this framework to help others create more influence in the world around them by providing elevated answers to important questions. So that’s my origin story and sort of where I am right now. Jenn DeWall:  No, I love the work that you do. I congratulate your global success as well with. I think the world could very much benefit from raising their AQ or their answer. And tell us. So when you think about what was the initial pain point, what did you notice? Were you thinking, I have watched way too many, you know, media or press interviews or heard way too many not great answers, or what kind of excited you to say, you know what, there’s gotta be a better way? Learning How to Give Better Answers to Improve Communication Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  You know, I think a lot of research starts with self-reflection. And you know, as a management professor, you’re, you’re trained on things like the research question and you know, questions are important and like you developed a, I developed surveys. What are surveys? They’re questions. And the more I did this, the more I realized that it wasn’t necessarily the questions that people are really interested in. When someone hired me, for example, to do a consulting project, they had questions, you know, they wanted to understand why their employees were leaving, and as simple as it sounds, but it was always the answers I provided that influenced them. And the more I reflected on this, the more I realized that your ability to provide answers determines if you succeed or not. And, and if we can apply like a rigorous approach towards it, maybe we could be more effective. And it is sort of this sort of emerging sort of belief that, that sort of inspired me forward. And maybe I could give you an example to illustrate. We’ve all been in job interviews, right? <Laugh>, and as a candidate, whether you’re a junior person or a senior person, you can ask great questions on the interview, right? I could be a candidate, I can ask you, you know, what’s it like to work at the company? You know, how do you do things here? You know, you know, what’s your purpose, etc. But ultimately, what’s gonna determine if you get the job or not, is your ability to provide answers. So if I can convey a leadership story or I’m a leader, or I can explain the procedure of how I lead a meeting, or I can describe a key action that unlocks a project, is these answers that convey competence. And it’s these answers that determine whether or not they’re gonna hire you. And and hopefully that makes sense. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, absolutely. But I’m curious, where do you think people get it wrong? Because I know, and in our pre-call we talked about examples where people really maybe weren’t thinking about their answers or they thought they were answering or thinking of one particular question, and then they get in that moment where either nerves or stress or, you know, the stakes are higher and our answers are not where we want them to be. What are some common missteps that you notice people making in terms of how they answer or how they do this? And again, why does it matter? So I guess that’s, I stacked questions there, but where are some common areas that you notice and then we’ll go into? Why does it matter? The 6 Answer Types: Story, Metaphor, Theory, Concept, Procedure and Action Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, I mean, I’ll, I’ll point out two things I think versus the lack of awareness. So we’re all trained on questions. You know, you may even, you know, think about the questions that you might be asked by someone, you know, and list out those questions, but we never really think about the type of answers we’re gonna provide. And I think of, you know, there’s these six answer types that I’ve mentioned. Story metaphor, theory, concept, procedure in action. And I like to say, unless you have a target to aim at, how are you gonna hit the bullseye? You know, so you think of these six answers, these are, you know, bullseye to hit. And if you’re a new leader and you’re thinking through what is leadership to you? Why should I lead? How should you lead? You have to think about the different types of answers that you need to connect to. So for example, if you ask me what leadership is, you know, I might say as a concept, you know, leadership is inspiring others and holding them accountable. There’s more to it than that. But I might say as a metaphor, it’s like two ropes. When the ropes are separate, they’re strong. When they’re braided together, they’re stronger. I’m gonna try to inspire and hold you accountable each meeting. If I’m a leader, I need to ask myself this question, what is leadership? And I can provide a concept and metaphor answer. You may disagree with my answer, but it shows I have command. Now imagine if you’re, you know, reporting to me and we’re meeting for the first time over lunch, and I lean in and I tell you that metaphor that I’m gonna try to inspire and hold you accountable each meeting, you know that couple with other answers, you know, a nice story, a procedure of how I’m gonna do this. And all of a sudden your belief in me goes up. I have credibility, I’m answering with gravitas. And I think to answer your question, you know, one reason people make mistakes with answers is they’ve never systematically thought about being intentional with their answers. It’s just sort of an afterthought. But you have to be deliberate and intentional. And when you do, you can influence. So that’s my my first response. And maybe if I could give you one other thing that I think trips people up is that we’re so used to focusing on questions and we don’t open our mind to the idea that the quality of our answers really matter. But I would say, you know, think about, you know, your a recent dinner conversation you had or a conversation you wanna have with a friend over dinner. What do those conversations look like? They’re balanced. Both sides speak about equally. Both sides ask and answer questions about equally. So if we’re gonna operate effectively in conversations, we have to have control and mastery of questions and answers. So I think it’s about people opening up to the idea that our answers create influence and they’re important. And then once you take ’em seriously, you start to become a student of answers and you become more deliberate, more intentional, and you’re, you’re just better. What do People Get Wrong about Giving Great Answers Jenn DeWall:  I love that. And so you also, you answered that why. And so, you know, it’s our influence, it’s our ability to build trust of all the benefits of why we need to be more intentional with our words. In your experience, we’re gonna ask the tough questions. Where have people gotten it wrong? You know, if someone’s thinking, is that really me? Where have you seen people really misstep the power of having the right answer or having a thought-out answer? Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, I think it’s, you know, sometimes people have a singular answer. Like if I ask you you know, why do you wanna be a leader in this company? Maybe you tell a great story, but then you can’t transform that story into procedure of how you’re actually gonna lead the meeting differently. You know, or you, you just have blind spots in how you think about things. So take employee engagement. You know, I’ll, I’ll ask executives. I have in the past, they get excited about employee engagement and then I ask them, what is employee engagement? And they can’t really define it. They’ll say, well, our employees are smiling. And if you think of employee engagement, those that really understand it, they can break it down. They’ve thought about the answer. And as a concept, they might say, you know, engaged employees are those that are cognitively engaged. They think about the job all the time, and they’re physically engaged, they have the energy to do the job, the stamina to stay until it’s done. They’re emotionally engaged. When the company does well, they’re excited when it does poorly. They’re, they’re sad. Unless an executive has that command of what engagement is, it’s they’re gonna suffer when they’re trying to influence others. Because if I know that engagement is cognitive, physical, and emotional, then when I start to talk about procedures to do this, I know what my targets are. You know, I’m deliberate about this. If you just have this vague sense of, of leadership or engagement, you influence and it’s about having command of all the answers and being very thoughtful is how you operate in the world. Does that make sense? Practicing Your Answers Will Improve Your Communication Skills Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, absolutely. Now, one question I have is like, is this a challenging concept for people in the sense of saying, how do I actually do this? I might be a, a fast talker used to just responding very quickly, not taking the power of the pause. I might also just not even think that, oh, does it really matter? And so as we’re thinking about this, what’s the difficulty to then slow down your process and how you think about this and kind of approach it in this new way? What obstacles have you seen people run into? Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, I think one natural reaction is, wow, there’s six answer types. I haven’t thought about this before. That’s a lot for me to keep in my head at one time. Or maybe you know, I’m used to telling stories, but I’ve, I’ve never really tried metaphors before. You know, can I do that? So it’s sort of getting outta your comfort zone. And the way I like to describe that is, you know, let’s go back to interviews. I mean, when you’re a junior person in the job market, what do you do? Interview number one, you try a story, maybe it doesn’t land. Interview number two, you try a different story. And then interview number three, you get a nice story. And then you’re using that same story for subsequent interviews. What you’ve just done there is trial and error. And you know, if stories are important. Now imagine if you have that same sort of experimental nature for different answer types, like metaphors or procedures or actions. So you just start experimenting and all a sudden you’re gonna be surprised with which type of answers work. And the other thing is just, you know, with practice it, you get that muscle memory and you start to experiment. And before you know it, you’re using the different types of answers and it’s effective. I think it’s, it’s just getting out there trying these answers and you’ll be surprised with how effective you can be. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Let’s, let’s unpack this a little bit. So I know you said the six areas before the six areas are theory, story, metaphor, action, procedure and concept. If it’s okay with you, can we talk just at a high level of what those even mean at, for the ones that maybe are, are not as, oh, what’s theory or what’s concept? What’s the difference between theory and concept? Let’s go a little bit and to talk about what those are. Let’s talk about theory. What type of an answer type is theory? How do you respond with a theory? Improve Communication by Choosing Your Answer Type Carefully Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, maybe if we could, I would suggest maybe we start with the, the what questions and, and then work our way around. Maybe start with, you know, let’s take leadership. What is leadership? So as a concept we can define that, you know, you know, and, and break it down like I was talking about inspiring others and holding them accountable. Then you can have metaphors that explain aspects of the concept. So in, in different metaphors matter for different times, like to give you something new. Let’s imagine we’re talking about leadership. I’m explaining to someone what a new leader, what leadership is. I define it, but then I maybe give a metaphor that might help that new leader. For example, I might say leadership is like gardening. You can water and feed the plants, but they don’t always grow. That’s a powerful metaphor for a new leader because a new leader is gonna realize pretty fast that their efforts to try to lead others aren’t, is not always successful. So, you know, you’re, you can provide a concept and a metaphor to any what question, you know? And, and then, you know, w would, would you wanna go up to theory then next perhaps? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. And so for those that are on our listening journey, he, we have the wheel of the six answers and of the six answers, they’re divided between the what, why, and how. So the two that we just talked about we’re concept and metaphor. And those are what based answers, or I guess what based question answers? Yeah, let’s go into the why where it’s theory and story. Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah. And also for, for the listeners, you can think of like, like the body and exercising, like you have your core, that’s the what question. You need to understand the concept and metaphors. Then you can, let’s say, move up to the, the upper body, which would be the why. And let’s say the lower body is the how at some point the metaphor breaks down, but it is sort of fun. So if you go up to the why question, it’s questions about, you know, why questions about leadership, why is leadership important? You know, and, and a theory is a basically a cause and effect. Logic, you could say leadership is important cuz that leads to job performance. Leadership is important cuz it leads to lower turnover. It’s, it’s your basic logic. You have it’s theory is also similar to strategy. So you need to know sort of the cause and effect logic. And just to make this point clear, and I worked with a company one time on employee engagement and it’s sort of common knowledge. You think employee engagement leads to like higher job performance, right? That’s a theory. Well this bank in Canada, they looked at business business analytics for their own firm and they found no relationship between employee engagement and job performance. And if that’s true, that’s basically saying that that common theory doesn’t apply in our environment. And that’s something to convey that if you wanna increase engagement, if you’re trying to increase performance, maybe that’s not the right angle. Maybe employee engagement leads to lower turnover. Maybe that makes sense. But it’s basically sharing your logic with others. That’s what theory is. And then story is sort of we all know what stories are, but stories sort of explain, relate to that theory and sort of intuitive way that involves development over time with characters and reversal. So, you know, often you hear of the moral of the story that’s sort of equivalent to the theory. The theory is sort of the more logical answer. And then the story is sort of the moral of the story. You know, it takes the answer of the why question wraps it with sort of emotion. So it’s a different way of conveying that answer, if that makes sense. Improve Your Communication by Using Metaphor, Theory and Story Effectively Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. What about for the people that might think aren’t stories and metaphors the same? Because I definitely know that I’ve heard that. I’m like, what’s the difference between? Aren’t they both kind of implying a story or a call to action or a lesson? What do you see in your experience as the biggest difference between a story and a metaphor? Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, I’ll give you an example then I’ll explain it. And one thing I’ll say before I get into it is that with this framework we take something we’ve taken for granted that, you know, an answer is an answer and we don’t distinguish between types. But once you start to lay out this framework, there are different answer types. So lemme give you an example just a high level. We all know the story of Romeo and Juliet, right? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  The metaphor for Romeo and Juliet is starcrossed lovers. So the story and metaphor are related, but distinct. A metaphor helps us understand a concept like leadership. You know, with gardening the story, you know, sort of has cause and effect to it. It’s basically showing, you know, you know, maybe you give a story about how leadership leads to performance, and that’s separate from a metaphor of what leadership is. So it’s two different ways to convey information. They’re related but distinct. The same way that the story of Romeo and Juliet is different from the metaphor of star crossovers. They’re getting at common things, but you know, they serve different purposes. So for example, let’s say, let’s say we’re talking about trust. You know, we could talk about a metaphor for trust. You know, a consultant once told me is, we’re a trusted advisor. We are the third card in the Rolodex behind the lawyer and the accountant, then us. That’s a metaphor. Separately, as an organization, you can tell a story about how you’re the trusted advisor, right? And unpack that. But the two are different answers. They compliment each other, but are distinct. And just to put a punchline on this, if you’re an organization, let’s say in sales that uses stories, that’s wonderful. Think about using metaphors. The more compact, they’re easier to tell, lower skill level for someone to tell it often and they answer different questions. So that’s just something to add to your portfolio to create an emotional connection. So that’s the difference between story and a metaphor. Jenn DeWall:  No, and thank you so much for walking that through, because I think that often is a misconception that people have is lumping them together. And, and you know, again, based on the the AQ diagram, you know, metaphor is there to describe a concept. Your story is there to reinforce a theory. A Message from Crestcom: Crestcom is a global organization dedicated to developing effective leaders. Companies all over the world have seen their managers transformed into leaders through our award-winning and accredited leadership development programs. Our signature BPM program provides interactive management training with a results-oriented curriculum and prime networking opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about our flagship program and developing your managers into leaders, please visit our website to find a leadership trainer near you. Or maybe you yourself have always wanted to train and develop others. Press com is a global franchise with ownership opportunities available throughout the world. If you have ever thought about being your own boss, owning your own business and leveraging your leadership experience to impact businesses and leaders in your community, Crestcom may be the right fit for you. We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the own-a-franchise page of our website at crestcom.com. How To Improve Communication with Procedure and Action Answers Jenn DeWall:  Now, if we’re going into the how, those are procedural and action, and so let’s go into those now, let’s Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Go into that and let’s introduce some, some new material. So a new ground. So let’s imagine we’re all in a training and you know, everyone listening here is, is in mentoring training, you’re about to be a mentor at your company and you have an initial question. It could be explicit or implicit. What is mentoring? Now as a trainer? I could answer this and I could say as the what question is a concept? Mentoring is helping others become their better future selves at work and in their careers. You know, emphasis on future. And I could say mentoring consists of three dimensions as a concept, career support, social support, and role modeling. You know, I could talk about it some more, but you have a fairly good idea what mentoring is separate from that. The how question is different. So I talked about social support, maybe your initial reaction and you raise your hand is, how do I provide social support? I need to explain the procedure to do that and or the actions. So it’s a procedure. I can say you can provide social support with an open door policy. So let’s assume we’re back in the office and I could say, here’s the simple procedure. Step one, you have your door open. Step two, someone comes in to talk to you about an issue. And step three is you ask them, will this take less than five minutes? Let’s meet now more than five minutes, let’s meet at a different time. And if it’s less than five minutes, step four, you meet right there. And this is particularly important for social support because social support, you need the support when the issues occur, right? You’re feeling anxious, you have anxiety, you wanna go in that office and have that open door experience right away. And as much as possible, we were trying to wanna facilitate that. That’s a procedure. Those are the steps. The actions are anything that occurs within the steps. So something key you can do to an action to make the procedure effective. So for example, if I have that open door procedure, open door policy procedure, and you come in and I am, you know, focused on my emails while you’re talking to me, that’s not gonna work. So a key action is, you know, turn off your monitor. And actually turn it off because you’re signaling to them, not only am I paying attention to you, I’m doing it so explicitly, my monitor is off, I’m not even gonna glance at it. It’s an intentional action that can really convey how important someone is. Would that be an example of the procedures and the actions? So let me pause there and see if you have any questions about that. Jenn DeWall:  No, I mean I love that and I actually just love that tip of if we’re working in a face-to-face setting, turn off your monitor. Yeah, because I can’t tell you how many times when I was in the office if I was going to ask someone a question and they couldn’t be bothered to look up from their computer. And this was one of the fastest ways for me to perceive, oh, so you don’t care what I have to say or why I have an issue. Okay, well maybe this doesn’t matter then, or just to, you know, it kind of just erodes I guess the trust and credibility within that relationship because I know that someone doesn’t necessarily value or want to take the time for what I have to say. Yeah. Which is totally fine if I’m talking nine nonsense, but not if I’m trying to actually ask for support or you know, anything as it relates to being able to move a job or a project or task forward. Now, one of the, so there’s six ways that we can approach it, and I think that for most people you might be like, holy cow, I was really living in metaphor land or I was in story and now I have to think about doing all six of these. That feels really overwhelming. So what is the kinda starting point to get us, I guess, more comfortable with accessing these six levels? How do you recommend people embedding this into maybe their communication style? Develop and Practice Answers Ahead of Time Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, I think a couple ways, you know, to answer that one I think is thinking about you know, before conversation, during and after. So you can use it for preparation. So let’s say that I wanna be a better leader, you can ask and answer your, your for yourself basic leadership questions. What is leadership? Why is why am I an effective leader? How do I lead you? Develop the six answers, write it down, think about it and refine them. You know, maybe that metaphor’s not quite right for you. What’s the right metaphor for you? And you can start to do some simple things like Google, you know, leadership and metaphor or use chat G P T and say, leadership metaphors, come up with 10 of ’em, which ones do you like? And all of a sudden you, you then, or first in the preparation phase, you, you, you apply answers towards yourself. And that’s self-awareness. Then once you’re aware of your own leadership style, you can manifest it, you know, an influence and you can start to have it come out in everything you do. And then, you know, use AQ. So that’s preparation then, then try these out in actual conversations. Look for those opportunities to convey to people, here’s how I’m gonna lead you, you know, practice it, and then when you’re done reflect on it, you know, so the, the, the short takeaway, there’s just three phases, but if you wanna just get started, take something very important to you and try to write down and define six answers for it. And I think you’ll have a profound impact on how you think about something that that’s important to you. So whether it’s leadership or another applications in sales, you know, imagine if you’re an organization, can you communicate your value proposition in terms of six answers. Most organizations will say, oh my gosh, I never thought about that before. You know, we may have a couple stories, but wow, we don’t have a portfolio of metaphors. We need that. Right? You know, and so, you know, just that’s, so that’s the first tip is, you know, be systematic on something very important to you. Develop six answers and just try it. Jenn DeWall:  So hypothetically, you know, by design, if I was a leader and I needed to make a announcement about a particular change where I needed them to maybe adjust a procedure that they were doing, which might take more time, how I’m understanding that is you could take this change initiative that you want to influence people to do or adapt. And you could start and say, okay, now let me put this into the AQ framework that Brian has created. And I’ll start with the theory and then the story and then going into the concept and the metaphor. So hypothetically, you could build an entire meeting structure around all six of these. Am I getting that right? Improve Communication at Meetings by Raising Your AQ Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  That’s correct. You know, partners that do board facilitation using AQ. So what is an effective meeting? It’s one that asks and answers all the questions. And particularly a very important meeting, you wanna cover all the answers, at least to some degree. We’ve all been in meetings where, you know, Susan tells a the story, then Joe tells the story, and then Billy tells the story and then the meeting’s over 45 minutes later, you know, that’s simply because the facilitator didn’t have the presence to say, we’ve got stories. Let’s look at the different answer types, you know, oh, Billy, nice story. It seems like you’re talking about leadership. What do we mean by leadership? Right? You know, oh, what’s a procedure we could use to, to, you know, roll out the product, you know, effectively. So yeah, you can use all six answers. The other thing I’ll say is there’s colors. When you look at the wheel on our website, there’s red, yellow, and blue answers that, that have different meaning. So when you provide answers the story and metaphor that creates emotional connection and connection to experiences, that’s important. When you provide the analytical that allow this theory and concept, the yellow that allows you to explain and predict, then you can provide the blue answers, the practical, it helps get work done. So procedures and actions. So in total, you need all of these answers to navigate important conversations. And this gives you a framework to think through the different answers, the type of influence you wanna have. And it’s up to you as a communicator to sort of leverage the framework to influence. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. I mean, I just love that this is a prescriptive model that you can follow because I, the other thing that’s coming to mind for me is thinking about different thinking styles or learning styles or, you know, I’m married to an engineer, I am the opposite of an engineer. We hear and we learn completely different. But by addressing these six answers, it feels like you’re almost creating an opportunity for more people to hear you because you’re speaking their language, which is really, really cool. And it’s a framework. I love that. Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  You know, and one other tip to, you know, to to be heard is this, this is a framework that works one-on-one and also works on one to many. So if you’re presenting to a larger group, all else being equal to your point, there’s individuals that prefer different types of answers. So it’s even more important to provide different answers throughout the meeting to sort of appeal to everyone. You know, like for example, you know, let’s imagine you’re advising someone, we’re going back to the office after Covid, the CEO gets up there and it’s an all hands meeting. Of course you’re gonna tell a story, and people would probably think about that, you know, before or without AQ. You know, remember when back in the day we were live in person and this great stuff happened. And by the way, I’m not advocating going back to the office, but let’s say Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh>. Yeah. There are people that are like, absolutely not Brian. That’s not happening <laugh>, right? Raising Your AQ to Build Influence Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Imagine if you’re this, this CEO or someone who wants to influence, you know, yes, you wanna be intentional, so tell the story. But guess what? If you’re not careful, you might not answer the how question you, you better answer the how question. So the CEO implicit or explicit, how are we going back? CEO needs to say, month one we’re doing this. Month two, we’re doing this, month three we’re doing this. Because the heck creates credibility. If you don’t answer the how question at a high level, what are people gonna say? They’re gonna say, nice story, but they really haven’t thought this through. They’re not serious about this. So it’s your ability to be intentional and know, you know, how you use different answers and which combination, which level of emphasis that’s gonna determine if you’re influential or not. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I really do love this. It’s a framework and yeah, you could use it in a coaching conversation. How are we going to do this? Also, as you know, I was looking at this even thinking about, I wonder if this could be a level of checks and balances in our own strategic or strategy meetings where we’re thinking, like, for example, one thing that I think that some organizations maybe aren’t doing well is how they actually develop leaders and being able to talk about mental health. We have a really big why of what matters that we need to do it, but they don’t always answer the what and the how. But we have I would say that I’ve seen more communication strategies that really get into the why, but then they fail to really answer the how. And so you have leaders that are like, okay, I know that this is important, but I still don’t know how to talk about this at work, <laugh>, so is this, could it be used as like a stress test too, to be like, how, how sound is our logic? If we’re looking at a problem, I’m, I, and I’m processing this to think of there are so many different ways to apply this. Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Like, like for example, you’re absolutely right. You know, if you can’t ask and answer all the questions, you don’t understand something, you know, look for the weaknesses or you wanna surface implicit answers, like take mental health. Many of us have the metaphor of the puritan work ethic ingrained in us so much that everything we’re doing is sort of going against sort of mental health that we’re sort of grinding ourself into the ground. But unless we can surface that metaphor, you know, and replace it with something else, then we’re gonna be sort of, you know, you know, just a servant to these implicit metaphors and mental models we use. So this is a way to surface things and say, wow, Puron work ethic is having this insidious impact on you. And, you know, and you know, let’s change it. But if you can’t surface all these answers and you can’t, can’t take control of ’em, then you’re never gonna be effective in mental health or leadership or whatever. It’s Jenn DeWall:  Yes. Oh my gosh. Okay. The last thing, cause I know we have to wrap up, but I have to ask this because I bet that there might be someone that picks up and is like, I am going to raise my AQ. I’m gonna think about what I have to do. Think about the theory, think about the story, the metaphor. They’ll do all the things, how do they make sure that it’s actually the right story or the right metaphor or the right way to do it? And I know I can’t go fully into the example that I shared with you on our pre-call, but even thinking through like how do you tell someone, or what advice would you have for someone to double check that the stories actually a right fit given, you know, the topic, the audience, any advice or tips that you have for people to kind of, you know, just double check their story before they actually test it live? Test Your Answers for Effectiveness and Appropriateness Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, you know, I’ll say, you know someone you have understanding for something when you can communicate in all six answers. So I would say a simple stress test you could do is, let’s say, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re presenting to a group about, you know, creativity or whatever the topic is, tell your story to yourself and say, can I transform that story into a procedure? So how would that relate to a procedure for this group or a key action or a theory or a concept, you know? And if you can’t transform your answer, you don’t understand it. I think too often, like we may tell a story about engagement, double down on what I said earlier, but if you can’t define what en engagement is, you know, do you really have command of what you’re talking about? So you just want to think through it in the different ways and make sure you have complete command no matter what the angle is, because someone can challenge you or ask a follow-up question. Great story, how am I gonna do this? You know, on the next project, if you can’t answer that question, then, then you know, you may have lost the opportunity to influence. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. Yeah, and I’m just thinking about that and you know, even thinking about the right story, like how do you think your audience will respond when they hear the story? Will they be excited? Could they potentially be offended even slowing down to think about if it wasn’t you, how might someone else respond if they heard you answer in that way? Because you can do all of this. But the other piece is really making sure is it appropriate, is it effective at driving the concept, the behavior, the procedures that we want to see? And if it’s not, maybe it’s actually the wrong story. Thank you for saying that because I, I love this. But then I know the example we shared in the pre-call. I was like, you can have all this. And I’m still surprised that people can use stories or metaphors that were actually really important or unimportant or not appropriate. Even making a passive joke such as, oh, women can’t drive, would not be an effective metaphor to drive home the importance of inclusion. And this is part of the story that Brian and I were talking about. And, and this is also thinking through, you know, challenging our answers to really think about how our audience might feel if you’re using some of these, especially if you might other someone or make them feel less than. Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Absolutely. Like that example, if I, if someone simply says off the cuff, women can’t drive, you immediately should connect it back to, you know, what concept is someone locating that response to? Oh, they’re gonna say that’s a lack of inclusion. Oh, that’s not very thoughtful. Oh, let me, lemme rephrase this. But if you need to sort of connect, you know, what’s the concept that it’s related to? You know, what, how these answers interrelated and you just want to be thoughtful. And I just saw something recently on LinkedIn where I, I commented where someone posted, I apologize, I’m not gonna air their dirty laundry, but they had a post about the, the grandfathers of management theory and I responded intentionally. Because it wasn’t inclusive, I was looking into the concept. I said, what about, you know, the grandmother’s management theory and I mentioned Mary Follet, who was really the first and founding thinker of negotiation theory. You know, so, but the point was, you know, people are using this language and they’re not being intentional with their answers and it’s clumsy. It’s just about being really intentional and imagine if every single word you’ve said, everything about your answers were, were choreographed and spot on. And you, you start going down the layers. Like for example, you can tell a story, but can you version your story have a short, medium, or long version, right? There’s all these different ways you can have commanded your answers that really convey gravitas. But I digress. Jenn DeWall:  No, I just, I I love that because again, to take that example, if you’re, if the concept that you’re trying to convey is inclusion, starting with inclusion with a joke about how women or people can’t do things is not going to support the concept and you’re actually going to lose credibility and influence. But I also, so, and I just have to say that, because I, I was very shocked to, you know, experience that, but I also, you know, to pivot now thinking through that. Yes. So then could you hypothetically, or should you be able to, going back to your answer response of having a, you know, a short, a medium length and a long, could you also think about these six areas through that and put it into the, if I had two minutes to describe this, five minutes to describe this, an hour to describe this and think about what would be my highlights? Would that be kind of a recommendation piece, too, to think about how you can adjust your style? Improve Your Communication By Adjusting Your Style to Your Audience Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah. How can you adjust your style? That takes practice, it takes command, but also being able to come back to, you know, different answers, you know, so like, can you talk about a metaphor and then five minutes later in the conversation deepen the metaphor by providing like another aspect of the metaphor. All this conveys gravitas and conveys con intentionality. It can convey a command. And that’s what great rhetorical speakers do. Martin Luther King, and Steve Jobs, you’ll see demonstrated different techniques that are consistent with AQ that I’m talking about. And that’s what creates command or influence. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, Brian, I feel like the world needs to develop its AQ. If I never have to sit through a meeting where I hear someone say something that is so grossly inappropriate, I’m like, I just wanna send them your thing to be like, think through what you’re saying because you know, whether it’s a first impression or whether it’s talking about a topic that is extremely sensitive, you could actually lose all of your credibility by not taking the time to do this. Brian, thank you for your work. Hopefully this will actually create a lot better, you know, communication, collaboration. I’ve loved our conversation. I love talking about how you can raise your AQ. Again, we’ve been running this podcast for four years and I’ve never heard anything like this and I just love it. But for those that are also loving this, how can they get in touch with you? Where to Find More from Dr. Brian Glibkowski Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  Yeah, thanks Jenn. And first of all, I appreciate being, being on your podcast. It’s been a pleasure. To learn more, you can go to my website, RaiseYourAQ.com, there’s a free Explore AQ test. You can take. Takes five minutes, you get a 10-page PDF report. So I encourage you to do that, or you could find me on LinkedIn. Brian Glibkowski. Jenn DeWall:  Brian, thank you so much. Thank you for hopefully helping us all be better communicators. One answer at a time. That was cheesy. Thank you so much, Brian. I Dr. Brian Glibkowski:  I Like it. That was good. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to today’s show with Dr. Brian Glibkowski. I loved that conversation. And for someone like myself that actually talks about confidence a lot with people, I truly think that by looking at this framework, you could actually develop your confidence in how you present ideas or how you can influence people to change. There are so many different applications of this tool, so I would definitely recommend checking it out. And if you want to take your own, you can take the free Explore AQ test. Each participant after taking that receives a 10-page PDF report, and you can access this test by going to RaiseYourAQ.com/explore.html. And if you enjoyed today’s episode, or if you know, maybe a new leader, someone prepping for a difficult conversation or a presentation, share this episode with them. And of course, if you enjoyed it, leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for listening. Good luck. I’m coming up with those answers. Until next time.   The post Improve Your Communication Skills by Raising Your AQ (Answer Intelligence) with Dr. Brian Glibkowski appeared first on Crestcom International.

Learn to Develop Your Own Resilience Recipe Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, we are talking all about resiliency, which is a perfect topic for this time of year when many of us who have set new goals or intentions or resolutions have a tendency to quit. I hope today’s conversation will motivate you to keep going. But before I get into the conversation with Lizette Warner, I just want to remind you about Crestcom’s monthly webinar. Every single month we offer a complimentary webinar that’s open and available to the public. And in February we’ll be talking all about how you can create resiliency and self-love in the workplace. That webinar is on Tuesday, February 14th, 8:00 AM Mountain and 10:00 AM Eastern. We would love to see you there and you can register by going to Crestcom.com’s Resources page. Now let’s get on with the show. Let me tell you a little bit more about today’s guest, Lizette Warner. Full Transcript Below Jenn DeWall:  Lizette is the senior director of MR Oncology Collaborations for Phillips. Lizette is an author, a speaker, and a leadership coach who turned her hand to writing after discovering a passion for helping struggling professionals through leadership crisis and renewal. Power, Poise and Presence is her debut non-fiction book and her mission. Want to know a little bit more personal things about Lizette? Lizette shows leaders how to embrace that perfect poise isn’t perfect. Let’s say that one more time. Perfect poise isn’t perfect. Lizette lives in Texas with her husband, a spastic Irish Wolfhound, a narcoleptic Mastweiler, goes tactical thrifting with her daughter and always hits the gym with her son. When he visits between semesters at Oklahoma University, you’ll find her swimming with her team or screeching in her church choir when she isn’t advising, coaching, speaking, or reading. Talk about someone that’s likely had to develop some resilience, coping or strategies just to manage everything that she has going on. Alright, so now it’s time to start that conversation! Enjoy as Lizette and I discuss how to develop your resilience recipe. Enjoy. Meet Lizette Warner, PhD Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I am so excited to be talking about the resilience recipe. I mean, let’s be honest, many people are probably quitting their New Year’s resolutions right now, may be uncertain about their goals. There’s no better time than start talking about what we can do to build our resilience recipe. And Lizette, I am just so glad that you were on the show today. Could you go ahead and introduce yourself to your or to our audience? I know that you’ve got a book that I would love for them to hear about, but tell us how you came to be. Lizette Warner:  Oh my goodness. What a question. Hello. Hello. It’s so glad and thank you for having me on on the show. So I am a healthcare executive and an executive coach. So both of those things sort of flow together. Grew up youngest of four in Chicago. We’re now like in in Dallas Fort Worth. And through that I, my whole discovery growing up, growing up sort of the, the Oopsy I was the Oopsy-baby <laugh> growing up <laugh>. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. What a way to feel about your presence. I’m the Oopsy <laugh>. Lizette Warner:  I’m the Oopsy. Right. And, and was made fun of because everyone was, oh my gosh, my, my siblings weren’t high school, graduating high school when I was born, so I got picked on. And somehow through that I, I ended up, because I only spoke Spanish when I was growing up and as they were picking on me, because I couldn’t pronounce the words right in Spanish, I ditched Spanish. I mean, I still speak Spanish, but I, I ditched Spanish and just started speaking English best English speaker in the family right here. Jenn DeWall: I love it. I love it. It might be the oopsie, but I’ve got this <laugh> Poise, Presence and A Resilience Recipe Lizette Warner:  <Laugh>, right? So I dunno, maybe my resiliency started from then. And and went through school, was really, really bright and ended up going into technology and pursued my, my PhD and in all of that, like I kept running into getting just sort of flipped over, just, just sort of being, falling into sort of the Oopsy category again of like, who quits their job to go pursue their PhD with a husband and two little kids. Like who, it didn’t even occur to me that, oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that. So anyway, so I did that and, and so I ended up as in healthcare as an executive coach because I ended up coaching a number of people. And through all of that, those adventures, I bring my, my stories to the forefront, but I help my clients through things like resiliency, which is man, what a great topic for, for the day. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. Well, and I feel like even within your opening introduction, you of course talked about resiliency in the form of learning a new language of resiliency in being the youngest one in a large sibling set. And of course resiliency in going against the grain. What might be untraditional to quit your job to pursue a PhD? I mean, it feels like you’ve got a lot of strong examples of resiliency built in <laugh>. Now, before we dive into the content, I would love to just talk about your book for a little bit. How are poise and presence? What was the inspiration in writing that? Lizette Warner:  It was probably the fifth woman who came to me with the same exact problem of, hey Lizette, I, I really wanna get into the director role, but a couple years ago I got myself set up, got the promotion, and then our company had a reorg and my boss went out the, the door. So in comes my new boss, and here I start all over again ready to, to get into my promotion. Worked really hard and guess what? The reorg happened again. And so now I’m in the position lizette that I’m doing the job of the director, but I don’t have the promotion and my company’s just had another reorg, what do I do? So I kept having these same problems and it didn’t matter the industry, it didn’t actually even matter where in the hierarchy she was in the organization that they were coming with the same exact problems. And then I was finding, finding my male clients were having somewhat similar problems not, not to that extent, but similar problems in terms of, you know, showing up and being, being confident in certain situations where they just didn’t feel confident and not knowing what to do. What do I do with all these emotions and, and sort of trying to bluff their way through things. And because of all of that and all of the conversations I was having, I decided, you know what? I fix problems. How can I help the people who are having these problems, who I’m never gonna get to, to coach who I’m nev who are, they’re never gonna come to me. How can I help you at scale? And so I thought, let me take all of these stories and let me write them down in a book. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And I love that. Oh my gosh, I love the reason that you drew to write your book to make it more accessible to more people. And at the heart of all of that, to be able to show up with confidence is our own resiliency. So your book is a perfect segue into how we can get that and what is our, or how can we create a resilience recipe, but maybe we should, again, level set and not that we don’t all know this, but let’s think about the operating definition. What is resilience at the most basic level? What is Resilience? Lizette Warner:  Wow, that is a wonderful question because resiliency is, is that ability in, in mechanical terms, it’s that ability to be able to bounce back, right? It, it’s being elastic, but then being able to bounce back from that. And so I think of that it’s funny, it’s sort of the mechanical term, but I kind of think of that a as resiliency, your ability to bounce back from the crap that life throws at you. The, the events that happen, the unfortunate things, the mishaps, the unexpected that pops up, and your ability to bounce back from that. Jenn DeWall:  It’s so interesting and I taught a webinar for Crestcom today on how to create a growth mindset. And one of the things that we talked about is the fact that when we’re setting goals, when we’re trying to create new habits, we almost create them in a vacuum as if a setback won’t occur, an obstacle won’t pop up. And I think all of us get a little bit, I don’t know if it’s more inspired to focus on the goal and then almost, oh, I don’t wanna think about the stuff that won’t go right because I know that I’ve got it all figured out. And I noticed that within a lot of achieving people and perfectionists we do that we kind of plan our goals in a vacuum and just assume still that everything is gonna be fine. Even though we know in our head that life is a series of ups and downs. I mean, I don’t Do you do that? I know I do it Lizette Warner:   <Laugh>. Oh heck yeah. I think that’s, that’s sort of human nature. because you think of, you think your goal, you think your, your outcome. Like, oh, I’m gonna run the marathon, right? I’m gonna run the marathon, it’s gonna be great. And then you get to like mile– I don’t run marathons, but I don’t even know, you get to– I’ve heard you get to like mile, I don’t know, 13 and it’s just, what did, who thought of this? Who said this was gonna be a great idea, right? And you’re on like mile 15 and I’m like, I’m ready to stop. But we, we, I think that is human nature. You sort of envision the best, right? And then when the worst happens, it can be, it can be a real setback and a real downer to, to quite a few people, right? And, and it’s not that people with resiliency don’t recognize the, the awful because awful happens, right? It’s not that that we don’t, we don’t look at it or we don’t appreciate it. It’s just we don’t let the awful get us down long enough to stop us. Right? So you get to mile 13, if you’re a marathon runner, right? You get to mile 13 and you know it’s gonna get better. I’ve already run 13, so I’ve only got 13 ish more to go like I’m at the midway point, I can do this, right? That, that’s how I think of it. Jenn DeWall:  I love that it’s the ability to look at, I might be at my mile 13 halfway through the marathon, but hey, instead of saying, oh my gosh, I have 13 more miles to go, I’ve actually already finished half of them. And maybe that then dovetails into that fixed versus the growth mindset. How we look at the problem in front of us is really going to frame up our actions, our behaviors and emotions around the setbacks when they occur. So I love this, you work with your clients, you’ve seen these setbacks many times before because hey, anytime we’re achieving or trying to achieve big things, there’re going to be bumps in the road. And so from your experience, what does resilience look like in action? Lizette Warner:  Oh my gosh. I, in in action it, it, it’s not glamorous or rosy in here. I’ll, I’ll give you an example. When, when we lived in, this was in Minnesota and it snowed. My husband took the kids grocery shopping because even forever, I have never liked grocery shopping, so he’s always done that. But he’d take the kids grocery shopping and they were five, six, some, somewhere around that age. And when he’d get home, you know, the invariably we gotta carry all the groceries into the house. So my son had these grocery, I don’t know what my husband was buying, but the bags apparently were pretty heavy. And so he, he yells at my husband, you know, while they’re tracking all the, the groceries from in the snow, like, help me. And my husband looked at him and gave him help, but not really the help that he was expecting. Lizette Warner:  So my husband told him grow stronger. And in that moment, that was a resiliency moment. In that moment my son could have chosen to like, I’m gonna drop the bags and I’m done. I’m gonna take one bag and leave the rest here. Or I’m gonna heave them up on my shoulders and I’m gonna keep my grocery delivery route. Right? And that was what resiliency was. He grabbed those bags and he continued his grocery delivery route, right? And he had the choice. He had the choice. And that I think exemplifies kind of what it looks like in action for you. Where Do People Lack Resiliency? Jenn DeWall: Oh wait, I, I love that because it brings forward the power of intention that actually every single day we all have the opportunity to make a different choice. We all do. And so where do you see that lacking in leaders? Where do you see that they’re not leaning into resiliency and that they’re actually shrinking or giving up or maybe just hiding and running away from the situation? Yeah. What do you see resilience lacking? Lizette Warner:  I, I love that question because I think it goes back to what you said earlier where we, we sometimes set our goals in a vacuum. And I think leaders are no different than that. You set your goals and, and that’s what I see is they set their goals in the vacuum and then come like whatever may come, they’re gonna keep that and not move from it, not adapt to, to, let’s say the changing circumstances. The covid happened, right? Everyone had to pivot and there were some that did not pivot and didn’t pivot very well, and they’re no longer here as businesses. So I think that, that I see as sort of the biggest challenge in, in leadership is this resiliency, this, this adaptability to sort of the, the circumstances around you and how are you gonna now pivot using the resources, the strength of your team, and to raise them up while you’re doing that, to see this, this new challenge as an opportunity for your organization to then rise to meet that challenge. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh. And again, adaptability, I think there’s no <laugh>, there’s no such thing as constant, right? That quote, you know, the only thing constant, constant is change. And I think we’re even seeing the friction points, whether it’s in, I think there’s the friction between the two schools of thought of leadership, that traditional leadership of what they think the workforce looks like, and then the new future of work of what people want, whether it’s younger generations or just what people want out of work now in a post pandemic world. And then I think you see that friction in the leader of being like, well, it’s just unfair that that promotion didn’t happen. Why did they pick them? I worked hard. Instead of saying, okay, I got rejected. Now what? I mean it’s again just a different choice. It’s your reaction versus your response was that, why do you think it’s so important? Why is Developing Resiliency Important? Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I know that <laugh> obviously at the base level, we’re not gonna get where we want to be if we don’t adapt. But why do people really need to start to take this seriously? Because I think even today on that webinar, I asked at the jump of it, Hey, on a scale of one to 10, how comfortable are you, you know, dealing with change? And of course everyone, you know, 10 being very comfortable, one being that, and many people were like 8, 9, 8, 9, 8, 9. And sometimes I think that we all have a more inflated sense of our own resiliency than what we actually have. So let’s, let’s get, like we can either talk about that or even just addressing why do we need to build our own resilience? Because right there, that example is we actually probably need to think a little bit more about how we’re showing up that maybe we need to start to take some responsibility for that. We’re actually not as resilient as what we think we are. Lizette Warner:  You know, it is a great question because there, there’s this in, in the communications field, there, there was a, a study that was done, you know, were, you asked people, you know, how, how good of a communicator are you? And resoundingly everyone was like, oh yeah, I communicate way better than my colleagues or anyone around me. And so what that convinced me of is, okay hello everyone, we all think we communicate poorly at best. It because we all think we could do it better than our neighbors. And so we can’t all be communicating a hundred percent or better than our neighbors, right? And I think it’s sort of the same as you point out with resiliency. We all sort of think, oh, we do it really well. But then when you’re handed, when life hands you sort of COVID and everyone’s like, oh my gosh, I’ve gained, you know, however many pounds or extra clothes sizes that you you gained during covid, we, we don’t necessarily handle it very well. And I think therein lies the challenge for us to accept of if we’re able to handle and adapt with resiliency, it only benefits us in our mental health in the bottom line of the company as well. Because let’s face it, if you can adapt to the situation, if you can be resilient in that sort of sense, then you’re able to make it past those tough times. And in that you’re growing new skills to be able to handle your next challenge, right? Because things aren’t static and something else is going to happen. I mean, that is the certainty. We don’t know necessarily what it is when it will happen, but you can be guaranteed it’s gonna happen. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. Yep. Yeah. Life is gonna happen. Things are not going to go as planned. If I could predict certainty, I would definitely go get a lottery ticket and I would presumably know the winning numbers. We don’t have that predictability. But, you know, in reality, I’m curious what your take on this is because I think some of the reasons that we don’t step up and take our responsibility as it relates to our own resiliency is the fear of owning it. Because owning it can feel like shame, oh, I did gain all that extra weight over the pandemic, which I did. So if that’s you don’t worry, you’re in solidarity with me. But, you know, understanding that, I guess my logic is always, if I can’t own my missteps, my mistakes, my deficits, the ways that I got it wrong, or my opportunities to do something different, if I can’t own one that is, I don’t, I can’t control it. And that’s different than pretend that’s, you know, that’s the important piece because a lot of us will pretend it doesn’t exist and then you can’t find any solutions. And I’m curious where you or what you notice from your perspective about the rule or correlation between shame and resiliency and if you have any thoughts on how people pull back in or what they could maybe do in that moment. What Lead You to Developing Your Resilience Recipe? Lizette Warner:  Oh my gosh, I absolutely do have thoughts around this because the, the whole process of of gaining, you know, weight, let’s say in, in, in whatever challenge that you have, like at, at COVID where everyone gained, gained weight, that is telling you something, right? And, and I think that’s the, that’s the key part of it is that you learn something from that. So I’ll give you an example of myself. I noticed, I I I tended to work be from home before COVID, but so it, it wasn’t that much of an impact for me in, in terms of, okay, this is a huge shift because I was already sort of used to working from home. But here’s what I noticed in myself. When I, when I doubt myself when I’m not very confident and I don’t know where to go with things, I discovered that I would end up at the refrigerator door, open the refrigerator door, or I’d go to the, the pantry open and look at the food and invariably I’d eat something. And I tracked this. And I tracked it for quite a while and I, I got to the point where I understood why I was going to the refrigerator or why I was looking for food because I, at the time when I was tracking it, I realized I’m not hungry. Okay, what else? What’s going on? If I’m not hungry, why am I here? Because I’d find myself like standing there, I’m like, oh yeah, that looks nice. I’m not hungry. And then I’d eat something. And I, as I tracked it and I started to understand what was going on, I realized in the moment when I’m opening the refrigerator door, it’s because I’m doubting and I don’t know what to do. So I figured out that my trigger, one of my one of my things that I look for is I’m going to the refrigerator door. I’m putting something in my mouth when I’m not hungry and it’s because I don’t know what to do. And so then I asked myself, okay, Lizette, if you don’t know what to do, what do you know? And then I’m like, oh, I can answer that question. And so I’d start writing it down, okay, now that you know that, what, what’s the next step? And then I’d start writing that down. And then before you knew it, I had snowballed into, I got out of, I wasn’t anywhere near the refrigerator, I was working, I was doing my greatest work. And now when that happens to me, because I’ve been through this whole exercise, when that happens to me, I get really excited because I know something great’s about to happen. This is my great zone. And now I don’t go to the refrigerator, I go to my desk and I start asking myself those questions. But I had to go through the process. And so to answer your question, I think there’s so much information there. I think as you said, it’s a huge opportunity. And a lot of times we miss it because we’re like, oh, I gotta go buy new clothes because now these don’t fit me. Instead of seeing it as a, whoa, this is a huge learning ground for me. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that so much. And the other piece that I really love about what you just shared is that not only right self-awareness, I think that’s still one of the hardest things for people to build because ignorance is bliss land and there’s a lot of stuff that we wanna pretend we don’t have. But you really demonstrated a strong example of your self-awareness, but then doing the next piece of your emotional literacy, what am I feeling right now? I’m feeling doubt, I’m feeling triggered, I’m feeling discouraged, I’m feeling blank. And I think a lot of people don’t check in. What is the emotion that I’m having right now? And I love that reframe that you had of, okay, I’m aware of this when I am triggered and I feel doubt come in. That’s when I, that’s kind of your cue where then you go to that behavior. But recognizing now I can reframe that when I have that cue now it’s the opportunity to start writing, to start to find that next discovery. What a beautiful example of resiliency in action. 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We’re looking for professional executives who are looking for a change and want to make a difference in people’s lives. Learn more about our franchise opportunity on the Own A Franchise page of our website at Crestcom.com. Recognizing Biomarkers to Develop Resilience Jenn DeWall:  I am so excited to get into your resilience recipe and to talk about biomarkers, which is a concept I’ve never heard of. And so I’m so excited to just to hear about that. So here we are, audience, we are ready. We’re gonna be talking about now, now that we know what resilience is, where we, where and why we need to develop it, we’re gonna dive into how you can create your own resilience recipe. And it starts with biomarkers. Am I understanding that right? Okay. That’s Lizette Warner:  Right. Jenn DeWall:  What is a biomarker for those that might be like me? This is new, this is a new way of looking at it. What is a biomarker? Lizette Warner:  So we’ve been talking about biomarkers as as we’ve been going along. So it’s, it’s gonna be really simple now for you to understand it, but biomarkers are biological, right? So bio and they mark something, they tell something. So for example your temperature, when you take your temperature with a thermometer, you’re marking your biological function like, am I healthy? Am I not healthy? By taking by that temperature. So that temperature itself is a biomarker of health or disease. There are tons of biomarkers. So your blood pressure, that’s a biomarker. When you go take images at at the healthcare provider, like you go take your MR imaging or x-ray, all of those are, those are biomarkers and they’re telling something, right? There’s telling if the bones broken or not. But biomarkers, as I was telling you right now, in my whole resilience of going to the refrigerator, that’s a biomarker. That was my biomarker of, ooh, I’m in doubt. I’m noticing something’s happening. So for me, that was a biomarker of, okay, I don’t know what to do. And there were tons of other associated biomarkers around, I don’t know what to do. My stomach gets in knots my shoulders get tight. I I tend to get tense and maybe I’ll, I’ll start talking a lot and I just don’t, I don’t feel comfortable. So all of those things go in around my biomarker, my recipe for my doubt. When I doubt myself, I may, for lack of a better word, like word salad all over the place and just words and words and words instead of being intentional about what I say. And so once I started to unpack, okay, that’s what my, that’s what my doubt looks like. I’m at the refrigerator, I’m maybe talking a lot and I don’t really know what I’m saying, my shoulders are tight. How Biomarkers Can Help You Develop a Resilience Recipe Lizette Warner:  But then I started looking at, okay, what, what’s on the other side of that? When I have been resilient, what does that look like for me? And if you wanna form your resilience recipe, what I’ll invite you to do is to look back at a time at something you got through or your someone in your, in your vicinity got through. And by vicinity I mean like your, your family, your friends, something that you witnessed that somebody did, and you’re like, wow, that, that was awesome, that they were able to make it past a certain hurdle. And for me, when I was studying for my PhD at the Mayo Clinic, so we moved across country to go to the clinic for me to study. I quit my job with two little kids. My husband worked and I went to school halfway through my degree, my husband lost his job, and there we were no income. I quit my job and I don’t have a degree. And in that moment I met doubt and sadness and I was doubting, why did you even leave work? Right? I’m looking at myself. And, and the worst of the worst in me came out. And in that same moment, I remembered my parents. And remember I told you I was an oopsie baby. I remembered my parents who my mother graduated third grade and somehow they had the four of us kids, they put us through school and they managed when my dad had gotten injured. So my dad was our main earner in the home when he got injured because of a fire actually that I talk about in the book. He couldn’t work. And somehow we made it through. And that memory of my parents making it through and traveling the globe, putting us all through school, let me know in that moment that my husband lost his job, that we could do it. I didn’t know how, I didn’t have the answers, but I knew we could. I just knew we could. And that is how your, you can form your resiliency recipe is thinking back to those things that you’ve, you’ve accomplished, you’ve gotten through. Sometimes I’ll even have people go as an exercise, look back two or three years ago, what have you overcome in that time? And that can even be sort of the anchoring into your recipe for resiliency. Things You Overcome Will Develop Your Resilience Recipe Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that. So does it start with thinking about, you know, checking in with your biomarkers and understanding what’s the information or the emotions or the mindset that you have towards a particular challenge or setback that you’re facing? And then next part is understanding where can I draw that inspiration from my understanding that first, so biomarker is that check-in and that self-awareness piece. And now once we built that, then it’s thinking about where do I want to go and who can I draw inspiration from? Am I getting that right? Lizette Warner:  Yeah, definitely. It’s, it, it’s t tuning into sort of your thoughts, your feelings around the successes that you have overcome and what can you draw upon from within yourself in your history or in the vicinity around you that you’ve experienced that, you know, and then leaning into those kind of like, as a recipe. So, so for me, my recipe in, in, just to give you an example with when my husband lost his job, was to remember that that situation that happened in our family, like they did it, they made it, and they, they didn’t have an education. Look, I have an education, we’ve got resources. I maybe it makes me uncomfortable to ask for help, but you know what, there’s so many people around me that I can ask for help right now. And it was building those things, kind of like my, my recipe of what, who do I go to? Who do I go to next? And bringing those around me as if I was gonna create a new, a new dish. And I was kind of creating a new dish. I was, I was creating my, my new future with this resiliency recipe of people to go to memories that I had and then what I knew about myself and what I knew that I could overcome. And all of that came to the table and it, it’s almost like surrounding myself with a team, but they weren’t really there. It wa it was, it was characters that I knew who were supporting me. And it’s weird, it’s sort of weird to think about it, but it, it was like thinking of my parents back years ago who, you know, they’re older now or they were at the time when I was there, but thinking of them as my inspiration moving forward, thinking of my kids and what, what they were gonna learn through us, going through this tough time that we were going through. And all of those things came to my aid. And I think they can come to your aid too, if you think about those in terms of what can you bring around you to create your, your own re resiliency recipe. Jenn DeWall:  And so that’s not even, or it sounds like it’s going to be incredibly personal that it’s, or is it safe to say that like your resilience recipe is unique to who you are as an individual, what experiences that you’ve had and what challenges you’ve been through and what ones you’re going through or you think you might go through. Yeah, so it’s incredibly personal. Lizette Warner:  Very much so. Yeah. How a Resilience Recipe Helps You Recover From Setbacks Jenn DeWall:  And then it starts, so starting with that self-awareness, then going around and looking for that inspiration. What do we do then to take, because it almost feels really meta. Okay, I can draw the inspiration, I can do all of those things. I wrote about, yes, I know that that person’s really good. Then what can I do? Let’s say I’m a skeptical person and I’m like, okay, but I’m still not them, so I can’t do that. What would be your advice or what would be your recommendations for next steps if someone is facing that setback or challenge? Lizette Warner:  Yeah, so if someone’s facing that setback or a challenge, my, my call to action to you would be to look back two, three years ago and say, okay, two, three years ago I was X years old. I was celebrating X what was it? Like, name it, write it down, remember it. Like really anchor yourself. Where were you two or three years ago? And think back, what were some of the challenges that you’ve overcome? What’s happened in that timeframe? Hello Covid. What, what were you doing? How did you manage through that? And maybe some of that’s good, maybe it’s bad, but what is for sure is that you’re someplace totally different now than you were back then. And for many people when they go through this exercise, they’re like, wow, I totally forgot that we went through a death in the family and I was able to bring the whole family together. We, I helped somebody get a job. I talked to, you know, certain, I talked to college kids, I help mentor this kid. And I say kid, but you know, I help mentor this young adult into a growing, a growing member of society. What are the things that you’ve done? And honestly, it really astounds people because one of the things that we don’t do, same things, to go back to what you had said earlier sometimes we think in a vacuum, not just for the future, but we don’t even take a moment to look in our rear view mirror to see where we’ve been and what we’ve done. And when we do that, we realize we’re we’re pretty awesome people. Recognize Your Own Magic Jenn DeWall:  Yes. Oh my gosh, I love that you said that. I, when I used to do more career coaching, I would talk about that even in the moment of how we’re talking about our worth, our values, our strengths, our experiences. And when we don’t take that time to actually look at where we’ve been and we think that, well, I was just blank title or I was blank title and we don’t look back. It’s like showing up to the interview with half of your resume in your head, <laugh>, like they’re not going to see it because you can’t see it. But I love that you hit that because, and, and I know that we see it from different sides, but too often we’re going way too fast. We are going way too fast. And you know what, the first person that we’re gonna throw out the car is ourselves. That’s fine. I’m gonna take care of you. You get in here. I don’t need to see what I did. It’s fine. I’m not magic. I just did this. You are magic. You actually are magic. Lizette Warner:  Totally. You are Amazing. And we have, each of us have done such amazing things in our lives and we discount it, we forget it. We, we do exactly what you just said. No, no, no. You, you and you and you and you and oh, no, no, no. I didn’t do anything phenomenal. You know, I didn’t, I didn’t cure cancer and maybe you didn’t. Well, you did some other amazing things like we’re not all meant to be on this earth to cure cancer. We’re here to do something phenomenal. And that is your role to figure out what is the phenomenal that you do. And if you’re a stay-at-home mom, you do something phenomenal. If you are a leader of an organization, you do something phenomenal. If you’re a project manager, you do something phenomenal. Recognize Small Wins Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love that so much. And I feel like it really goes into the importance of why we need to celebrate small wins. They don’t have to be the grandiose cancer curing esearch. It could be, you know what? I stopped and read it. I was able to take the time to read my child a bedtime story and that will help with their development. Or I was able to stop and help my neighbor with something that they were struggling with. We can still tick stock in those things as points of celebration. Don’t, don’t diminish or discredit yourself in your worth by thinking that you’re not adding value every single day that you’re, maybe it’s not every day, right? Maybe we’re isolating, but you, you do matter. You have value and you need to at least stop and look at the small ones. Otherwise, yeah, it’s easy to look back in your life and be like, haven’t done anything cool, <laugh>. Lizette Warner:  I know. I think that, I think of that all the time. Like even even when I go to sleep and I sort of wake up the next morning, I, I’ve got all these wear, everybody has wearables, right? And I’m, I’m checking out my, my sleep score, like my sleep statistics or whatever, and I’m like, Ooh, I slept, slept an extra 10 minutes. Yay. Go me. Like that’s an accomplishment, right? I, I ate a balance. I cooked a balanced meal for myself today. That believe me, that is a huge accomplishment and amazing Jenn DeWall:  For me. Yeah, <laugh>. No, I love that. And it is, anytime that we do these things, they are big moments. And I guess maybe that begs the question of maybe a reason that we struggle with resiliency starts with the own expectations that we have on ourselves. Do you expect yourself to be, and actually, here’s one that I love, like even as it comes down to people pleasing, like, do you actually think that you can do all of the things right to make everyone love you? Because you can’t. And one of my favorite questions to ask people is tell me one person in the entire world that every single person loves <laugh>, Lizette Warner:  Good luck. Jenn DeWall:  You can’t right? The natural answer that always comes in those moments. Oh, oh, it’s naturally Mother Teresa. Well, believe it or not, there are actually people that do not love her. Yeah. And it, so if you look at that at a high level, there’s actually no one that’s achieved being loved all the time. <Laugh>. And the one thing that you can control is loving yourself. And the other thing that made that, that made me think of too is understanding that our best every single day is going to look different. Like my, and I think about this because on Monday, I, I, you know, was speaking and teaching a class, and I can tell you it was not my best work. I felt like my brain wasn’t operating well. I felt like my thoughts couldn’t come together. And as a perfectionist, I was really actually frustrated. You know, insert the opening for all of the genuinely are awful at this. Why do you think you keep trying? Until I decided to lean into the fact that every single day my best is going to look different, it will just look differently. I can’t be perfect every day. That’s actually an unrealistic expectation. And I don’t even necessarily think I did bad on Monday, but I just didn’t do. And that perfect expectation that I had for myself. I mean, any thoughts on that? Be a Better Friend To Yourself Lizette Warner:  Yeah, I, I think if we, if we spoke to, or if our best friends spoke to us the way that we speak to ourselves, we would no longer be friends with them, right? <Laugh>. We would, we would, who would, we wouldn’t let those people in our lives, right? You don’t let people in your lives that tell you, Jenn, you’re ugly, Jenn, you just don’t know what you’re doing. You just, you’re what gives you the right to, to host a podcast, to talk about leadership, to coach anyone, right? You would, you would distance yourself from that person as quickly as possible. But sometimes we let ourselves tell us those horrible stories. And then worst of all, we believe those horrible stories. Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh> Yes we do. Oh my gosh. Now I actually love talking about this because I think this is again, that point where we don’t want to own that we might fall into that category. And I, I’ve asked that question in events before too. Like, who here struggles with self-doubt or who, who actually, who here actually never struggles with it? And then it doesn’t always happen, but there’s always one or two people that are like, I don’t struggle with it. And in my head I’m like, give me five minutes, give me five minutes with you one-on-one because you’re human, which means that you’ve had to overcome some adversity in your life, which means that you likely have some bad programming in there and it doesn’t make you a bad person. Like stop, stop pretending that you have to prove that. Oh my, well I just, I got everything figured out. I don’t know, but I don’t know what you’re struggling was that like, look at me over here. Lizette Warner:  Yeah, I got it all. Yeah. <Laugh>, totally agree with you. because those are the ones who, who Yeah, you’re totally right. Let, let, let’s have five, let’s sit for five minutes. because I’m not quite sure I believe that Jenn DeWall:  Yes, it’s, and, but it’s, I t  ink we need to remember that and we need to keep talking about it because resiliency, you know, what deprives you of your ability to live re to be resilient, it’s your own shame. Mm-Hmm. It’s your own shame about it. And you don’t deserve to shame yourself. You are perfectly perfect as you are. Oh my gosh, Lizette, I have really enjoyed our conversation. Any final thoughts before I kind of ask you how the audience can get in touch with you that any final thoughts as it relates to resiliency or your book and any tips that they can get from that? Develop Your Resilience Recipe to Control Your Outcomes Lizette Warner:  Wow. In, in the last few seconds? I think, I think what I, I’d love for your, for everyone to know is that you are in control of your outcome. Now, you may not be in control of exactly how it plays out, but you’re in control of how you can handle it and address it and how you’ll come out of it on the other side. That’s, it’s all in your control. So if, if that’s the only thing they take away from today, take that. And I talk about more, more of that in, in the book. But if that’s the only thing you take away today, it’s been a, it’s been a home run for you. Where to Find More from Lizette Warner, PhD Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Develop your own resilience recipe. Pay attention to the areas where you’re not showing up. Draw inspiration from those that are, are resilient. Challenge your expectations, we talked about so much. And then of course, know that you get to put yourself in that driver’s seat. Lizette, thank you so much for coming on The Leadership Habit podcast. Where can our audience get in touch with you? Lizette Warner:  So I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Instagram, Lizette Warner, and you can also find me on my website, lizettewarner.com. Super easy, one Z two Ts Jenn DeWall:  <Laugh>. Where do they get the book? Lizette Warner:  In the book? So the book, it’s on my website so you can find it from the website. It’s on Amazon, it’s on Cobo. Anywhere you get anywhere you can buy books. You can buy my book. Jenn DeWall:  Perfect. Lizzette, thank you so much for coming in on such a timely reminder of stepping into the power of our own resilience. Thank you for giving us the gift of your time and expertise. I really enjoyed our conversation and I know that our leaders or our listeners will too. Lizette Warner:  Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of a Leadership Habit podcast. I hope that you enjoyed today’s conversation and if you did or if you know someone that did share this with them, it’s available on all podcast streaming platforms. So please spread the love. The world needs more resilient leaders and if you want to get more in touch with Lizette, do yourself a favor and invest in one thing certain to quadruple your investment. You. You can go to lizette’s website LizetteWarner.com and you can buy her book Power, Poise and Presence: A New Approach to Authentic Leadership. And in closing, if you are a leader and you are looking to develop your team, know that we have you here at kras com. That is actually our specialty. And if you are interested in a leadership development program that is designed to give you the right tools to lead for the future of work, head on over to Crestcom.com to learn more and even request a two hour complimentary skills workshop. We would love to come into your organization, in person or virtually to help develop your leaders. Until next time, everyone.   The post Developing Your Resilience Recipe with Lizette Warner, PhD appeared first on Crestcom International.