The Leadership Habit

Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership with Colleen Stanley Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall! Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, where I sat down and talked with Colleen Stanley. She is just one of my favorite people to talk about emotional intelligence with, for those that are unfamiliar with her. Colleen Stanley is the president of SalesLeadership, a sales development firm specializing in the integration of emotional intelligence, sales, and sales leadership skills. She is the author of three books, including Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success, which is now published in six languages, and Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership, and Growing Great Sales Teams. I hope you enjoy our conversation today as Colleen and I talk about bits and pieces of her book, as well as just drawing on her many years of experience within combining both sales and emotional intelligence to create success. Meet Colleen Stanley, President of  SalesLeadership Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone! It’s Jenn DeWall on The Leadership Habit, and today I am so lucky to be interviewing Colleen Stanley. Now, many of you in the Crestcom network might be familiar with her. She has done great work with us in terms of our emotional intelligence classes and our curriculum. And we’re so excited to be talking about sales leadership and emotional intelligence. But for those that may not know you, Colleen, please go ahead and just introduce yourself. Colleen Stanley: Thank you. And thanks for having me today. So I Colleen Stanley, I’m the president of SalesLeadership, and we are primarily a sales development firm. That is the lane that we swim in. So if you’re not in sales development, think of it as influence, which is something all of us need. And so we work with teams on sales, kickoffs are coming up, we’ve got a sales management training and sales training. And then, I am the author of two books, Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success, and my latest one, Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership. So again, thanks for having me. Jenn DeWall: Gosh, emotional intelligence for sales leadership. Why do you think that it’s important for people to have? Well, actually, maybe I should ask why the heck aren’t people starting to really get into emotional intelligence and the way that we all know that there is a case made for it. What do you think is holding people back from really recognizing that that’s a skill set that we need to embrace and have and hone? Colleen Stanley: Jenn, you know, emotional intelligence is referred to as a soft skill. Now take a look at the word, soft it infers that maybe you’re sitting on a couch and you’re a big old couch potato. People will say you’ve got to go soft on this person. So I think the very word that’s associated with emotional intelligence makes people concerned that they can’t achieve hard business results, hard sales results, hard, any results in life. So there’s a little bit of a knowing and doing gap there when it comes to emotional intelligence and how it can make a huge impact, both personally and professionally. How does Emotional Intelligence Improve Sales Leadership? Jenn DeWall: That’s so interesting to think that yes, soft, if we just look at it by nature, soft skills, does that mean I’m not going to be able to drive results or communicate in a place that I can have influence with people? Why, you know, you’re really like your thought leadership is leveraging emotional intelligence in sales. Why is it important to combine emotional intelligence and sales? Why should sales leaders? And by the way, for those of you that aren’t in sales, as Colleen mentioned, you’re likely in a position of influence. So this is still for you, but why is it important to combine emotional intelligence and sales? Colleen Stanley: What I discovered about 10 years ago, Jenn, when we brought this curriculum into our hard skills training, right? It was the light bulb for me because I recognized that what was missing from giving salespeople and sales leaders a hundred percent of the skills to be successful in life was missing. So hard skills are important, and I would use the analogy of diet and exercise, right? So the hard skills can be diet, and that is going to help you lose weight, but you’re missing another piece called exercise, and exercise to me are the emotional intelligence skills. So in life, we want a complete set of skills by which we can function and be our best and do our best. So quick example, you know, I can teach a sales team how to ask provocative questions, consultative selling questions, but when they get in front of a decision-maker that might be sitting there looking a little bored or scrutinizing them, right? Emotions can start running that conversation. At that point, a salesperson can default to a fight or flight emotional response, right? So the fight response might be, they start getting defensive back, or they start doing more product dumping to earn their expertise in the room, or flight response can simply be, I’m just going to shut down here and go away. And I hope this meeting ends soon. So you’ve got the hard skills. You’ve taught them the great selling skills, questioning skills, but what’s getting in the way of execution is managing your emotions, your impulse control to deliver that particular skill. Jenn DeWall: Gosh, Colleen, I think that you probably just resonated with a lot of our audience because I think there are some people that could see themselves, myself included. I know that I speak, but it doesn’t mean I’m perfect that it is easy to see someone in a room or see someone in a virtual classroom that you think is looking away. They’re not paying attention to you. And then, all of a sudden, you just get in your head like, Oh my gosh, am I not engaging? Did I do something wrong? What do I need to do? And then yes, you try to oversell them in a way that they probably are backing further away, or you just stop. Maybe having that, that confidence. I just think that that is such a real example of what people experience, myself included. And I know that I’m an extrovert that people just assume is competent all the time, but it is easy once you see that one thing. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for even just bringing that to light because it’s something that all of us face. Colleen Stanley: Absolutely. And what we have to be aware of is sometimes where the trigger, right? So in life, I call it the trigger response, regret loop. I can trigger someone with my extroverted personality, my high driving personality. I’m talking too fast, too intense. And so I might have a perfectly good opportunity in front of me. And that prospect is looking at me, thinking I don’t really like her, and I don’t really emotionally connect with her. So I can have the greatest solution, the greatest expertise in the world. But if I’m not making an emotional connection with someone, they can’t hear anything I say. They’re not engaging with me at that emotional level, which is really the area by which people buy. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I love it’s emphasizing that emotional connection. Where do you feel like people get that wrong? You know, I think that if, if we don’t address the emotion piece, where, where do we get that wrong? Emotional Awareness is Vital for Sales Leadership Colleen Stanley: So one of the skills that really addresses the emotion, well, there are actually two skills that address reading the room, the emotional temperature of another human being and the first would be called emotional self-awareness because that what you’re not aware of, you cannot change so if I’m not aware of how I’m landing on people, my communication style, my personality style, my questions. Then I’m going to be unaware that those questions or my style might be triggering them. Now, the second skill is empathy, and empathy is a powerful, powerful skill. However, in most organizations, people aren’t really getting it. They’re not really teaching it the right way. They’re well-intended, but they often teach empathy as a validation skill. Jenn, you must be disappointed. That must be frustrating. Well, validation isn’t really emotionally connecting with you because when I’m able to describe why you’re feeling frustrated, why you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s called empathy because you’re demonstrating. I actually have the ability to see the world from your perspective, and more than anything in life, people want to feel understood. It is a basic human need, and it doesn’t matter how I guess confident you look, maybe even arrogant. That’s a basic emotional need. So I would say emotional self-awareness and empathy. Those are the two key skills in making that emotional connection. Jenn DeWall: My gosh, empathy. You know, I think that one just rings so true because it is awkward when you have someone that doesn’t necessarily know what empathy is or doesn’t know how to do it. And so they think that just by saying the words of what you’re going through, that they’ve somehow connected with you, but really I think most people can tell, would you say that it’s fair to say most people can tell whether you are genuine in your approach or whether you truly do kind of understand or empathize in the right way. I think most people, you know, we understand that we perceive that, but I guess my experience, I still think sometimes people think that I’m pulling it over. They can’t tell, they can’t see that I’m doing this. Do you feel like you see that where someone might just, that arrogance kind of comes through like I’ve got this, and they’re just completely tone-deaf to the room and not understanding that they’re creating the opposite effect? Colleen Stanley: Absolutely. And one of the things we will teach, whether it’s in a formal sales conversation or influence conversation, people absolutely sense your energy. So when you study emotionally intelligent people, it’s an inside out project, right? Because how I show up is how people are going to perceive what you’re thinking or feeling, whether you’re genuine or authentic. Now, the challenge in sales is something called a sales quota. It can be a manager that is strictly managing numbers, right? And so, and, and numbers are important. I understand filling the top of the pipeline working the way through. But if I show up, I am attached to my quota more than I’m attached to understanding where you’re coming from. Why is this particular need you’re expressing so important right now? Do I actually have the right solution? If I don’t show up unattached to my quota but very attached to connecting with you, then I’m going to be tone-deaf in the room and the prospect. I’m going to say it again. Even if you have the right solution, can’t hear anything you say, they’re not connecting with you. They’ve just gone tone-deaf. Jenn DeWall: Gosh, Colleen, can you go into every single organization and help them? Because I’ve seen this, I’ve seen it in leaders and whether it’s a salesperson or whether it’s a leader with an idea like I’ve absolutely sat in a room where, and I probably been that person too, but like the, you have this great idea that you love so much, right? So we’re high ego. And then we push, push, push, but we’re not even looking at the people that we’re trying to influence. We’re just so concerned about me, my idea of what we’re going to do. And then people are just like, why do I want to do this? I don’t listen to someone where I’m not in the conversation. If they’re trying to influence me, I want to feel like a part of that solution or feel that, okay, you want my insight, or I can make this come to fruition or implement it. My gosh, can you, can you please go in and just help every single leader? Reading the Room Colleen Stanley: Well, it, for example, let’s say you’re presenting an idea. Now you, as the leader, often, if you’re a leader in this, doesn’t make you more important than anyone else. You’ve just got a different set of talents. So one of your talents might be seeing the vision- where we need to be in 20 years. The problem is, as you’re laying out that vision, you’ve left behind everyone else. And all they can think about is, Oh, this is more work for me. I don’t have the skills to do this. If you’re if we’re going to implement this idea, how does it affect this? And so what happens is if you’re not reading the emotional temperature of the room, you’re not seeing people that have maybe angst about workload or their own abilities and empathy is stopping and pausing and say, now let’s talk about this because, for many of you in the room, you might be thinking this, you might be wondering about this. You might be feeling this, and you state the elephant in the room because nobody wants to speak up to their boss and say, I’m not capable. I’ve got too much work. How do you expect me to do this? Right? We don’t want to be that person. And so often what happens because we don’t demonstrate empathy, leaders miss the meeting after the meeting, Jenn DeWall: The meeting after the meeting! Colleen Stanley: Yeah, the meeting after, or everyone gets together to talk. Does she not know how much work I have? Or when the person goes home, I think I’m going to lose my job because this is where the company’s headed. And I don’t have the skill sets. I’m not sure how I’m going to get the skillsets, you know, whatever the story is that people make up. And they’re great fiction writers. So that’s why empathy is so important. You get to have the conversation in the room versus missing the conversations that occur outside of the room. Jenn DeWall: Okay. Colleen, I’ve never heard it expressed like that because if it’s true, it’s you have the meeting. If you miss the mark or you miss the tone, you’re not addressing that elephant in the room. It’s absolutely going to go on between the employees to say, what in the heck are they thinking? Or yes. Like what does my future look like here? Should I start looking for another job? So we know that disengagement starts to rise, but you’re right. It’s the meeting after the meeting. Do you want to be a part of that? Or do you want that to like, and be present in that moment? Or do you want to just know that that’s what’s going to happen if you don’t address it? I love that concept. And I think for our audience, you know, asking yourself, are you addressing the elephant in the room or are you missing the meeting after the meeting, which had, that’s where I think so much can be discussed? And even the things that meeting after the meeting is likely where people, if you actually had insight into that, could then overcome some of those obstacles or give them different perspectives to help soften their anxiety or stressors. I just love that concept. Assertiveness is a Necessary Skill Colleen Stanley: Well, you know, but, and then if we flip it to the other side where yes, the leader is, you know, we say the pace of the leader is the pace of the organization. I would also say this though, put the responsibility of your company’s success on your employees, your team members as well. Because it’s very easy to show up in a room, expect the man or woman running the meeting to have all the answers, or, you know, even when they’re asking for input, I’ve seen people that have not developed their assertiveness skills, so they’re not willing to state their opinion, and they’re not willing to state what they need. However, these people can also become very passive-aggressive. And then after the meeting, that’s when they fall into a victim mentality, well, they didn’t mention this. They didn’t mention this. He or she didn’t mention this. Colleen Stanley: And so part of the responsibility and creating a great culture is to teach people assertiveness, and then also teach them that when you’re not displaying assertiveness, you generally fall into a victim mentality. Everybody’s doing it to me. Nobody’s listening to me. Well, the fact is you’re not speaking up and stating what you need nicely. So there are two sides of the room that always have to be working together. And so I see sometimes where a leader can be doing a great job, but if they haven’t taught their team the power of assertiveness and what the implications are, if you don’t display the right assertiveness, then you get into victim-blame-excuse cultures. Jenn DeWall: Well, and that’s a great insight just reminding people that yes, we can have expectations of a leader. We can want them to do a really great job, but we also have to have expectations about how we show up. And, you know, I’m glad that you touched on victim mentality because I do feel like that is something that can be rather rampant in organizations where people feel like, you know, they’re just throwing, throwing out the criticism, throwing out that, but then they’re not doing anything about it. They’re just complaining. And then going back to the emotional intelligence component, because in, in my coaching school that I went to, what they called it was entrainment. When someone had maybe bigger energy— so if I walked into a room feeling really happy that people could entrain to that and also feel happy. But knowing that we have that complainer who’s always, I hate this company. I can’t believe they didn’t do that, how then they could also entrain. And so that victim mentality also perpetuates. And again, they’re the victim. They do not recognize that they actually still are a leader. They’re just a leader in victimhood and then criticism. Emotional Contagion Colleen Stanley: And, and, you know, in the EQ world, I think the equivalent to that definition would be called emotional contagion. And it has actually been proven. People will pick up your emotional state, your attitude, or your habits. So, you know, the old saying one bad apple can spoil the whole bucket. It’s absolutely true. So it’s not just a pithy quote. It’s based on neuroscience, and it’s based on Psychology 101. So it’s, you know, the victim mentality when we work with sales leaders on this, and any leader could tap into this is teaching your team the concept of the locus of control. And so this is a body of work from the psychology world. Julian Rotter is the person that I understand is credited for this. And locus of control is developing either your internal or external locus of control. So for internal locus of control, their pithy statement is if it is to be, it’s up to me. So you and I are both talking about how we grew up in the Midwest. And frankly grew up with parents that were kind of like, if you want to get it done, it’s your responsibility you’re accountable, right? And those are the people that succeed in life. Now, external, when I’ve seen this in sales and extra locus of control, people are professional complainers. They could actually put a sign out open today for complaining, bring me your problems. And I’ll add three more to them. I mean, it’s amazing! Complaining is a habit. And so what they do is they’ll blame the company. I don’t enough good marketing leads. I get enough good leads, but they’re not qualified by the sales development person. I don’t have brand recognition. Our prices are too high. I don’t get enough coaching. I don’t get enough training. And it goes on and on. So these people will never be successful in life because the external locus of control people are only successful when the external environment is perfect. Good luck with that. Jenn DeWall: Right. And I’m wondering, is there ever, yeah, so there’s never an endpoint for that where all of a sudden everything is there. Perfection. Perfect. We’ve got it. So there’s just if you find yourself in that position and some of you, this has to be an honest thing. I have to be honest. I know in my twenties, I was far more ego and did not have well-developed emotional intelligence skills, which meant that I was probably that person to some extent, and I’m not proud of it, but to those that are listening, just remind yourself if you are that person, you know, give yourself permission to change. How do you really want to show up? So this brings us to another question because you’ve already given us so many nuggets, Colleen. I am just loving this conversation, but what tips would you have to strengthen your emotional intelligence in sales at work? And again, for the people that may have identified, maybe see themselves as being a little bit of the victim or being a little bit more of the complainer, this is your opportunity to change. Colleen is going to give you insights into that. How to Stop Having a Victim Mentality Colleen Stanley: Well, I would say there’s probably three steps. The first step is this make a decision. Make a decision because you know, when you look in life where you first change is not studying and not learning, right, you make a decision. I am going to change. And at that point, you will start looking for the resources. You will start looking for friends and colleagues that can help you. Now, when you get into the actual skills, the mega skill for developing all of the emotional intelligence skills is self-awareness. So in the words of Socrates, know-thyself, because that what you’re not aware of, you cannot change. And that which you’re not aware of, you’re bound to repeat. Now, the number one way that emotional self-awareness is developed is through quiet time, reflection meditation. And so one of the things we coach all of our teams on is when you get up in the morning, don’t grab that little adult binky called the cell phone or checking text emails because then your brain implodes. And even if it’s nothing warranting immediate attention, your mind is often running. Carve out five minutes, start with five minutes, and reflect. And the reflection might be, how do I want to show up today? Where will I be challenged to bring my best self? Your reflection might be looking over the previous day. How did I show up? Was I the trigger that caused an emotional response? Someone else, once I fully present in all my conversations. Now I have evolved this practice to almost 45 minutes in the morning. So I generally read something spiritual positive. And then I meditate for about 20 minutes. Because for me, this is like, and this isn’t my original thought. I read it in a book somewhere. It’s like taking a shower. You know, I’m going to take your shower every day. Luckily I live here in the States, but I am going to get my mind fresh and ready to go. So check in with yourself before you check into the rest of the world, and you’re going to show up better and be better. Jenn DeWall: I really liked that you equated the cell phone to our binky because I even sat there. This, I sat this morning, and I, I really actually had the thought because I, I was just messing around on my phone. Right. I go through the news. I go through my email, but it’s not necessarily, I would say intentional, I know that I’m going to do something. It’s more of a passive like, Oh, what’s going on today? And I was thinking, what did I do twenty years ago? What did I do when we didn’t have cell phones? I, my alarm went off, and I got up out of bed. I didn’t just sit in bed. And I’m glad that you bring that up because that again is that’s our emotional intelligence. That’s our self-awareness and bringing it as a type of daily habit building in your self-awareness time. That’s when you’re flexing that emotional intelligence muscle. That’s a great piece of feedback. Colleen Stanley: And it’s a habit. And initially, you know, I have friends that still say, I just can’t sit for 15 minutes. I can’t sit for 20. Well, I couldn’t either when I was starting the reflection. It’s like anything. A habit is what you do repeatedly. So, and if you choose to study at which I have, then guess what? All of a sudden, five minutes turns into 10, 10 may turn into 15. And it depends on your schedule. You know, small children can make a difference, a sick child to make a difference, maybe something going on at work. But I promise you, you all have five minutes to check in with yourself. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I think I want to start that tomorrow. Like I have extra space. I could probably just use that as my self-awareness space of checking in. So starting with self-awareness, how, where do you think people get it wrong? Or like, what are the mistakes or things that they need to avoid? The Dunning-Kruger Effect Colleen Stanley: Well, sometimes, we need help. And with self-awareness is you do have blind spots, right? And there’s another body of work out there called the Dunning-Kruger effect. And so this is the research basically as summed up this way, we all think we do better than we do. We think we’re better drivers. We think we’re better conversationalists. We think we’re better friends. So one of the first places you might want to reach out to as far as just maybe some reflection if you desire to be a better leader, right? A better salesperson, better sales manager, reach out to three trusted friends that you know have your back. And what I mean by that, when they give you feedback, it’s not going to be full of I gotcha, I’m superior. They truly want you to be better because then they may point out some things that you’re not even aware of. And then those can be the things that you can sit and reflect on, start visualizing yourself being that type of person. So for me, I have had to do a lot of visualization thinking on patience because I’m not a patient person. I had to do a lot of thinking, reflecting on my temperament because I can go from zero to a hundred. And all of a sudden, the person that’s written a book on emotional intelligence is acting really like a big jerk. So I had to become aware of, okay, what triggers me that brings out the jerk in me and then makes me say or do something that I regret, and sometimes you can’t mend. So I would say simply where did you get triggered? Was I the trigger? And then look for those outside colleagues that can point out some blind spots to you in a loving way. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. And I think that’s so important because I, too, was laughing during that because I think my husband, if he was listening to this, would say, that’s exactly what my wife needs to work on. She needs to be more patient. She needs to do that. But I think, you know, really thinking about it in terms of before you hit that point of no return or before you can’t mend it, I even a few weeks ago, went out to dinner with some girlfriends, and it was just three of us, and we wanted to eat outside, but because of the pandemic, they won’t see you outside until you have your full party was there. And my friend was over a half-hour late. And in my head, I knew I had that leadership perspective of, okay, like, it’s okay, that she’s late. It’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. Cause my trigger is lateness. Colleen Stanley: Me too! That, that must be a Midwest thing. Know Your Triggers Jenn DeWall: And, of course, when she showed up a half-hour late, I was such a jerk. I honestly, admittedly was such a jerk, and I was like, Steph, come on. And then I just felt horrible. And I, of course, apologize to her profusely. I apologize to her, you know, a few days later because I know that’s not how I want to show up. But I think again, just reminding ourselves that we’ve got to continue to work on our triggers, time will always be a trigger for me. I don’t have to be a jerk just because of that. I don’t have to be responsive to it just because it’s my trigger. I get to choose that. How in the heck did you get to like calm down and be like, okay, all right, I’m not going to go there. Like, what are some of the things that maybe you, that help you in addition to doing the self-awareness? Is there, are there any other tricks that you’ve done? Colleen Stanley: Well, one of the things, when you’re triggered, is actually what I call the neural science of emotion management, and do know it’s an actual physiological response that your body is sending you into. So when your friend is late, you start telling yourself a story, and the story might be, you know what? My time is just as important as hers. I don’t know who she thinks she is. You know, she’s always late. She doesn’t respect us—what a moron. I don’t care what the story, but that story triggers your reptilian brain. And at that point, that is the part of your brain that doesn’t have sound judgment, problem-solving logical, rational reasoning. So you’ve just, you’ve got to move it out of there. So the first one is recognizing when you’re getting triggered. So for me, it starts happening right here. I can feel it right there, and I have to pause. And then there’s a couple of tools you can use. One is simply to state the emotion you’re feeling. I’m feeling disrespected. Now you don’t stay there and ruminate cause that gets you more upset. I’m feeling disrespected by stating the emotion you’re feeling. It’ll move that thinking to the prefrontal cortex, where you can start applying logic, rational reasoning. And what you might’ve done in this case is say, okay, this will be the time to have the conversation. But at this is a friend of yours that’s consistently late. You have a couple of choices. Number one, you give her a false deadline. There are they just I don’t know what it is. You give them a false deadline. And then you know that they’re going to show up at the appropriate time. You might tell yourself a different story. I hope she didn’t get in an accident or Wow, this is unlike her to be late. So then you start applying empathy and compassion. So if you can get yourself to the logical, you could either start making some decisions. This isn’t a good time to address, but I will use my assertiveness next week to call her again. Habitual lateness starts becoming a decision. And frankly, I’ve had some people that I quit trying to meet them for things or set the half-hour or even 45 minutes early and had them waiting for me. So there’s some in that, not to be passive-aggressive, but just that’s how late they were. So it’s some decisions to make there, but you can make them from a logical, rational point of view. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And that’s so important to think about when you are triggered at the moment. Because I, I can go back to my twenties and when maybe I felt like a dig at work, or I felt like I was not enough, whatever, that was, how, you know, anytime that someone was maybe because I’m a perfectionist by trade, right? So anytime that someone maybe had a better idea or was perceived as smarter than me, then that was a trigger. And so then I just started to question my worth. I also started to live in that place of competition, but what do they have versus me? And I mean, again, I’m not proud of any of this, but I really liked the approach of understanding that you’re triggered. It’s okay to be triggered, but we’ve got to shift that to a logical thought process because you’re also going to feel that emotional hangover that comes from responding poorly. Right. And no one wants to feel that way. I don’t want to feel crappy because I didn’t say something kind to someone. That’s not a good way to spend my time or energy. Beware of Falling into Judgement Colleen Stanley: Yes, yes. And, you know, I, I think what’s important is none of us like to be judged. And yet, I know for myself, I can fall into judgment very quickly. So judgment then can set whether you say anything or not. They know you’ve got an opinion about what was just said, done, not done. And so one of the things is to become aware of when you’re judging for me, I judge people in areas where I’m strong, and they’re not as strong. And that can actually be a form of arrogance. Right? And so for both of us, we’re probably pretty good at time management. We were lucky. We either had it modeled or taught whatever that gift was. I have seen people in life that are just lousy at organization, and they could attend every time management course in the world. So that’s where sometimes watch the judgment, and it put in maybe other boundaries, which are going to be acceptable to you. So again, when I find myself walking into judgment, I just then turned to the what’s the story I’m telling myself, is there a new story now, remember for everybody listening today, this does not mean you “let people off the hook.” See, that’s the biggest worry people have when you’re talking about emotion management and empathy. But what it does mean is when you’re going to have the crucial, I guess, you know, the crucial, crucial coaching conversations, sales conversation, you can have it in a manner that you can very much set expectations. You can state your observations of what you’ve been seeing or not seeing. You can be assertive, and you can apply empathy. So you can use a nice combination of hard skills and soft skills, but you still lay out the expectations, and you can layout consequences. So remember the soft skills don’t mean that you do not set expectations of how you expect to be treated. How you expect someone to perform at work is just that you’re able to deliver it in a manner that you feel good about it afterward. And they feel good. Even if initially, when somebody is receiving feedback, nobody really likes that. They all say they do. They don’t. We all have that ego that that gets in the way. But somebody that’s self-aware 30 minutes an hour later, they’ll say, you know what? Jenn was right. And those are the people you want on your team. The excuse-makers that literally never hear anything you say, even if you deliberate it brilliantly, that’s when you’ve got to make a decision as a sales leader or a leader, is this the person that I need on my team, that’s going to help us win the future. Jenn DeWall: I think that’s really great, like an important point. You’re not just letting people off the hook by handling it in a more productive way. Right. We think, well, if we’re not as firm and aggressive, then they’re not getting the point. They get the point. Like you can address it through boundaries and expectations. Colleen Stanley: Right. And you know, I think I think Stephen Covey was the person that said I was started using the analogy of building a- you’ve got a relationship bank account. So as a good sales leader, if you put a lot of deposits into somebody’s account, but now it’s time to have the coaching conversation. Because even with good people, you are going to have to have some type of anybody in a friendship, marriage long-term relationship. You’ve had those conversations. And so I remember when I was back in corporate, and I mean you and I sound very similar. I mean, I’m 30, I’m a bull in a China shop, but I will tell you, as a worker, my intuition was generally right. And so I think I was lucky to have these mentors and bosses that probably got behind closed doors and went, okay, who’s going to talk to her this week? Right. And my boss and mentor, I remember going in for my yearly review, we had had a great year. I think we’d had 30% growth. I’m thinking easy peasy. And it was the toughest review I’ve ever received because Kline Boyd was a man that modeled treat others the way you want to be treated. And so what he had noted in my thirties being this hard-charging, hard-working, love the company. He said, Colleen, you’re coming into the office every morning. I never doubt your work ethic. You’re in here early. But I got to tell you. You don’t look left. You don’t look right. When you go to the restroom, you don’t say hi to anyone. That’s got to stop. And I’m like, what do you mean? I am giving my blood for this company. But what he was pointing out is I was becoming very task-oriented and not people-oriented. And that wasn’t working for him regardless of the results I was bringing in. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, you and I are really like. I think of the conversation where I had a boss at the time. And Dave is like, Jenn, your passion- unbeatable, your drive- unbeatable. But you’ve got, and they were like, you’ve got to calm it down. Cause I would be so emotionally responsive to things. So if, if I was frustrated, there was no doubt that you could tell that I was frustrated. And you know, it’s understanding the power, like understanding the power for good. I know that we don’t have a lot of time, and I do really want to hit on this important topic because you are in the sales space, and you are in emotional intelligence, and we’re all in the middle of a pandemic. How do we even begin to navigate this? Because it’s seeming more and more likely that we’re going to be navigating this for a little bit longer than maybe what we anticipated. So how can you navigate sales and emotional intelligence in the face of the pandemic? Sales Leadership Requires an Internal Locus of Control Colleen Stanley: So for sales leaders and leaders, I would say, let’s talk about two tools. One, I mentioned already locus of control. Because even for a highly optimistic person, you can start listening to the news, social media, your peers. This is never going to get better. This is never going to go away. And so what I suggest to people focus on what you can control. So in our business, we had to flip a lot of it, almost all of it to a virtual instructor-led, but we can control how good we do that. We practiced on it. We bought and purchased the equipment. I’ve hired a couple of coaches to become very good. I can control that piece. I can’t control when the pandemic is going to be over. I can control doing more activity, better activity. I can control practicing more, getting better at my craft. So locus of control is focusing on what you can control versus what you can’t control. I would say the second thing, get some sleep, people. What I’m finding is, and I don’t think people recognize that for you to bring a, you know, just a really productive salesperson or sales leader. I am much better when I am rested. And this goes back to neuroscience. A rested brain can think clearly. A rested brain is creative. And you know, if you’re going to make it and succeed through the pandemic, it takes clarity. It takes creativity. How do we do this? How do we do it better? How do we do it differently? And then the other thing is I would say in building that resiliency muscle, go back to self-awareness and watch the self-talk. Because out of the world of positive psychology, it’s easy for us to forget. The pandemic is temporary. This is not permanent. And so I- Paul Stoltz wrote a book and actually talked about it in my book here. So I want to give him some credit. It’s called The Adversity Quotient. And he talks about temporary versus permanent. So let’s say the pandemic was permanent. Now it’s not going to be then what could you control about that? The attitude, how I go about life? What do I need to do differently? So watch your self-talk because temporary means this too will pass. Permanent thinking is that’s what gets people depressed? And frankly, starts really making them incapable of taking the right actions and doing the right things. So those would be three tips I’d give. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, those are great tips. I mean, I love, I especially love that last one because I think recognizing every single day that we have a choice, we have a choice in our thoughts. We have a choice in our actions, and our sleep, and how we communicate with people. And even if we do have a misstep, we can always make a different choice. Recognizing that choices are always there. That’s the one thing that, you know, we can control. You just hit on so many great, valuable things. Colleen Stanley: And this was a coaching tip that leaders, sales leaders. So leaders, in general, is what part of this do you need to own? When something is not going the right way, easy to slip into the blame game. What part of this do you need to own? Because see, when people lack ownership, that’s when they move into learned helplessness, blame, excuses, and nothing changes there. So what do you need to own? What can you do to change, improve? What’s good about this, change your coaching question, and you’ll get people to change their focus, their perspective, and then the ensuing actions they take. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Yes! Okay. Oh my gosh, Coleen. I don’t want this to end, but unfortunately, I know it has to. I want to keep talking to you about this, but I’m going to wrap up with our closing question that we always ask everyone, which is, what is your leadership habit for success? Colleen Stanley: Well, I think everyone just heard it throughout,  and mine is carving out that quiet time. So I would say it’s carving out the quiet time, getting enough sleep, and I get outdoors in nature and exercise. So yes, I do a ton of reading on sales, sales, leadership, psychology, but I will tell you if I if physiologically and mentally, I’m not showing up in the right way to the game, none of that great knowledge I’m learning can be applied, taught or shared. Jenn DeWall: Gosh, that’s a great closing insight, Colleen. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, your experience, all the research that you’ve done. You know, is investing in your craft. Thank you so much for bringing that to our audience. It was such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Colleen Stanley: Thank you, Jenn. You’ve been a great host, as always. Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of the leadership habit podcast. If you enjoy Colleen, go out and get her book, Emotional Intelligence for Sales Success, or Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership. Of course, you can contact her at her website SalesLeadershipDevelopment.com. If you enjoyed this, go ahead and send that over to your friend. Share it on LinkedIn. We want to help the world be better leaders. And of course, don’t forget to write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for tuning in. We’re grateful for you. Have a great day.   The post Episode 49: Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership with Colleen Stanley appeared first on Crestcom International.

Achieve Your Goals Using the Success Formula with Executive Coach, Andy Fell Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone, it is Jenn DeWall. Thank you so much for tuning into The Leadership Habit podcast. This week, I sat down with Andy Fell, and what a great inspiring conversation it was. Andy is the founder of GiFT631, a virtual and face-to-face coaching and development business that helps people become the best version of themselves! Who doesn’t need that? He also works with executives and senior leaders to create high performing teams and build winning cultures. Other projects include his #whatwinnersdo events brand and FutureYou membership site. Prior to GiFT631, Andy spent almost 30 years in financial services in both the UK and Australia. His passion is empowering people to aim high and think big, and have fun. Well, it’s making a massive difference to customers, communities and the organization. Andy led teams of 2000 people and delivered an annual revenue target in excess of 2 billion AUD! Wow, Holy cow! That is a lot of responsibility and a lot of success. This is absolutely someone I want to learn from. Andy is married to Leona and has four amazing children. He loves to run, read, journal, travel, and meditate. His motto is to do what you love and love what you do. Enjoy our inspiring conversation about how we can up-level our performance and become more inspired and motivated every single day. Meet Andy Fell, Founder of GiFT631 Jenn DeWall: Welcome! On this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, I am talking with Andy Fell, who is actually joining us from across the pond. So I am here in Denver, Colorado, but he is in Australia. And Andy is the founder of an organization called GiFT631, which, Oh my gosh, I don’t even want to try to take away what the meaning of this organization is. And I think it’s so much better if you hear it from Andy himself. So Andy, could you just go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience and talk a little bit about the origin and what you do every single day to help make everyone live a better life, live a more confident life, be better leaders because you’re making waves. So yes, please go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience. Andy Fell: Well, thanks, Jenn! It is absolutely amazing to be joining you today. And like I say, I founded a business called GiFT631about three years ago, and I spent 30 years in financial services. Before that, I spent 20 years in the United Kingdom working for the Royal bank, Scotland, the National Westminster Bank. And I just had this love of running big people-centric divisions of the bank. So, you know, branch networks, contact centers. And that was my real passion. My passion was helping every single person in my organization become a better version of themselves on a continual basis. And then the GFC came along, and I was made redundant along with many, many other thousands of people, but I’m a huge believer that there’s an opportunity in absolutely everything. And on the back of that, I relocated about 11 years ago down here to Australia, initially only planning to come here for two years to work for a bank and then go to Singapore for a couple of years and then go back to the UK. Anyway, 11 years later, we’re still here. We’re citizens. It’s the most beautiful, amazing part of the world and very, very happy. And, but I turned 50, and I was out in Bali with myself, my amazing wife, Fiona, our three girls, and our best friends and their three boys. And, and I’ve been thinking about, you know, how I wanted to spend the rest of my life. And I worked on my 50th birthday, and this was the day that changed my life and actually where it GiFT631 was first founded, which I’ll come to. And my wife and I had gone for a walk down the beach and watched we were out my eldest daughter, Emma had done one of the most beautiful things that anyone had ever done for me. When we got back, she had put 50 photos from 50 different moments in my life around the living area, and between each one was a speech card, and each speech card was written by somebody who was there. The Richard Branson Test Andy Fell: So everyone had written a few, and they all started. I love Andy because, and I’m going around and I’m, and I’m reading the speech cards, and I’m looking at these photos, and I’ve got tears in my eyes. This was just an absolutely amazing thing to do. And I made a couple of decisions. The first decision I decided I’d achieve more in the next 25 years of my life than in the previous 50. The second decision I made was I took what I call this a Richard Branson test. And Branson says, you’re 90 years old. You’re sitting outside your house. You’re looking back on your life. What do you want to be saying to yourself? Do you want to be saying to yourself, well, I could do this. I should do this. I wish I’d done that. If only I’ve done the other, or do you want me to say to yourself, well, I didn’t get everything right, but at least I gave everything my best shot. And at that moment, I decided I was going to pass the Sir Richard Branson test. It was time to leave financial services, and it was time to set up my business. So one of the things I believe, Jenn, is every single day I have an appointment with Mozart and the story goes, I don’t even know if this is, this is a true story, but I heard this story a long, long time ago. And I was like, wow, I’m doing this. And the story goes like this, that Mozart used to suffer apparently from composers cramp. And the way he used to overcome this composer’s cramp is he’d go out on his own, away from everybody and away from everything. And he’d go out into this beautiful forest in the middle of these middle European estates. And when he was on his own, isolated from the world smelling the trees and watching the deers and the squirrels and listening to the birds. That’s when he started to compose his music again in his mind. And I was like, wow, I was a really young manager at the time. I was, I was struggling a little bit. I could never get any time to myself. And I just put an appointment in my diary with Mozart time for myself, by myself, with myself, no interruption, no disruption, no technology, just me, my journal, and my thoughts. And I’ve carried that through my whole life and career. So on the back of, you know, the decision I made on my 50th birthday, I sat there with my journal, and I started to think about my business. And the first person that came to my mind was my grandfather. He was my first-grade teacher, and he was a servant in a big country house in England. And he left school at 12. He actually started by living in the stables with the horses. He was a stable boy, and then he got promoted to be the butler’s assistant. And he lived in this big, big country house. And when my grandmother passed away, he used to come to this house that I lived in, which was called 631 Kenworth road. And so, GiFT631. So he would come to 631, and like I said, he was my first-grade teacher. He taught me to live life with gratitude, to live life with a servant’s heart, to always put good out into the universe. Never worry if you get it back. He says, always do people a good turn, always be very respectful. And he taught me relationships are the foundation of everything. I believe we absolutely need to be very, you know, across technology and embrace and use technology. But I’m also a fundamental believer in the power of relationships. The only practical thing he ever taught me never to make a decision when you’re tired. He used to say things will always look better in the morning. And you know, for my clients, I would extend that to emails, never send an email when you’re tired, you know, stick it in your draft box, have a look at it in the morning when you’re feeling fresh. And it’s amazing how much work that will, that will save you. I’ve seen so many people who send it a tired email, just trying to clean up their inbox at the end of the day, and it’s misunderstood. And it just creates this huge amount of extra work. So I’m there. I’m thinking about my business, and I’m thinking about my granddad and my parents, and I just thought I want my parents, my grandfather’s legacy to live on in the name of, in the name of my business in terms of GiFT631- Well, really those are four things that I really stand for in terms of my business. The “G” stands for growth- personal team and business. The “I” stands for inspiration, helping people get out of their comfort zone. Life begins at the edge of our comfort zone and stretches further than they think they’re capable of stretching in the direction of their true potential. The F stands for the fulfillment, you know, at the end of the day, are we doing what we’re doing? You know, we, we need, we need happiness. We need fulfillment. We need true wealth in every sense. And then T for Transformation, personal team, and business transformation. Hence you get, GiFT631. You Can Change Your Goals at Any Age Jenn DeWall: That is such a powerful business name in just knowing that the work that you do around helping organizations or individual leaders achieve that growth, inspiration, fulfillment, transformation are all things that we all need. The world could be a better place, but I want to back up, you made a career pivot at the age of 50. And I think that there might be some people that think, I don’t know, I’m 50, I guess I better stick with this now because I committed X amount of years. How were you able to do that? I just think that’s— I want to bring that forward because there could be someone listening to this that might be contemplating the exact same thing, like making that shift into something, you know, that it’s kind of new land to some extent it wasn’t, it’s outside of financial services directly. How did you do that? Andy Fell: Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question, Jenn. To me, what holds most people back is a lack of belief, a lack of confidence, sometimes a lack of self-esteem. And I believe that once you have an unshakeable level of self-belief, then you realize that anything is possible, and each and every day, each and every one of us will have this conversation going on between that inner critic, and in a coach, our inner critic is driven by our doubts, by our fears. And that’s our negative self-talk. But our inner coach is driven by our dreams, our goals, our aspirations, and what I’ve recognized is the gap between me and future me. There’s this river of self-doubt, and that feeds the inner critic. And some days it flows gently, and some days it flows like a torrent. For example, lots of people around the world, unfortunately losing their jobs. So their river of self-doubt has got wider, but it’s also flowing faster. And in that river, there’s a there are bull sharks. There are piranhas, there are crocodiles, and alligators, depending on where you look around the world. And these are people who’ve given up on their dreams and that people with a negative mindset, you know, poor old me, life’s not fair. They live by excuses, or they’ve got a cynical attitude. You know, it’s easier for them. We’ve tried that before. It won’t work for me. If I see someone achieving great things, they’re either lucky— or if some somehow worked out, maybe they are favored by the boss, or they worked out how to get around the system. And then there’s the majority who are spectators. And these are people who lack courage. They procrastinate. They overthink. I always think about the downside, not the upside. They always think about what’s the worst that can happen. Not what’s the best that can happen. And I knew at 50, I’ve got a choice. I knew where I wanted to be, which is the founder of GiFT631, but I knew there was this river of self-doubt. And I knew there were tons of people who would tell me this is crazy. Why don’t you just hang on? How can you hang on, hang on for ten years until you’re 60, you can retire. That’s an enormous part of my life. So I can either jump in there and try and swim my way through, or I can build a bridge. And so what I do every single day, I build a bridge of self-belief, and once you’ve built it, you’ve got to sustain it. And now I’ve dismissed my inner critic, and I’m between my inner coach and what LeBron James would call my inner champion. So which, which is because I’ve been able to build this level of self-belief, self-confidence, and self-esteem. And that gave me the courage to take the plunge, to leave the supposed security of financial services and set up my own business on a practical level, Jenn, you know, get very clear on your purpose, get very clear on your business plan, get very clear on the problems that you solve for other people. But then you’ve got to bring the passion, the patience, the perseverance. You’ve got to push negative people as far out of your life as you possibly can. Trent Shelton—  the ex-NFL guy speaker in the States. I meditate every single day using the format. And there’s a piece of it called the spark. And there’s a nine-minute meditation that Trent does talking about loving people from a distance, which is just brilliant. You’ve got to push- however supposedly close to you they are- push all negative influences as far away from you as possibly can. And surround yourself with a winning circle of people that challenge you and stretch you. They’ll be the wind beneath your wings. They’ll lift you up. They’ll genuinely support you. And that’s how I was able to pivot from serious pivot from 30 years in banking to, you know, founding and setting it my own entrepreneurial world. And it’s an amazing world to be living in. Fueling Growth with Coaching Jenn DeWall: It is! But I don’t know if you got the same thing that I did- and I love your story and how it came to be. Even just reminding ourselves that whatever we do or do not do is a result of our own view of our self-worth or our confidence. But I know when I entered the coaching space, X amount of years ago, people initially looked at me like, you’re going to do, what? What is coaching? Why are you doing that? And it felt like, I think they thought I was trying to paint the world in rainbows, and that’s not what coaching is. You know, that from, you know, working with them. But I’m curious if you got that kind of feedback, like, what are you going to do? Looking at you, a little bit puzzled. Like, I haven’t seen that or heard that before. Andy Fell: Yeah, it’s really interesting. I think I was very, very passionate when I got hired for my role in Australia. The guy that hired me, fantastic guy, he said to me, so what are you going to bring? If I’m going to bring you from one side of the world to the other, what are you going to bring to the business that I run? And I said, well, one of the first things I’m going to bring is that we’re going to be world-famous for coaching. And he kind of looked at me, and I said, Jason, the vast majority of corporate leaders that I see, and I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked for, we play at the word coaching. And I say, I’m going to make sure that starting with myself, that every leader in my business has an enhanced level of coaching from their start point. I said, I truly believe if we get that right then, that’s how we’ll fuel business growth. And it was like, wow, I’ve never heard anyone, anyone thinking or talking or acting like this before. I think it’s always been really ingrained within me. And I believe, you know, great leadership is, is about great communication, which is as much about listening as obviously is about, about talking. So I think, you know, I was always put forward by the organizations that I was working for to represent them at conferences. So I’ve fallen into a load of conference speaking. I’ve always been passionate about people, culture, and coaching. So for me, it was more, you’re going to give up the financial security at this age, you know? I’ve got four kids. I’ve also got a son from my first marriage in England. My wife is self-employed; you’re going to give all that to go and do this. I was like, yeah, absolutely. I am most passionate about this. And I will pass the Sir Richard Branson test, and I need to do it. And I knew if I didn’t do it at 50, if I waited till I was 55, 57, 59, there’s a less and less chance of it actually happening. The Formula for Success = G + M + A x D Jenn DeWall: Why wait? Well, and you help your clients with what you call the success formula. And I’m so excited to be able to bring that forward to the Crestcom audience because it sounds like you clearly, you know, have that you have the confidence and the belief that why not now, and also knowing that organizations need to put an emphasis on how they’re leading their people, building their people up. So I’m curious, what is the success formula that you use within your organization? Set Bigger Goals Andy Fell: Yeah, sure. So the success formula goes like this success =  G + M + A x D, so the G is goals. And when I was in the bank, most of the training courses I went on, you know, they would teach you about SMART goals, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. I hate that. I love specific. I love measurable, love time-bound, a goal without a deadline is a wish. But I want people to set unachievable, unrealistic goals. And when I was working with an organization in England, I used to call them un-smart goals. Actually, we love the thinking, Andy, but we hate the term. So they renamed it SMUT goals, which is very easy to remember. Because Michael Angelo once said the danger for most of us is not that we set the bar so high and we miss it, it is that we set the bar so low and we hit it. So I really encourage people to set really big goals. And then Jenn, if you take 631, and you reverse it, you get 136, and this is critical— all my work is simple, practical, actionable, clear, and based on experience space. That’s how I define my work. Simple, practical, actionable, clear. And experience-based, so if you reverse 631, you get 136. So the 1 is the really big SMUT goal. Or, as Jim Collins would say, the BHAG. I then break it down into three milestone or sub-goals and are then break it down again into the six next best actions. And all I need to do is focus on the action level because for you and I and everyone else, the analytical side of our brain, the logical side, if you set a massive goal, the logical side of your brain is going, how do I achieve that? How do I achieve that? And there, you don’t know how you’re going to achieve it. So it starts to reduce the size of the goal until it’s just outside your comfort zone. And actually, whether you hit it or not, it doesn’t really change your life. So the only way you can keep it out there is almost set and forget the really big goal and come down to the action level because the brain can deal with that. And I know every time I achieve an action or replace the action, every time I achieve the sub-goal, I replace the sub-goal. So I do a lot of work around goals. And then all of the basics of I write my goals down every day, you know, I share my goals publicly, I create two levels of accountability. I create visual representations of visualize. So all of the practical steps around what great goal achievers do is part of the work. Have the Right Mindest Andy Fell: So that’s the G. The M is the bit in the middle. That’s the Mindset. And I think 80 to 90% of the vast success as we’ve been discussing is what is going on between areas, this conversation. It’s what our self-talk is all about. So I bombard my subconscious mind on a daily basis with affirmation, visualization, manifestation, and the people I surround myself with. Like I was saying, you know, pushing the negatives out, creating this incredible winning circle as Jim Rohn would say, we are the sum of the five or six people, but then I have a really well-developed morning routine. And I will share that and not the time to go into all of my winning habits and routines, but I’ll share this. And this is something that your colleague Manny Martinez, he’s a fanatic about the 4M routine. So on my 50th birthday, as well as the amazing experience that Emma did with the pictures and the, and the speech cardshttps://crestcom.com/blog/2019/11/08/episode-13-multi-generational-leadership-featuring-manny-martinez-gen-xer/ Leona, she gave me a couple of books. One was On Fire by John O’Leary, and I loved it. And yeah, John comes from the same place as my grandfather. She also gave me The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. And Hal’s got a really well-established routine each and every morning called the SAVERS routine: Silence, Affirmation, Visualization, Exercise, Reading, Scribing. I’d all of those things on a daily basis that influenced my mindset, but I don’t do them all in the morning. So I one of my mantras is to look at what successful people do. Success leaves clues. I learn what they do, either copy it, or I adapt it. And then I add my own 10% winning edge. I learn, I copy. I add my 10% winning edge. So I learned from Hal, and I adapted the SAVERS routine into my 4M routine. And it’s now the format, which I’ll give you the full thing. Jenn DeWall: Can I just ask, how do you stay disciplined? You know, one of the struggles that I have it’s I think some days are better than others and being able to do it. I’m curious, how do you stay disciplined and motivated? I love the, you know, all the different things that you do every single day that help aid to your success. What’s your trick for discipline and commitment? How do you do it? Reach Your Goals with the 4 Ms Andy Fell: Yeah, that’s, that’s a brilliant question what I realized without actually knowing it until I listened to-, so I do some self-development every day. Normally when I’m, when I’m exercising on my treadmill, and I was listening to Atomic Habits by James Clear, and what I realized is what I’ve been doing is habit stacking. And my morning routine gets me into that ideal performance state, and one activity leads to the next. And it’s just become an ingrained habit. Or then have a 60-second state change that I use during the day. And then I’ll have a debrief process at the end of the day. But I’ll give you the morning routine because I’ve achieved so much by the time I actually— I don’t touch my inbox, by the way. Until I’ve done this morning routine, I don’t get caught up in meetings. And it goes like this. I start every day with some movement, and a healthy body is a healthy mind. Stimulate the body, stimulate the mind. Many of my clients will say to me I’m not a swimmer. I’m not a runner. I’m not a cyclist. I’m not a gym junkie. I’ll say, that’s cool. Just move, move the body, stimulate the mind, you know, go for a walk. It’s great. If you’ve got a dog, even if you’ve got young kids, put them in the buggy and push them out to the park, you know, 20 minutes, 20 minutes of movement. Fantastic. Then I do what I call a mind, cleanse our brainstorming, hold four thoughts at any one time. So I literally dump everything. That’s in my brain down into my journal, the critical thing. It’s not a things-to-do list because your things-to-do list will have a ton of low-value activity. So I get everything done; it’s not just to do with business. It’s just life— dentists, restaurants when we can, holidays, whatever it might be. But I start at things that are most important. And my commitment to myself, my discipline is around the things that I’ve starred. I have to do those each day. Then I meditate. That’s my third M, so I Move, I Mind-cleanse, I Meditate. I can’t meditate unless I mind-cleanse because I sit there doing this meditation thinking I’ve got to do this, but I’ve got to do this because I’ve got to do this today. Because I’ve captured everything, my mind is clear, and meditation, transformational practice. You know, it’s really helped me. The more pressure I’m under, the more I exercise, the more I meditate. And then I have my appointment with Mozart. That’s my four M’s. Don’t Forget to Say Thank You Andy Fell: And it’s a combination of practical, but most of the time gives me time to think, how do I become a better leader? How do I become a better coach? How do I build a better business? How do I create more relationships? How do I become a better father? How do I become a better husband? Whatever it might be, how do I achieve my goals? How do I set more goals, whatever it might be? So it gets me upper level, and then I’ve added on an A, and a T. So the A is appreciation- when I was in corporate 15 minutes a day, Jenn, every single day in my diary, 15 minutes a day to say, thank you. And you know, an early boss I worked for, it was one of his mantras. He used to say to me, Andy, every leader can spend 15 minutes a day saying, thank you. And I know what gets in my diary gets done. So I, I, when I was in the back, I saw no appointments before 10, o’clock doing all this routine. Andy Fell: And now, but I ended it with 15 minutes of praise, recognition, and celebration. I wrote more handwritten cards than I believe the other 79 general managers of the Westpac group put together. So now I do a quick appreciation of somebody. And then the other book I absolutely love and recommend is Gary Keller’s One Thing., Man, I’ve listened to that four or five times, you know. And I then I’ve done my 4 M’s, and then I added an act of appreciation or gratitude. Then I lock in my diary, my one thing time. And that’s where I complete either the things I’ve starred- or the most important activity I have to do that day. You know, because we all need free space in our diary. And I see way too many times when I start working with them. They’re just doing all that. They’re not thinking as a Mozart time, and they’re not focused on the things that matter most. So that’s my morning routine. That’s what, that’s a discipline, that’s a habit. And one just leads to the other, and it just flows. You know, Jenn DeWall: I love the four blessed that I’m just thinking about how we can offer. I love the tip of like the last 15 minutes of your day. Think about how much better your commute would be. I know right now it’s remote, but if we ended our workdays with just thinking about who made our day better or did something great and thanked them, I feel like I would have a much better conversation with, you know, my husband when I get home or my friend on the phone, if I was giving them a call on my way back, I love that piece of just really protecting that, that final 15 minutes to give thanks. That’s a beautiful thing. Yeah. Wherever you are—Be “All In” Andy Fell: Yeah. And it’s so important. And you’ve hit on a really, really important thing. Now, whether people are remote working or whether people start to get back to office working, you need to have that transition from work to home. And for me, it’s, it’s debriefing on the best things that have happened that day. When I was at the bank, I mean, I was living in Sydney at the time, living in the most beautiful, there’s different. If you’re in San Fran, you might say, well, actually, we’ve got the most— or Vancouver. You might argue, we’ve got the most amazing oceanfront, but Sydney is pretty special. Right. And I used to get the ferry. I used to get off the ferry, and I had a 15 minute walk time. So, you know, I’ve done my, my, my praise, my recognition, my celebration. And in those 15 minutes, I’ll be thinking about the best things that happened that day. If there was anything I needed to complete, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t go into the house until I’ve done it. So if there was one last call I had to make, or if there was one last email I had to send, I would stand outside the house until I’ve done it. So when I went in the house, I was ready for the next phase of my life, you know, to meet the owner, to meet the kids, to sell out to the dog, rather than I see too many people who they go through the door and they’re still trying to deal with calls. They’re still trying to send emails. They don’t do that very well, but also, the personal side of it isn’t anywhere near as good as it should be. And it’s about creating that almost that point of completion. And it’s the same, whether you’re working at home is to have something that signifies switching off work mode, switching a hundred percent into the other parts of life. And I would say, one of my mantras, Jenn, is “all in.” So if it’s home time, I’m all in. I’m all in with family. If it’s work time, I’m all in, you know, I’m completely present with whatever I’m doing. And I see people who jumble it up all of the time. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And they think that, Oh, I’m totally here. As I’m looking at my, my cell phone or trying to check an email, I, you know, Prioritize High-Value Activity Andy Fell: Yeah. I just, I just wanted to make sure I complete the success 4Ms. A’s action. No surprise, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, love him. You know – no one got muscles watching me work out. Another, you cannot climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pocket. But what I would say to everyone who watches this is divide it up. There’s high-value activity, and there’s low-value activity. I work really hard with my clients to reduce the amount of low-value activity that they get caught up in. Jenn DeWall: What’s an example that you see of low-value activity- I’m sorry to interrupt you. Andy Fell: So I have people that go to meetings with no purpose, no agenda, and not sure the value that they’re going to get and not sure the value they’re going to give. People who just spent hours and hours working on their inbox. People who go to steering committees with three or four of their colleagues. So all of this like salespeople who spend more time doing administration, doing sales reporting, just getting caught up in bureaucracy, as opposed to the things that really matter, setting up appointments to see clients, seeing clients, following up with the clients. It’s amazing how many salespeople spend less than 50% of their time selling or setting up appointments or following up appointments. And if you can switch that focus. So high-value action is anything that is directly related to the achievement of my SMUT goal. And then the D, and this is the biggest accelerator. Winners debrief more than the average. And every single thing I do of any significance, I debrief at the moment straight after I’ve done it. And if you do a significant activity repeatedly, imagine if you can just find the one or two percenters consistently over a three, six, nine, 12 month period, your growth and your performance is the compound effect of that is just phenomenal. Most people just “do” all day long. They’re on that hamster wheel, just running, running, running, running, running, running, running. And at the time I’ve got, I’ve only got two speeds in life. You know, I’m still, or I’m fast. There’s nothing in between. So when I go, I absolutely go. But you’ve got to have times when, when you, it’s not just the Mozart time. It’s the ability to be still and just reflect on what you’ve just done, what went well, what didn’t go so well, what questions resonated? What should I do differently? Even if it’s just stop, start, continue. And if you build in that deep debrief on all of your significant action, you will accelerate and accelerate really, really quickly. So that is the successful formula. Goals + Mindset + (High-Value) Action Jenn DeWall: I love the success formula. So goals- Andy Fell: Plus mindset plus action, but it’s high-value action that directly links to the achievement of the goals, times the debrief Jenn DeWall: And the debrief. I love that you bring that up because I was talking to a group of consultants. And one of the things that they had talked about is they didn’t really do lessons learned until the ultimate end of the project, which by that point in time, they’ve already started on the next project and everyone’s already going on the hamster wheel. And so I like the importance of adding in additional debriefs that we have to somehow trigger it. Hey, you’re taking action every day. Do we want to do it, you know, informed with your mistakes or data from yesterday? Are we just going to keep going until two months have passed? I think that’s such a great important point. Plan it, Do it, Review it Andy Fell: Yes, you’re so right. I mean, so at an individual level, at a team level, at a business level, if it gets done at all, it tends to get done way too late in the process. Yeah. One of my friends—a  guy called Richard Weston, and he worked in Formula 1 motor racing for it for a long time in his career. And he said in the Formula 1 motor racing teams that a very, very simple three-step process plan, what you’re going to do, do it and review it. And as a business consultant, he says, I get more and more concerned about the level of planning because people are just on the hamster wheel doing, doing, doing, but he says, I just don’t see anywhere near enough reviewing. And to your point, Jenn, when they do, it’s like way too late. Kind of we’ve launched. And the project is either delivering, or it’s not delivering. We need to have all of these little check-ins through the process Jenn DeWall: And take a cue from a Formula 1 racer. They have seconds to be able to execute that. And they’re going, I mean, I don’t know, they’re their top speed, but that’s what it’s like as an organization. We’re also just flying through trying to put out fires. And you can quickly go in the wrong direction! Andy Fell: I’m glad you picked up on that point because Richard said, yeah, he’s, he’s worked with many, many, many Formula 1 greats, and one of which was Michael Schumacher. And he said Michael Schumacher used to spend more time in the Ferrari garage with the engineers after a race that they’d won, rather than a race that they’d lost. Because he wanted to analyze the root cause of success, and that’s a really important point as well. When I do see people reviewing their activism behaviors, it’s when things have been a spectacular disaster. So they analyze the root cause of failure. So few people analyze, why was it so successful? What was it that we did that we can do more of next time? So analyzing the root cause of success is, in many senses, as important as are analyzing the root cause of failure. Jenn DeWall: Well, and I think that comes back to your mindset too. It’s I mean if we said, and look at our goals, like, well, during the debrief, “Well, you really missed the mark on that one, Jenn! You really failed.” How are you going to be able to find your confidence or find that energy to say, Hey, I want to set another unattainable goal if we don’t have that. And that’s also another thing I love your take on goals, but not smart goals, because I think that people are a little fatigued from, you know, smart goals is a great practice. It’s a great template, but I think in some way, yeah, it doesn’t necessarily encourage people to play big. And I just love your whole success formula because I think it’s, it’s really important for us to think beyond what a basic easy goal is that we could do. We have to think bigger. Is Fear of Judgement Holding You Back? Andy Fell: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And what I realized over the years was early in my career. I was all about external validation. I needed other people to tell me I was massively competitive in the early part of my career in Scotland. I was a sales leader, you know we won sales trophy after sales trophy, after sales trophy. And I needed that external validation from people that almost reinforced how good that I was because my level of self-confidence wasn’t like it is today. And you see it on social media. People are just desperate for likes and shares and comments. It’s external validation. And when that crosses over with internal validation, that’s when the magic can really happen. When you realize that the only person who can truly judge you in life is you, that’s when you’re willing and comfortable to go for massive goals, because what holds most people back in my view, Jenn, is not the fear of failure— It’s the fear of being judged. But when you realize the other person who can really judge you as you, then actually, what other people think about doesn’t matter, you know? And if they say, Oh, you failed, but that’s their perspective. You know? And I see so many people that, you know, they can both achieve a hundred of something. What sets a goal of 110 and extended by a crazy cause they get to 115, the other starting point is the same. They set a thousand, and they get to 600. I mean, that’s like nowhere near a thousand, but it’s way beyond if you’d set a smart goal of 110, and what would you rather have? Now I would live very, very comfortably in the fact I’ve achieved 600. And if people around me want to tell me that’s a failure, well, that’s cool. That’s their perspective. To be honest, I don’t really care. You know, they’re probably in that river of self-doubt. They’ve given up on their dreams, and they want to try and not me not be down for, you know, going where I know I’m surely capable of going. And I honestly believe that I’m at the start of my journey, and I’m, I’m 54. I believe anything is possible. The jersey on the wall behind me is a Shepherd Steelers ice hockey jersey. I’m not quite as successful as you know, the avalanche and the Canucks and all that, all those amazing NHL teams. The reason it’s on that wall. And I look at it every single day is because that was the first professional sports sponsorship that the Royal Bank of Scotland did. And that was my deal. And everyone in the organization said you will never get a deal done. We don’t do sports sponsorships. It won’t happen. Blah, blah, blah. I got the deal done. We made it happen. And I keep it on the wall to remind me that anything is possible. As long as you have a big goal, a powerful mindset, you take massive action, and you debrief to drive continuous learning and improvement. Set Bigger Goals Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, that what an inspiring close to this. And I love that you touched on external validation. I mean, I do want to ask you out of a personal thing. Where, you know what I see with external validation as we just pick that up during childhood, think that we need to continue it into adulthood and then it just drives the car for us, but there’s got to be the point that people recognize that it starts from, with it that you know, that mindset that you talk about, like what, how we see ourselves, how we see the value or even reframing how you look at your failures. If you did set that goal and got to 600, I’m curious, where do you see that starting with people? Because I think everyone probably has it. And they might be like, I, I do rely a lot on external validation, but I thought you had to because my boss needs to care or to like me. Andy Fell: Yeah. And I think it comes down to continuous self-development because it’s not just about the knowledge. It’s actually what it does, be it, you know, your mindset, your self-belief, your self-esteem. It comes down to that, that company that you keep—surrounding yourself with that winning circle. And look for aspirational people, people that will lift you up, people that will take you to their level. And that’s what I believe has been one of the great successes of my life. I looked for those amazing role models. One of my great mentors and friends is a guy who I first saw when he was coaching the Shepard sharks basketball team. Now it’s back in Florida, and a guy called Jim Brandon was originally drafted by the Utah jazz going way, way, way back, and then ended up playing and coaching in Europe. And I watched him when I was sitting in the stands, and he was coaching the Shepard Sharks, the professional basketball team there. And I’m like, I’m going to get to know that man. And everyone around me is like, how are you going to get to know him? I said I have no idea. I’m going to get to know that man. And 15-20 years later, you know, he’s been, my mentor. He’s a great friend. We do amazing stuff together. You know, so seek those, those people are at a high level, you know, traditional way of thinking about high levels. But those people that you know are going to add tremendous value to your life, go and seek them out and get to know them. Find a way. There’s always a way, What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, what an inspiring close and thinking. I love that. I’m going to get to know him and just that call to action. What are you going to, what unattainable goal are you going to set and give yourself the permission to pursue? I have to ask one final closing question. I think you’re probably going to. I think I might know what you’re going to say, but what is your leadership habit for success? Andy Fell: Yeah, I’m going to give you two, so have a definition of success. I can’t define success for you, but I can give— I’ve given you that winning formula, but then have a morning routine that works for you. So I’ll give you the format routine, but adapt it, mold it. You have a short-form version of it. Something that gets you into the ideal performance state on a daily basis. It fires the engine, and it gets you motivated to make the best of every single day that you have. Jenn DeWall: Well, Andy, how can people connect with you after this podcast? If they want to know more, where can, where can we them to? Andy Fell: Yeah, please. I mean, please connect with me through LinkedIn. You can go to my YouTube channel. Andy Fell GiFT631. There’s a ton of content on there. That’s free and available to absolutely everyone. If Facebook, your desired, you know, Andy Fell @GiFT631. So connect through LinkedIn, connect through Facebook, check out the YouTube channel, or just email me. I love connection rather than sending people to websites. To me, it’s all about relationships and sort of that connection. Love to hear from you, and can I say, Jenn phenomenal, just talking with you. I feel fired up myself. So thank you. Jenn DeWall: I’m fired up. Thank you. I’m like, what am I going to do tomorrow to incorporate your process? I was like, I really want to do this. No. So thank you. Thank you so much for sharing that with our audience, Andy! Andy Fell: My Pleasure Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for tuning in to this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Andy Fell as much as I did. If you want to connect with them, Andy actually wants you to drop him a line on LinkedIn. So jump on over to LinkedIn, connect, share a message, email him. I know that he’ll take any level of conversation because he just wants to make a difference. And of course, if you liked this, if you were inspired, if you are going to change your behavior, share this on your social media platform, email it to a friend, and don’t forget to write us a review on your favorite podcast, streaming service. Thank you so much for listening. Have a great day. The post Episode 48: Achieve Your Goals Using the Success Formula, with Executive Coach Andy Fell appeared first on Crestcom International.

Practical KPIs with Bernie Smith, Author, Consultant & Trainer Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast. It’s Jenn DeWall here. And this week I sat down and connected with Bernie Smith. Bernie coaches businesses to develop meaningful key performance indicators or KPIs and present their management information in the clearest possible way to support good decision-making, which we know is essential right now. Frustrated by the random way, in which performance measures are often chosen and implemented Bernie setup made to measure KPIs. In 2007, the goal was to develop simple, structured and repeatable ways to create KPIs that humans could design and use to improve businesses. Using the experience and scars of working with a huge variety of organizations over his consulting career, Bernie has boiled that experience down into simple, sensible, and practical advice on performance measurement. His books aim to share that expertise in a down to earth and conversational style. Bernie lives in Sheffield, UK with his wife, two children, and some underused exercise equipment. Enjoy my conversation with Bernie as we talk about key performance indicators.  Full Transcript Below Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. I am so excited to welcome the man, Bernie Smith! He’s joining us from across the pond. Bernie, go ahead and introduce yourself. And also you might as well fill our audience in where are you joining us from right now? Bernie Smith: Hi, Jenn. I’m in what was described as the barren wastelands of the North. I mean, Sheffield in the UK, a place which has got a terrible reputation from The Full Monty, but is on the edge of a national park. So it is beautiful. rolling moorland than about a mile away from my window. So if you don’t know where Sheffield is, we’re about 40 miles away from Manchester. Everyone seems to know what Manchester is. Jenn DeWall: Or they follow the soccer teams or they’re like Manchester United. I got that. Bernie, you spend a lot of your work around helping businesses essentially, or I shouldn’t just say businesses. I know it’s not limited, but helping individuals, helping leaders really improve their performance. And a lot of your background comes within agile or even just really talking about, you wrote a book on key performance indicators or KPIs. Could you just go in and talk about your inspiration for the book? Why did you decide to pursue maybe this as, Oh, I’m going to write a book on KPIs? Cause that’s something that’s still some people I think don’t really know a lot about, but tell us a little bit about what you do. I want to hear about your book. And so does our audience too, because I’m just learning I’m along for the ride. Meet Bernie Smith, Author of KPI Checklists Bernie Smith: Well, absolutely. So first of all, thanks, thanks for having me along. So the reason I wrote the book on KPIs it’s because people don’t like them and find them difficult. That’s the short story? So my background is I started helping organizations improve their operations about 25 years ago. I worked all over the world, so I worked with big manufacturing firms, particularly paper-making firms like Kimberly-Clark, Smurfit Stone, traveled the world and deliver what’s now called Lean Six Sigma, but before it was called Lean Six Sigma. So a lot of problem-solving a lot of measurement, a lot of improving businesses. You know, we turned businesses around in some situations. You know, several million dollars a year per site, extra profit through good problem-solving, good improvement techniques. I then moved industries because I like spending time with my family rather than traveling the world and staying near paper mills. I did the same thing with retail banks. I’ve worked with every UK retail bank, quite a few of the investment global investment banks as well. Doing a similar kind of thing, improving processes, but I noticed a common theme KPIs. So key performance indicators, the things that tell us how well we’re doing or how badly we’re doing or which bits need improving. They were sort of unloved stepchild of the business. Everyone had a go at doing their best, and they were all doing their own thing to the best of their abilities, but the end result just didn’t make any sense. It was a really confusing mass. And one of the first things we’d start doing on a consulting project would be to try and actually figure out what’s going on by sorting the measures out, the KPIs. So after doing this a few times, I realized that most organizations and, and an awful lot of managers have problems figuring out what’s going on and would love to be able to measure things. Now there’s a few ways you can approach that she couldn’t wait for an expert, someone who just comes in and tells you what to measure, but that doesn’t really work whose every business is different and every business situation’s a bit different. So I just wanted you to come up with an approach that was universal. And in fact, the method that I developed has only one requirement and that is to know what you want to achieve. So it’s being clear on what strategic outcomes you want. Now, strategic quite big way of putting it, but it’s simply knowing what we’re there to do. So- Why are KPIs Important? Jenn DeWall: I love that. Wait, I want to break that down because that is in its simplest form. I think you touched on a few things. There’s I think initially our tendency that we just start kind of all showing up and doing our job, but we’re not necessarily sure of what we’re driving towards or what impact that we’re having. And why do you think that is? Like, why do you think that maybe companies or organizations don’t necessarily have, like, when you think like I’m getting paid by a company, I should know exactly how I’m contributing to their success, but why don’t we know that? Bernie Smith: Well, yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I mean, I think there’s a, there’s a couple of things going on here. Firstly, I think there’s, there’s a tendency in human nature to assume, you know, what people want and to see, you know what they’re saying. And there’s lots of examples. I mean, Daniel Kahneman might got a Nobel prize for, for explaining this whole thing is called cognitive bias. So first of all, people tend to make assumptions about what’s expected and what’s good for the business. And the other thing is it can be quite difficult. How do you take something, which on a really high level, you know, if you know, if you’re running a global business, how do you take the strategic objective of that business and turn it into something that’s relevant to someone working on the process or facing a customer, how do you break that down? And that was the thing that I noticed that people were finding difficult. And that’s what I tried to tackle in KPI Checklist. So I developed a methodology for visually breaking things down. So taking these massive overarching goals, breaking down layer by layer, and then getting to something where you say, this is the difference you can make. This is the thing that we can measure to show whether we’re on track and this is how it links all the way up to the top. And to do it in a logical way. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. That’s, I think that’s so important because again, like I can tell you that depending on my role, depending on I guess, whether or not I had an opportunity or even insight into strategy, I may or may not understand what’s going on. And I think that that can create just more barriers for the people that are actually in the strategy room, creating that no one knows what they’re working towards, so they’re not helping you with your KPIs. But you wrote the book, the KPI checklist, and again, KPIs in the simplest word. Like how would you simply define what a KPI is for those that are key performance indicators, for those that are maybe new to that term, how would you define that? Measuring Your Key Performance Indicators Bernie Smith: In really simple terms? A KPI is simply the measure of something you care about. So whatever’s important to you or to your business. That’s key- and performance indicator just tells you how you’re doing it. So we’ve all got KPIs. I mean, you know, my KPIs is how much I weigh and how much I’ve got in my bank. Things like that. How much I earned. Jenn DeWall: Yes! Those are your KPI’s. I don’t always measure those either. Bernie Smith: Oh yeah. I mean, it’s embarrassing to admit, but for many years I didn’t do what I was preaching and I kind of had a long, long dark day of the soul a few years ago and thought Smith, you need to sort this out. So I’ve got my dashboard. In fact, it’s what the second of the month. So I’ll be doing my dashboard after this call. I’ve got the bar charts showing how the business is being broken down. So I know it’s not easy. I know there’s always a million other things going on, you know, I’m a small business, so I completely understand the pressures. But I genuinely believe that you take that time. If you invest that time, looking at the handful of things that are really important to your business, then that’s the way you might long-term progress. Because we’re all really locked into short-term stuff, you know, responding to customers, keeping the wheels, turning, you know, maybe developing new products, it’s all really time-consuming. And then sometimes you need to take a step back and just say, Hmm, okay, what’s the long game here. So I’ll give away one of my, one of my sort of trade secret KPIs, my business, I’ve got all the usual stuff around turnover and sales and whatever. But one of my key KPIs is of value of time spent. So I’ve got an interesting dilemma between spending time working with clients, you know, which is well paid. But only for the time that you work with them or creating books and materials, which might take 10 years to actually come through and justify their worth. And then long-term is a fantastic way of helping more people and also creating passive income as well. So I, I have, I have a measure where I look at the lifetime value of the time that I spend, not just the short term revenue. So just thinking about a little bit differently, there’s a bit more sort of maths involved, sorry, math. And you know, it’s just a slightly different way of looking at things and that’s, that’s how I make my decisions now within my business, how I spend my time. So it’s driven me to write a lot more books. This is actually book 1 of 19. KPI Checklists Jenn DeWall: Hey, I want to talk about KPI Checklists but think about it. I mean the exciting thing about KPI’s and even as you’re talking, I, the wheel, the wheels are turning for me. Like, what else could I be doing if I truly did measure my time, would I be spending less time on unproductive emails? Would I be spending less time picking up my phone and messing around on social media or a game? You know, I think that I could really benefit from starting to measure the things and I don’t do it right. I’m a business owner, but I also support a business and I feel like I don’t do it so I can understand why maybe some people are living in that more reactive place. But when you wrote KPI, checklists, what were you hoping to help people be able to do or help organizations be able to do? Bernie Smith: So it actually started as just a big sheet of paper. So I found myself with a client in Manchester, in fact walking them through the steps that we needed to go through to build or identify the most important performance measure, square business, the KPIs. It was a medium-sized bank. And I realized I’ve done this a few times before. And I thought, well, rather than drawing it out on a sheet of paper every time, maybe I need to do a better job at this. So I started to document the method. So it’s seven steps and the idea is it takes you from strategy through to implementation and it covers each of those steps along the way. So I started formalizing the process, just testing it, checking that it worked you know, exactly as intended. And, you know, there was a bit of, bit of learning bit of sort of adjustment required there. Got it into good shape and then realized that alot of books, a lot of management theory books, are very high-level. They’re very general. They talk in terms of theories and case studies, but they don’t really tell you what you need to do. So my, my background is, you know, I’m a practical guy, I’m an engineer by training and I like to know what to do. You know, I, I want someone to tell me this is how you do it. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, you want the process piece of it! Bernie Smith: Exactly. So the idea of the book is, is how-to guide. It’s not theoretical it’s based on what works. So I thought, right, okay. The book I would want would explain why we do each step. So there’s a few pages talking about that and there’s actually a story about why it’s in checklist format as well. So I read a fantastic book called the checklist manifesto by a guy called Atul Gawande. He’s a doctor and he implemented checklists in the Great Lakes Area, I think. He saved 1300 lives across five hospitals when he first implemented a checklist. And there’s a fantastic story about how the U.S. Air Force actually implemented them. So they had a fatal crash when they were looking for the next-generation bomber. The Air Force concluded, the bomber was too complex to fly. A couple of innovative test pilots decided to implement checklists, flew several million miles with no problems at all. And that’s how checklists were born. So I talk about that story in the book and then on each of the steps, I talk about what steps important. And then here’s what you need to do. So we talk about the workshop you need to do there’s tools and templates. There’s certain steps you have to go through. I also talk about pitfalls. So really I wrote the guide that I would want, and I wrote a guide that was intended to not be a long read because we’ve, if you’re anything like me, you’ve got a bookshelf full of worthy books, but you haven’t quite got to the end of. I mean, I talk about Daniel Kahneman, fantastic book. I’m only two thirds of the way through it. So this is a three, three and a half hour read. I know that because I I’m the reader of the audio book. So it’s just designed to be what you need to know to get going with this. Because if I’m honest, no one does this stuff for fun. Yeah. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, the perception is hard. It’s just how maybe people are looking at the problem or what they’re doing. And it does. It’s what you alluded to in the beginning. People think that it maybe is so daunting or just too challenging that initially the response is, I don’t know, I just have to like wave the white flag and I’m going to send it over to a consultant. But your book is for even the people, if you don’t have the resources necessarily to go in. And if you just, and actually, if you, even, if you do have the resources, you should still understand this at a simple level. So then you can make sure you’re guiding anyone that’s going to come in and work. What would be one of the first steps that you think someone should take? If they’re starting to look at this and they’re getting, they’re cringing a little bit of wanting to approach it, what would be one of the first things that you would say for them to do? If they’re looking at maybe a business challenge or how to improve a procedure or process, what would, what would you say, where do you see? The Cobra Effect Bernie Smith: Okay, so these, these two important things here. The first thing is to think carefully about what you want your business to achieve. This tends to be the thing that people rush through and often tell till we the Cobra effect story to sort of illustrate the, the pitfalls of, of getting a strategy wrong. Have you heard the cobra effect? Jenn DeWall: No, what is the Cobra effect? Bernie Smith: This is the kind of apocryphal tale. But it illustrates things quite nicely. You know, the, the small, the small difference between success and total disaster. So legend has it 150-200 years ago, when the British ruled India, that one of the governors in a large city in India they had a cobra problem. So he decided to offer a reward for dead cobras. So his implicit strategy was we’re going to offer a reward for dead cobras. Okay. So he implements this and the local start hunting for cobras and they get pretty good at it. They bring the dead cobras to the town hall and they get a bounty. So this goes on for a while and then the wild cobra population starts to dwindle. So if you’re an enterprising, local who had a good income stream from hunting copers what do you do? Well, you start to farm cobras. So the local started to form cobras. The supply was resumed. They carried on claiming reward money from the. Jenn DeWall: So there was a new revenue stream from this! Bernie Smith: Indeed there was! So, governor got wind of this. So he stops the reward for cobras. And if you’re a Cobra farmer with a stock of venomous snakes that are now worthless, and need looking after, what are you to do? You release them into the wild? Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Yes. That’s. You’re like, I don’t need to take care of that. Oh my gosh. Okay. So what happened? They released a bunch of venomous snakes! Bernie Smith: So they released the cobras At the end of it, the town hall and the government had paid out fortune to kill a load of captively bred snakes. And the wild cobra population had actually increased. And arguably there was a sort of failure in the strategic wording of what he set out to do. He should have really focused in on the fact that it was wild cobras, not just cobras. And he obviously thought that was implied when, when he started offering the reward. But a small error in intent and a small error in implementation had a completely counterproductive effect. Now I’ve got a lot of fairly gruesome tales from clients, which I can’t share. But the reason it’s number one on, on the process or in the Rocks method, is if you get that step wrong, everything else is propelling you in the wrong direction, faster and with more enthusiasm. So you need to be really, really clear on what outcome you actually want. Think quite carefully about exactly what you want because small differences can make a massive impact on the reality. And then the other thing is to think about where your pain is. Now, one of the problems that people have with KPIs is there is almost overwhelming choice of what, what you could measure. What do you Need to Measure? Jenn DeWall: You could measure anything like, Hey, how many, how many days does someone come into work? How many emails did they send? I mean, anything. Bernie Smith: Yeah. And that’s the heart of the process. So steps three and four. They’re actually, there’s two steps when it comes to selecting KPIs, because I discovered the hard way that these two types of people. There’s people who dream, and they just want to measure everything. I make tend to be the senior people in the business because they don’t have the pain of actually going and implementing these measures. Jenn DeWall: Can we talk about that? Because I do think that is such a big challenge. You have people that I think it’s, you know, whether you want to call it the low-hanging fruit or look at all this possibility that’s there and then they want it all. And I think everyone else that maybe, you know, without the power, that’s just maybe more like they’re having to try and implement. It’s just like, what, why are we even doing this? And it feels like it can feel grossly like overwhelming and just frustrating as an employee to be like, why are we trying to do so much? And then to be also met with, we’re not even measuring what we’re doing, we’re just doing it because everyone else is doing it. And it’s what we think we should do, but we don’t necessarily going back to your first, like, we don’t necessarily know what we want. It might be just, we want more sales or want to sell more units. So we’ll just throw paint on a wall. And, Oh my gosh, it is the most infuriating thing. Like, and we know that it creates initiative fatigue where people become less, I guess, responsive to your tasks, to your strategies. They’re not as enthusiastic. And then they can just kill the ones that probably are your good ideas. Bernie Smith: Absolutely. And you know, that’s a completely universal problem. So what we do in the method is we have two steps. Step three is for the dreamers. And that’s where we think about all the possible measures. And we do that with a visual method. And then step four is for the pragmatists, the practical people. And what, what, what I do is I explain this as we go through so that the pragmatists sit on their hands in step three and put up with it. And then when we get to step four and the dreamers have to go, all right, okay. Over to you. And it’s actually quite a, quite a simple division. So step three, we build this thing called a KPI tree where we break down the top level strategic objectives. We go through a couple of layers and I can give you an example. So the example I use when I’m doing training is my top level objective as a middle-aged guy who spends too much time on Zoom, is to be healthy. Okay. So be healthy. That’s great. That’s a fantastic objective, but how do I measure it? Well, I can’t measure it directly. What I can do is I can break it down into its constituent parts, so, you know, okay. It means I eat well. I sleep well. I sleep well and I sleep long enough. I’m in a relaxed state on regular basis. I’m aerobically fit. I manage any bad habits. I’ve quit smoking and drinking, so good. You know, we’re getting a bit more detailed, but we need to break it down a bit more. So if you take the, the, the eating, well, we can talk about calorie intake. We can talk about balance and nutrients. We can talk about whether I’ve got the right balance of carbs, protein, fiber, and so on. Then you’re getting down to a stage where you’re able to break things down into KPIs. So we’re getting to the stage where we can actually measure things. So we’ve built this tree diagram, we take the high level objectives, and we break them down into logical chunks, and we do that twice. And then when you do that, you get to a point where it’s pretty obvious what you want to measure. So if you talk about, you know managing calorie intake, correct, we just can’t counter it. You know, we’ll read the packet, write it down. Breaking Down Your KPIs Bernie Smith: Of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but the idea is that we create this visual representation, very easy to read. They’re a bit tricky to build, but they’re very easy to read and share and discuss. You can put stickies on them and write on them, and that’s great, but it produces too, too many KPIs. So then we go into the step four. The one for the pragmatists, for the IT department, the BI team and whatever. And the good news is we’ll, choose not to measure about 90% of the KPIs from the tree, but the tree gives us the universe. And then we can have a discussion to shrink it down. And the way we do that is we just ask two really simple questions. We say, how important is this KPI? And how easy is it to measure? And we give each KPI a score of zero to ten on those two. And the sort of reference point I use is cash in bank, because for almost every organization, it’s a 10 for importance and an eight, nine or ten for ease of measurement. So that, that goes in that top right-hand corner. And if you multiply those two scores together, it gives it a ranking number between zero and a hundred. So we can, we can sort our KPIs by the score. If it’s a hundred, you know, if it’s a nice high score, great, we’ll, we’re going to measure it. As we work down the list, we get closer and closer to borderline cases. And we have a discussion and we record the reason and you end up with a carefully reviewed list of KPIs we choose to measure. And some that we choose not to measure, and really importantly, some which are important, but not necessarily that easy to measure. Now, these are the gold bars. These are the things that if your competitors find them difficult to measure as well if you can figure out a way to measure them, you’ve got a unique, competitive advantage. So if you take two questions, how credit worthy is Bernie, or how relevant is this webpage to the query I’ve just typed into my browser. Those are both questions that are really important, but hard to answer. And Experian and Equifax have done an amazing job of taking terabytes and petabytes of data and turning it into a simple answer on the credit question. And Google did a fantastic job of taking that query question and coming up with a good answer. So there are in any industry, there are questions that are very difficult to answer, but if you find a way of answering them, they can be game-changing and they tend to get thrown out with the bathwater, as we say. They tend to get discarded because they are hard. So this process does two things. Firstly, it narrows down the selection of things that you choose to measure really dramatically. So it might be five or six KPIs that you start with not completely fine, but what it also does is it helps us keep an eye on the long game. It helps us keep an eye on the things that we would like to measure, but we can’t at the moment. And I can give you an example. So I was working with a pension firm and they were losing customers. They were transferring their pensions elsewhere and we have a meeting. And in that meeting, one of the managers said, well, to stop this, we’d be able to, we’d need to be able to read the minds of our customers. He just dismissed it. He said, there’s no way we could do this. But what we found was when you look closely at the process, because they were losing millions of pounds worth of pension this way. When you look closely at the process, there was actually a way that you can anticipate if customers were going to leave. And the way you do it is there’s one thing that someone does just before they transfer their pension, they ring up for evaluation and we found those people are about to leave. And we also found that they had just automated that process, which is why lots more people were leaving. So all I would say is, you know, sometimes you will find things in your business that are really important and looking possible. Don’t give up on them, keep them on your radar, because if you can figure out why I’m doing it and you know, you can, can transform your business. What if We Can’t Agree on What to Measure? Jenn DeWall: You know, there’s, there’s kind of two things that came after that explanation that came to mind for me, it’s one, you know, you gave a really great framework to be able to then rank and say, what’s the importance, what’s the impact. This is the criteria that we’ll use to be able to throw something out. But then you have to add in the human element, right? How do you overcome the human element of, but I still think that one’s really important? And so we should still really do that because I saw something or I read something or they’re doing it. You know, what’s your advice for that for, to be able to manage maybe those personalities that don’t want to see the data or still are really, there might be a lot more ego involved. What would be your advice? Bernie Smith: I mean, that’s a really common problem. The approach does diffuse that to some extent, because when you’ve got things written on the list, it becomes a discussion about the score on the list, rather than a discussion of someone else’s opinion. I was quite surprised to find this, but as soon as you have a system involved, and a process, it becomes a lot calmer discussion. When someone just speaks out and says, I think we should measure this. That’s when it gets quite heated. So using the method does generally avoid any kind of heated debate, but the way to deal with those kinds of discussions is to look at the neighbors. So look at KPIs that are above or below that KPI, and have a discussion. Do we think this is more important than X? Do we think it’s less important than Y? And there is some element of negotiation, you know, if, if, if it’s going to cause a major stakeholder to fall off the project, then you know, we may compromise. We may flex. None of this is absolute, but the idea is to provide a structured framework and a structured approach that enables the discussion. You know, it’s not a magic wand. It is just, just a structured way of doing it. But I found that it, it works well and we don’t have sort of classic arguments of opinion, but seem to characterize this. I mean, it was those kinds of arguments that really helped motivate me to come up with a method, because I know I like to have something that is based on reason and based on structure rather than simply opinion and shouting matches. Generally those are won by senior people. That’s not always where you want to be. Jenn DeWall: No, and I want that as an employee, as a business owner, as all of those things, I want to make sure that data is there. You know, I would be someone that I wouldn’t identify as a data person. I wouldn’t identify as you know, I’ve had analyst in my title. I wouldn’t say that was my strongest suit. Yeah. I could analyze the data, but I wouldn’t call myself maybe what some people might label a math person. Right. But the benefit of data, you know, I think in terms of even how you’re saying that if we think about workplace conflict or some of these challenges in determining, what way do we go, where do we go on a team? Right. We can all understand that. Data is the one piece that helps to depersonalize it. It’s not about being the best in the room or having the greatest idea. It’s about making decisions that are informed. And it, you know, it’s not the loudest voice. That’s going to be able to persuade that. And I like that because I think if you go at it and say, we’re looking and starting with data. We, might’ve made a lot of impulsive decisions based on emotion, but we’re going to look at it from data and you might have some really great ideas, but this is what the data is telling us. And so now how do we want to respond? So that’s, I don’t know if you have anything to add. Because the other piece I want to touch on is maintenance. So you have the people component, but like, I don’t know if you have anything you want to add on that at all. When you Measure KPIs, Don’t Be Afraid of the Math Bernie Smith: Just by one small point. You were talking about maybe not, not, not being the sort of most enthusiastic about sort of the mathematics side of it. This is one of the myths about KPIs. Almost all the KPIs I deal with are really quite straightforward to calculate. There’s nothing particularly clever, you know, they’re percentages, they’re adding, subtracting my own KPIs, my own business KPIs. It’s just basic arithmetic. So they don’t have to be super fancy to be useful. You know, really basic things like how much did we make? How long did it take, these are the things that will transform a business. You know, how many of our customers are happy? How many of our, you know, how many of our products got sent back? How many warranty claims do we have just counting, but doing it in a logical consistent way that’s repeatable. And you start to get trends and stories coming through that you wouldn’t pick up through anecdotes. Jenn DeWall: Oh, I appreciate that because I think that’s one of the things that we do need to recognize is it doesn’t need to be this, Oh my gosh, I have to put my head down and try and figure out new ways to assess this. And so I think we do complicate it when we’re starting to do it. But what you’re saying is it’s little things like looking at how much revenue are you bringing in, or how much time are you investing in a product? That’s I thank you for breaking that down because I know that I actually just perpetuated that myth on the podcast. How do You Maintain KPIs? Jenn DeWall: So let’s talk about maintenance, right? So they do all of this heavy lifting in the beginning. We are sitting in that room, maybe with our team and we’re determining what direction do we want to go? And I think that the piece in my experience that does fall off is even if we do the data, we still somehow lose sight of it. Once we go into implementation, we, we forget to come back to it or we want we’re onto the next bright, shiny object. So what does maintenance look like if you were actually going to be great at measuring these KPIs or the KP forum, key performance indicators, what does measurement or maintenance need to look like? Bernie Smith: Okay. so first thing is to make sure you don’t overstretch yourself because maintenance gets harder. The more KPIs you’ve got to maintain. So I see a lot of organizations just biting off more than they can share, as we say. So keep it small to start with focusing just on the handful of measures that are really important. The other thing you talk about people forgetting to look at them, forgetting to maintain them. You need to check in at the right frequency. So a common mistake that people make easily, they will fit KPI reviews in with their existing meeting schedule. So it’s typically once a week, once a month, that’s a big mistake because for KPIs to be useful, you need to understand three things. You need to understand how important the thing that you’re looking at is how fast it can go wrong and how much notice you need to fix it. So to give you an example, if you’re a surgeon in the operating theater, you’re not going to check the patient’s heart rate once an hour are you? Because you’ve got no more than four minutes to fix any plumbing problems if that heart stops. So you want that real-time and you’ve only got three and a half minutes at best to fix any problems. So very often the reason that KPIs fall into disuse is because they’re not that useful because they’re not being checked at the right point or the right frequency. So for me, you know, that things are working right when the first thing people do is they come in and they check the board, or they check the display. And they’re not happy and they’re not comfortable when they can’t see it. So hopefully you’ve worked in organizations where you’ve seen that you know, very often production organizations is intense, personal pride. People come in, they want to see how the shift’s done. They want to know how the other shift has done because they’re competitive. And then they want to know what’s between them and a good shift sort of either the next eight hours or whatever. So the primary thing with maintenance is to make them an indispensable part of your everyday business. Once you’ve got that, then the maintenance part gets a lot easier because people care and they see them as an asset. If they’re seen as a chore, and if they’re seen as not relevant, people will not put the time, effort and love required to keep them going. So they need to be things that people care about deeply. So that’s why it’s good to start with some pain points. So when you’re picking your KPIs, if you decide to start with a small handful, pick some things that really help with making the business better. I mean, that’s the right thing to do anyway, but go for ones that are visible and ones that cause people a lot of personal pain and make that your start point. Because as soon as you start seeing improvements, being driven by those KPIs and people’s lives start to get better, then the KPIs become their friends. And that’s the important thing. They’re just tools to help you do what needs to be done Jenn DeWall: Well. And I think that one’s so important to making it relevant, showing people that what you’re working towards is solving maybe this frustrating email exchange you have to have with the customer, or, you know, it’s causing a breakdown in communication with the coworker. But solving something that’s going to mean something to them. I love just really thinking about that. It doesn’t have to be something that’s so like out there, that’s going to support the business. It’s just little wins, but you know, you’re talking about even the basics of change management that if you’re going to then take and put it into a strategy, you’ve got to talk about it. It has to be in your communication. You need to have a separate meeting where you’re assessing that and even making visual, like there are so many online resources right now, but even if you’re remote, you could make some type of digital tracking tool. What were you going to say? The Simple Magic of a Whiteboard Bernie Smith: I was going to say, this is one secret tip that probably isn’t very COVID friendly. So yeah, when, when we come through all of this, this is a golden tip. There’s something magical about whiteboards, I don’t know what it is, but I found that if you get people to write the result on a whiteboard, it has much, much more impact than if it’s just appearing on a screen or on a printout. And I don’t know why it is, but it’s a fantastic way of getting people engaged. So I’m possibly 20 years behind the time here, but Jenn DeWall: Oh whiteboard on Zoom. Is that the feature you’re talking about? [laughing] Bernie Smith: Yeah, probably, but I mean, yeah, just physically getting people to write their own schools out and to keep score. I mean, I’ve, I’ve got a wrong machine in, in, in my shed and my kids use it as well. And I just brought my time’s up on whiteboard. So use it, let’s start writing their time’s up, putting a little star by their best score and whatever zero barrier to entry, highly visual, completely intuitive to use. But there’s a lot to be said for just taking a really simple approach. Just you might not stick with it forever, although they’re actually surprisingly useful, but it’s a great way to just gently introduce things with no technology with no complications, just get started. You can start now. All we need is a pen and a board and go for it. So I’d recommend keeping it simple. Jenn DeWall: I feel like I could even do that. I can just get a piece of paper and start writing instead of it, you know, and just tracking. Tracking and making sure that there’s consistent recordings in the journal and the diary and the whiteboard, whatever that may be. I know that we’re rounding out our time here, but I do just want to talk a little bit about the book that you are writing, because I know that we don’t have it, you know, it’s not there yet, but you are writing also a very important book. Do you want to just talk about that. They pair really well together? And I think it’s another consideration that, you know, we all need to take into account if we want to be successful. So what is the newest book that you’re writing? Gaming the KPIs Bernie Smith: So it’s called Gamed- Why Performance Measures Break- and sorry, Why Performance Targets Break and How to Fix Them? So it’s all about performance targets, performance incentives, and the results that they drive. So if you look at the existing sort of management guidance out there, they talk about smart objectives, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and targeted. And that’s fine. You know, that, that covers quite a few of the key ingredients in setting targets and setting objectives. But when we look around, we see them going wrong everywhere. So I started looking at the Volkswagen Audi emission scandal and you’ve got one of the biggest firms in the world who cheated. They cheated their emissions targets. And I was really interested in understanding why that was some of their executives went to jail. One guy, Oliver Schmidt was arrested at Miami Airport seven years in jail. It cost them $33 billion in compensation. Bernie Smith: And that was really interested in understanding what was it about targets and target setting and incentives that drives that kind of behavior. And the more I started digging, the more I found. It was just really fascinating. And there are certain common mistakes that we make both in terms of setting targets and in terms of the incentives we applied to those targets. Also then the behaviors that they drive. And I’ve, I’ve written certain case studies cipher just going from bots, Audi and their emission scandal through to just some funny examples from motor-racing. And with them all, you can see common things starting to emerge. So if you can see common problems, then there may well be some lessons we can learn and some solutions we can apply. And that’s, that’s what the book’s about. And of course there’s a structured method in there as well for going from the outcome that you want through to meaningful targets that should drive the, the right behavior. But I was particularly interested in why things don’t work as they expected to and coming up with some solutions to that. So the plan is to have that out in January. So I’m writing it down at the moment, but all the pieces are there, it just needs sort of shaping into the finished product now. Jenn DeWall: Well, I think it’s, I love that your use of stories or case studies, because setting these peak performance indicators and these targets can bring about just as you shared in the Cobra story, an ethical conversation, what are people going to do? I mean, how are they, if you’re going to cheat your emissions in the case of Audi, what are people going to do based on the incentives that you set and how can you maybe get ahead of that? How can you at least try to be a little bit more, ok like what could happen? How could someone maybe bend this a little bit? And I think that’s a really important thing for us to keep in mind as we’re setting strategy, because just in the case of the Cobra, it seems so simplistic. He wanted to get rid of all the cobras in the city. Okay. Well, and there’s a ransom for it. So let’s go and do that. Well, eventually someone’s going to find some upside or it’s not even that they’re bad or malicious people. They’re just working within the rules that are there. Bernie Smith: People are amazing at finding loopholes. So one of, one of the stories I tell in the book is about a racing class called the GT production class. So the idea is really simple. That car manufacturers can produce sporty cars and you can watch them being raced on TV. So because of that and the there’s two rules in the class amongst athletes, firstly, you need to be able to buy that car as a member of the public. And secondly, that car needs to be able to hold a suitcase. So you think that’s pretty simple. You can see the intent, but because car racing is winner takes all. And this is one of the, one of the criteria is often identified as being really high risk because it’s winner takes all. Toyota, came out with a new car in the nineties and they argued that because the car was inspected with an empty fuel tank and the empty fuel tank was big enough to hold a suitcase, that met the suitcase criteria and it was approved and have the thing they identified was there was no lower limit on how many of these cars you could sell to the public. So they sold one. So you have, you have some rules which were drafted with a clear intent. You cannot, you know, easy to understand why they’re there. But you’ve got what I call an accelerant winner takes all, but really puts the pressure on really, really encourages people to find loopholes. And they found the most absurd loopholes and these stories keep on coming up. So if you’re in a high stakes situation where it’s winner takes all very high reward or punishment, people text the rules to destruction, I’ve got lots more examples of that. But when you start looking around, you see it everywhere, Jenn DeWall: Right? And I want to have you back on after you write your book, just to talk about that, because that is such a problem within a lot of organizations. Just that winner takes all, whether that’s internally feeling like, you know, if you were going to cut through an organization and you want to get to the next level, it might have that winner takes all kind of mentality. And I’ve worked in structures like that, that it was just survival of the fittest climb that corporate ladder. It doesn’t matter how you get there, you got to do it. Or the bottom 10 get cut, you know, whatever that looks like. And just the adverse consequences that are sometimes unintentional. Sometimes it may not, they might kind of know they’re there, but they just ignore them. And knowing that like we have to do better, like, and also how are we framing things? Because if it’s a winner takes all, then someone bends your rules, then they cause some type of lawsuit. Well, then it would’ve made more sense to, you know, not promote that in any type of way. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: So I need to have you back on the show, but I know that we’re coming time. So I’m going to, I’m going to wrap it up here, Bernie, this has just been a really great conversation, but I want to ask and close with our final question, which is what is your leadership habit for success? Bernie Smith: So the thing that has had the biggest impact on my life is using a really simple technique called the Pomodoro Technique. Pomodoro means tomato. I have no idea why it’s called that, but I use it when I have to grind my way through something I don’t want to do. And it’s substantial. So when I was writing this book, I have to write the definitions of 416 KPI’s with examples, not a fun task. And I did it with the Pomodoro method and it’s really simple. You set a timer and you do a work interval. So I do 20 minutes, but it could be 10, whatever you’re doing, when the alarm goes off, you stop for a short interval. I do five minutes. You do this three times. And then at the end of the third cycle, you have a longer break, 15 minutes. And two things happen. Firstly, when you know that you’re time-limited, you work like you’re, you’ve got a deadline. And secondly, when you’re interrupted mid-task, you’re uncomfortable. So when you sit down five minutes later, it’s really easy to get back into it because you’ve stopped mid-flight. I find that that’s the technique that has helped me get through some really tough stuff where I’ve been procrastinating and putting it off and you can do it. I think Amazon, Alexa has an app for it. You can buy them for the Mac. You can do it with a stopwatch. It’s really easy. Jenn DeWall: So a half-hour, heads down working on the task Bernie Smith: Just 20 minutes. Yeah. Five-minute break, but he’s up to you half an hour’s quite a long time. So start short, build it up 20 minutes is about right for me, it’s 20 minutes, five-minute break, 20 minutes, five-minute break, 20 minutes, 15 minutes break. And you can get, for me, it doubles my productivity. So it’s quite intense. You can’t do, I can’t be more than about four or five hours like that. But you get much more done in the four hours than I would in a full day normally. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, I’m doing that today. Bernie per your recommendation of doing that today, I want to see what I can do to be more productive. Because I absolutely have the tendency to procrastinate. Bernie Smith: We all get distracted by emails and messages and prompts, you know, and just having that deadline pressure, but repeatedly just, just keeps me moving and that’s the hard thing to do, isn’t it? Jenn DeWall: Yes, absolutely. But once you get started Bernie, thank you so much for your time and your stories and just sharing the insights from your book to help people you know, set better key performance indicators to separate our targets, to be more productive, to make sure that we’re getting that return on our time investment. I just really want to say thank you so much for joining us on the show. It’s been great to have you. Bernie Smith: It’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I’d love to come back and talk about Gamed when it’s out. So thanks very much. Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for tuning into The Leadership Habit podcast. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bernie today. If you want to connect with Bernie, you can find out more about KPIs at madetomeasurekpis.com or you can buy his book KPI Checklists on Amazon. Also, if you enjoyed this, don’t forget, share it with your friends, Share it with your followers, share it with your team. And of course, if you do like this content don’t ever hesitate to reach out to Crestcom to see and have us come in and offer a two hour leadership skills workshop. Thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget to write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. I’ll see you next time.   The post Episode 47: Practical KPIs with Bernie Smith, Author, Consultant and Trainer appeared first on Crestcom International.

Full Transcript Below Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Leadership Habit podcast. It’s your host Jenn DeWall. And in today’s episode, we interview innovation thought leader Stephen Shapiro. You might remember him from a past episode that we did about a year ago, but for the refresh, Stephen cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle, and solve their business challenges. We all need that right now in light of COVID. And obviously, the drastically changing environment that we’re operating in today. He helps them by applying the knowledge that he’s accrued over decades in the industry. Stephen is able to see what others can’t- opportunities to improve innovation models and the cultures that support them. So enjoy today’s episode as we talk about asking better questions, and we also talk about a way that you could potentially get your own questions answered by Steve. Welcome Back Stephen Shapiro, Innovation Expert Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. I am so excited to have back on the show for a second time. Stephen Shapiro. Now, if you weren’t blown away by the first episode that we had with him, where he gave you just such great valuable tools on your innovation efforts, like, I don’t know what it’s going to take, because I know this show is going to be that much better, but before we get into the content, Steve, let’s just go ahead. And I want you to introduce yourself to maybe our new listeners that didn’t have a chance to hear you the first time, but tell us who you are, what you do. Stephen Shapiro: Sure. Jenn. Well, first of all, let me say it was so much fun the first time I had to do it a second time! So I’m thrilled to be here. And I love the work that you do. So yeah, I’ve spent pretty much most of my life in innovation. I started working in innovation in the 1995-96 timeframe after having spent the first part of my career in business efficiency, business optimization. And I realized that people lost their jobs as companies started to make them more efficient. So I decided to shift away from people losing jobs to helping people create jobs, getting jobs. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. So for 25 years, I’ve been focused on job growth innovation and helping companies grow so that they can be more successful. Jenn DeWall: Gotcha. And you do a great job. I mean, I’ve read, I’ve read the majority of your books, and there are just so many great insights. I’m curious. How have you seen innovation just change in the face of the pandemic? Well, Innovation in Times of Crisis Stephen Shapiro: So there’s usually two phases of innovation in a time of crisis. And the first one is what we’ve seen over and over in the past, which is a reactive adoption. So it’s still a form of innovation, but it’s a mild form of innovation. And so what would end up happening is people would you know, they were trying to meet in person originally, and now they can’t meet in person. So the problem that we’re looking to solve is how can we do what we were supposed to do in person virtually? And so we then have everybody hop on zoom, but basically, we’re just replicating, and we’re just automating. And that’s when we’re in survival mode. And I think where we’re starting to get to right now is actually that second phase, which is a proactive innovation. So instead of a reactive adoption, it is really pushing the pause button and saying, what are we looking to do? How are we going to think differently about the world, and how can we really create something new and better rather than just try to repeat what we’ve done in the past. I think that’s the exciting thing. So as difficult as it’s been right now, I think we’re going to look back on this time and say, wow, there was some incredible innovation that took place. Maybe some of the greatest innovations in the history of business. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. And people probably don’t even realize they were innovating, but I think that’s a really important point of emphasis. Is, are you still living in that reactive place of innovation? Are you still trying to force the things that you did in the past to make them work? How do you get people to wake up and recognize that it’s time to shift from that reactive place to more of that proactive strategic approach? Stephen Shapiro: I think it really comes down to where somebody is in their life and their business. If they are still in survival mode, then they’re going to take care of what they need to take care of from a survival perspective. It, it’s just a natural human instinct. We’re wired primarily for survival, and we’ll innovate either to help us survive or when we’re comfortable, and we don’t feel like we need to survive. And so it really is going to depend on each organization. Each individual’s going to be responding differently to the situation. But I think the key is just to tell people to take a breath, push the pause button, and ask a different question. That, to me, is the key to everything. So instead of asking the question, how can we do what we’ve always done- just online? Maybe we ask some provocative questions, which is like, what if we stopped doing what we used to do? What would happen if we eliminated meetings? What if we eliminated the need to be together all the time on zoom or whatever platform you’re using? Well, these are the types of things which we’ll start stimulating new types of conversations, which will lead to new types of solutions. Jenn DeWall: So that’s a big piece of, I think where your tools really frame things- is starting with the right question to find the right solution. Can you explain a little bit more about where people get innovation wrong in terms of maybe they’re trying to solve the wrong problem, or maybe they’re asking the wrong questions? Are You Solving the Wrong Problem? Stephen Shapiro: I think the biggest issue is especially in organizations, is we’ve become so enamored with ideas that we ask people for their opinions. And look, there’s nothing wrong with asking somebody for their opinion. The problem is when you ask somebody for their opinion, and you have a large number of opinions. Now, all of a sudden, you just have a sea of opinions that may be good, may not be good. So it’s like a suggestion box. You know, there’s a default question associated with every suggestion boxes. How can I improve the business? The problem is if you ask a thousand people, how can you improve the business? You’ll get 10,000 ideas, of which maybe three have any value. So that’s why this shift is so important because we’re either not taking the time to really think about the problem in a structured way, or we’re just asking the wrong problem. And I remember this fortune cookie I once got. I love this. It said you always have the right answers. They just sometimes answer the wrong question. There you go. There, you’re solving the wrong problem. I don’t care how hard you work. The wrong problem, solved, doesn’t do any value. That doesn’t do anything good for you. It just has no value. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Oh my gosh. And I can think of that all the time. I think, you know, people just saying, Oh, I want to grow sales. It’s got to be this. Or I want to make my employees happy maybe. And actually, that’s a big one. I think. How do you stop employee turnover? The first thing that people initially jumped to is only thinking it’s gotta be affiliated or associated with pay in some way. Well, we’ve got to pay them more, and then if we can’t pay them more, because right now we’re in a pandemic, we’re going into recession, then I guess we can’t do anything. Would that be an example of asking the wrong question? Stephen Shapiro: It’s, again, it’s a broad question. So they start off with, how do I retain my best talent, which is a great question, but it’s a broad question. So I, I always like to say, we tend to ask questions and one of two ways, either they’re really broad. Like how do I improve the business, or how do I keep my employees? Or we ask some that are so specific and narrowly defined that we don’t have a good chance of finding solutions. So in the case of retention, that’s not a bad question, but once we jumped to the solution of pay, well, now that we’ve gone from abstract to ridiculously specific, and to me, the question we want to start asking is what really would incentivize people to want to stay. And one of the things that we know is there tend to be three levels. Stephen Shapiro: At least when it comes to innovation work, which carries over in all work, there are three different categories that will keep people motivated to stay. Compensation is the lowest level. So you need to pay the bills. If you’re not able to pay the bills, then the money is important. But if you’re at least in that place where again, you’re not surviving from a financial perspective, the next two levels are much better at keeping people engaged in an organization. That second level is the community feeling like you’re part of something bigger, feeling like you’re engaged and involved with something. And then the last one is contribution, which is feeling as though you’re actually making an impact in the world. And so we have a lot of different levers, and you really need to just take the time to figure out what matters most. And that will then drive the right solutions. Jenn DeWall: So why are asking questions more important than answers for why are like the questions more important than the answers that you seek? Are You Asking the Right Questions? Stephen Shapiro: Well, if you think about most leaders, most leaders think they need to have all the answers, but that’s really not the role of a leader. The role of a leader is to ask questions of the organization that gets everybody in the organization to ask better questions. And the reason for that is our answers. Our solutions tend to be built on a lot of assumptions. So you could be an expert in your industry, but it doesn’t mean you are an expert. It means you were an expert. So you knew your customers, you knew your competition, you knew your industry. It doesn’t mean, you know it, because it changes. And obviously, in recent times, it’s changed pretty much overnight. So we have to relearn pretty much everything. And if you think you have the answers, the odds are, those answers are built on faulty assumptions that you’ve made based on your past experience. Jenn DeWall: How do you double-check that? Like how, what are things that maybe you would recommend that clients do? If, you know, let’s say that someone hears this and they’re like, wow, okay, you’re right. I knew my customers. I don’t know them today. What would be a way that we could measure whether or not we’re behind the curve? Do you have any advice for that? Whether we, is it, should we be looking at metrics like sales to determine if we’re getting it wrong? Like what should we be looking at? Stephen Shapiro: So I think there’s a couple of different things at play here. One is the pause button. I talked about it before. Just, just stop, just stop. As soon as you think you have an answer, just stop and ask. What’s the question. What’s the problem that answer solves and then ask yourself, is that the right question? And in order to answer that part, we need to have data. And so one of the things you need to make sure is you recognize that innovation and creativity are not— we tend to think of it as just coming up with really cool ideas. It’s not. It is a problem-solving process. What we need to do is figure out what are the most important problems. So we need data, and there’s several different ways you can get data. One way to get data is to just gather data, gather insights, numbers, and hard metrics and things of that nature. Stephen Shapiro: But sometimes the best thing to do is softer ways of doing it, whether it’s observation and an innovation. We talk about ethnography, which is the process of observing people using your product or service. And I would say today that sometimes the best thing to do is quick check-ins. I mean, there’s so many great video tools out there where you can ask whether it’s customers or employees or others, how are you doing? Don’t lead the witness, don’t do surveys. Don’t ask them questions that are so specific that you lead them. But rather just say, what’s going on? What would you like to see? What aren’t we doing? What do you need? And just let them talk. And sometimes you’re going to get some really amazing insights by just allowing people to share where they are right now. And it has to be based on data. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And I think you’ve just simplify people’s surveys. It doesn’t have to be, did you like your meal? Did you like rate it one through five? Or what did you like about X? And it’s leading them towards that answer, but I like that you’re really just encouraging the open-ended curiosity of what do you like, what’s working for you. What do you dislike that we’re doing? I think you’ve just made someone’s job a lot easier to know that the questions, the easier that you make them, the more information you can find out. Stephen Shapiro: And, and sometimes here’s, if this is going to seem like a really goofy question, but it’s one that works really well because of the way the brain is wired. Once you get somebody to think about something that’s analogous to the current situation, they go off in a different place. So if you asked your customers or your employees, what color is our organization? Or what emotion is our organization and why? That’s like it, it stimulates a thought, it plants a seed in the brain. So that now all of a sudden like, okay, well, what color is it and why? And now they’re, they’re not thinking necessarily about their past experience, but they’re really trying to make connections to something different and deeper. So you can get really creative and provocative with the questions as a way of driving new insights also. Jenn DeWall: So go back to the questions, like, why do you think that organizations ask bad questions? I mean, maybe it ties back to the survey of, they just asked the wrong questions, but why do we ask bad question? Get Out of Survival Mode Stephen Shapiro: Well, the reason why organizations ask bad questions is because individuals ask bad questions and it’s- look- part of it has to do with the fact that in business we’ve been told that we don’t want problems. We want solutions don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. So that’s, but that’s, but that’s exactly the opposite of what we need organizations to be doing. We need people to step back and say, what’s the problem. Is there a bigger problem, a more important problem. And can I reframe that problem as a way of finding maybe potentially better solutions? And so part of it is education. Part of it is the way leadership operates, but part of it is just the human brain. Again, we’re wired for survival. And so what ends up happening is we make instinctual decisions and decide to go running. So if you think about back in the days, when they’re saber tooth cats and you saw one, you wouldn’t sit there, you wouldn’t analyze it and ask a bunch of questions. If you saw something that was furry with big fangs, you would start running. And the problem is you start running probably in the wrong direction. Now from a safety perspective, going in any direction was good. But from a business perspective, if you start running in the wrong direction, you’re moving further and further away from your ultimate goals. So when you stop and make sure we’re all aligned and moving in the right direction, we will get much better results. Jenn DeWall: And that’s so true. I know that I’ve worked for organizations where you might have part of the company running in one direction and the other part of the company, trying to solve a different problem, or thinking that what they’re working on is the right thing to do. And then they’re another place. And I think that’s what you see a lot, probably right now with organizations that are really in that survival mode is that you might have these little microcosms within or departments that aren’t necessarily aligning. And so then they’re just wasting all your resources because they’re all focused on different things, Stephen Shapiro: Right? So we need to make sure that everybody’s rowing in the same direction. I mean, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use. And that takes time for people to just breathe. Because again, our survival mentality is to run. And if we’re in survival mode, which many of us are right now, we’re just going to be running, but we’re probably running in the wrong direction. So we need to do a course correction and sometimes the best way to go fast. And there’s, there’s a difference between speed and velocity. And I think that’s really, the key here is speed is just doesn’t have direction. So I could be going 60 miles an hour, but it doesn’t matter if it’s North, South, East, or West. But velocity is relative to the direction we’re trying to go. And that’s really, to me, the key here is we don’t need speed. We need better velocity. We need people to move in the right direction, quickly, not any direction, because if I’m going South at 60 miles an hour and I need to go North, I’m going exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve. Jenn DeWall: So what’s the cost of doing that, or what’s the cost of asking bad questions, you know, of running in the wrong direction. Stephen Shapiro: It’s the biggest issue in the long run is irrelevance because if we’re not adapting and evolving, then we’re not going to meet the needs of the market, which means that we’re not going to have people who are going to buy our products and services. And so when people ask me, how do I define innovation? I use one word: relevance. To me a relevant organization is an organization that is constantly evolving to move in the direction of what the market needs and wants. And they are the aspirin right now. The other aspirin for the pains that people have, because people are going to make bigger decisions based on your ability to eliminate a pain. They have. That’s what they’re going to go after. And so if you look at, for example, we’re virtual right now, all of my speeches have gone virtual. All of my work has gone virtual. So why, if you look at the market cap of zoom in January, it was about $16 billion. A couple of weeks ago, when I last checked, it was $160 billion. It’s a 10 fold increase. If you try to buy a webcam, they’re now price gouging, because everybody wants one. So that’s a pain that people have and they’re willing to pay a premium to solve that pain. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. I mean, this is probably a personal curiosity question, but where do you think retailers got it wrong? Because I, you know, I have a past in retail and I loved it. I love obviously, you know, working in that, but as we see right now, there’s a ton of retailers or brick and mortar stores that are closing. Where do you think they got it? Wrong terms of innovation because clearly a lot of those brick and mortar stores aren’t relevant anymore. I know that I personally, especially in the age of COVID, I’m not shopping in the same way that I once was like, where do you think that they got it wrong? I know that I threw you for a loop because that was my own personal curiosity, but I don’t know any, any insights on where you think maybe retail could have done it better to adapt. Taking a Phygital Approach Stephen Shapiro: Look, this is, this is a challenging situation right now, in terms of, you know, there were times when malls were closed and stores were closed only so much you can do with that. I mean, you could argue in hindsight that having a better online presence and of course with Amazon and everything else that’s going on right now, that’s not a bad thing, but I do believe that there is still a need for physical retail. To me, it’s more about the phygital approach. And I love the word phygital, which is basically the blending. It sounds like you’ve got like an itch or something. I’m, I’m fidgety, I’m phygital. Phygital is the blend of physical and digital. And so we tend to think of either we’re digital or we’re analog, we’re physical or we’re online. But I don’t think that I think the opportunity for the retailers is to recognize when you can blend the best of digital technologies with the physical experience and being able to do things in the retail stores that you can’t do online. Stephen Shapiro: I think there’s a lot that can be done there. And what’s happening traditionally with a lot of retailers is the online presence was separate from the physical presence. And I just remember so many times in the past I would buy something they’ve corrected things slowly over time, but I’d buy something online and want to return it in the store. Or I’d buy something in the store and want to return it online. And they’re like, Oh no, you can’t do that. Or I remember one time I was buying an item and they wanted to refund a different price because the price was different online than it was in the store. And it just created so much confusion. So if you really think of it as a larger whole, and how does digital and physical blend together, I think that would be a very powerful way to look at it. Cause then you have a one, two punch that an online only, or a physical only retailer couldn’t handle. Jenn DeWall: I love that. I mean, how annoying as a customer to look online at any retailer, see that a price is significantly different, walk into the store and in the past they used to just, Nope, sorry. That’s online only. We would rather risk losing your sale or you can we’ll pay the shipping for none of that made sense to me, but I think you brought up a good point that in that industry, they really did look at the brick and mortar and the digital experience or e-commerce experience as completely separate entities when that did just cause more confusion or frustration like that. I would just find, I’ll go online. I’ll look for someone else that I can shop with. I know we went on a tangent. I’m just, you know, I do believe that we need standalone stories. So I’m anxious to see how retailers continue to adapt, because I like being to go to the store if I need something, I don’t want it to solely be online. So let’s go back to that, that approach. So we were talking about questions and now we’re thinking about what can we do so we know why it’s bad. We obviously know it can, you know, not serve our customer. It can make us not relevant anymore, but how do we start? How can we start to ask better questions? Stephen Shapiro: Well, so the first thing is just to recognize that all of our questions have built in assumptions. So when you hit the pause button and you say, okay, what am I really looking to do here? Then you say, well, what am I assuming? So if it’s a large organization, a lot of times we’ll, we’ve always done it this way. So we should continue to do it this way, or we’ve never done it this way. So we shouldn’t do it this way. Those are, those are just assumptions. They’re not truth. So that’s the first thing is just sort of look at what am I, what am I underlying assumptions? What do I believe to be true? What if they aren’t true? The other thing is I’ve developed some tools to help do that. And I think that in basically what these tools do is help question the assumptions in a very methodical way. And you can just ask, you know, a whole bunch of different questions. And sometimes the easiest thing to just ask yourself is what if I change the dimension of the question? What if I change the who dimension? Well, if we’re the ones doing the work, what if somebody else did the work? That’s a different way to look at it. So it’s, but it’s all comes down to assumptions and challenging those assumptions. Jenn DeWall: So it’s what assumptions am I making about this? But you just touched on who else could help me. That is one of my favorite parts of your book. Best practices are stupid, is really thinking about where we’re looking for innovation, what we’re doing. And one of the things that you talk about in your FAST innovation model is the shift approach. Can you share that with our audience that may not be familiar with that type of innovation technique, if you will? Expertise is Often the Enemy of Innovation Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So I, I believe that expertise is often one of the enemies of innovation. It’s not the only one, but it’s often the enemy of certain types of innovation. And the reason for that is because we have all these past assumptions. And so we need to start making some shifts. And one of the things we know, one of the things we know, I mean, there’s, there’s scientific studies that have shown this, and we know this anecdotally to prove to be true, is that when you look outside of your industry or outside your function or your department, or your area of expertise, we’re going to get sometimes much better solutions. And in fact, there was one study done, which looked at it and basically found that most patents, most patents that are filed are based or were filed by an expert in a particular domain. Stephen Shapiro: So if it’s a chemistry problem, be solved by a chemist and almost every situation, the patent was a derivative of an earlier patent. So it was an incremental improvement. And when they looked at the patents that were just really fundamentally different, that is, they weren’t incremental. They weren’t based on past patents. They found that in almost every single situation, it was submitted by somebody from a completely different area of expertise. And so the simplest way to do this in practicality is to ask yourself two words, who else, who else has solved a similar problem, not the same problem. And when you ask those two words, now, all of a sudden you start looking at other places for potential solutions. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Who else has done this? I thought of you because I saw- and I know that this is bad because it’s part of our headline culture- but I saw a headline and I’d never got back to reading it, but there was a 14 year old that had won a $25,000 grant for his insights in creating a cure for COVID. And that like made me immediately think about what you talked about as who else. And even that I think was probably the most unassuming thing. Like if there’s a 14 year old that we could tap into that could potentially have a new way of looking at it or just different experience. I mean, clearly he was able to win a $25,000 grant. That is, I think that the thing that we’re looking at is we don’t have to just go to the exact same person. And how can you disrupt who you ask? Or disrupt your own solutions by just inviting someone else to the table? Why do you think people don’t do that more knowing that there’s so much of a benefit and asking who else, why, what do you think holds people back from doing that? Stephen Shapiro: I think one of the other enemies of innovation is ego. So the reason why leaders believe they have to have all the answers is ego. Leaders don’t have the answers. They don’t, that’s not their role as leaders. Again, there that’s the role of the leader is to get to ask questions, to get others, to ask questions, that’s the role, but our ego gets in the way. And so we’re going to assume that we have the answers, whether it’s our company has the answers or our industry has the answers, or I, as a leader, have the answers. And that just is where we start to fall apart, because now we lose our curiosity, we lose our open-mindedness and we’re not looking elsewhere. And we know that if we use open innovation, for example, which is a way of tapping into larger crowds of people when done right, we can find solutions very, very quickly that have been out there that nobody’s been able to find. Stephen Shapiro: And one of my favorite stories is the Exxon Valdez oil spill from 1989 for nearly two decades, between 1989 and 2007, they tried to stop the problem, which was every time they’d extract the oil water mixture, because the temperatures were below freezing, it would solidify. It would freeze. And so they thought the problem was going to be solved by oil experts know when crowdsourcing was used and when they reframe the problem in a slightly different way, the solution was found by somebody who is not an oil expert, but rather chemists in the construction industry who worked with wet cement and had the same problem. And so he had a solution to a completely different industry, a completely different problem that actually solved that. And that to me is the key, but you have to be open to somebody else being smarter than you. The Invisible Solution Jenn DeWall: You got to drop the ego. I think that’s so important. Don’t put the pressure on yourself to have all the answers, because by doing that, then you’re missing out on finding your own solutions. So in your newest book, Invisible Solutions, you talk about lenses, lenses that we can use to help us solve our innovation challenges. How can the lenses help reframe our problems? So we can make sure that we’re actually solving for the right challenge. Stephen Shapiro: So we tend to not take the time to ask good questions. And part of that again, is about, we believe if we move quickly, that’s good, but if we’re moving quickly in the wrong direction, that’s bad. The other thing is it’s just easy. Sometimes it’s just laziness. So it’s much easier to ask your organization, how can we improve revenues if that’s your target, but to take the time, to really dig into it a little bit and say, well, is it really revenues that we want? What if it’s about profitability? So maybe we don’t want more revenue. Maybe we want greater profits. Maybe we want more profitable customers, or maybe we want fewer, yet more profitable customers. Each of those are different questions that lead us down a different path. And so what the lenses do is they help you take either abstract questions and break them down into something smaller. Stephen Shapiro: So if I’m looking to improve revenues, the first lens is the leverage lens. And the leverage lens says, if I could only solve for one aspect of this, what would give me the greatest results? So if I’m trying to increase revenues, it might be who, who do I go after to get the greatest revenues? Where’s the greatest opportunity or where maybe it’s a geography question, where can I tap into to get the greatest results? So how can I start getting the best results for the least amount of energy? And so each of these lens helps to challenge an assumption that you have either deconstructing a big problem into something smaller or taking some that’s too specific and making it less. So yeah. Innovation and the Goldilocks Principle Jenn DeWall: What, like no, making it less. So, I mean, I love that. And you talk about that in terms of the Goldilocks principle, right. And maybe, I guess that would be a good thing to explain, because I, I can say one thing, but I think it’s better coming from the man that wrote it, but Goldilocks principle, what is that? So that has to deal with how we ask our questions and how that then determines what type of solutions we uncover. Stephen Shapiro: Right? So the Goldilocks principle, as, as most people would probably guess is based on Goldilocks and the three bears, she goes into a house and there’s three beds. One’s too soft. One’s too hard. One’s just right. And this describes the way we tend to ask questions as sort of a default, our most natural way is to ask questions that are too, or too abstract or too broad. And so we have five lenses in the 25 lenses to break them down into something smaller. So we talked about the leverage lens, but there’s also like the deconstruct lens, which says, well, maybe we deconstruct it into parts or steps or pieces. And then we solve that smaller piece before we start to try to tackle the larger problem. The other part of the Goldilocks principle though, is sometimes we ask questions that are too hard. They’re too specific, they’re too narrowly defined. Stephen Shapiro: And so in the case of the Exxon Valdez, for example, it was assumed that the problem had to do with oil and freezing temperatures. But in fact, when you ask a less specific question in this case, it’s something called viscous shearing, which is a little technical, but basically it’s any dense liquid that’s put under forced acceleration will act like a solid. When the question was shifted to that, a less specific question, a less hard question that’s when a solution was found. So we tend to ask either questions that are too broad, too narrowly defined. And the goal is to ask ones that are just right, actually, Jenn DeWall: Steve and I just, I want to talk about this cause before we close, because you’ve given a lot of just different considerations, I love the lenses, too. Thinking about different ways that we can break down our innovation challenges and just different approaches. I think that look has been really helpful just in terms of me and how I can apply it to my own business. But one of the things I really do want to talk about, because I think it’s a big deal is your new podcast, because you not only are talking more about innovation, but you’re also giving the opportunity for people to call in, to write in, to have insight from you to help them solution their innovation challenges. I can’t even think of just how much I would say that’s invaluable. To have someone else, especially when you think about who else having someone else in that you can just tap into. But can you tell our listeners a little bit about your podcast? Because I would be remiss to not like actually, you know, encourage people to go there because I think it could just be of such value to those that are maybe struggling right now as a result of the pandemic or just struggling to stay relevant. Tell us a little bit about your podcast. Stephen Shapiro: Sure. So the podcast is called Invisible Solutions. Didn’t get very creative with that, because that’s the name of the book. If you want to learn more about it, it’s invisible solutions, podcast.com again, not very creative, but it works and it’s a short form, weekly podcasts. So basically every week what we’ll do is there’s two pieces to it. The first piece is the tip of the week. So I just share. What’s something that you can do to help solve problems in ways that probably weren’t obvious, but the core of it is going to be people who submit problems to me. I will then use the lenses from the book, Invisible Solutions, to reframe those problems and provide potentially interesting solutions. And so I just recorded the first handful of episodes. And so I had two people in particular who emailed me saying I’ve got a problem. Stephen Shapiro: And so I decide, okay, I’m going to record the episode. And I sent them, they’re not published yet, but I sent these individuals the episode and I’m like, Holy moly, you helped me in five minutes see things that I’ve not seen in years of thinking about this problem. And that to me is my goal is not just to solve the individual problem that somebody submits, but also then to show that whatever your problem is, you can have the tools to be able to do it. You don’t necessarily need outside help. It’s really a systematic process that works. Jenn DeWall: I love that. So, so what we can tell our listeners right now, if they have an innovation challenge that one of the things that they can do is go to invisible solutions, podcast.com, and that’s where they could actually submit that for an opportunity for you to potentially maybe select that and help them. Is that right? Stephen Shapiro: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would love that and you can submit them anonymously. So you don’t have to mention your name. Most of the cases, most of the time, people don’t want their names attached to a problem. But that’s the nice thing is it is anonymous. So people don’t know, but you know, if you do send me a problem, when that one goes live, I will send you, I will personally email you back with a link to that one, so you know that I’ve actually worked on your problem. . What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: I just think that’s such a great generous offer because again, I know that right now, people are really, we want to, how do we stay and navigate through the pandemic through these changing global circumstances? And I know that this podcast is just going to be of so much value. I just have to plug it because I think we all need to have that help and that connection, how can we stay afloat? How can we make sure to keep our employees on the payroll? How can we keep serving our customers and so on and so forth? Steve, I really enjoyed having you on the podcast today. Of course, I have to close with our final question that we end every single podcast with, which is what is your leadership habit for success? What do you do? How the heck do you stay abreast at a topic like innovation that I feel like probably changes by the minute? Stephen Shapiro: I think the key thing is having an open mind and asking a lot of questions. And then the other thing that’s really good is having a hot tub in your backyard where you can just close off the entire world and just sort of relax. I do find that for me, if I get so caught up in thinking all the time and I don’t take the chance to relax, I’m probably solving old problems or unimportant problems, or I’m solving them the way that I might’ve solved them last year, rather than the way they need to be solved this year. So it really is just taking that breath, whether it’s a hot tub, a shower, a walk, it’s going to be different for everybody. But that to me is one of the key things is just that time to breathe, to make sure we’re moving in the right direction. Jenn DeWall: And I feel like that’s how it started. We’ve got to take a time to pause, to breathe, to reflect, jump off of that scarcity autopilot. Yeah. It makes sure that you’re looking at things in a curious and new way. Well, Steve, thank you so much. Just investing your time with us for sharing your insights. I’m sorry. I know, I didn’t tell you that I wanted to plug the podcast, but I think it’s such a value add that I had to do it. So I’m sorry if that put you on the spot, but thank you so much for being on the podcast. I it’s, I’m just so happy to have you on for a second time. Thank you, Stephen Shapiro: Jenn, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much. Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much For listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit. If you want to learn more about Steve, check out his website, StephenShapiro.com. You can find his newest book, Invisible Solutions, as well as his game Personality Poker, which is a tool to help make your team more innovative and drive high performance. In addition, be on the lookout for Stephen’s podcast, Invisible Solutions, or you can go to InvisibleSolutionsPodcast.com. And there, just like you talked about on the show, you can go in and maybe submit your innovation challenges and see if Steve can help you solve them. I think that’s such a really neat thing that he’s doing. If you liked today’s episode, please don’t forget to share it with your friends and family, share it with your boss. And of course, write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time.   The post Episode 46: Find the Invisible Solutions to Innovation Challenges with Stephen Shapiro appeared first on Crestcom International.

Elevate Your Virtual Presentation Skills Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, we are talking with Tanis Roeder, who is the founder and president of Elevate Your Communication, an international training and consulting company that focuses on educating individuals to become exceptional communicators. Couldn’t we all benefit from better presentation skills? Tanis has spent the last decade focused on verbal and nonverbal communication skills that have served as the scaffolding for her business and have allowed her to raise over $1 million for charity. She’s a professional member of the National Speakers Association and has presented to audiences around the globe, including 25,000 youth and over 15,000 business professionals. I hope you enjoy the conversation as Tanis and I sat down to determine what we can do to be better presenters in both a virtual and live setting. Enjoy! Meet Tanis Roeder Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall. And on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I am talking to Tanis Roeder. And we are going to talk about one of the scarier subjects speaking. And now, for some of you, that may not be that big of a deal, but I know for some of you that could be a terrifying ordeal. And so Tanis is here to help us today to think about how we can be better virtual live speakers. So Tanis, go ahead and introduce yourself to our audience, tell them about yourself and what you do, and how do you maybe even got into, you know, wanting to help people be better speakers. Tanis Roeder: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Jenn, for having me here today. Again, my name is Tanis Roeder, and I own a company called Elevate Your Communication. Primarily what I do is speaking workshops for executives and sales teams, really anyone who is communicating in front of two or more people. So you don’t have to be standing on a large stage to benefit from the things we’re going to talk about today. If you’re talking in front of two or more people, the skills we’re going to talk about and the discussion we’re going to have can absolutely play out in your day to day life. As far as how I got to where I am today, I started speaking competitively when I was 13 years old. One day I managed to forget my speech in front of 500 of my peers. And it was one of the most traumatic experiences I’ve ever had. But what I realized that day is I had fun with the audience. I made some jokes, they laughed, I laughed, maybe I cried, but I laughed a little too. And then at the very end, I got a standing ovation. And that day is the day that I realized it’s not about me- as a speaker- about me being perfect and having the perfect hair and the perfect content instead. It’s about our audiences. And I really gained a passion for helping people, leaders and sales teams, or really anyone who’s speaking up in front of people to connect with their audience and take the pressure off themselves. And instead, focus on what can we teach our audience? What can we bring to the table? How can we improve people’s lives? So that’s really what brought me to where I am today. Jenn DeWall: What a mortifying story, I’m sure for just being 13, and how we may be at that point in time, don’t have that full confidence in ourselves so that the embarrassment can feel really high. You know you did it. And so then you can remind people like, Hey, I’ve been there, I’ve had that moment where I maybe didn’t have my words memorized or what I wanted to say. And I still figured it out, and you’re making it real. Because there’s that statistic that says that people are more afraid of public speaking than death, is that right? Because that’s bananas. Tanis Roeder: That’s what they, yes. And that’s crazy because I don’t want to be buried, but you know, Why Are People Afraid of Making a Public Presentation? Jenn DeWall: I know that there are some people that are like, Nope, Nope, no, no, no. I do not want to do that. So let’s talk about the fears. Like why do you think people are afraid of speaking? Why is it something that people would rather maybe die if that really is true, then have to go into an audience or talk to people, maybe as you said, two or more people? Why be afraid of that? Tanis Roeder: I think it really comes down to the fact that as human beings, we don’t want to be judged. We’re afraid of being judged. We want people to like us. And when you are in a position to be the center of attention, you have 20, 40, 60, a hundred eyeballs, all staring at you, and they’re expecting something from you, and they’re judging you. And so that can easily send us into cortisol overload. That’s our stress response that happens when we’re in a situation where we feel like we are in danger. And when we get into that cortisol mode, and things keep getting worse and worse and worse, and lots of physical things happen to our bodies, and our brains go blank. And so once we’ve been through that experience, once we think it’s going to happen every time we speak up. And so once people get good at the skills, they can overcome the fear side of speaking. Jenn DeWall: I got. So we’ve got to get rid of that, maybe past the assumption that because something happened once, it’s going to happen again. And I think I like to it, my coaching practice, I like to say that with clients, we think that, you know, if you get rejected on a date one time when you ask someone out that it’s going to happen for the rest of your life. But you somehow overcome that. And so I wonder why, how people can benefit if they just recognize their own resilience that they’ve had. And that’s a great point. So how can you keep that in check? How do you even start to develop a muscle that says, yes, Tanis Roeder: There’s definitely a few things that you can do before you speak that will help you keep your cortisol under control. Because again, we need a little bit of cortisol to give us the energy to get up and be enthusiastic in front of our audience, but we don’t want so much cortisol that we start sweating and shaking and stumbling. So we’ve got to keep it in check and the couple of things that you can do the first and foremost, number one thing, it sounds simple, but people forget to do it. And that is to breathe. Jenn DeWall: Right, because one of the first things that happen is you run out of breath. Before Your Presentation, Take a Deep Breath Tanis Roeder: Right, because what happens is you start taking really short, shallow breaths from your chest. And so then you start to get tunnel vision. Your brain can’t think correctly because it’s not getting the oxygen that it needs. And it’s all because of the way that you are breathing. So breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth before it’s your turn to stand up and present. Or before you start, you hit live on your computer, whatever it may be. Just sit there and take a couple of really good deep breaths. Jenn DeWall: I’m doing this right now. As you’re talking, It’s just calming in general. Tanis Roeder: Exactly. And it Doesn’t have to be obvious. You don’t have to get up and go [loud exhale]. You can do it very quietly. So the second thing that I recommend keeping that cortisol in check every single time you’re in a presentation situation, you want to have your first minute memorized, and I don’t recommend memorizing entire presentations because then your brain can go into what we call cognitive overload. Memorize the First Minute of Your Presentation Tanis Roeder: And if you are trying to remember word for word of presentation, if your brain can’t find the next word of the next sentence, it’ll shut down. And that’s what happened to me that day on that stage in front of all of my peers. My brain shut down. So having our first minute memorized helps us because when we get up in front of an audience, that first time that we see their eyeballs staring at us is when we are going to be the most nervous, the most scared. And that’s when a cortisol dump usually happens. If we know our first minute cold, then we can get up there and just start with a bang. And once we get through that first minute, you know, we’re going to be ready to go for the rest of the presentation and not feel like we’re struggling to get going. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. The first minute— that seems so much more manageable. You know, in terms of your stress level, as you’re approaching a presentation or a speaking, something where you have to talk at, you know, to feel like you’re just focusing on the first minute, just seems like I can do that. Whereas if I think that I have to do the entire thing, that’s a little bit more intimidating. I think that’s such a valuable tip. Rest, Eat and Exercise Tanis Roeder: Yeah. I definitely don’t recommend memorizing. I tell people, you want to know your content by heart, but you don’t want to memorize it. If you know it by heart, you can kind of move around and go over here. And then your brain will remember something that you forgot to say, and it’ll throw it back in. But if you memorize, you get in trouble. So just that first minute. And a couple of other things that I highly recommend that you do. I want you to eat something before you present. Your brain is very glucose-sensitive. And so you need to have something in your system. It doesn’t have to be right before you eat, but maybe even a quick candy bar or something, just to give you that spike that you need. And your adrenaline will take you the rest of the way. So eat something. Tanis Roeder: You want to get plenty of sleep, which I know is hard. If you’re nervous about the presentation, you stay awake all night long, and you change things, and you tweak things. And the problem with that is you’re setting your brain up for failure because you’re going to get up the next day. And you’re not going to remember the changes that you made in your PowerPoint or what exactly you wanted to say here because you just changed it the night before. So I really do recommend the night before is just reserved for maybe one final practice and then a good night of sleep. And one other thing that I want to share-actually, there’s two more- right before you present or within three hours of presenting, get some type of physical exercise, and I’m not a runner, so I’m not going to put on my running shorts and go out for a 10-mile run. I do jumping jacks in the hotel bathrooms. Jenn DeWall: Oh, nice! But you make it work. Right? So like, I don’t want to run. I don’t want to do this. You can just move your body. Tanis Roeder: Yes. So you can run in place. You can do jumping jacks, whatever it is, the reason that I want you to do this. And you remember to take off your jacket before you do this. So you don’t get pit stains. Just saying. Jenn DeWall: I know that’s a legit problem that I have. So Tanis Roeder: It is for a lot of people. We all sweat, and we don’t want those big pit stains. So take off your jacket, do some jumping jacks. What you’re doing here is you’re getting your adrenaline up, and adrenaline counteracts cortisol. Win-Win! And so that’s why I want you to do it within three hours of your presentation. So you can counteract some of that cortisol. That’s inevitably going to happen when you get into this high-pressure situation. The Spotlight Effect Tanis Roeder: And the last piece of advice that I give everyone is that you just have to say, so what the audience isn’t going to know, notice things, the way that you notice things. So even if you feel the sweat dripping down your back, the audience doesn’t see that. Even if you feel your hands shaking a little bit, the audience isn’t focused on that. Your brain has something called the spotlight effect. And the spotlight effect when you are in a high-pressure situation makes you believe that people are focusing on you more than they actually are. Jenn DeWall: Oh, Right. So spotlight, I love that. There’s a name for that, though. The spotlight effect, because that’s that message that you’re then telling yourself like everyone is noticing. And that’s just counteracting, I guess, all the work that you just did to bring your cortisol down. Tanis Roeder: Yeah. It just perpetuates the problem. And so learning to hear the spotlight effect and say, Tanis, the audience does not see your hand shaking. Tanis, get out there and be confident. So it’s really about the messages you send yourself. Telling yourself that you’re going to fail right before you get up to present is a really bad idea. Visualize a Successful Presentation Jenn DeWall: Yeah. So, I mean, what do you visualize? I mean, I imagine like do visualize kind of success or the outcomes, or what would you say about that? Tanis Roeder: Not everyone is into visualizations, but I definitely am. And I visualize my audience. So typically, when I’m teaching even a presentation skills class, I’ve done this class hundreds of times, and I still get nervous every time. And that’s just me taking the situation seriously. And knowing that every time I get up to speak, I have the opportunity to impact someone’s life. So I visualize my audience, and I visualize light bulbs going off over their heads because that’s why I do what I do. I teach because I want people to learn something that they can, in turn, go out and use. Jenn DeWall: Well, and the better that they can feel like. I mean, I’m sure there are so many people even listening to this podcast that has a message or a point of view or insight that, because of maybe being intimidated by speaking, aren’t sharing it—and so knowing that you can give people that confidence too, you know, want to feel comfortable to share their message. And I think even drawing in the importance of nerves, that’s always, and I don’t know where I picked that up either. It’s like, if you’re not nervous, that’s when you should be concerned because then you’re not necessarily on your toes. You’re not maybe engaged in the audience or the outcome. So I that’s, I don’t know where I picked that up, but that’s always, what I heard is if you’re not nervous and there are some problems coming in, and even now for an interview or something like that, it should be a little nervous before you go in. Because that’s going to help you and make sure you’re doing your best. Tanis Roeder: Absolutely. Yeah. I always feel bad when someone says, Oh, I don’t get nervous to speak. I feel sorry for their audience. Jenn DeWall: Right. Well, and they could just be like, my message is, it’s so great. And then that is probably the first time that it’s probably not going to be the best. Tanis Roeder: And then they bring their body with them and there, they don’t know what to do with their body. And it gets really awkward. Capturing the Attention of Your Audience in a Virtual Presentation Jenn DeWall: Yes. I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen it. I’ve seen it where you can watch someone awkwardly present. And it’s worse obviously when they have got a huge ego about what they’re talking about because you’re like, are you talking to the same audience that’s listening right now? I’m not sure that you’re connected with them. Or everyone is like, if they don’t have their phones, they’re like thinking about their weekend plans or something like that. The other thing that I always heard is that people heard this from someone, and maybe this is something you talk about, but I’ve heard that you have essentially like three seconds to make that impression on someone, to engage someone into your message. And so when you’re thinking about that opening, and if we do have such a short amount of time to like pull our audiences, I mean, does that true? Have you heard that, that we have a really short amount of time to be able to grab them? Tanis Roeder: I would say it’s thirty seconds. Thirty seconds is super fast. I mean three seconds, maybe visually, but 30 seconds with both the visual and auditory lobes, checking into your presentation. Really what we focus on in my speaking classes are the first thirty seconds. And I tell them again, and again, if you can nail the first thirty seconds, then you’re going to continue to soar through the rest of your presentation. Jenn DeWall: Yes. So we’re breaking it down, Tanis is breaking it down for you, which is, I mean, they think there are many people and I hope that they walk away and they’re like, I can do this. I can do this! But let’s okay. Let’s get into my, not my favorite, but we’ve got to talk about the failures because in this, where many of us are virtual, maybe we’re just really not that in our I’s and crossing our T’s. So we’re really forgetting to just double check that we’re coming in, but let’s talk about some failures that people might have with speaking and maybe things that people need to be mindful of. So they can hopefully learn from someone else’s mistakes. Tanis Roeder: Yeah. You know, I think the number one thing that causes us to fail is those messages that we send ourselves. And I’m guilty of this too. And before I go into a workshop with a bunch of executives, I’ll tell myself that they’re smarter than me, and they’re going to nail me to the wall, and I’m not going to be able to answer a question. And then, when I get up in front of them, I will have destroyed my confidence. And competence is what we call a reflexive emotion. And that means when I’m standing up in front speaking. If I can display confidence, my audience will, in turn, have confidence in me and in the material that I’m presenting. That’s incredibly important because if I get up and I stand here, and I’m awkward, and I don’t have a lot of confidence, then all of a sudden, like you said earlier, my audience checks out. Tanis Roeder: They’re looking at their phones. They’re not paying attention. They’re thinking about their weekend plans. And that causes me to fail as a presenter. So that’s probably the number one thing that I see people do and that I encourage people to steer away from. Now there’s obviously some funny things that have happened in this virtual world of presenting. Oh, my goodness. You know, we’re almost seven months into this, and you would think that by now, we would have it down. We would all have the equipment we need and the skills that we need. But that is definitely not the case. Learn to Operate the Technology to Avoid Zoom Fails Jenn DeWall: Knowing the basics of maybe Zoom, like you’re mute and unmute. That would be a perfect one. Tanis Roeder: That’s a good one. I don’t know how many of you have been in meetings where you had to say, and you’re on mute. They say that that’s going to be the ultimate saying from 2020 that everyone takes away from this year. You’re on mute. We got to watch that one. We’ve also got to watch where our cameras are and when they’re on and off. I mean, I’m sure many of you have seen the “Epic fails.” I don’t need to talk about any of those, but I’ve seen some pretty interesting ones myself. I was in a writing class a couple of months ago, and our teacher came on, and she was sideways. And I don’t know if she just wasn’t paying attention or couldn’t see how she was appearing, but she taught the entire class sideways. And that was our first impression of our amazing writing teacher that we were all supposed to be listening to. And she talked to us sideways. Jenn DeWall: So her head was perpendicular essentially to the camera Tanis Roeder: She had her phone or camera turning in the wrong direction, and it wasn’t paying attention. And no one in the class said anything because they were all kind of embarrassed for her. I think they just let it go. And that was her first impression with us. And I had another one a couple of weeks ago where a director-level individual was presenting with another director. They were co-presenting. And he thought that when the other person took over the presentation and shared their PowerPoint, that the audience could no longer see him. That’s what he thought. Oh no, that is not the case on Zoom. As you know, you can see the gallery image if you have that open. And so he walked out of his office and walked into his living room, sat down on the floor, and placed this computer between his legs. And everybody noticed it. Luckily as the host, I was able to turn that off. So always important to have a host that’s paying attention to what your participants are doing. So you can shut off their camera for them. Jenn DeWall: Can you do that as a whole on a host functionality? Okay. That’s a valuable tip for any of you that are hosting these meetings. If you start to notice something like, you know, you can just help them save face and make sure that people aren’t distracted by something that’s taking them away from your message. Tanis Roeder: Yes, it is. Absolutely. I’ve turned people off. I had someone sleeping in a workshop the other day. It wasn’t my workshop, but I was the MC, and he had told me he needed to make some phone calls and was going to turn his video off. And I think he maybe thought he turned his video off, but he didn’t. And he laid down on the couch. He put his computer on his lap, and he fell asleep. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, no, no, no, no. Oh my gosh. So if you like, basically create a checklist for yourself, then it has to start with mute and unmute as well as, where is my camera? What does that look like? You need to, at a minimum, be doing that every single time you log onto a virtual event, but people forget. Tanis Roeder: Know what or who is able to walk into the room or in my cat is famous for jumping. If I don’t shut the door, he jumps into my zoom calls, and everybody sees him. He just wants to say hello. He likes being the center of attention. And in a really casual team meeting, that’s one thing I’m not going to say that don’t do that in a team meeting if everybody’s laid back. But when you are in a position to present or leading a group call or doing something like that, we need to be bringing our A-game the same way we would as if we were in person. Tips for Mastering the Virtual Presentation Jenn DeWall: Yeah. What are some like, so let’s go into the tips, like talking about what, how can we succeed? And I know that you focus obviously on helping to develop people to do speaking live, but, but you also do it for virtual. And so knowing that so many of us are likely either going back into virtual environments to influence as a result of the pandemic, we’re going to focus on tips for virtual presenting. But obviously, I know you have a full arsenal of things, you know if it was a live event. So I definitely want our audience to know that if they want to hear, get more access from you, but what are tips to be a better virtual presenter? I mean, starting with making sure that your camera’s in the right place and that your mute and unmute privileges are where they need to be. Set Your Camera at Eye-Level to Make Eye-Contact During Your Presentation Tanis Roeder: Those are absolutely important basics of the camera. I cannot tell you how many people I see their ceiling fan, or I see just the bottom part of their face or their chest. And the key is to get your camera to eye level. And for some of you, if you’re using just a laptop and you don’t have an external camera, that might mean that you stack your Amazon boxes. I know we all have lots of Amazon boxes right now. So you can stack your Amazon boxes on top of each other and set your computer there to bring the little dot up to eye level. And that way, your audience is going to feel like you’re actually connecting with them. There’s a big difference when I’m talking to the camera than when I’m talking down to my computer, or I’m reading my notes. So we really want to focus on keeping our eyes in contact with the camera, and it takes practice. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, that, one’s a really important one because I think that people, you know, I’ve been in meetings where I think people, I think you’ve just, it’s so new that we just don’t where, where do I look? Do I look at the person that’s talking? Do I, you know, where do I look? But what you’re saying is make sure that your camera’s at eye level and that you’re looking at the camera, you can look at the person, but they’re going to actually feel like you’re looking at them if you’re looking at the camera, is that right? Tanis Roeder: That is exactly right. Yeah. If you have a hundred people on the call, they will all feel like you are looking directly at them if you’re making eye contact with the camera. Jenn DeWall: Okay. So get your camera ready eye level. And that you’re not having to maybe slouch, which I know my, I have an external camera that just sits above my laptop. But yeah, mine is my setup. I absolutely have a platform for my laptop. I can go on. I’ve definitely used boxes before. I have absolutely done that. If I’m ever doing a video, I’m like, okay, here’s a really tall chair. He’s a lot of boxes, and people don’t know, but you know, that bonus is that you’re just able to create a better video experience by making it eye level. Tanis Roeder: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve even used a ladder. So I have a ladder. That’s just about the right height. Then when you tip down the little paint tray that’s on the ladder, that’s a great place for your computer to sit. Jenn DeWall: Ooh, that’s a good tip. I feel like that’s a pro tip. Suppose you’re trying to think about maybe creating different backgrounds or wanting to stand or things like that. I love that idea. Tanis Roeder: Yeah. Well, and I even taped my notes. So my bullet points of what I wanted to talk about in that class to the ladder, because I was standing far enough back that I could see the camera and see the notes in my peripheral vision. And it was great. It worked perfectly. Jenn DeWall: Oh gosh. Absolutely. Okay. What’s, what’s another thing that we need to do. So we need to know where the camera’s placed and make eye contact. Check Your Lighting Tanis Roeder: We must, must, must have good lighting. Just please, please, please. Because I contact is what helps us connect with you when you are speaking, when you are leading, when you are anything you’re doing. And if we can’t see your eyes because of bad lighting, then we lose out on that connection. And there are lots of different things that you can do. You don’t have to buy all the big professional lights. You can buy a ring light on Amazon.com. There are tons to choose from— from $20 to $50— anywhere in there. Just get something that’s going to give your face a little bit more light. You always want the light to be in front of you, never behind you. So that lighting is number two on my list. Jenn DeWall: Like that, you talked about the eyes because I don’t think I realized that that was the reason that I wasn’t necessarily connecting with someone. I mean, because it would be, you know, when I see that it’s, it’s someone that’s so dark on their screen, and then they might even have an even darker background. So then it’s just harder in general to kind of connect with their message because you feel like you can’t see that. But that one of the pieces is that because of her eyes, that’s, that’s so interesting. Try Multiple Monitors to see the Camera and the Audience Tanis Roeder: You know, and one of the questions that I get all the time when I’m teaching virtual presentation classes, will I, I still want to see my audience, and I’ve got two different ways that we can handle this, the way that I did it. I took an old TV from my garage that I was going to donate. It’s super old, and I didn’t even think it worked anymore. It doesn’t have a remote, and I set it up behind my computer. And what I do is I put the gallery from zoom up on that TV screen. So the participants are actually right behind my camera. So you can do something like that. The other thing that you can do, if you don’t have any technology, you don’t want to spend any money. That’s fine is. Just step a little bit further back from your computer or scoot your chair back from your computer. Because what this does is, it allows you to have a wider area where you can look, and the audience is still going to feel like you’re looking at them. So right now, I’m looking at my screen, but Jenn, I’m guessing it still feels like I’m looking at you. Jenn DeWall: Yes, absolutely it does. Tanis Roeder: The closer you are to the camera, the more you will have to be directly in the little lens of the camera. Jenn DeWall: Okay. So just take a step back. I mean, that’s got to also feel a little bit more relieving, so you’re like not, you know, feeling like I’m so in their face, like I feel a little bit calmer probably by giving it a little distance. That’s where I feel. I mean, but it’s yeah. It’s I think these are such great tips and also, yeah, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to be able to make this there. I really appreciate you sharing that point because you know, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to invest a lot of money. There are just little things that you can do to be able to make that experience that much better. Get a Green Screen or Set Your Background Carefully Tanis Roeder: Yeah. I love now people always comment on the background. Oh, Tanis, that looks so good. And your hands don’t disappear. That’s because I have a green screen and all of that must be so expensive. The good news is that it’s not, you can buy little portable green screens. You can go to your local fabric store and get a green cloth. I had someone the other day tell me that she brought, she bought a bright green tablecloth, and that’s what she uses as her green screen. And so there are lots of ways to achieve this without spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Jenn DeWall: Yes, I absolutely. And you’re right. That’s a great point. I know, right in the beginning with zoom, we did use a lot of their virtual backgrounds, but because it’s not actually on a green screen, then it would create that fuzziness with your hands and your hair and all that stuff. So then I just stopped using them. But I like the idea of going back to a green screen because then you can personalize your background. I love that you have a personal brand statement. I think that’s so great to have in position when you’re presenting. Or for those that are listening. Maybe your company name, maybe the word that you’re talking about, or who knows. There’s a lot of different ways that you can leverage the power of your background. Tanis Roeder: And there’s a website called Canva.com. They have a ton of free zoom backgrounds that you can drop your logo into, and you can create something just like this that’s personalized for your company without paying a designer to do it and totally free. So again, you can do it on a shoestring budget. I just really encourage you to look at this because it ups your game, and people will notice since, wow. That looks really good. Jenn DeWall: Yes. I think the background is so important. I also got advice that, so when I was setting up my background, I got advice that you really want to kind of remove anything that would pull your audience away from your message. So maybe not heavy on a lot of books where people are going to say like, Oh, well look, did they read? Did I read that one? How to like, are we, or then they’re losing sight of your message. Like what other tips would you give for a background? Tanis Roeder: Yeah, absolutely. So if you don’t have a green screen and you don’t want to go that direction, you just want to find somewhere in your house. That’s relatively simple. I mean, Jenn, I love your background. You’ve got very simplistic shelves with just a couple of things on it. So after I initially get on the call, and I look at your background, and I’m not paying attention to it anymore because my brain already visually took in everything there was to take in. And now, I can focus on you and your message. It’s really important that we understand that our visual lobe is larger than our auditory lobe. So we’re always going to be focusing on our eyes before we start listening. Jenn DeWall: No kidding? I love learning these things! For a Better Presentation – Limit the Words on Your PowerPoint Tanis Roeder: Oh, it is. It’s fascinating. That’s why PowerPoints with a ton of words is the worst thing that you can do for your audience. We think we need to put all that content up there, but really what we’re doing is we’re making our audience stop listening to what we’re saying because they’re all reading what’s on the slide. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, that is. Oh my gosh. I don’t know if we’re going to talk about PowerPoint and a lot of words. Because I’ve heard that you should go even on a slide that for every bullet point you shouldn’t have any more than six or seven words is that very simple. Tanis Roeder: People always have a panic attack when I tell them six by six, but I have never worked in any industry. I’ve worked with engineers, real estate, mortgage healthcare, every industry that I’ve worked with. We’ve been able to take very technical presentations and simplify the slides. So they are following the six by six rule. And so that they are visual instead of an overwhelming amount of just content and graphs and numbers. Jenn DeWall: So what’s the six by six rule. If our audience may not know what that is. Tanis Roeder: Yeah. So six by six is no more than six bullets per page. And yes, that counts sub-bullets. I actually don’t encourage people to use sub-bullets on a PowerPoint. That’s more of a handout—no more than six bullets per page and no more than six words per bullet. Jenn DeWall: Okay, everyone- six by six. I think that’s a great tip because I know I go there. When someone throws, you know, 50 words on a PowerPoint, well, then I’m trying to read it. I don’t want to go away from the speaker because I don’t want to feel like I’m not listening, but I actually have checked out. So now I’m just focused on reading. Tanis Roeder: A good rule of thumb. Is that a period? It should never ever be in a PowerPoint. Jenn DeWall: Got it. Yeah, just points. Okay. I like that one too. That should make it easier for some people maybe that are planning a presentation that you don’t have to put everything, just do enough. That it’s going to be a prompt for you or a prompt for your audience to know the talking point and what you want them to remember. So what’s another tip that you would recommend for people that are presenting virtually? Watch Your Body Language Tanis Roeder: The interesting thing is people feel like this is such a different form of communication, and it is to a certain extent, but when it comes to the presentation side of things, the same skills that I teach for in-person apply virtually. You still want to have good eye contact. You still want to have a strong stance. So I always say, don’t be wiggling because even when I’m moving my feet, you see it up top. If I’m swaying, that can be really distracting. So you want to have a strong stance. Tanis Roeder: And I want to be able to see your hands every now and again, which is a little bit harder on a computer screen because you have to bring them up higher than you do when you’re in person. But the reason that I want to see your hands is because the palm of your hand is very important. It shows people that you are open. You are honest. You are ready to connect with them. You’re not hiding anything. And so using gestures that show the palm of your hands makes a big difference in how you connect with your audience and other things. Jenn DeWall: That one’s a new one for me. Okay. So palms facing audiences. Tanis Roeder: Yes. Even if you’re relatively close to your screen. And you’re sitting here. You can still bring your hands up every once in a while or make a gesture here or something along those lines. And then the last one is really to remember, to get your voice involved. We sometimes get bored because we are by ourselves, you know, in our offices, with nobody to give us any feedback. We can’t see people’s facial expressions as well. And we forget that if we lose our vocal variety, then all of a sudden, people are going to check out because they’re bored of listening to the same voice and staying in the same pattern that has no emphasis. That’s just really consistent. Instead, we want to make sure that we’re adding emphasis, and we’re going up, and we’re going down with our pitch, just really showing our audience that we’re excited to be here. And we’re excited to talk about whatever topic we’re going to talk about. Your audience is going to be a little less excited than you are. And every time you speak, whether it’s virtually or in person, you set the enthusiasm level in the room or in the Zoom call. So you can do that with your voice. Get Bigger for a Virtual Presentation—Not Smaller Jenn DeWall: I, gosh, I think, you know, for virtual presenting, I always try to just be big. I feel like I am bigger than I’ve ever been on stage. I am much bigger even when I’m just behind the camera because I’m so, I guess, concerned that I don’t want my audience to all of a sudden be like, Jenn, thanks for talking about communication or this and not buy into it. So I feel like I use a lot of props. I’ve got my fancy microphone with my karaoke microphone. I try to use things and be even just that much bigger just to make sure that people are paying attention to me and not looking at that next tab on their screen. Tanis Roeder: Yeah, you, you are in a bucket of few. Most people that I’ve seen presented in this virtual world go the exact opposite direction. They get quieter because they’re nervous that there’ll be too loud on the other person’s computer. That other person can adjust their volume. The volume of your voice is really equal to the amount of confidence that you’re displaying. So if you talk softly and your audience is never going to see you as confident. However, when you bring your voice up to an appropriate volume, all of a sudden audience goes, wow, this person knows what they’re talking about, and they’re confident, and I’m confident in them. So really making sure that you are vigor, you do a great job of that. And I encourage everyone, no matter what industry you are in, no matter what type of presentation you are giving, to be a little bit bigger virtually than you maybe originally would have. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Well, and I think that’s a good point too, for the people that might think, Oh my gosh, I’m talking so loud, and you’re in virtual. They can always reduce the volume. You don’t have to control that. They can control that for themselves. So, you know, take that and throw it out of your brain because it’s one less thing that you need to worry about that might give you a little bit of nerves. Yes. I need to. I love all these little, like trying to use more hand gestures. Tanis Roeder: It’s harder in a virtual world. It definitely is because you have to make more, a conscious effort to do that. Dress Professionally—Top to Bottom Jenn DeWall: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that you had touched on was how to dress. Why do people forget that dress still matters in a virtual environment? Why do we forget that? Tanis Roeder: It’s because, in the beginning, the big joke was we all get to work in our pajamas now, and that was fine for the first two months. It was, we all gave each other a ton of slack, and it was totally relaxed and no big deal. But now we expect more. We expect you to show up the same way you would when you’re in person, which means that no, you can’t wear your boxer shorts on the bottom half. You do need to put pants on, and you know, have a nice blouse or a blazer or whatever it is. Dress the exact same way you would as if we were in person together. Jenn DeWall: People! Remember, you’re still influencing your audience if you’re on camera. So you want, you know, it’s not to say that every zoom meeting requires a more formal look, but know your audience. Know who you might be trying to influence what maybe they would be wearing. I know that even anytime I talk about my business, I feel like I do it in a way that I’m live interacting with someone. Like that’s how I treat it. And that’s most of my zoom meetings, but I just want to make sure that I’m there. But I know for me, confidence is huge when it comes down to what I’m wearing. If I came in here with the sweatshirt that I had on earlier, I probably wouldn’t project the same level of confidence. I mean, it’d be warmer, but yes, confidence. Tanis Roeder: No, it’s absolutely true. That’s actually why I stand up. Even in most of the meetings that I have, if I’m pitching a new client, if I’m doing a, you know whatever it is, most of the time I’m standing in my zoom calls because it just raises my level of confidence and raises what I bring to the table. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Stand up. So by the, you know, I need to buy one, I know I do a standing desk, but by a standing desk or just move your computer, like till the ladder, you can do that. If you have a meeting that you’re presenting on and have it so you can stand and make yourself bigger, I guess. I mean, I feel like it would just be more comfortable with standing like that would be. That’s the thing that I’m starting to get more sick of. It’s just sitting because it’s just not as comfortable doing it. One meeting after another, after another, Tanis Roeder: Your brain needs that movement. And I don’t encourage you to move while you’re talking, but maybe while someone else is sharing their piece, you know, you can just move your legs a little bit, and you’re not just sitting around all day. Jenn DeWall: No, that’s. So before we go, I know you just covered a lot in terms of what people can do to be a better virtual presenter. I know we can’t go all-in on live, but what are some maybe high-level tips that you would have for someone if they are going to do a live presentation? Live Presentations Aren’t That Different Tanis Roeder: Sure. I like, I mean, again, you’re using a lot of the same skills, so you’re going to work on your gestures and your stance. Eye contact is one of the most powerful skills that we have. And when you are live, you have the opportunity to use eye contact to really develop a relationship with your listeners. And every single person that I’ve coached with the exception of maybe a handful. I have encouraged them to slow down their eye contact. We have a tendency when we get nervous, and we’re presenting live to look around the room very quickly, and we’re looking, and we’re looking, and we’re looking above people’s heads and, and that actually is really taxing on our brain instead, what I want you to do the next time you’re speaking with two or more people, I want you to really focus on staying with each person a little bit longer than you normally would for you might feel a little bit uncomfortable, but I guarantee at the end of the conversation, if you ask the other people, they would say, no, that was great. Tanis Roeder: They may even walk away and say, wow, I feel like she was really listening to me. When when you look at people, that’s what makes them understand that you are really listening to what they have to say when it’s a two-way conversation, and it helps them connect when it’s a one-way conversation. So eye contact, eye contact, eye contact! Practice it, get feedback on it, record yourself if you’re doing a virtual presentation, and watch your eyes. But when you’re live, really work on slowing that down, and then with the gestures, you’re going to get bigger when your life, obviously I would have to back way up in order to get much bigger with my gestures. But if I were in a room of 50 people, my gestures would need to be bigger for the audience to see them. And for them to really understand how my gestures are showing them what I feel and what I’m saying. There’s a reason that we have gestures. So we want to make sure that we use them and that we use big ones when we are in person. And when we’re in virtual, at least get them involved a couple of times. So that’s a few things that are different between virtual and live, but good tips and things you can practice on a daily basis. Yeah, absolutely. Tanis Roeder: If you’re virtual, what a nice gift that we actually do have the opportunity where we can set up a mini Zoom session, and we can practice it there, and we can prove ourselves and do that. That, I mean, that’s a pretty nice gift. Yeah. I and I’ve called family members and said, Hey, would you jump on real quick? And let me know what you think of these slides. And if you can read them or, you know, if my camera’s set up, Hey, am I blurry? Is the lighting good? And so I can get a ton of feedback before I hit go live on a zoom call, which I wouldn’t be able to get if I were live in-person. So that is a huge advantage. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Yes, absolutely. Well, Tanis, thank you so much for sharing all these insights with our listeners. I’ve got to close with the final question that we close every podcast with, which is: what is your leadership habit for success? Tanis Roeder: You know, I gave a lot of thought to this. And what I realized is that it’s actually a piece of advice that I give to people in my speaking class, but it doesn’t just apply to speaking. And that is that the small things make a really big difference. In speaking, small things maybe eye contact or gestures and stance. But as a leader, the small things are saying thank you to your team members, acknowledging what someone has done. Dropping someone a thank you note, or a little gift on their desk, or sending it in the mail. Those little things make a huge difference. And not only how you are perceived as a leader, but how the people who are on your team want to follow you and want to be a part of your team. So just remember the small things make a really big difference. Jenn DeWall: So that’s a great closing tip. I think you can apply that in a lot of different ways, too, just to remind yourself, don’t have to tackle it all at once. It doesn’t have to be a grandiose gesture, but it’s just the little things that add up to become memorable. Tanis, thank you so much for joining us on the leadership habit podcast and helping our audience become better virtual facilitators and live facilitators. I, if you guys apply these tactics that Tanis just shared, feel free to share them with us. We want to hear the results of you trying this, but Tanis, thank you so much for joining us. Tanis Roeder: Thank you so much, Jenn, for having me! Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the leadership habits podcast. It was a great conversation with Tanis Roeder, and I hope you felt the same. If you want to connect with her and you can learn more about her training and workshops at ElevateYourCommunication.com. You can also connect with her on social media, where she’s going to share a variety of communications, speaking, and body language tips. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or on Facebook. And then, you can also connect on Twitter @Taniselevates and on Instagram at @tannisroeder. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked today’s episode, don’t forget to share this with your family and friends. And of course, write us a review on your favorite podcast stream and service until next time.   The post Episode 45: Elevate Your Virtual Presentation Skills with Communication Expert Tanis Roeder appeared first on Crestcom International.

Meet Natalie Dumond, Leadership Coach, Facilitator, and Speaker Jenn DeWall: Hey everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall. And on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I talked to Natalie Dumond, whether she is helping you go after the life and dreams you were always meant to be living or showing organizations and leaders that there’s a different way to lead, work and connect with each other. Natalie brings enthusiasm, boldness, and kindness with her every single time. As a professional certified leadership coach, facilitator, and contributor to Brené Brown’s latest bestselling book, Dare to Lead. Natalie focuses on leadership and female empowerment coaching, along with workplace culture development. Working in partnership with leaders and teams helping build their capacity for courage, candor, connection, accountability, vulnerability, and trust in the workplace. In today’s episode, Natalie and I are going to be talking about what are the best ways to give feedback? I know some of you might be thinking about maybe upcoming performance reviews. This is a can’t-miss episode. Full Transcript Below: Jenn DeWall: Hey everyone, I’m so excited to be sitting down with Natalie Dumond today, Natalie, for those that you have a tremendous introduction, by the way, I’m sure they just caught your bumper. But for those that maybe are still new, a little bit new to you, I want to hear from you, tell us what you do. Tell us why you’re here. What do you do? I know why you’re here, but what do you do? Natalie Dumond: Thank you so much. Okay. So what do I do? Simply put, I’m a leadership coach, and I work with a lot of female leaders in particular, and I just try to help guide them into the lives and careers that they always wanted. So I speak on that. I coach on that, and I facilitate around those areas. So that’s basically what I do. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. Which, what’s your favorite part about your job? Natalie Dumond: Watching people realize how powerful and magnificent they really are. Like when you see somebody get that, you’re just like, there it is! That is the best feeling in the entire world. I’m addicted to it. And I just feel like, I don’t know, I just have the best job. I feel like I’m getting away with something because it feels so good. Jenn DeWall: That’s I mean; I do feel like that’s the joy of coaching, right? Like it’s able to— you get to see those transformative moments where people are like, Holy cow, I can do that. Natalie Dumond: I love that. And I have to like facilitating a large group of people and teaching, and the energy that you get from that is also incredibly powerful. So I would say it’s a toss-up between those two, Working with Brené Brown Jenn DeWall: Hey girl. And that’s why you’re here, everyone. I actually was on a panel with Natalie, and I got to hear all of her great advice on all-around leadership. And so we’re so excited to be able to share with you some of the nuggets that come from Natalie, but before we get into it because I love Brené Brown. And I’m sure some of the people that listen to the podcast may have also heard of Brené  Brown, that’s Brené with a B, but you actually to her book Dare to Lead, which is, look, here’s the plug for Brené’s leadership book. You contributed to that! How did you get to do that? Because I love her and I read that book. I love that book. That’s great. Tell me more. Natalie Dumond: Yes. So I still pinch myself over this one. How it came to be was that I was coming off of maternity leave back in 2017. And for anyone that’s been on parental leave, you know, there’s kind of this uneasiness with going back into the workforce, like, and you know, what’s it going to be like, what am I going to do? So I want to just, you know, change up the mommy mode and get back into work mode. So I started researching, you know, and just looking online. And then, one of the things came into my thought process. What is Brené up to? Cause I’m also a big fan of Brené. I have been for years and read a lot of her books. I started with Daring Greatly. And then I went on her website, and at the very top corner, there was this thing called Brave Leaders, Inc. And I was like, what is that? So I clicked on that, and it was an online course to help bring bravery into leadership. And because I’ve always been fascinated by good leadership, great leadership, ugly leadership. I was like, what is this? So I clicked on it and went through the course, and I couldn’t like to get through the material fast enough. It was like. It was all of her research plus everything. That’s fantastic about Brené, and her ability to story tell all woven into this course. And I fell in love with it. So I did the course, got my little certificate to put on LinkedIn, and then went on my way and went back into work. Well, about a month after I started, the team from Brené’s organization contacted me to do just some customer service. What did I think of the course? I was like, these guys are amazing. They’re so friendly. And so I got on a call with this lovely individual named Lauren, and we start talking about what I found with this course, what I liked, what I would have wanted to see more of. But what I didn’t know at the time is they were doing research to find out how they could bring brave leaders or dare, dare to lead to the main audience. I was one of their testers. I just didn’t know I was being tested. So I did that, met with them, talk to them over the phone, just like this, and told them what I liked. And that was it. And then the next year, I think it was around June of 2018. I get a call from her team again. And they said, Hey, Brené is writing a new book on leadership. She is curious if people that took brave leaders put it into action in their job. So my background was in human resources, and I was like, absolutely, I’ve done this. And I said, here’s a bunch of the areas that I did. And one of the areas was on feedback and how to build a feedback culture. And I took what I learned in that course, and I applied it and built a program around performance management and feedback. And she ended up liking it and decided to take my work and put it in her book. And then it launched in October of 2018. And that’s it? Jenn DeWall: Yes, yes, yes. Congratulations, Natalie. That is a huge accomplishment. And I mean, of course, just to like to be in the, I maybe it’s because I’m so far removed from Brené that I absolutely am like to be in her presence to be in her book is such a fantastic, I mean, achievement. That is wonderful. Congratulations. Natalie Dumond: Yeah. She’s just as magical. Well, she’s just amazing. She is, she is really down to earth, and she’s, she’s a lovely human, so she deserves all the goodness that comes her way for sure. Daring to Lead Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And so you have that experience. You’ve been in HR. You said it was over 15 years. You’ve over 15 years of HR experience. And one of the things I just want to ask you, I know this wasn’t our plan thing, but what does it truly mean to be a brave leader? Like I know that we didn’t necessarily like because when we think about brave leaders, I know before this, we were talking about maybe some not great leaders. So I guess maybe, maybe we could talk about what if you could have coached one person that maybe is not a great leader. Like what advice would you have or what, what would you do with that? I know that’s on the spot. Like where, how could you be brave? Maybe that’s the better question. How could I be more brave in leadership? Natalie Dumond: One of the things that are, you know, well that we see happen over and over, you probably see this in your work is the ability to lean into vulnerability. The ability to show up authentically the ability to be more curious about the other person’s perspective, right? So it’s this ability, you know, to also be aware of and do empathy well, and those are all vulnerable things, right? So vulnerability is this big trait that we need more leaders to start to lean into, and it can feel really uncomfortable. And a lot of people try to shy away from it, or they try to like, pretend that they’re not vulnerable. They just don’t know how to do it well, but here’s the thing about vulnerability. We either do it consciously, or we do it unconsciously. And when you do it unconsciously, you get a lot of the bad things that come out like passive-aggressive, you know, armoring up hiding, numbing out all those things. But what you want to do is be conscious and be like, okay, I know this is gonna be a vulnerable moment. I know this is going to be tough, but I can do it. I can do hard things. I can lean in and be myself throughout all of it. So for me, it’s vulnerability. And like when I’m working with leaders, now there are two things its self-awareness and self-compassion are the two biggest things that we need our leaders to be having. Because there’s no more room for leaders to be going. I didn’t know. Or I was unaware. That’s not an okay excuse anymore. Your job is to become aware of that self-awareness piece. And then the self-compassion. So when leaders have self-compassion for themselves, that means like give themselves the grace to try something, make a mistake, own it, and move forward. If they can do that with themselves, then they can extend that, which is the empathy piece to everybody else. So anyway, long-winded vulnerability, which ties heavily to self-awareness and self-compassion. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Well, and it’s, I wonder what if I go back to my twenties when I heard first entering the workforce, working for a really big company that’s based here in the US and it was a dream job, right. Because it was such a recognized company, but I had always been a geek about leadership because I’m that nerd that was doing it since I was in high school and leadership camps. But I remember honestly, going in, going in and cause you to learn so much about leadership even at a young age, especially if you’re nerding out, reading all those self-help books. And then I remember getting into work and being like, wait, was leadership a myth? I’m sorry. Is that something that like, like it was someone that was going to come in and like Prince charming at a horse, like, was that a total lie? And I think that’s probably because people armor up, they go, they go into work with their armor on, and they don’t understand that they’re in the business of serving people. Natalie Dumond: Yeah. They’re there to connect to other human beings and show them what’s possible within themselves. Right. And if you come from that space, you come from something completely different. But like a lot of leaders are coming in. Sometimes they lack that self-awareness, and when you get that, you get the armored behavior, you get the ego-driven behavior, and you drive more disconnection than connection. Feedback and Performance Management Jenn DeWall: Yeah. What, what inspired you? So now, we can shift into feedback. What, what inspired you to kind of create your own feedback or performance kind of performance improvement, not performance improvement, but like a feedback plan or program. Natalie Dumond: Yeah. Performance management was when I- so the right before I went into the coaching world and started my own practice, I was working at a tech company for about eight years. And when I started there back in 2011, the first thing they ever said was we need a performance management program. Can you build one? And I was like, absolutely. So I did what a lot of good HR people do. I ran off, and I got myself a form and a star rating system and a bunch of competencies. And then I just jammed it into the organization, and they were all like, no, no, like, okay. We said we wanted that, but we don’t like it, and we’re not going to do it. And I’m like, but why? So I’m like, all right, fine. I will. I will go and get us a tool. Not just, it just won’t be in a doc now I’ll go get a tool to automate it because that’ll make it more efficient, and then that’ll work. So I did that, trained everybody else, jammed it in the organization, and still, I was policing the crap out of it, begging everybody to do it. And, you know, making sure leaders were pushing it on their employees to do it and all that stuff. And I was like, and so we did this for a couple of years, right. Just kept tweaking every time it was performance management, time tweaks the form, tweak the competencies, tweak the system. And I was like, I hate this. Like everybody hates it. I hate it—performance management. And I was just like, Hey. So I remember sitting in a room with one of the co-founders of the company. And I was like, why do we even do performance management? Like, what is the point of it? Everybody just hates it and avoids it. Jenn DeWall: That would always be the last thing I can tell you that you got all the emails when I was at a big company because they were pretty sophisticated. Right. So you get the email reminders, just a reminder to put in your goals for the year and another reminder to do your mid-level ones. And then at the end of the day, you know, it’s like, you’re yes, you hate them because you’re just writing the stuff that someone wants to hear. It’s not. You’re just checking the box. I felt like going back to school. People Want Feedback, But Not Like That Natalie Dumond: So I’m like, so I’m like, then you as an HR professional, you always hear. But like, I want to know what people think of my work. I want to know, am I doing okay? So I’m getting these like, you know, dueling, you know, ideologies of, we hate doing it and then no, but we want it. And I’m like, okay, so what’s going on? So I just remember sitting with the co-founder, and I was like, how can we make this? So it’s actually valuable to everybody involved because, as an employee, they want to grow, they want to develop, they want to grow, and they want to expand their skillsets. Okay. Got it. But they also want to have a connection, and they’re kind of scared to see what everyone thinks. Right. So there’s that, that we’ve got to deal with. And then, on the other hand, the company, as an organization, they need to know if they have the right players on the bus, on the bus. Right? Do we have people performing at the levels that we need in order to produce the services and products that we need? So how do you bring this all together? So we just stripped it all down. And I said, look, the whole reason for performance management is to make sure that the employee grows and that if you have a growing employee and that’s doing, you know, then you get the right products and services, right—it just kind of feeds into it. So what we did is we got rid of absolutely everything, every system, every competency, and all the star rating, numerics, like all that. And we just asked like two questions, what makes me successful? And what is holding back? It was that bare bones. And I put it in a Google doc. And I said, here, employee, you are now in charge of your performance management. I’m not the HR person, and neither is your leader. You are. So now, you go out and get five pieces of feedback from your peers and all the people you work with. And then, when you come to sit at the performance management time, you’re going to drive the conversation, and your leader is going to now be the coach. Jenn DeWall: I love that. That is drastic by most accounts. I’m sure for a lot of co someone might be listening. They’re like what? You got rid of a form with two questions?! Natalie Dumond: Yeah, we just simplified it and drilled it down to what actually matters. Right? So it w it was through that and just launching it and getting it. And, you know, some people have modified it to start, stop, continue, whatever you want to do, but just get it down to simplifying. What do you think? And then having the bravery, and this is where the work from Brené’s research came in because then I had to turn around and train the organization on how to be vulnerable. One to ask for feedback and two, how to be vulnerable and brave enough to give it, and how to sit in. So then that was the next big push with the organization how you train people and get them to actually sit in feedback, both delivering it and receiving it. So that’s kind of how, how we changed it. And that took some time as well. Right. Jenn DeWall: So that would be a big part because there are still the people that are. I’m sure if they really want to tell you that you’re actually a passive-aggressive communicator, I’m just going to say, you’re fine. Do you know what I mean? Cause if they have, did you, what did you see? Like what was it like initially when people were doing that, was there a little timidness, like you got to do this, like, how did you overcome that? Effective Feedback Takes Practice Natalie Dumond: Yeah. And like, I think it’s, you gotta think about like when you go to the gym, right. If I went to the gym today and I was like, I am fit after one time, and you’d laugh at me. It’s the same with feedback. Right? You need to practice it over and over and over again to actually get better at it. And, and it’s like most things, right. So the first time we went and launched it, there were tears. People cried because of real feelings, real thoughts, opinions came out. Now you actually know what the other person beside you really thinks. And so there was lots of training on how to give feedback. Absolutely. Right. Like there that’s a big piece, but the other piece that was eye-opening is how do you see that you know, you were in control of how you receive feedback, you know, just because it is said, doesn’t mean necessarily mean that you have to fully, you know, do what it says. You could take it, and you can take a look at it and see does something needs to shift. Okay. That’s their opinion. I understand that. Like you get to be in control of it. And, and I think that was one of the bigger shifts is just because you are given feedback, what do you do with that? It doesn’t mean you always have to take it right in. So receiving feedback was just as difficult to train as, or challenging to train as, as giving it. Jenn DeWall: Well, and in my experience, I really, if I even go back to earlier, you know, I would say that clearly, I didn’t do a great job in the beginning of my career at receiving feedback because I never had, what I was, you know, I was used to really just like making the mark and over-achieving. So when you get feedback that counters that, it can be just debilitating. But I’m curious, like why do you think that we, I feel like we can talk, we know, you know, different ways that we can give feedback. We could probably rattle off them, but yet why is it that most trainings or even what we know is so focused on just like, this is how you give feedback, and you have to give feedback, but it’s never focused on, okay, this is how you can look at feedback. This is how you can receive it. Why do you think that we don’t have that emphasis? Learning How to Receive Feedback Natalie Dumond: I know. I think a lot of us just get really caught up in how it’s said. And we’re so worried about how it’s going to be delivered, that we spend a lot of time there and you do have to focus like on that part of it. But the other side of it, like if we have a world of organizations that had employees that knew how to receive feedback well. Do you think we’d have a world of people that were so anxious to give feedback? No. So it’s just as important. I think it’s just missed. Right? I think we need to do some heavy lifting or coaching around people to be okay with other people’s, you know, opinions. It’s okay. And you cannot control what other people think of you all the time. What you can control is how you take it in and how you process it. And sometimes it’s hard. Like I still sometimes will get a feed piece of feedback, and I’m like, Ooh, but now I’m changing the process of like, okay, what can I learn from this? So I want to modify something in my workshops. Do I want to change the way that I showed up that way or my speaking game? Whatever it is, I get to now be in control of what I do with that. So it was a changing, you know, the way I thought about feedback anyway, I don’t know why we’re not giving it enough attention, but I definitely know that we need to talk more about receiving feedback and that we don’t have to be as scared about it as, as we think. Jenn DeWall: Well, I think part of it, of why people don’t put the emphasis on, you know if I’m going to go into a big class about feedback and why they don’t necessarily focus on how to receive it. I think part of it is because we still are in denial that emotions exist in the workplace. Like, of course, you know, especially if someone’s really passionate about their work, you know, they’re going to be emotional, and that’s totally okay, but you have to also teach them how to receive it in a way that’s productive. That’s not, you know, doesn’t leave everyone feeling terrible. That feedback was given because then people will be so scarred and not want to give it again. But I think even talking about it, and I’m sure there’s a lot of people listening. I know that like, whether they’re leadership facilitators or coaches themselves, like how you and I are. Yeah. When you’re kind of in a public space, like I know when I give webinars or when I teach classes, there are feedback forms that come out and sometimes, you know, like you get these great, like, Oh, Jenn was lovely. And then it’s like, and this is why I think Jenn sucks. And that those are hard. And I think it’s my own. It’s talking about starting the conversation; it’s okay. That not everyone loves you. Feedback Helps You Make Progress Faster Natalie Dumond: It’s okay. You know, but just keep trying, you know, be a good person and, and do good work and see what happens. And like, I think a lot of the time, you know, I was doing a, I was hosting a live event on LinkedIn, and I was interviewing Vanessa McDonald, who is the creator of The Brave Journal, which is an awesome journal to help you be braver in your life. And we were talking about this like feedback loop and, and how we are so afraid to just get out there and try something out of fear of feedback. But I found in being in business for myself if I go out there and just put, you know, what’s good enough out there, the feedback loop makes me stronger. Right. And I go faster. Right. So when I launched my, my, my business and I want to put out a website, I had to, I was working away on it, you know, fiddling with like every little piece color, this text, copy, you know, all that kind of stuff. And finally, I just remember after two months of working night after night on, I was like, that’s it? And I submitted it to the world, and I went out, and I said, Hey everyone. And if you want to see what I’m up to, you know, check out my new website, let me know what you think. Well, there was good feedback, but there was also, Hey Nat, there was a misspelling on this page, or actually, it was doubled. And I went a lot faster because people gave me feedback. I could spend another couple more months reading every line again by myself. So, you know, I was telling this to Vanessa, and anyway, she said, life is about living in the iteration. And I love that. It was just like, we’re constantly iterating, but we also have to be open to the feedback that comes through with that iteration. And a lot of us are trying to wait until we are perfect and not okay with just good enough and then moving from that. So anyway, feedback and actually really help you move faster if you’re open to it. However, so many of us are just like, I’m just going to hide until I think I’m perfect enough. And then they wait so long. Jenn DeWall: You wait, and the opportunity’s gone or you, you know, become more anxious. I know I just did a webinar on Agile leadership. And when we think about being agile, that’s one of the most important things of an agile mindset is your adaptability to change. And that you have to have feedback on that. And someone actually said this last week in a class, you know, good is better than perfect and that we have to get better at looking at, Hey, is it good? You know, we’re not ever going to be perfect. I don’t know why we ever I, myself too, as the recovering perfectionist, right. As I’m sure many of the people that are listening to a leadership class are probably a little bit more type A, but it’s getting people to recognize that good is better than perfect. So if I, so what advice would you give or how, what do you think is the best way to get feedback? Like what, what advice would you share with our listeners on how to actually give and have a good feedback conversation. Want Better Feedback? Ask For It. Natalie Dumond: We just ask, what did you think? You know, what could I do to serve you better? If you’re a leader, what did you need more of? What do you need less of? What would help, you know, what would help you just be naturally curious and know that whatever they say is okay. For me, it’s just asking. So as a coach and a facilitator, every time I’m done a workshop, I put out a Google survey and I, and I asked my participants, what do you think? It’s a quick one, you know, what you learn? What were you hoping more for? So for me, it’s just asking, Jenn DeWall: Do you have an opinion on this- I know a lot of people listening might have been trained or given the advice to follow the sandwich method– I’m not really a huge fan of it because it does seem so disingenuous to me. And I know that’s not the intent, but it’s just, it seems so forced, right? Like I got to give you the positive for the bun, then I’ll give you the meat of what you actually need. And then I’m going to wrap it up on a positive note. Like, it just seems so strange to me. And then if you’re not maybe as fluid in your transitions, then it’s going to even seem more awkward. Natalie Dumond: Yeah, and everyone can kind of see through it. So yeah, if you’re using the sandwich method for feedback, I would highly recommend stopping that doesn’t feel sincere. Right. And so people are looking, here’s the main thing that people are looking for with feedback. And this comes from Kim Scott’s radical candor. And it’s brilliant is they’re looking to know that you were clear and kind, that you actually care about them. So show them that you care about their wellbeing, their growth, their development, right. Show them that you care. So that’s the main like that’s overarching, that’s what the energy you should be bringing into a feedback session. But if you’re looking for a kind of like some formula to put through, the one that I train on is you talk about the situation, behavior, impact. Situation, behavior, impact. So you explain the situation of what you noticed, the behavior that you witnessed, and then the impact that it had on you or potentially the team. I always recommend speaking in the I statements. It’s a lot harder when you’re like, we all think we all believe because people get really armored with that. Jenn DeWall: It feels like someone’s like stomping you down. Like Everyone thinks this? Delivering Effective Feedback Natalie Dumond: And then that changes the conversation. Because the person automatically goes to, well, who’s saying all these things? And then they start thinking about, who’s been talking about me? So really try to keep it about the I statements. So you want to explain the situation and the behavior of the impact. So if, you know, say I was late for meetings every Monday morning meeting we had, we met at nine, and I kept coming into the meeting really late. And I was disruptive when I came in and all this other stuff, you could maybe say something like, Hey, Nat, do you have a couple of minutes? I’d like to talk to you. Hopefully, I say yes. And you would say, Hey, you know, this Monday morning meeting that starts at nine o’clock. That’s the Situation, right? The behavior is you’ve been a bit late recently. And at times kind of disruptive when you’re coming in, and the impact of the team is it’s disrupting everybody and also making us late for our next meeting. And then this is what you do. You end it with a question. So the situation, the behavior, the impact. And then you end it with a question: the assumption that I’m making up is this meeting is no longer a priority for you. Is that true? Right. You just end it, you know, you can say it like that, or help me understand what’s going on. Right? Maybe I can’t get my kids to school on time. Maybe that time doesn’t work for me. Maybe I don’t get value from it. But whatever my answer is, because you end it with a question. Now we get to go down that path. So I might say, yeah, it’s this does this meeting doesn’t add value to me anymore. And then you can go, okay, tell me more about that. Or I could say, yeah, my kids, it’s just doesn’t work. My kids got to school now. And it’s just crazy. And getting here for nine o’clock, it’s really hard. Like I think I need another option. Okay. Let’s talk about that. So when you end it with curiosity, it opens up the space for the dialogue and lets people kind of come in with it. Jenn DeWall: So it’s like a fourth step. Behavior, outcome, curiosity, questioning, and curiosity, like that, comes to everyone there that might be making and living in the assumption. It is practicing curiosity. You got to set aside and say, maybe there’s something you’re not seeing. You got to leave judgment away from it and allow that other person a fair opportunity to address your concerns. Assume Good Intent and Ask More Questions Natalie Dumond: Yeah. If you come in with a feedback session, with positive intent, rather than the intent to prove that they did something wrong or that they’re a bad person. What you do is you come in with positive intent, like Natalie’s doing the best she can. And I’m, I want to get more curious about this behavior that she’s doing, right? So when you come at it from that angle, people can feel that energy. Right? So curiosity and positive intent at the end of the situation, behavior, the impact is very powerful, and it really does open up space. Jenn DeWall: Where do you think people get it wrong? I mean, I’m sure you and I can probably go on this. Like where do people get feedback wrong? Because there is bad feedback happening. It’s probably happening every 10 seconds. I don’t know. But there’s bad feedback happening. Where do people, where do people get It wrong? The one thing I’ll always think of is my example of when I was told to, because again, none of these, I felt were related directly related to the outcome of what I was producing for a business, but they were what, the perception that was wanting that people wanted certain executives to see. So I got feedback. Like you need to be more vanilla. You need to be more of a yes, man. You can’t laugh when you’re outside of the cube. You need to make sure that your back is up straight. I’m not even lying. Those are all legitimate feedback comments that I’ve received. And in my head I’m like, I’m sorry, like how was this? Like my business numbers are great, but I’m laughing too much. And you know, I feel like if they would have actually sat down and said, Jenn, why do you laugh so much? Well, I would have said, you know, we operate really fast. People are really stressed out all the time. I want to try and keep people calm. So then we don’t make mistakes. Right. And one of the ways that we can do that is through laughter. Like, but I, I felt like I didn’t necessarily have a leader that even tried to understand why I tried to do that. And so my result of that feedback coming at me was to just shut down. And I just sat at my desk and I, you know, I put my headphones on and just like focused on what I needed to do. And then all of a sudden, fast forward two days later, and they’re like with Jenn, we really do need you to start talking to people again. I’m like, what do you want? I don’t know what you want. And they’re like, well, you’re too much of a presence to like, not, you know, not talk to anyone. And it was so frustrating to me because it felt like they were just telling me all these things to show up as, but they didn’t necessarily include like why. There’s no curiosity. Like I wonder why you do that sometimes. Natalie Dumond: Like when you come in thinking your perspective is the perspective, you miss the ability to connect with the other person. So yes, you might have been perceiving about, you know, your behavior in some way, but not getting curious about why you are behaving in that manner. You’re missing the mark to connect to you and then co-create. What’s possible. Right? And I think that’s what a lot because we get so worked up with, okay, I gotta say this, I gotta get it right. I gotta deliver it a certain way. I’m just gonna like lob it over there and then hope they get it. And it’s like, no, you can go over there with some positive intent and some curiosity and find out what’s going on and see if you can, co-create a solution together that works for both parties. That’s where people are, are I think, missing the mark. We get stuck in our own head of how to say it. Right. And I gotta make sure this lands. And no, just go over and ask some really good questions. You Control What You Do With Feedback Jenn DeWall: You don’t even. I don’t know if people think about it. I love your approach of the, you know, first what’s the situation because telling me, if I go back to even my example of telling me that I laughed too much and I needed to stand up straight, if I’m like walking and making sure, you know, and fully in my blazer, my power suit, I need to understand how that connects to what, how that either takes away. You know that when you talk about the situation, behavior outcome, like I need to understand the outcome. Like what is the cause? And too much. I think people give feedback. They, they do, they do step one, and then they don’t do the rest of the things that you’re saying they do. Here’s the situation. I don’t want you to do that anymore. Well, why? Why don’t you want me to do that? Is that bad? Am I a bad person? I mean, if your career I was career motivated. So getting, you know, a big part of my competence key comes, it still does. I wish it didn’t mean as much, but a big piece of my confidence comes from how well I do in my career. So then when you get feedback, that is not, doesn’t feel great. It can feel pretty debilitating, especially when you don’t understand why you need to change. You just understand that you need to stop doing this. Natalie Dumond: Right. So, so, okay. So you know, where anyone that’s listening to has a similar experience, like think about this too. So we can’t control everybody. So you might be, you know, work around people that are just going to love that. And they’re not going to be curious. And, and hopefully, we get to train enough people to show them a new way to do feedback, but here’s the powerful thing you are in control of what you do with that. So just because somebody wants you to stop laughing and wear, you know, straighten up and do all this, you know, buttoned-up stuff, some of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself at that moment, you can get curious. You don’t have to wait for them to get curious. What is it saying about them that they’re asking this change of you? What does it saying about the culture that they’re asking this about that? Do I want to change? Does it serve me to not laugh, and you know, be straight-laced? And if the answer is no, and this isn’t aligned to me, you get to ask the questions like does, do I, should I be working here? And maybe not. So I think curiosity also is with the person receiving the feedback. You get to ask the powerful questions of like, does this feedback come from a good sincere place? And does this feedback serve me to help me step into the highest version of myself? And if the answer is no, then you’re out of alignment and probably working at the wrong organization. Jenn DeWall: Yes. And I think that’s a really valuable point that you just made, Natalie, is that people, again, we, when we think about feedback, we can think about how to receive it, but we don’t necessarily think about the, okay. I can receive it. I, you know, I can have the mindset of looking at this as growth, but we don’t necessarily go to the next step, which is okay, like, what do I want to do with this? Like, do I want to take it on, do I want to, like, does this make me want to ask different questions? Should I even be here? I mean, I knew I shouldn’t have been there based at all that I was a little trapped in that circumstance because I was in their MBA program. So I couldn’t leave without paying for it. And they just didn’t have that money, but it was just so hard. And at the end of the day, like I’m saying all this, but like, even if that boss was listening, I actually really liked working under that boss. And I did know the people that he was kind of like mouth-piecing through. Like, it wasn’t his words, but it, I still wish I could tell him to this day, like, Hey, I loved you as a boss, but like how you did this, probably not your best work. Maybe not the best word choice. Like that’s not going to make anyone feel great. You know, you need to be more vanilla, more of a yes, man. And then like to stop laughing. I’m like, what? Natalie Dumond: And I’m a firm believer that if anybody’s asking you to take up less space and you know, like to not be yourself, that is the wrong role. That is the wrong leader. That is just, or it’s, it’s a conversation that needs to be had because I don’t think anyone should have to be less than themselves in order to work in an organization. Remember It’s a Choice Jenn DeWall: So, yeah. I love that, though. So yeah. Going back to that, you know, reminding people that you can change. That if you are sitting here listening, and maybe you’re starting to question based on what Natalie had just shared, even the questions, like, is it the right organization or company? You know, what could you, where could you go next? Like, I think, you know, the thing that I like to say is like, your parents didn’t birth you for X. Like, it’s not like all of a sudden they had you. And they’re like. I hope they work for this random organization one day and that they do this role. Like you get to choose. And that’s all yours every single day. Natalie Dumond: Wow, absolutely. You get to ask the questions just like anybody else does. So ask the questions. Does this serve me? What do I want to do with this information that was just gifted to me? Because it is a gift. You can look at it that way. And, and how do I want to move forward? You are in choice. And I think that’s the thing that coaching has really helped with myself and other people that I work with is reminding them. We are all in choice. We get to choose how we react. We get to choose how we show up or not show up. We’re always in choice, right? So I think the less victim or victimhood mentality we play when it comes to feedback that is delivered, the more powerful we’ll be. And it doesn’t mean that you just get to go, well, screw it. I don’t believe it. Whatever. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Look at it and then see what you want to do from it. There, it doesn’t serve you, can you grow from it? And if not, then put it down and keep going. Jenn DeWall: You know, that’s great. I had a friend that went to the University of Santa Monica in California, had a school on, has a spiritual psychology program. And one of the things that they said is if you’re getting feedback and you touched on it if you’re getting feedback from someone that you can see doesn’t necessarily care about you, doesn’t, isn’t doing this, then you should actually question whether or not you even take that on. Like, if you don’t respect that person, if they’ve been really rude to you, if they exhibit all of that, like, just because they have words that they’re giving to you does mean that you need to take this on. It also doesn’t mean that you need to work there anymore, but you touched on something that I wish we could have actually spent more time on, which is victimhood. Because if we’re talking to the person that’s receiving feedback, it is so important. We are always in choice. Like you can’t live in a place that the world is happening to you, that you are in, you know, we’re all in some way, we’re either active or passively involved in their lives. But that is the hardest piece. I think when people are giving feedback— it is knowing that you might have to give feedback to someone that lives in a victim mentality. Like any like words of wisdom that you would give, maybe for a leader. If they had to address that with someone, The Victim Mentality – How Leaders Can Help Natalie Dumond: If the leader felt like the person, they were going to talk to plays or sits in the victim mentality a lot? So there, you just have to do a little bit more digging there, there a lot of people are unconscious to the victimhood mentality, and you can hear it, right? It’s like, I can’t, I don’t, I don’t believe in myself. I’m not enough. Like, you can hear some of that self-deprecating talk. And so victims need to be reminded of their resiliency, and they need it to be, you know, just reminded of their power. So if I was a leader and I had someone doing that, I’d be really curious about where the victim mentality is coming from. Like, keep asking questions. Like where was it a previous organization that taught that to them? Was it teenage years of childhood, most likely, and just keep digging and then remind them of the resiliency of their power that they can get through this? Probably a little bit of empathy too. So they just need a little bit of a different approach. I’m not saying you have to coddle them, but I’m just saying a lot of curiosity and then reminding them of their resiliency, reminding them, like when was the last time that you fell down, and you got back up? And let them tell the story. Well, it was this time, this time, and I did that. Okay. So you know how to get back up? Well, yeah, but no, but you know how to get back up. So how would you get back up after this, this time? Well, I don’t. You’ll start to. They just need a little bit more rebuild. I think a lot of society is really good at making us believe we are the victims. And so this, this victimhood mentality is a bit epidemic. And I think, you know, as a leader, we need to start reminding people that they are not victims in their lives, that they have a choice and they can get back up. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. We all need to hear that message. I think every day and resiliency is a huge piece of feedback. Maybe even starting a feedback conversation. If you know what’s going to be there just with, Hey, I’m going to share some feedback with you. And this is why I’m giving you the feedback because I believe in your success. I want you to thrive. I want you to achieve greater heights. I want you to X, Y, Z, or aligning it with something that’s important to them. And then describing why that situation can be- I just love it because it’s so simple. Your approach is very simplified, right? And it doesn’t include the, let’s just throw in some positives. Let’s just do this to check a box. Like people are waiting for it anyway. So why not get to the point and just have an honest conversation. And then, I mean, I would be surprised how, and you said it in the beginning that it’s something where you have to practice it. Right. You have to be consistent at just knowing that you’re going to maybe bomb at your first feedback round after this new approach. And that’s okay. Natalie Dumond: It’s okay to fail and try again. And I think a lot of the times we’re like, okay, I need to get it right the first time. And then that’s it. And it’s not. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Natalie. I have one final question to close out our podcasts, what we ask every single guest, which is what is your leadership habit for success, or what do you do to help aid to your success as not only a speaker, a facilitator, a trainer, a leadership coach. I mean, you wear a lot of hats. What do you do to maintain your own success? Natalie Dumond: Just continuous learning. I like to put myself more and more on the edge of being uncomfortable. Not all the time. Like I don’t love being uncomfortable, but I know that’s where growth happens for me. So just continuing to learn about who I am, what stretches me, what makes me uncomfortable, and then just following what makes me also feel good. What makes me feel alive because that’s what I’ve been kind of put here to do. So it’s a lot of just continuous learning I would recommend. Learning about things that interest me and things that also challenge me and stretch me. Gosh, I love it. So thinking everyone, if you want to take a page from Natalie’s book, what can you learn today? Or how can you, you know, change the way that you’re thinking or just see something in a different way. I love that. Natalie Dumond: And then I, Oh, sorry. I just want one quick thing about SBI. So this Situation, Behavior, Impact. You can find more information on that. This is coming from The Center of Creative Leadership that helped kind of create that as well. And you know, if you’re looking for more curiosity, reach out. They have a lot of information. Jenn DeWall: And you’re going to hear, and they’re going to hear how to connect with you too, in the bumper. So stay tuned if you want to hear how to get in touch with Natalie. Natalie Dumond: Thank you, everyone! Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast. If you want to connect with Natalie, get to know, maybe hire for a workshop or hire as a coach, go to NatalieDumond.com. If you liked today’s episode, don’t forget to share it with your friends. Maybe share it with a colleague and of course, leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service.   The post Episode 44: Giving and Receiving Better Feedback with Leadership Coach Natalie Dumond appeared first on Crestcom International.

Buzzwords like Scrum and Agile are often misunderstood by leaders and workers alike. Jenn DeWall talks to Scrum Master and Agile Coach Lizzy Morris to bust some common myths and share some real ways to bring Agile to the people Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall. And on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I am talking with Lizzy Morris. We are going to go more in-depth on all things Agile if you will. Now, if you caught last week’s episode, you probably got a little bit more of a high-level perspective, and Lizzy is going to share with you, based on her experience as a certified Scrum trainer and Agile transformation coach and a consultant, different ways that you can develop your Agile skillset. Enjoy the conversation. Meet Lizzy Morris: The Scrum Provost, Agile Coach and Change Agent Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit, I am talking to Lizzy Morris, and we’re talking all about Agile! Lizzy, go ahead and introduce yourself. Let’s— they want to hear a little bit about you. What brought you into the Agile space, and how you help organizations and leaders implement and apply Agile tactics to be more successful? I’m so happy to have you, by the way. Thank you so much for joining us. Lizzy Morris: Thank you so much for asking me to listen to this every way. Hi, my name is Lizzy Morris. As some of you will be able to tell, I’m a native Brit who’s been in the US now pushing on into the 15 years mark. And I got introduced to Agile through pain. So it wasn’t that I thought, Oh my gosh, I’m going to be so strategic and take Agile on. It was your project that is now going to use Agile, and we’d like you to learn about Scrum. And I was like the, what? The, who? So I had the heartburn reaction to it, right? Because I was a staunch project manager. And I thought this was just the biggest cowboy mess that people were bringing in, but what it did, and every time I remember it, it’s like life-changing. It brought the people in the team back to life. And I’m used to, when people go into that burnout mode that, you know, they hate their work. They hate their job. They hated me, right? Because I’m pushing for those deadlines. It needs to be delivered, but people seem to transform when Agile came into the room. And that’s what got me actually bought into wanting to know more was what it did to the people. Yes, they’re great effects and what it does to the environment and the work product. But the people- that’s what made me become an agilist. Right? And when I look at the four values today, the one that I really lean in on is the one that talks about individuals and interactions because we cannot make projects work— or anything happen in this world unless humans are having interactions with humans. So when it comes to being Agile, I just think of it as a way of life, right? So be Agile versus you do Agile. And as we get into the conversation, I’ll be able to do more into that. So I’ve been helping organizations transform and adopt these principles and values with different frameworks for them to actually actualize it through. And I’ve helped organizations that have over 10,000 people. I’ve helped small organizations that are like kind of 1000 and a little bit above. And I’ve done a lot of charity stuff with nonprofits to help them take this, to kind of give them some momentum or boost. So it’s a great thing to know about. And I’m really happy to be here to talk about it. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I mean, what a powerful thing to say that it can breathe life into an individual or a team that if they’re maybe burnt out or frustrated and can’t see a way out that by embodying or applying some of those Agile principles that they can be kind of refreshed and rejuvenated. Lizzy Morris: Yeah. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like a metamorphosis. These people come back, and you finally get the person versus just the role. Right? And that in itself is so powerful because that’s what you’re hiring, right? When you’ve gone to hire people for change, you looked at their skills, and this is the person that you want to bring in, but they start to embody your role. And then you lose the person. So that creativity gets lost. That innovation ability goes down the drain, and you turn the Agile key on. It’s like, you’re liberating your teams. And amazing things happen when people feel that sense of freedom and individual thought that my thoughts are worth something. And then, you merge my thoughts with my other team members, thoughts, my other team members, thoughts. So, you know, you now have this amazing collage that we call innovation. Jenn DeWall: I think that’s so great because you don’t typically hear when people think about, Oh, we’re trying to do something to make the team more efficient. Let’s focus on understanding the individual—those things. I don’t feel like you hear very often. They don’t say, well, you can probably do that. But really Agile at the heart and soul is a people practice. Agile is a People Practice Lizzy Morris: That’s right. It’s very much a people practice. It really is. You look at every single one of those values. They’re all tied into humans. How humans react or how humans respond. Even if we look at working software over comprehensive documentation. Well, who do we think software works for? It’s going to be a human, right? You’re making it work for a human to utilize it. So the human is still there in the delivery of work. If the human doesn’t value the work you’ve given to them, they’re not going to keep paying you. They are going to go elsewhere. Right? So there’s always that human component that’s in there, but a lot of people miss it. And then they wonder why. Well, we tried Agile, and it didn’t work for us. Jenn DeWall: Why do you think they miss it? Lizzy Morris: I think the reason people miss it is because we’re so programmed to output. Although we’re in a modern age, we’re still very industrial thinkers. So we’re still using that industrial framework of the mindset of resources, time, materials, as it were mining coal picking up bricks. That’s still because most organizations that we’ve grown up in are really old. Right. And they’re founded on that industrial mindset principle, but it doesn’t work for where we are today. But if that’s your default programming that doesn’t have humans, it has resources and resources are the same as bricks, mortar, coal, diamonds, wood, steel resources. When you start talking about Human’s, that’s different. Jenn DeWall: Why don’t you think it works today? I mean, I know it’s kind of like the square peg in the round hole, they’re going to keep trying to push it, but they’re likely not going to get the same results that they had in the past, by still trying to force that application. Why doesn’t it work today to do you know, an approach from the industrial revolution or an older, more traditional approach? Lizzy Morris: If you think about even just the education level, right? Most team members today are more educated than their managers. And they have way more cognitive- I would say- renewal. Back in the day with the industrial, the people who were educated were managers, not the workers. So you were dealing with an uneducated workforce who would just brute force pick up stuff. Do you know what I mean? Now you’re dealing with thinkers, right? People who are creating, it’s not industrial, it’s a different paradigm. So trying to use the old paradigm with these new thinkers who are extremely educated, spent years getting degrees, etc. And this old way of work, well its not going to work. That makes sense. Jenn DeWall: So I think that as you look at, even the younger generations, the Millennials, Gen Z, are lifelong learners. They’re always wanting to challenge the status quo or they stay at organizations that give them developmental opportunities or career path. It sounds like by embracing Agile, you’re going to be able to engage your employees in a way that connects them back to what they’re doing. That gives them meaningful work. That makes them excited to probably work for you. Lizzy Morris: Which means attrition for you goes down, which attrition is a huge cost. High attrition costs you a lot. So if you can keep your attrition down, think about the savings and the return on investment your organization’s going to have because this newer generation wants to be attached to a purpose. And whenever you’re talking about being Agile, you’re talking about being Agile to make a purpose come to light. So it attaches to the people today, do not want to be managed or told what to do. Now you’re giving them the space to be, right? So it feels like for them, it’s my choice to be here. It’s my choice to work for you. And it’s my choice to give you my talent and my thinking. When I feel it’s my choice I will give way more because I chose to do it. There’s a huge impact. Scrum and the Agile Manifesto Jenn DeWall: So before we go further, Lizzy, let’s dive into the basics. Because you know, I, I gave a webinar on Agile. I understand the surface probably in a way that maybe some of our listeners do, but I’m going to guess that some of our listeners were like me and Agile was still new. It was definitely something that when I heard Agile or I saw, or like saw the word Scrum, I just assumed that that was a place that was reserved to some tech software developer down where I would probably never interact with them. But tell it, like, let’s go back to the basics of what Agile is and how it actually has moved into maybe the forefront of someone that’s not in the tech space. So what is Agile? And I know we’re going to talk about the Agile Manifesto, but I want to hear from you. How would you describe this shift into modern day, I guess, business practices. Lizzy Morris: So when, when you look at Agile, right? Agile came about 2001 that’s when it was morphed, right? It was kind of birthed. But what you’ve got to understand is the people who came together to birth, that we’re already doing different frameworks. So let’s take the Scrum framework. That’s extremely popular. The creators at the Scrum framework helped to create the Agile manifesto, which is why the two of them married so well together. And they support each other because the influence from Scrum came into Agile. The influence of extreme programming came into Agile. So there’s all these elements that came into the birthing of these. So these 17 minds that came together in Utah, right after a three-year conversation- understand that- they will go back and forth for three years talking about stuff. You know, you kind of, you know what, it’s like, you go to a conference, you meet people, you pontificate, right? And they like, I love pontificating with you over a beer. We should exchange details. Right? And then you keep doing that through emails and all the rest of it. So when they finally came together, it wasn’t just in that moment, it was moments that had built to that point. So they were able to say, okay, what could we all be comfortable agreeing on that we believe could change the way the workplace looks and the way the workplace acts. So those four values that they came up with. Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools Lizzy Morris: First- individuals and interactions over processes and tools. We all know processes and tools exist. We use the processes, we use the tools, but how about now, reengage these processes and tools to empower humans, to have better interactions together. That’s where you see what I call the cha-ching-ching happens. Okay. So classic all cell phones, the process of making a call. You think about the process of managing your calendar, communicating. We took this and we socialized it around humans being able to interact with each other. Think about how that’s affected the banking industry, right? How has it affected the mortgage industry? Every industry in the world has been affected by this particular tool because it helped humans come together. Now it’s not just friend humans its business humans. Right? So when I have to have a business interaction, when I have to buy a car, when I have to apply for loan, I can do that all now to my device. So here I’ve took a processing tool and it has enabled individuals to have interactions. So we see that value everywhere, everywhere, right? The telephone market is what? Kind of like in the trillion-dollar market? Jenn DeWall: Wait, I’m not even sure. I know that’s a, you know, obviously a very large market Working Software over Comprehensive Documentation Lizzy Morris: Right! And then we look at the second one working software over comprehensive documentation. Now, today people get bent out of shape about that. Well, I don’t do software. I’m not in software world. And we say replace software with what you do. So if you’re a life coach, right, we’re saying good life-coaching services, over documentation about it. So you’ve written about it. You’ve done videos about it. But when I come with you and you take me through that journey and you’re coaching me, I should be getting that happening in great coaching service and a great value. Not just, well, your brochure said, if I had like 10 sessions with you, I feel better about myself but I don’t. Jenn DeWall: So rather than just a pretty brochure of what that is, actually just doing the service that people will want to invest in. So if you’re a consultant, you know, you don’t have to spend all the time on the website or thinking about how to market, but it has actually the I’m not just talking about it. I am doing it. And providing that benefit for you. Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation Lizzy Morris: And that’s the second one, just provide the benefit you’ve told people you’re going to provide, right? And you can do that best by implementing the third value, right? Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Jenn DeWall: What does that mean? Lizzy Morris: Build relationships with your customers! Collaborate. Collaboration is not me just talking at you or you just talking at me. It’s a sharing ideas. It’s morphing together. So I truly understand what it is to be in your shoes. So now when I put a contract in place, I’m not about the red letter of the contract, the contract is aligning how we’re going to collaborate. Responding to Change over Following a Plan Lizzy Morris: And then the fourth value, right? Responding to change over, following a plan because I’m open to responding to change over following a plan. It helps me collaborate with you better because my job is to help you as a business, right? As an multimillion dollar company, as a person, just trying to do better in their relationships with the people they care about, have those better relationships. So I’ve got to listen to hear what’s going on with you to empower you, to have better interactions with the people you’ll have interactions with. So if you look at it, it’s this, it’s not one, two, three, four, in a line. Relationships make all the difference in the world. I can think about organizations where I’ve had relationships with leaders and I’m able to bring people on site based on the relationship, right? Even though we haven’t had master services agreement, all done, et cetera, relationships make a difference. Why humans are doing business with humans, not doing business with robots. Jenn DeWall: Sometimes we need to remind people of that. Basically. I think people, I think leaders even forget that you’re in the business of leading people, not a means to an end, and everyone can tell when they feel like a means to an end. And that doesn’t feel good. But one thing I want to touch on. So you just, you know, for our audience, that’s listening, what Lizzy just gave you are the four core values that are rooted in the Agile manifesto. But I think number four is pretty, pretty big. It’s a pretty big ask. Because you’re, you’re asking people to really get comfortable being uncomfortable because they have to become okay with change. How would you, I mean, I imagine there’s a lot of resistance there. As you know, as a consultant, how do you overcome some of those barriers are the people that are just unwilling to change or don’t want to see it because it’s maybe a little bit overwhelming or they’re afraid of the outcomes. What do you do to kind of get them on that page to embrace change? Agile is Only Possible if You Embrace Change Lizzy Morris: So one of the things I do with people to help them embrace change in an organization is help them understand change is difficult. And as humans, we hate it. So give them a common playing field. You’re not a bad person right now because you don’t want to do this. Right? This is change and as humans we hate it. And the reason we hate change is because it comes back down to that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Right? We need safety. We need to be able to predict what will happen because we feel, we can’t predict we’re going to be in danger. So it’s that raw human fright flight that comes in. Right. So it’s helping people go, it’s okay to scream. But guess what? Once you finish the scream, you’re still going to be here and you’re going to be okay. Right. So it’s like, if you think about somebody who goes through a horrible divorce at the time, they can’t see how their life would ever be the same, how they’ll be able to figure it out. But the time happens and they’ve become even a better person. So change when you teach people that it helps you to evolve. One of the classics I use with executives who really have a problem is I asked them this question. When was the last time you saw a dinosaur? Right? And they’re like, like, what is this woman on this? Dinosaur? Where was she going with this? Right. And then every now and again, I’ll have what I call like a smart alec, you know, Lizzy. I just took my son to the zoo the other day. Like, God, that’s so amazing. Why is it you saw an elephant and not a Tyrannosaurus Rex and then we get back to, okay, where’s she going? I go because the elephant was able to adapt to the changing climate that was happening on the earth. The others worked. And where are they today? They’re in our cars as Petro. So as an organization, you have to make a choice. Are you going to be a dinosaur that people talk about and uses fuel? Or do you want to be an elephant? Jenn DeWall: I love that analogy. Lizzy Morris: It’s like, it’s like the light bulb goes off and well, Yes, of course. We want to be an elephant. We want our company to be here. So that’s what we’re talking about. We’re going to have to respond to the changes that’s happening. And if we put these frameworks in place, they will create a security for you while you’re dealing with the complexity that’s happening around you. You can’t shift the complexity, but you can shift you. And that’s why it comes back to that human element. Right? Understand the human in the place is what you can shift and change at will. Circumstances you can’t, they’re out of your control. So us as complex beings, have this amazing ability to be able to make shifts. You just gotta be reminded that you can, and failure is not part of the equation it’s learning and adapting. And that’s what it brings to the table. So those are the conversations I have with people. I help them to see their own inward fear of change first. So we deal first with internal transparency. Who are you right now? Why is change a problem for you? And a lot of times it’s what got me into executive coaching. A lot of times, the reason why people leave in such a very tight way is because growing up and in their life, they had no control. So now, as a result, these are things they, because it gives them a sense of this is who I am. So what they do is now attached to the value of who they see themselves at. So it’s helping people detach from things, being the value to them being valuable. Jenn DeWall: I love that perspective just in the sense of, you know, I think that people, as you grow older or as, from childhood were never taught to internally value or to internally validate to, to see themselves as adding value. And yes, it was always, maybe being controlled by someone else or feeling like you had to meet the expectations of someone else. And so really it sounds like a part of Agile is getting to be more confident in your own strengths and what you bring to the table and also being able to articulate and describe that what you see in yourself that adds value, but also holding space to see the benefits that other people have. Lizzy Morris: Right? So it comes back to individuals. So starts with the person, then having interactions with other people. So, when we’re talking about being Agile, it starts with you. And it starts with me. The Myths About Agile Jenn DeWall: What are the myths about Agile. Like what do you think people don’t understand about it? Lizzy Morris: Okay. Biggest myth, Oh, if we’re Agile, we’re going to save money. We’re going to be fast, biggest myth, right. It’s magic. Right. Second myth. It is a place. We can get there. And we will then be able to like, kind of take the flag in the pole. We are Agile. Yay. Drop the mic. That is probably the worst myth. Jenn DeWall: Like there’s some finite point. It’s kind of like perfect perfection. Like you will get there and be able to do it even though that destination doesn’t exist. Lizzy Morris: It’s the journey of life. As long as you’re alive, as long as your company’s doors are open, you’re going to be shifting and you’re going to be changing. So what ends up happening is we use the phrase of talking Agile maturity. So just as a human grows and becomes more mature in life, through experiences, et cetera, organizations become more mature in being Agile, but they’re never going to get the drop the mic moment. So there’s really no ticking the box. And that’s one of the things that people have to realize. So a lot of times when senior leaders decide, they want to bring Agile into the room, so to speak, they’ve got boxes, they’re trying to tick. And they think, okay, well we’ve done it now. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Like they have that skill set. So now we’re good because you know, they have this experience or they went to that school. So yep. Now we’ve got that good check a box- set and forget. Lizzy Morris: Right. Or another myth that people think is if you bring Agile in, your teams are going to just love each other and work together. Jenn DeWall: Well, assuming like, Hey, well I guess if we’re all seeing the people and they forget about the fact that you still need a leader, that’s going to come in and kind of govern and facilitate those relationships. Lizzy Morris: Right. And another myth is that Agile is for the teams and not the leaders Jenn DeWall: Tell me more about that. Where do you think people fall into that maybe trap or that myth and believe that? Lizzy Morris: A lot of times leaders have a habit of kind of being in the ivory tower. Right? You know, and it’s, it’s kind of like, you know, even as I’ll compare it to parenting. We have a habit of telling kids don’t do what I do, do what I say. So that comes back again from the industrial age, command and control. So leaders command an organization to Agile by X date, not realizing they are going to have to lead the change they want to see. So it begins with them. And most consultants don’t tell organizations that it begins with you as leadership. Because again, when thinking about the consultancy model, right, it’s about getting into the organization, getting in as much people as you can, make it as much money as you can, have a billable hours, it’s not always about helping people to solve their problems. Jenn DeWall: We gave you this framework. So you go and be empowered, go and create your success. Cause we checked that box for ourselves, Lizzy Morris: Right? Well, we have got to help leaders to understand if you want an Agile organization, it starts with your own personal transformation. Leaders have got to understand that most leaders, sadly, when they bring Agile into their organization, they’ve never read the Agile manifesto, never! Jenn DeWall: What’s the benefit of reading the Agile manifesto? We talked about the 4 values, but there’s also the 12 principles. Lizzy Morris: So there’s the 12 principles behind it, right? So you’ve got your 4 values, got your 12 principles. It’s important to see what that is. So that as a leader, you can look and say, Oh my God, are we ready for this? Are we ready as an organization to embrace these 12 principles? Do we have organizational structures in place to support this? Are there things in our organization that are going to block this, that we’re going to have to tear down and reorder the way we do things? Not necessarily just about reorganizing the way you’ve got people, but reorganizing your processes, right? Looking at the system of your organization. Does it support agility? A lot of times it doesn’t, but if you’ve never read it, you wouldn’t know. Right. You will know. So when somebody complains, well, our teams are really having a hard time getting stuff done. You know, we don’t have a great production environment or they’re like, we’ve got blocks and nobody’s listening. You’ll understand well with the structure. They’ve got to go here, here, here, here, here, here, before anything gets done. So, wow. Maybe we need to pull apart that and really empower teams. Right? Give them the ability. Maybe a team has its own budget. It has the ability to make its own decisions. It gets empowered in that way. You know, there’s lots of different ideas that will come to the leaders once they read it. Jenn DeWall: So what you’re saying is if you want to even start to scratch the surface at incorporating Agile practices into your team or organization, it’s got to start by reading the Agile manifesto. And it’s not this well, I guess maybe it is this huge book, but from how I’ve seen it printed, it, isn’t just a quick, like here’s your four values. And here’s your 12 principles. Lizzy Morris: It really is not like crazy. And I mean, one of the principles that I love is principle number 10. Alright. Simplicity. The art maximizing the amount of work, not though. What does that mean? You listen to it. It’s basically saying, find what it is that truly moves the needle for your customers or your organization and focus on that thing. So find where the value really is not the noise is your differentiator, right? So the I, which is why I say simplicity, the art of maximizing, what you don’t do, because it is an art form to be able to always hone in on the value. And if it’s not valuable, we’re not doing, Jenn DeWall: How do you get people to like even prioritize it like that? Because I think, you know, I’ve worked with leaders in the past that, bless their hearts, they see so much opportunity. They see so many possibilities. But you can’t always just connect those possibilities to actually value-add. And so how do you encourage people to prioritize all of those things and kind of let go of the fear of missing out by not doing something, if it doesn’t connect to the value. Start with Remembering your Purpose Lizzy Morris: See, now that’s where really great leadership comes into place. And one of the things I often say to leaders is how did this organization come about? What was this organization doing? Why it became an organization? Because a lot of times people don’t realize the reason you opened shop was because you had a service, a product that was something you were exchanging for money, which is why this thing came up. Right. So the thing that you did then is that still the thing you’re doing now is that why you have customers? Is that still your value driver making that thing amazing? Or is it something else? So sometimes it really is having to go back so that you can go forward. And that brings us into principle number 12, right? At regular times, the team gets together and inspects, right? So the actual wording is it reflects and becomes more effective. Then here’s one, then tunes two. Now, if you think about a musical instrument, right? Pianos guitars, you can play them alot, but you always have to tune them back to that note. Like, what is the standard for the “E” key? Is it at the standard common E? So if an organization doesn’t tune itself back to what is the reason it’s in existence, you can’t find its value. Jenn DeWall: Do they, how do they start to do that? You know, one of the things you talked about is the need for it to be a culture shift. What does that look like? Or how, how do you actually start to transform the culture into a more Agile culture? What’s one of the prescriptions that you would recommend to leaders? Lizzy Morris: The first thing I have leaders do is dream. I know that sounds really weird, right? Jenn DeWall: Well, it’s kind of like love and dreams. Lizzy Morris: I have them dream. I’d have them do a dream exercise where I have them draw a circle. And I asked them in the circle, describe your perfect employees, your perfect teams, your perfect organization. So I’ve given you an abracadabra. What does it look like? And when they have all of that, they’re right. It’s kind of like the persona that building of their new organization. Then I ask them to take that as a mirror and look at their organization today. What stops the organization today from being that organization in their dream? A lot of those key 10 steps they could make to take the organization. They have now closer to that organization that they really want. That’s the beginning. Because that’s where they get really honest and transparent. So when I do those sessions, it’s not a session that happens as a town hall. It’s a session that happens with the real core C-Suite, really asking hard questions, right? So you can add to, there’s not like a perfume, right? That you just could spray on. You are going to have to get naked. Right? I say, I’m actually preparing a talk about how true Agility comes from learning how to skinny dip. You’re going to have to get you to be exposed and take it all off. Right? And look at who you guys are as an organization. And from there now you can do the necessary building. And that’s why you really have to have a coach help you with this. Right? So when you bring in a team, you really need to bring in somebody who has experienced really coaching leaders so that you can take them through that. And they begin to map what they want the organization to look like, because here’s the thing about culture. Culture can never be erased. It has to be evolved. Jenn DeWall: Can never be erased. I like that statement. It’s always there. Lizzy Morris: Right? Right. You can’t, you can’t erase your past. It doesn’t happen. It’s there. So now we have got to say, where do we want to be? And we start making steps. And we start teaching ourselves to think differently, teaching ourselves to be different, giving ourselves that room. That’s where that evolution and emergence starts happening. And there is where now the new culture starts to form. The Gemba Walk – Know Your Front Line Jenn DeWall: What advice would you give to a leader that says, okay, I want to bring this into my culture. What are some actionable things that you would have them start doing if they actually want to lead Agile style efforts or, you know, to embody that, To walk the talk? What are some tips? I know, you know, one of the things you had mentioned is maybe being in the trenches. And why does that matter? Because I know we talked about the ivory tower and how we can’t do that in Agile. And why is it so essential to be in the trenches? Lizzy Morris: Toyota had this thing that they came up with when they came up with; they call it the Gemba Walk, right? And it’s Where the leader comes down, amidst the people and watches what they’re doing and walks the walk. So walks through all the processes. A real leader who wants a culture change and wants to know what’s going on. Cannot just wait for reports. They can have to go look, they’re going to have to go talk. There was a leader. I encountered some years ago and he is by far, I think just one of the favorite leaders that I have in mind. Right. and he made a point of making his office in the cafeteria. Jenn DeWall: That’s fantastic! Talk about accessibility. Lizzy Morris: And so just people could come up to him and he could observe and you see people and it made such a difference. It was a very strategic, intentional move, right. But it gave him sight of what was happening. Sight and how people were reacting. Because if your surveys are saying, everybody loves this organization. When you were in the cafeteria, people laughing, are they having fun? Or do they look stressed? You can see what’s going on. And as a leader, if you are going to lead, you must see the people you’re leading and be able to see where you want to take them to. That’s why that dream part is so important, right? Because then the vision truly becomes about, and it’s okay if the vision today, isn’t what the vision was yesterday. At least we’ll know that. Right. But we need to be transparent. And transparency is one of those key things that comes out of the Scrum framework, right? The three pillars that hold Scrum up are transparency, inspection and adaptation. So if you think about that, that influenced the creating of the Agile manifesto, that number 12 principal at regular intervals, take the time out to tune. That tuning is take the pause, get naked. And I like to say, not actually naked, because we’re not talking about telling anybody to strip clothes off at work. Okay. I just want that to be really clear. Jenn DeWall: That is not happening on this podcast either! We are not promoting that. Lizzy Morris: We talked about vulnerability, right? So and you think about Brene Brown, right? How important it is to be able to move forward. So the organization has to be vulnerable. That’s that transparency. Make it a point to pause. A pause is necessary. Look, what’s happening in our world right now, the universe put us on pause, right? Because we haven’t been pausing and now organizations intentionally pause. So have time boxes as a leader. We’re not saying every God-given day, you’re going to be walking with the people. It’s not necessarily practical. Right. But have a point every month that you have in your calendar where you’re taking intentional time out to go look, what’s going on. What is Scrum? Jenn DeWall: So I want to back up there because time boxes or the sprints those are, you know, a little bit of the foundation of Scrum. Could you just give us a general description of what that is for someone that may be unfamiliar with those terms? Lizzy Morris: So in Scrum, a time box is a calendar month or less, right? That’s that sprint? So the sprint is a fixed time box and what is lovely? It has a character, right? So the character of the sprint is it’s always time boxed and it’s always protected. Meaning for that time box that we pick. We don’t let outside change, change the directive. Jenn DeWall: Okay. So if it’s worth, if we commit to this task for the next single bonds, we are solely focusing on that task. And even though there might be noise from the outside, we’re not allowing that to come in until we go to that until that expires Lizzy Morris: Right now, you may find though, you’re in an organization where you can’t do four weeks, it’s too long. You’re in a very dynamic moving place. So forward four weeks is too long to insulate from change. So maybe you have to be in a two week window, or maybe you have to be in a one week window, right? Because you’re insulating from outside change and staying focused for that sprint. And that’s the key thing. So it’s like, you’re getting ready to run a race. And you’re just focused on hitting that line right. For that amount of time. And that’s the power that Scrum gives you is this time box. Because it allows you to say, okay, let’s enter the time box. Here’s our hypothesis. We’ve got to get an idea of this is what’s going to happen. But by the end of the time box, you know, if your idea was right or if it was wrong and all you’ve done is spent that time. Applying the Scrum Timebox Lizzy Morris: You didn’t spend six months, 12 months before you waited for the lessons learned to, you know, to see all the mistakes you have this small time box. So it’s insuring you guys against risk. It’s insuring against unnecessary spend. Now the third characteristic is that iterative, meaning we keep this cycle of habit consistently going. So we always work in a time box. And when we’re in a time box is always protected and it’s always focused on something. And last but not least is that it’s iterative. I think that’s the magic of Scrum, personally, right? Is the fact that you got these little bite sized pieces and you can figure out is that what you really want? You know, like if you go going for a wedding, right, and you go for a tasting, like you do a little small taste before you pay to feed all these hundreds of people this food and to show and be like, what are they giving us here? You didn’t, you didn’t do the tasting. So the increment allows customers and the people they’re working with, right. To be able to collaborate around this taste, this taste, right. Do you want it to be a little bit more spicy? Do you want it to look this way more? And they get to see? Cause a lot of times when you have an ask, you don’t really have a visual. Now when you can see and get tactic with it, you’re like, Oh yeah, I don’t mean it like that. I thought I did, but no, I actually could you do this? And now you can go back and make the adaptation. So the sprint is a powerful thing and it’s something that you can bring it to everyday life. Jenn DeWall: You know, whether you’re an individual contributor or whether it’s a suite leader, you can think about how am I going to what’s most important. You talked about two questions. What were those questions? Lizzy Morris: Yes. So when we talked before, the two questions I always say to people is, is this value add as an, is this thing that you’re going to drive the value that drives return on investment? Okay. Or second question is this thing necessary activity to drive value-add to like compliance. Compliance is a necessary activity you have to do, depending on the industry you’re in, because you can’t release your stuff if its not compliant, right? So it’s unnecessary activity, but is it a necessary activity for us per se to have, I dunno, let’s say sucralose coffee everywhere. Is that necessarily right? It’s one of those things. Is it value add, is it really necessary if it’s not doing those things anymore? Remove it out of the way. Introducing Agile or Scrum as an Individual Contributor Jenn DeWall: Wait, can I pause on that one? Because one of the, I was listening to a different podcast and the person that was being interviewed in terms of Agile, one of the things that he recommended is banning the reoccurring meeting, which I think could cause someone to have a little bit of a panic moment to say, what do you mean? That’s the time that I’m actually connecting with my team. And we’ve had that every Monday for the last five years. What? You’re asking people to, you know, throw out something that they’ve likely thought was really valuable, Lizzy Morris: but turns out it was actually waste, right? Because if you need to have a conversation and you’re really collaborating, we’re going to compensate. It’s normal. So do we have to have a standard that every Monday we’re always meeting, right? Does it make sense? And it comes back down to that idea of focus. And focus in Scrum and here back simplicity. What do we need to really meet for? Like, what do we, we need to meet for what’s the value we’re getting out of this meeting. And if you can’t determine value that you’re going to get out the meeting old value that you’re going to give to the attendees, because you know how much meeting time gets on people’s calendars and they get invited to all these crazy meetings. What’s the value you’re giving back to them. If you can’t quantify that and that meeting shouldn’t be in anybody’s calendar. Jenn DeWall: You know, I was leading a session yesterday and one of the things that the individual brought up was that he worked for an organization that he would sit in, you know, anywhere from four to eight hour meetings. And when he would share the feedback with higher level leadership, Hey, we have too many meetings. He felt as if he, you know, they saw him as kind of being more cynical or negative. And he was really, I guess he didn’t know how to address that. How do I tell these leaders, if I’m not in a position of power that these meetings may not be adding as much value as they want to believe that they are. How do you even start to, I guess, educate people on why they should reconsider some of these, Lizzy Morris: Call it an experiment. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Let’s just try this out. Lizzy Morris: We just experiment, you know, all the cutting edge companies are doing that. They’re running their little experiments. How about we want an experiment where for, you know, maybe four weeks, we don’t have calendar meetings. We just have doctors’ hours. So everybody keeps their door open from, I dunno, 10 to two. And you need to talk to that person. You arrive between 10 to two and talk to them. And added to that you empower that person to be able to make decisions. Jenn DeWall: The autonomy. I want to go and talk to you, then I’ll talk to you. Otherwise, if I feel good, I feel good. Lizzy Morris: There you go. And see what happens. I actually ran that experiment with a few organizations, but the first one I did it with, it was really like the experiment, right? When we did it, we noticed how much time executives got back, right? Jenn DeWall: Oh, that’s what they need. That’s what they want. Lizzy Morris: Okay. You brought executives into envision to lead, to come up with things, concepts, to immobilize teams to do them. And they don’t have time when they’re supposed to do that. Most people do their work after five o’clock because they’ve spent all day in the meeting. That doesn’t promote a healthy lifestyle for a human. So if you’re constantly running in burnout, when do we get new, fresh ideas? Jenn DeWall: Yes. So this is the opportunity for you as a leader to challenge the way that you think. To challenge the way that you structure your time, to challenge what you know, and determine if you are willing to risk those comforts, to achieve something greater than what you have now. Lizzy Morris: I say. Because if value is what it’s about, because when you hear the buzzword “business agility,” right? When we’re talking about a company, having business agility, it’s the ability to deliver value the value at the right time. At the right time, you are not going to be able to deliver the right value at the right time. If you can’t even quantify what value activity is. And you have no real mechanism for prioritization, you’re trying to do 10 things at once. Jenn DeWall: I feel like if people bring in Agile, I think that way solve at least challenges that I even had earlier on in my career, a feeling like, why are we trying to do so much? Why are we measuring what we’re trying to do to determine whether or not it’s the right thing? I feel like you’re probably going to give people sanity. Some of these things, because they, you know, if you’re not in a position where you have a seat at that table to offer that insight, you’re likely just thinking in your brain, like what, wait, why are we doing this? And so you’re further disconnected from the vision in the first place, because you’re not seeing the value. Lizzy Morris: One of the things I have a talk to individual contributors to do, like people on in leadership position is to create a visual that everybody can see. Right? So when people are in the workplace, I’d say, put it on your wall, showing all the activities everybody’s asked you to do. What you’re working on right now. Right? So when somebody comes, you can say, not a problem, I’ll add that to my backlog. Right? And then when you sit with your managers and they can play with and say, okay, I brought my backlog with me. Can you tell me which thing do you believe is a higher priority. A lot of the things that got to do. So when I say back off all those to do’s, everything everybody’s emailing you about every single boss has asked you to do, put it in a list and then go back to them and say, could you prioritize this for me? What’s going to drive the highest value, right? To help me to help our department be what we’re trying to do this year. That’s simple. Learning to Prioritize Lizzy Morris: Because then sometimes people just don’t have the insight as to how many things are going. So they really don’t realize it. But when you see it, you’re like, Oh, well this is more, this is high priority. And I’ve even done that in my organization. I had a team member come to me, well, you asked me to do this. You asked me to do that, she asked me to do this. I said, here’s your prioritization. I said, this is how you always prioritize. If it’s going to drive revenue, we’ll help our customers. It goes up to the top. And then if you can’t decide between helping our customers and driving revenue, talk to me. If you’ve got something that’s sitting right in between those two, ask me and I’ll prioritize it for you. Jenn DeWall: This is also a moment of development. Lizzy Morris: Yeah, I liberated them! Because I’m like, don’t be overwhelmed, there’s no need to be overwhelmed. This criteria, because you know, I had a couple of people who were. I said, pause, stop, stop, choose your base priority. Use this all the time. If it’s not revenue generating, it’s not helping our customers. It doesn’t come up to the top. So anything that doesn’t fit into that, it’s going to be lower. Now, if you have concerns, talk to me, let’s talk through it. And when I did that, they can calm down, so you’ve taken people out of the stress, right? So now they can think, now they can create. Now that can be productive. And that’s what you want. As a leader. You want productive teams. If people are in overwhelm, they’re panicked, they’re have anxiety. How are you thinking they’re going to create anything for you that’s worthwhile in that state? They’re not. Right? You need people to be in a calm state to do great work and there’s data that says not only do you need them calm, you need them happy. And that is not necessarily a concept from the industrial age. Happy? What do you mean? You should be happy you’ve got a job, you are privileged to be here! Yeah, that’s not happy. You know, I think about it. Mental health is a huge thing, right? The amount of people who commit suicide, those statistics are off the radar for people in corporate organizations. And why does that happen? They don’t feel they have an outlet. They feel overwhelmed. And when you have constant overwhelm, your brain tells you, it’s always going to be this way. You’re always going to feel this and who wants to feel that all the time. So we have to, as leaders really inspect our environments that we’re creating. So create environments that allow people to thrive, not simply survive. Jenn DeWall: My gosh. I think that’s a great ending point. Lizzy. You’ve given so many nuggets to our listeners, just so many different perspectives speaking from even, you know, the last point that you had said, I just, I see so much opportunity. If you’re thinking about teaching someone, how to prioritize, and if it’s someone that’s newer in their career, newer to your organization, by doing that, you’re also connecting them probably in a quicker fashion to the big picture and helping to really develop those strategic thinking and decision making skill sets that are essential. If you want them to add value as they continue through their career. But I know that we have to wrap up. What would be maybe one last thing that you would want to share with our audience? Or I could say it this way. One of the final questions we typically ask our guests is what is your leadership habit for success? What do you do to create success for yourself to be successful? So, you know, I would say take it that way you can answer. What is your leadership habit for success or what is one thing you would want them to know in your closing remarks? What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Lizzy Morris: I would say, if you’re going to adopt a new leadership habit for success, it would be to take time every day, to be very transparent with yourself, to inspect the things you’ve done for that day and figure out what is the next best thing you could do that would make your life better, make your organization better, make your teams better and make you better. If that becomes a practice for living, leadership, will go from here to here because then you’ll teach that on. That will become part of you. And then it will have a knock-on effect to become a part of your teams. Then before you know it, your culture of your organization has become value-driven. And that’s just simple. So it starts with you. Jenn DeWall: Gosh, that’s a great place to end it. Lizzy, thank you so much for just sharing your time, sharing your insight, sharing your ideas with our audience. I really enjoyed our conversation and I know our listeners did too. Thank you so much for being here. Lizzy Morris: Wonderful. Thank you so much. It’s been great. It was absolutely fabulous to talk about something I’m so passionate about. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, you can absolutely tell. We are going to be giving information on how they can list. They can connect with you in the bumpers. So stay tuned and we’ll give you some insights on how you can connect with Lizzy. Thank you so much for listening to this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast. If you want to connect with Lizzy, go ahead and meet with her all over LinkedIn. She posts weekly updates. She’s got motivation. She’s got different resources that you can follow. So it’s Lizzy Morris at LinkedIn. Connect with her. Ask her questions about Scrum and Agile. If you loved this episode, don’t forget to share it with your friends, help them become better leaders. And most importantly, we would appreciate if you went and rated and reviewed this podcast episode over the leadership habit, podcast in general on your favorite podcast, streaming service. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time.   The post Episode 43: Agile is a People Practice with Scrum Trainer, Agile Coach and Change Agent, Lizzy Morris appeared first on Crestcom International.

This episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast is taken from a recent Crestcom Webinar. You can also view it on YouTube here: How to Apply Agile Principles to Any Organization If you would like more information about future Crestcom Webinars, check out a trainer in your area, or click here: https://crestcom.com/leadership-trainer/leadership-team/ Agile Leadership Hi, everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall. And in today’s episode of The Leadership Habit, we are going to present to you a recent webinar that we did all about how you can become a more Agile leader and how you can make a more Agile team. “Agile” Is not just a term that is left to people in the software world. There are plenty of leaders now that could benefit from many of the strategies that exist within Agile. So stay tuned to this webinar as I share with you some introductory knowledge into Agile. We want to give you the basics, right? Enjoy! Full Transcript Below: Jenn DeWall: Good morning. Good morning. Good afternoon, depending on where you’re joining from! It’s 10— or it’s almost 10 o’clock here in Colorado. I see a few people logging on. So excited to just talk about some basic principles from Agile today and thinking about how we can, we, as leaders can potentially adopt these characteristics and even just take nuggets to help our team be more efficient, to help our team be more productive, to ensure that our team is focusing on the right things that are actually going to give us the results. I mean, I know that I’ve worked on teams before where it felt like we didn’t have a clear sense of direction, or we were trying to do too much that we are burning ourselves out. That is something that we want to talk about. And yeah, David Brotman, I am early! I am four minutes early. I just, I mean, I wish I could see everyone’s smiling faces. Maybe for the people that are on maybe just throw out where you’re calling in or logged in from, and then what are you hoping to gain out of this? Why did you want to attend an Agile Leadership webinar? What were you hoping to maybe bring into your leadership skillset or tool kit? How do you want to be maybe more Agile? Go ahead and throw it in the chat! Hey Shelly. It’s great to see you. I love seeing the names of people that I know, Mr. Dave, David Brotman. I know he is joining us from New Jersey. I am in Denver, Colorado. I’m going to move my mic around and hope that that helps a little bit. But yeah, go ahead and throw in the chat. Tell me where you’re from. Where are you from? Where in the world are all of our people joining us for our Crestcom monthly webinar. And this one is How to Apply Agile Principles to Any Organization. And we’re going to be walking through just different ways to consider Agile. What can we really do now? Agile isn’t a one size fits all approach. There are actually multiple methodologies within the world of Agile. So know that what we’re going to cover today is very introductory. It’s something just to give you a high-level perspective and view of the objective of Agile, why Agile even came to be. Oh, I love it. We’ve got Toronto, Thornberry, Ontario. I know Shelly! Yes, yes, yes. I’m so happy that you’re joining us. Where else has everyone from? We have, we’ve got Canadians. We’ve got someone from New Jersey, but I think there are a few other people on here that might be from other places, Maine. Oh my gosh. I bet Maine is so beautiful right now with all of the fall colors, Detroit. Hey, I’m from Wisconsin originally. I will absolutely take that, Kayla. I’m so glad that you’re here! For those that have never been on one of our webinars before, I’m Jenn DeWall, and I lead our monthly webinars for Crestcom, and I’m just so excited to share a different skillset. We always cover a variety of topics in our webinars. Agile Leadership Jenn DeWall: This month, we are talking about Agile. Last month, we did an interview and talked about AI and what that looks like and the future of leadership. And next month, we’re actually going to be talking about emotional intelligence. So, which is something that I think ties really well to Agile, to be an Agile leader. It really does require you to have high emotional intelligence, because you need to be able to see that big picture, connect the dots, motivate people, and communicate with them in different ways, based on their personality experience, and insight, Agile and emotional intelligence go together, hand in hand. So I hope that if you come to this one that you also attend next month to figure out how you can actually build those together. So we’re going to get started promptly at 10:00 AM mountain time. We’ve got one more minute to go. Feel free for those that are still joining. If you want to just drop in again, where you’re joining us from also what you’re hoping to get, or maybe even your favorite thing about fall, because I love that too. I mean, I can think about all the things that I love and Denver, as the colors are changing, I’m going to go ahead and get started. So you’re joining us today to talk about how to apply Agile principles to any organization and what you may or may not realize is that as a result of the pandemic and the abrupt shift that we all had to make as business leaders to either change our processes, to work in a remote world, to change how our team interacts in a remote world, much of what we did to quickly adapt to the changing circumstance and the environment that was created by the pandemic are actually rooted in Agile whether you realize it or not. Why Agile? Jenn DeWall: And it’s really about the characteristics, but why Agile? Why are we doing a topic on Agile? Why is that important? Well, we can probably think about our day to day and what you could likely think of. If I said, are there any things that you do in a day for work that maybe you don’t feel like bring as much value or aren’t as productive? Because if you have an Agile mindset, you are going to look at those things and really question, are they worth it? Because there are some things like meetings. For example, I called this meeting, and it’s not a meeting until someone’s time gets wasted. What, but how many of you, You have actually sat into a meeting and been like, I don’t even know I’m here. I have so much stuff to do this isn’t productive. I’m not even a part of this, right? Agile is all about figuring out, do our meetings make sense? Does the format of them need to change? How can we modify our process to make sure that people are maximizing their time, that we want them to be as productive as they can? So not all meetings are going to be the same. And then, of course, this, please read the attached email about the email that I sent yesterday, referring to the previous email about flooding the system with unnecessary emails. Please forward this email to your entire staff. How many of you have an inbox that has way too many emails that may or may not be relevant or productive? I’m guessing many of you do. And every time that you check some of those emails, it’s causing a lag in your ability or in your productivity. Multitasking is actually kind of the opposite of what Agile would want you to do. So our goal today is to think about how we can look at our processes to make improvements so we can be more efficient, more productive, more successful. The important thing is not your process. The important thing is your process for improving your process. Not a lot of organizations and teams have processes for improving the process because they think that, Hey, we did this once and it worked really well. Let’s just keep, you know, why try to recreate the wheel? Well, sometimes you’ve got to recreate it as we saw it as a result of the pandemic. Things shifted so drastically that it forced our hands to make changes. However, we should start to think, Hey, our process must have been great yesterday, but it doesn’t mean it’s right today. And so we need to have processes for thinking, what should we do? Is this worth it? How can we evolve? What can we get rid of, and how do we want to move forward? Meet Jenn DeWall Jenn DeWall: My name is Jenn DeWall, and I’m a Leadership Development Strategist for Crestcom. And all that means is I helped to build our leadership classes. And I also facilitate our monthly leadership development classes, but so do many people around the world as if you don’t know much about Crestcom, we’re a global leadership development organization. We operate in over 60 countries. And our goal is to develop managers into leaders. And we do that just based on providing them with the skills and their leadership toolkit to be as effective as possible. And that’s what we’re doing today. We offer these free monthly webinars because we want to help develop leaders. We know that leadership is one of the places that when we develop great leaders, not only are they going to be happier themselves, they’ll be happier employees, better performing organizations, and then there’s a ripple effect into the community, into the world. What is Agile Leadership? So I am so excited to have you here today, and we’re going to talk about three things. We’re going to understand what it means to be an Agile leader because it will require us to kind of remove that traditional leadership or maybe that task-oriented mindset that we had, and to think about how can we show up in a different way to help Agile or to build a more Agile team. And then we’re going to describe the key components of the Agile Manifesto. The Agile Manifesto is essentially the working document that was created by a group of software developers, and it’s essentially their rules or their guidance for how to go about incorporating Agile. And last, we’re going to explain the best way to create an Agile team. So what does it mean to be an Agile Leader? Are you an Agile leader? Well, Agile, if there’s at the start, are those who can adapt to ever-changing and uncertain environments. So if you found yourself having to move around quickly, figure things out, and just pivoted very quickly. You’d likely have a lot of characteristics of Agile, and you may not even know because we often just think, Oh, Agile, well, first wearables. I can tell you that I’ve had a conversation with friends. And when I brought up Agile, they basically looked at me like, what is Agile? I’ve never heard of that before. Is that a new language? What are these terms? For many of us, we haven’t had that exposure with Agile. We’ve left that in the tech world. That’s for software developers, but really there are so many characteristics that come from Agile that can be relevant to you. No matter what industry you were in. Agile methods were first developed in the tech industry to increase success rates in software development and move new products to market quickly and efficiently. The Agile Manifesto So when these Agile principles were created, it was really to help design better products that met the customer needs in the ways that they wanted. So, the Agile Manifesto, this is something that created, it was created in 2001 by a group of 17 software developers. And they came together because they wanted to change the way that they addressed, how they created their apps, what they were doing. And they came together to create the Agile Manifesto, to solve two key opportunities. Shorten the Delay of Benefits And they are this: to shorten the delay of benefits to users, to resolve product market fit and development graveyard issues. So what that essentially means is we’re just trying to make sure that we’re getting that real time feedback and we’re making changes. We want to be able to adjust to what people need. Think about if you took something from your staff and you found out that something wasn’t working and then immediately addressed it, how much happier they would be. Get Feedback The other objective is: get feedback from users more quickly and more frequently to confirm the usefulness of new products continue to improve them. Agile. That means you can no longer if you are truly trying to be an Agile Leader, you can’t practice the set and forget. Like, Hey, we did this in a meeting. We walked through this. It’s so great. That goes to launch. Now we don’t need to think about it again. No, you can’t. If you think about even the iteration of an app itself, they might create an app, but based on user feedback, based on how the app is performing, they make modifications and enhancements. And we should be looking at that with our team. Why just see that feedback and know that something’s not working. And then just say, well, but I guess there’s red tape. It was created like that. So we should probably keep it. That’s not going to help anyone. And it’s likely going to create more disengagement. But the Agile Manifesto is founded around or formed around four core values. These values are as follows: The Four Core Values # 1 Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools The first core value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Now, you think about this in the sense of think about being an organization. That’s like, we need to have the best software or the best technology or the best of this. You can have the best of everything, but if you don’t have the right people to leverage it, you’re not likely going to see those outcomes that you envision in your head. So you have to prioritize the individuals and interactions over the processes and tools. #2 Working Product Over Comprehensive Documentation Then the second core value of the Agile Manifesto is working product over comprehensive documentation. Now this one came to be because before it would actually launch a product, what they would do is they would document, and they would work through all of the—Hey, we need to do that. This is a consideration. And they would essentially ma market out this whole plan without necessarily taking action and your building. I’ve done a lot of your own gut feeling or instincts, which may or may not be appropriate. And so when we think about the core values, it’s a working product. We’re trying to eliminate the red tape. We’re trying to eliminate the bureaucracy and actually get to designing and creating something, instead of wasting your time, just only planning it. #3 Customer Collaboration Over Contract Negotiation Number three, customer collaboration, over contract negotiation. Our goal, if we’re truly Agile, is to serve our customers to the best of our ability. And we can all think of our customers, and we teach this at Crestcom, in two ways, we have internal customers. Those are employees. Those are the ones that we want to keep happy because what’s felt inside of your organization is then felt by your external customer on the outside and your external customer, of course, being that individual that’s investing in your products or services. So we truly are Agile. We’re trying to think about how can we create the best experience for the customers that we serve? #4 Responding to Change Over Following a Plan And the fourth principle is responding to change over following a plan. Did some of you just kind of cringe a little bit? What? I mean, we had this plan, this plan looks great. Thank you. 2020 would have actually ended up if we said Nope and January, you know, or actually, in our strategy meetings for the year, we planned this, and we’re going to stay the course because we had that. How would that, how effective would that plan be today? I’m guessing that everyone here had a disruption to their business. And the great thing about Agile is it does help you embrace change, knowing that change isn’t necessarily bad that we have to change. If we want to stay competitive or respond to market conditions. But Agile just requires you as a leader to get a little bit more uncomfortable, being uncomfortable. The 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto So what is the Agile Manifesto? Well, there’s 12 principles within it, and I’m going to review all 12 of them. #1 The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of a valuable product So the first one: The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of a valuable product. So that means that we don’t have to wait until it goes through all these review cycles. We don’t have to wait until we have them all these meetings to be able to bring something to launch. The key is we’re starting. And then, when we start, we’re gathering real-time feedback. We’re listening to people. What are they saying? What’s working what’s not working. How many of you have been a part of something where you don’t even think about that? You’re like, Whoa, we had this plan. So we’re going to follow through it. If you are following the Agile Manifesto, your highest priority is to satisfy your customer. #2 Welcome Changing Requirements Second welcome changing requirements, even late in development. What does this mean for you as a leader? If you find that at the end of a project or you have a strategy and you’re going all the way through, and you might love it, but you’re starting to get some feedback that I don’t know if this is going to work, we might have to adapt in a different way. We might have to change, even though you might be at the end, you still need to change. Agile says we’re not just going to keep pushing something even when we know that it doesn’t work. We want to make sure we’re putting the right things through. And that people are focusing on the right things. #3 Develop Working Products More Frequently Number three, develop working products more frequently. We want to be able to get feedback on them. We want to, instead of just thinking about things in theories of like that could work, that could work. We want to actually deliver and do that more frequently so we can get the feedback to make things better. #4 Collaboration Between Business Stakeholders and Developers Number four, collaboration between business, stakeholders, and developers. Now, Agile is all about what I would like to say is that together we rise. How can we learn from each other? How can we partner with each other? How can we all come together to solve a challenge, to be better? #5 Build Projects Around Motivated Individuals Number five, build projects around motivated individuals and give them the support that they need. This means you want to choose the right people on your team, and you want to then give them the right tasks and the right resources for them to be able to accomplish what you need them to accomplish. Now, a lot of Agile requires you to be a little bit more hands-off as a leader, which can feel a little uncomfortable. However, if you think about this, if you were a leader, especially a servant based leader, and you delegated something to someone, you gave them all the support that they needed and decided here’s my outcome. This is my afters. This is the final. This is what success looks like. Now, go and make this happen. And then, they were able to use their own strategic thinking, critical thinking skills, decision making to make that happen. That creates a happier employee. #6 The Most Efficient Communication is Face-to-Face Communication Number 6 -the most effective and efficient-this is from the 12 principles- the most effective and efficient communication within the development team is face-to-face conversation. We can’t just send everything over email and think that we’re going to get a great result. Why? All of us have email overload to some extent, and not all emails are a priority. If you have an important message, you need to have everyone come together face to face and face to face. For many of us could still be in a remote setting. And in that sense, I would still recommend having everyone turn their cameras on. Have them join in for the dialogue. You want to have eyes on your people. When you have eyes on your people in those meetings, you can look at their visual cues. Does it look like they’re confused? Does it look like they’re confident in what you’re saying? You lose all that. And those are opportunities to think about. Are we getting it right? Do we need to change the process? So really embracing the face to face conversation. #7 A Working Product is the Primary Measure of Success And number 7- a working product is the primary measure of success. What is the effectiveness of our product? How well is it working? What adjustments are we making? That is how we determine whether or not we’re successful. It’s not just, Hey, well, we, we put that product out there or we accomplished that goal. Or we made that process and set and forget, no, it needs to be functional. #8 Agile Processes Promote Sustainable Development at a Sustainable Pace Number eight, Agile processes promote sustainable development teams, and users should be able to maintain a consistent pace. Now, this is really important. When you think about the bureaucracy or red tape that can sometimes come up in organizations, these might delay the ability for your teams and where any, in any individual your customer to engage or to do what they need, what they need to do to be successful. So wanting to think about sustainable development, how can we make sure that people can be as productive as they can be? #9 Continuous Attention to Excellence and Good Design Number nine, continuous attention to excellence and good design will enhance your agility. Again, you cannot go for a set and forget with Agile principles if you’re incorporating them, you need to determine ways that you’re evaluating. How is it working? How can we continue to make it better instead of just saying, yeah, that didn’t work, but I guess we’ll probably get to that one. I know I’ve worked at organizations where we know that let’s say there’s a leak in the tire and the tire could go flat, but we’re like, let’s just patch it for now. No, fix the tire. #10 Simplicity is Essential Number 10. Simplicity is essential. Think about it. If you’re even giving communication to someone and then it starts to become very overwhelming to someone. People are not going to pull out what you need them to pull out. If you’re truly Agile, things should be simple. It should be easy to understand your problems should be easily framed. You are thinking about trying to identify your problem. And let’s say one or two sentences versus having to give you a brief summary to try and describe it. You want to try and make things as simple as possible. # 11 The Best Requirements and Designs Emerge from Self-Organizing Teams Number 11- The best requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams. Allow the teams to come to their conclusions, allow the teams to come up with their strategies, allow others to be the best that they can be. #12 Teams Must Reflect on How to Become More Effective And finally, number 12 – teams must reflect on how to become more effective at regular intervals and adjust behavior accordingly. Now, I can’t tell you how much I see this in my experience from teaching leadership, where organizations, individuals, consultants, what have you, we’ll implement a product, or they’ll go through a full— let’s say client experience, where they’re working with them. And then when it’s done, they’re on the next project, they don’t even bother to think about what worked. What did we do well, what didn’t work? How can we then take that and move it into something different? And you might find this at your organization because you’re operating so fast that you feel like you don’t even have time to sit back and reflect. Well, if you’re truly trying to be an Agile Leader, you’ve got to face the music. You’ve got to build in feedback times to figure out, is this working? Is this not working? And you’ve got to suspend your ego. This means that you’ve got to let go of, this is my best idea. And I think it’s the best exactly as it is. It may not be. And that’s okay because the benefit of Agile is bringing everyone together to make something great. Agile Methodologies So there are multiple Agile methodologies. We’re going to talk about briefly two of them that are common, but know that there are many different frameworks for how people actually apply Agile. And one Agile methodology is called Scrum. Scrum, I believe, is a rugby term, but Scrum was a word that I didn’t know. And I know when I first started hearing about it, I was like, Oh, that sounds really confusing. Scrum Well, Scrum was just a framework for project management that prioritizes accountability, teamwork, and iterative progress to achieve a specific goal. So if we’re operating from a Scrum perspective, then we have the emphasis on how can we using our assigned roles, understanding what’s expected of us, come together, focus on the right things in this certain amount of time to achieve X. So on your slide is a brief overview of what the Scrum process works, or it looks like if you notice that bottom left circle that says product backlog, essentially think of your, to-do list. Think of all the things that you want to accomplish in a strategic initiative. And then you could even take that to your individual level. What are all the things that you want to accomplish? Well, then you move into a meeting with your team, and you say, I know we’ve got a lot, but not all things can be created equal. The Scrum Master So what do we want to focus on? And those are your sprint planning meetings. And then you create your essential list of to-dos. All right, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to do it by when. And then they go into a sprint, which is a short interval of time where they only focus on those identified as “to-do.” And after the sprint is complete, it goes into the finished work. And then we’re talking about or reviewing it. What were our insights gained? How can we change going forward? Now that’s kind of the basic principle, but what’s important here is that there are defined roles. Now there’s the Scrum master. The Scrum Master is the servant leader. Now that is the way to say that the Scrum Master is there to overview or to watch the team, to allow them the autonomy in their own decision making, but to be there as a support. The Product Owner They’re setting that vision and then allowing other people to make it happen. And then there’s the product owner. That’s responsible for what they want as well as the team members that are going to make that happen. But the Scrum Master is the highest level of the hierarchy if you will, but all of those people have a unique role within the process. So if you think about your role as a leader, thinking about, Hmm, do people know what’s expected of them? Or how do I want them to impact this or interact with this strategy? What role do I want them to play? Now, the benefits of the Scrum framework is that it increases productivity. People know what’s expected of them and you’re focused. So obviously, you have a faster speed of being able to accomplish things. You’re more adaptable because you’re getting real-time feedback and people are accountable. User Satisfaction They understand what’s expected of them. And ultimately, you have user satisfaction. So whatever you’re working on, you know that because you’re addressing it, you’re focusing on it, you’re getting real-time feedback, you’re able to incorporate that to deliver in a better way. So if you wanted to embrace, let’s say a more Scrum framework because remember, this is more an introductory level. There are plenty of resources out there to help you actually incorporate this. But if you wanted to just start, one of the first places is with you and acting like a servant based leader, which means that you are not there to take all the glory and say, look at my team and me. You are there to help people be the best that they can be. You are there to set the stage to set the vision and then say, okay, now team, I’ve got everything. Let’s think about what we want to accomplish. Now. I want you to go. You have the task; make it happen. Communication Another tip in a Scrum framework is recognizing that we’ve got to communicate. One of the things that they talked about in the Agile Manifesto is that we have to have face to face communication. If we’re trying to really improve the speed of how we do things, we’ve got to communicate, which means that not all things can actually be sent over the email. They need to be done over face to face. So you can have a real-time dialogue. Also, define rules. Make sure when you’re thinking about delegating a task, or you’re coming up on a project that people understand what their specific role is. When they understand what their role is, then they’re better able to be a self-starter. They’re more confident because there’s less ambiguity, which we know humans do not thrive well in ambiguity, Focus Focus, you know, going back to the Scrum framework. If you think about it here, they might have an entire product backlog, or let’s just look at it as our long-running, ever aspirational to-do list all the things. But then they go together, and they focus, okay, well, what do we really want to accomplish? Why does this matter? That’s the benefit of having the meeting? We can’t treat all things as equal. We have to think about all of the things. What do we want to be known for? What do we want to succeed? Those are the questions you want to ask in a meeting and then determine the to-dos based on that meeting. So it’s all about focus now. Emotional Intelligence Emotional intelligence is huge because as if we’re thinking about a Scrum framework, it does allow you to say, okay, here’s the big picture. If I’m thinking about the individuals that are part of this process, what resources do they need? What additional support do they need? Where could there be potential bottlenecks or obstacles that I need to help address? So emotional intelligence, you have to be able to see that big picture and adapt accordingly. Collaboration Encourage collaboration. Hey, think about this. Maybe someone else has solved something in your organization that you have a problem with today. How can you go out and reach with them? We’re talking about that cross pollenization. How can we get other people to talk, to share information? So then we can solve problems in a faster way. And another tip is to define what done looks like. Oftentimes in a team environment, people might stop doing their roles because they think they’re done based on what think done means. Well done to someone else might not look the same. So you need to determine what does done look like? Does done mean you’ve done a quality check review on something? Does done mean you followed up with someone? What Does “Done” look Like? Everyone needs to have a shared definition of what done looks like. And by doing this, that then says, I am done. I know that I’ve met this set of criteria and now it can move into the next phase. Or now we can focus on something else. And of course, learn, learn, learn! The biggest thing about Agile. If we’re going to get comfortable with uncertainty, we need to be able to learn, learn not only how to adapt in those situations to manage our own emotions, but also how to learn new techniques, new tools, new concepts, Agile. If you want to be Agile, it will require you to be a lifelong learner. Now, before I go any further, I actually want to just send this poll earlier, but what is, how much do you know about Agile? It just kind of want to understand our audience here. I’m gonna launch a poll. Are you a beginner? Are you an intermediate? Are you an expert in Agile? Have you written a book about it? Beginner. Okay. I got a few in the beginners. Absolutely. Yeah. There’s a lot to learn about Agile and there’s a lot of valuable nuggets. Okay. Great. We’ve got a little bit more. I’ll hold this up in a little bit. We’ve got one expert. Perfect. I’m happy to have you. I hope I represent this well. All right, I’m going to go ahead and share this. If you think about it, the majority of people are still new to Agile, but what you’re not new to, what you may not realize is that, again, going back to all of the characteristics, the actions that you took at the pandemic, you actually are more Agile than what you probably think. And so, while it’s new to you, these frameworks and know that there are many different directions that you can go, you likely have a foundation, but the primary foundation will always be your mindset. How are you looking at it? Do you have a fixed mindset? Or do you have a growth mindset? So majority of people here are beginners. I welcome you. We’ve got an interview, a few intermediate and an expert, which is great! We know that we’re all in this together. And the challenges with Agile in general is that again, we looked at that as something that was, Oh, that’s for the people over there in IT. That’s for our tech team. They’ve got that figured out. No, there’s so many great principles that we can incorporate into our day to day, whether or not we’re working in the software side of a business. Kanban So I’m going to go into the second methodology now, which is Kanban. So Kanban is a great tool, especially if you’re a very visual person. I think that it helps you understand, What am I supposed to do and by when am I supposed to do it? Where are there bottlenecks? So on and so forth. Kanban is an Agile tool which uses a shared visual Workboard to break down complex projects, into manageable trunks and track progress. So one potential Kanban board might look like this and keep in mind, if you Googled Kanban board, you would likely find so many different ones, but the Kanban board. Columns So you see multiple columns. That’s a big piece of the framework. We’re thinking about what do we want to accomplish? And then it goes into a range of, okay, what are the actions required to accomplish that? Which our requested. And then we move them into the next phase phase, which is in progress. Now, what you may notice at the top of your screen is the number three and the arrow that says WIP limits. Now WIP means Works in Progress. So essentially the things that need to be done. Why did they have a limit? WIP Well, if you ever say, well, this needs to be done. And this needs to be done. AND This needs to be done. AND THIS needs to be done. Then you might be putting too much on your people. They’re not going to be as productive. They’re spreading the resources everywhere, because they don’t have all the time. So the limits are there to help you focus. And those little cards, those are the tasks. Those are what we need to accomplish. And Kanban can come in a variety of ways. Organizations can be on boards, look different. Some of them do them virtually. If you’re face to face, maybe you have a big working Kanban whiteboard, but it’s essentially a place where everyone can come to say, okay, what’s going on? What’s everyone working on? Or what is our focus for the week? Where are we in progress in the queue? And then when is it done? Priorities So the great thing is, is that when you shift things through those columns, one thing can’t come in until something goes out. So it forces you to really focus on what you want accomplish. Instead of saying, I want this and I want this, and I want this. When you may not have visibility or resources into who could actually accomplish that. This is another just sample Kanban board that you could do. Think about it in a more simple way. Here are your to-dos. You write them on different colored post-its. Then once you’re ready to work on them, you move them into the in progress. And then as you’re working on them, you’ve complete. You go to done. Stops Other things that they add into Kanban boards are also stops. Those are points where, Hey, I’ve had something to do, but I’m blocked. Maybe I need this, or I need that and I can’t move forward. But again, these are just overall tools that you can use to give those visual snapshots to what you’re doing. The bonus is when you share this with your team, it helps people understand maybe the roles, expectations, and also the workload of your peers. So if you see, Hey, someone’s got a really busy week right now, based on this. Maybe I won’t be so frustrated if they don’t instantly respond to my message. You know, those are just great ways to help us better connect with each other. Flexibility So benefits of Kanban are many, it’s flexible. You can adjust that. You can adjust your WIP, you can adjust what you focus on. And it’s all about continuous delivery. We want to make sure that we are taking action. That’s going to yield results. So it increases productivity. It allows us to focus because we can’t just over inundate that with works in progress, not everything can be equal. So if you think about your role as a leader, how can you prioritize in a different way to make sure it’s very clear, what’s important to you, the team, the organization, so on and so forth. Kanban also makes you more efficient. Again, you’re not wasting time on the wrong thing. So then you’re saving time. So if you want to try and incorporate a little bit of Kanban, and again, I would encourage you to take this one step further and learn more about Kanban. Think about your to-do’s and then really prioritize those two dues. What ones are most important, one most important? What ones are essential, maybe there’s some that are important because they’re urgent, but maybe some are important for a longer running change and really be critical about what you’re allowing to go into the workload. Initiative Fatigue Anyone ever suffer from initiative, fatigue? I wish I could see that where essentially your boss might be saying, I want you to do this, but wait, let’s also do this. And then let’s also do that. And let’s also do that. And all of a sudden you have an employee that’s like, I don’t know. I might sleep at my desk or I might need coffee. No. When we actually really are forced to prioritize. When we truly identify the things that are going to be the most value-added, you can reduce stress and anxiety for your employees, and you can also improve their confidence because they know what’s expected of them. And they feel like they have a reasonable amount of time or resources to be able to accomplish a task successfully. If you give them too much, they may not be able to produce in the way that they want to, which could create disengagement. Visualization of Priorities So other tips. Think about your to-dos. And then if you lay them out in a visual perspective, where are their bottlenecks, what processes might be taking a little bit longer than what you thought that you could maybe look at and revisit and figure out how you could save some time. Or what other person do you need to get involved to make sure that you can reduce the bottleneck. Another thing. And I’ve said this multiple times within Kanban is prioritize. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. You can not make everything the same. I know that there is so much opportunity. There is absolutely so much opportunity, but we all know the phrase “paralysis by analysis.” We don’t take any action when we see all the actions to take. So we want to make sure that we’re very clear and that we limit our work in progress. And at the end, ultimately analyzing our workflow. What works, what doesn’t work? How can we continue to get better? Iterative Tools Everything in Kanban or inn Agile is iterative. We’re not just saying that because we came up with this once that’s a one and done, we’ve got it all figured out. No, we are embracing change and saying, how can we continue to make this better for our employees, for our customers, for anyone that we serve. While Scrum and Kanban are both popular tools to help organizations become more Agile. It’s important to remember that they’re not the only way to build an Agile team. There are other methodologies out there. And the other thing to keep in note is that you don’t necessarily want to say I am all in and we only do Kanban, or we only do Scrum because there are then going to be different situations, different scenarios that one of those approaches may not be the most effective. So we’re not saying to use this approach, and that is your end all be all because you have to have that growth mindset where you’re always changing. Removing Barriers to Success At the heart of an Agile organization is leadership that removes barriers to success increases employee independence, trust, and personal accountability. When we think about one of the focuses of Agile, it is really to be able to clear those obstacles, reduce that red tape so people can do what we need them to do. And when we do that, we’re giving them a sense of autonomy. We’re giving them a sense of employee independence. Hey, I do get to have that impact. I am connected to the big picture. I see where I produce value. And when you give people that autonomy, you’re building trust with them. You say I trust that you can do this specific task. Or I know that if I give you this assignment, that you’re going to figure out great ways to solve this. Think about the wonders that you could have on your team if you gave people the flexibility and opportunity to just be the best that they could be. That is one of the benefits of Agile, but it really requires servant based leadership. That means hands-off. It can’t always be well. This is the way that I’ve done it. And it’s the best way. So it’s going to require some of you to just pull back and say, okay, maybe I can learn something from this. How Can You Embrace Agile? So how can, how can leaders embrace Agile? How can you essentially become more Agile? You don’t have to develop software, but you can take all these characteristics and think about how you could maybe modify your own behavior or your daily tasks to be better. So number one creates stability to encourage agility. Number two, focus on clear communications, three, make conflict more constructive. This is going to require you people that might run from conflict to say, okay, conflict, maybe isn’t that bad. Maybe there’s some good that can come from it. Learn from our failures, allocate resources effectively, and embrace lifelong learning.  Create Stability to Embrace Agility Now we’re going to go into each of these. So how do you create stability to encourage agility? Well, one of the things that you need to do is create stability, which means psychological safety. There’s gotta be consistency there. People have to know what’s expected of them. There’s gotta be a clear target. They can’t feel like there is going to, there are going to be consequences. If they try something new that is going to try to serve or solve a challenge, we need to make sure that people feel safe and comfortable in the environment that they work in. Focus on Resilience The next piece is to focus on resilience, resilience, especially with the pandemic is an essential requirement of all the leaders in our organizations. We need them to be able to say, okay, if this happens, we can get through it. If there’s a no, I can find another way. If that was shut down, we can figure out an alternate route. We want people or leaders that feel empowered to continue to persevere. And that perseverance, that belief that, okay, we can make things better just because it didn’t work out is what’s ultimately going to achieve the right result for your organization. Set Clear Priorities To create stability you also need to set clear priorities and goals. That means that you can’t just say these are all the things that I want to accomplish. No, you need to try and look at one, two, three. What are the top three things that you want of your team of your organization? This is what I want you to focus on. You cannot be everything to everyone. Communicate Frequently Communicate frequently! Keep people on the same page. I know that in this remote life, that there are some people that are like out of sight out of mind. I mean, I know I have employees out there. I haven’t even seen them in a virtual camera in a long time. You need to communicate, and it’s best if you can try and do face to face to figure out real time what’s going on for certain challenges know what’s appropriate to send over email and know what needs to be conducted over a meeting. That is an important distinction for you. If it’s something that’s more technical, if it’s something that could be potentially confusing, you need to pick up the phone, have a phone call, have a conversation to make sure that they’re all on the same page. Establish Trust And of course, establish trust. Show people that you trust them, that you trust in their abilities and their capabilities and be consistent. If you really want to create stability on your team, you actually need to. And this comes down to emotional intelligence. You need to be a consistent leader. You need to consistently manage your emotions. You need to be consistent when you manage when something doesn’t go right. You need to be consistent in how you communicate that consistency is going to help trust or help you build trust. As well as a feeling of stability. Make Sure Everyone Understands the Vision Number two is to focus on clear communications to ensure that everyone understands the vision. We’re not well, we had that meeting at last Monday. We talked about the strategy. I know that we talked about this for like a five hour working session, and then I’m going to come down to the team and just say, yeah, this is what we want. Give them insight into the vision. What are you trying to accomplish? Why is that vision important too often, we just give tests and we can’t necessarily live in that way in Agile. You want to share the vision and allow people to maybe find creative solutions to help you get there. Connect the Dots Connect the dots. So that goes with the same thing, make sure that people understand how, what they’re doing, what you’re asking them is to do or they’re or how their role is actually helping you move forward. You want to connect the dots for everyone. This is especially true for your younger employees that might be new to your organization. You want to make sure they understand what’s going on. Instead of them just being more tactical and looking at a small piece of their role. If they have more autonomy and they, you are more inclusive in their conversation, you want to find some solutions that you had no idea that were there because you overlooked them based on your own role. Face to Face Communications Embrace face to face communication and create regular checkins and opportunities for feedback. I’m talking about opportunities where at the end of a project, or after you kicked off a big proposal, what worked, what didn’t work. Don’t just move on to the next, because you feel like you don’t have time. The faster you try and move on to the next, the more that you’re just going to likely spend time trying to fix the same problem, have the same conversation. You already knew it was going to be a problem and you could have solved it before. So maybe sure that you’re taking that feedback and actually leveraging it. So you can save time down the road. We’re talking about short term pain for longterm gain. As a rule of thumb for every user who tells you about a problem, there will be between 10 and 100 other users who have experienced the same problem and didn’t think to get in touch. We as leaders, when you truly want to be Agile, have to facilitate conversations and relationships between others, it will help us solve our problems faster. Make Conflict Constructive Make conflict more constructive. Yes. So I’m talking to the person that might be the avoider that sees conflict and is like, how do I get out of here? Can I, can they see me? I’m just going to look at my phone. I won’t, this is awkward. Or you know, that person that might be like, well, this was my idea. And I really liked my idea. I think this is going to work. No. If we are thinking about conflict, because it’s going to happen, no matter what type of process you do as a leader, we need to also have a mindset that says, yeah, I can handle it. And that’s the embracer mindset. You see conflict and you say, okay, great. These are different points of view. This is new feedback. You look at it as a blessing because it’s truly something that’s going to help you improve a customer experience or solve a potential organizational challenge. Not all conflict is bad. We know that conflict is necessary to move us forward. However, if you want to think about how conflict is handled on your team, you have to think about how you manage conflict as a leader. So starting with that, embracer mindset. Conflict is going to happen, but how do we want to leverage it? How do we want to use it? How do we want to resolve it? And other ways to make conflict, more constructive, respect, differences, and approaches now for truly thinking about Agile. That means that there’s not a fixed way. Perfection basically can’t exist in Agile because there’s no definitive end point. Continuous Improvement It’s all about continuous improvement. So we need to respect differences in approaches. We need to say, Oh, maybe my approach isn’t the best approach. Maybe that’s a good approach. Hey, I wonder what they have to say. So using conflict as an opportunity to just hear different voices that may not always have that same opportunity to contribute, focus on the collective outcome. It’s not a me, it’s a we. How do we make sure that everyone feels that they’re working towards that same shared vision? And when you do get everyone around the same collective outcome, this is what we’re here to do. Then it’s easier to gain consensus. Hey, well, if we’re trying to solve this problem, then maybe this is what we have to do, which makes it easier to reduce the conflict. Because everyone is bought in most importantly, let go of you, go let go of, and you go, there’s no place for it. It’s not about you being the greatest person on your team. It’s not about you being the greatest leader. It is about the collective team and organization coming together to build off of each other’s ideas, to be the best that they can be, and leverage that power of diversity. Inclusive Culture We know there’s so many benefits to having diverse teams and to having an inclusive culture. And this is really what you want to do. If you’re thinking about Agile, it is asking that person that’s quiet to share their contribution. It is inviting someone else to the table that doesn’t normally get a seat. You want to leverage the power of diversity because these voices will help you create greater products, processes, and so on and so forth. Learn from Failure Learn from your failures. Again, this one is often overlooked because people are so quickly moving on to the next thing they’re caught up on the next that they don’t even have to take the time to learn from the failures, which means that they’re going to repeat them again. Hopefully not, but they could. So if you really want to learn from failures, and if you want to help your team become more Agile and learn from their failures, one of the things that you have to do is avoid assigning blame. Maybe you create team rules that when conflict happens that, Hey, we’re not about blaming. We’re talking about the solution at hand. We’re not going personal. We’re not saying, you know what, Jonathan, you really, you didn’t do this in the process. Absolutely not. We’re not doing that because that’s not productive. It’s just going to cause more lag and your time it’s going to cause more friction between the team. And it’s going to get you further away from your goal. So avoid, avoid assigning blame, Optimize Failure Then optimize failure. Hey, it’s not a matter of whether or not you are going to fail. You are absolutely going to fail. I’m going to fail. We’re all going to make mistakes. However, we can’t live there. We have to figure out how to quickly learn from our failures, fail fast. What can you take from it? And then move on to the next and how can you improve in the future? You can’t live in your failures. So you can’t bring all that baggage from the tasks that didn’t work on that project that didn’t go as planned. You’ve got to just take the learnings from it, with you and keep moving. Re-Frame Failure Frame failure as an opportunity to reflect and learn. We talked about this in past webinars, frame-storming. What are the benefits of this? How can I look at this as an opportunity? Oh, well maybe by this failure, I see a different way that we can serve our customer. Or maybe by this failure, I see a different way. I can communicate with my team failure. Isn’t bad. There are so many learnings of failure, but we sometimes just miss them because we’re either, again, moving too fast. Or sometimes we just don’t like to admit we failed. And when we do that, then we’re not learning. We’re not able to change our behavior to make sure that it can be different in the future. Embrace Change And most importantly, embrace change. Failure is going to happen regardless of whether you want it to or not. But you do have to embrace the fact that change is going to happen. One of my favorite quotes is “comfort should scare you.” When you live in a place of comfort. Well, that’s when you become more risk averse, you’re not as tolerant to any type of change or disruption. And we know that in today’s climate, whether it’s affected by tech or just the fact of globalization or the pandemic- change is the one constant. And we as leaders need to get better at managing how we respond to change. Welcome it, and create a safe space for experimentation and creative thought. Remove Fear of Failure Make sure that you’re removing the fear of failure. Hey, I’m not going to fire you. If you get this wrong, I’m going to give you a challenge. I want you to see what you can come up with and reward them for that. Instead of making them feel well, if you don’t get this right it’s game over for you. No, you need to give them a safe space to be able to experiment and provide honest feedback, honest feedback, but what works on a product, a process, maybe even a communication style. This requires you to go back to embrace failure, having that embracer mindset. Hey, we’ve got to have this conversation. If we have this difficult conversation, then we’re likely going to be better. Provide Honest Feeback Instead of having an undercurrent of maybe inefficiencies or frustrations that I’m not sharing, we need to provide honest feedback to make sure that we are not going to repeat that same failure in the future, and then identify opportunities. That’s going to move the team forward. What can you do differently now? You could look at these as aha moments. Maybe you create a list of aha moments. What did we gain? Oh yeah. I learned that we can do this a lot quicker. Oh, I learned that this personality style prefers this when we talk to them. So maybe that’s how you want to present your information. What are the “aha moments?” Create aha moments make you do it on a Friday where you’re like, let’s talk about our aha moments for the week. What insights Allocate Resources Did you gain? Allocate resources, effectively. Strategically allocate resources. Now going back to the Kanban methodologies that we even talked about, Scrum and Kanban, both require you to prioritize, to focus, to say, okay, not all things are created equal. And these are truly the things that are going to have the biggest impact on our bottom line or on solving this challenge. And so this is what we’re going to focus on. We’re not going to say all things are equal because then we’re just dividing our resources in terms of employees time, or in terms of the financial component. So we need to strategically allocate resources and make sure that they are connected to the big picture that they have a why. This is why we’re doing it. Understand the Why Now. The why is important obviously for solving the challenge, but the why is also important for the employee to understand, because it gives them motivation. It gives them competence and it gives them that sense of meaning. And if you want to allocate resources effectively, you also need to consider how time is spent. Are there recurrent meetings that just, you know, you feel like you have them, but they’re not necessarily the most productive or you just have them because they’re standing in on your calendar. Oh, maybe it’s time to reconsider whether or not that’s worth it. Maybe you shorten your meetings. Maybe you make them more frequent. We’ll talk more about some solutions at the end of this webinar. Delegate and Empower Delegate and empower. When we talk about allocating resources effectively- you are a resource! And you as a leader, if you are going to do great things, you can’t do it all either. So you’ve got to prioritize and think, what do I want to accomplish? Okay. And if I want to accomplish that, what needs to go off of my plate? Who can I delegate that to? Delegation is such an amazing way to build the competence of your team to free up your time. So you can produce more value or contribute in a way that maybe is more meaningful for you, but leverage the power of delegation and empower people to have their own sense of autonomy and ownership. The more that they have, that the more they’ll be. Embrace Testing And embrace testing. You don’t have to have an idea and then say, all right, well, we’re just going to push it through because we had this idea. Absolutely not. If we’re thinking about Agile, it’s, we’re not believing that we have it right the first time. There’s no such thing as perfection. Those are the things that we know to be true. We are always going to change. And testing or pilot groups are just great ways to slow down before you speed up and then hit that accelerated about on drive over the cliff, unintentionally. So we want to make sure that we’re using testing is what we’re doing, right? And reduce red tape. People might spend a lot of time documenting something or having to dot these i’s and cross these t’s. And do, does that really matter? Maybe it mattered earlier in the day or earlier. Maybe it mattered years ago in the business, but does it still matter today? It requires you to ask those tough questions as a leader. Does this make sense? If it doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s time to remove that red tape so you can free up someone’s time and ability to focus and solve that challenge. Make Your Team Accountable And also make your team accountable by doing things like a Kanban board, that’s a visual way that you can see that they’re accountable or even adopting the Scrum. There are so many different ways, but make sure that once you connected them to the big picture, you know, that they have their assigned tasks, that you then have a way to measure it. What are key performance indicators or KPIs or milestones that you can put into place that people are working towards so you can help their accountability. Embrace Life-Long Learning And last, but certainly not least. If you want to be a more Agile leader, if you really want to show up in a way and solve problems differently and make a greater impact, you have to embrace lifelong learning. Now, again, this goes against the notion of perfection, Hey, I’ve, I’ve mastered this. I’m great at this. And this means that you can’t have that ego. Like I’m so good at this. Absolutely not. You can be good at that. And then tomorrow, what you’re good at may not even matter. So you’ve got to keep working to get better. It’s not about you. It’s about how can I continue to learn new things, to develop people in a different way. So it requires us to have a growth mindset that belief that things can change. We’re not just here victims of circumstance. We absolutely can make an impact. And we have to challenge the status quo just because something’s been done once or it was done that way. Doesn’t mean it’s the way that we need to continue to do it. So we need to practice curiosity. Huh? I wonder what would be different if we did that? I wonder, Oh, I see something really great that they’re doing over there. I wonder how we would do that? And even in lifelong learning, in terms of getting feedback, we talked about the feedback and reflection part of Agile and how that’s so important. But even if you think about your standard meetings or one-on-ones. If you came to those with a place of curiosity, instead of a wad and should do this, if you truly sat, I wonder what came up for them. Maybe you would uncover a new challenge or bottleneck in your process that you could solve. So embrace curiosity, and of course prioritize your own professional development. We become so immersed in our day to day that we forget that, Hey, life is happening. Oh my gosh, we can do other things because we use the excuse of time. And while I can understand that we don’t have time to do all things. What we want to do is still prioritize us. What are we doing to make sure that we can be the best that we can be. Thinking of professional development as essentially the gas for a car were the car. And the professional development is the gas. We need to continue to fuel up to make sure that our car can go the extra mile. I just came up with that or out of the spot. I know that ones have been around, but didn’t plan on saying that, but we do need to make sure that we are fueling ourselves, feeling your curiosity, fueling the, you know, and challenging ourselves. Remove Obstacles So to become more Agile leaders must find obstacles to performance and remove them. Facilitate connection among employees and create psychological safety and room for failure. So one of the key things here is as a leader, are there any obstacles, someone who’s facing on your team that you can remove? Again, maybe it is the red tape. Maybe it’s just a funky process that needs to be evolved. What are the things that you can do to essentially make it easier for people to go about and be as successful as they can be? Or how can you make sure that you’re facilitating connection among your employees, helping them learn from each other? One of my favorite quotes is “every person you meet is your teacher and your student.” How can you create that mindset within your team? Where everyone says, Oh, I wonder what that department did or I wonder what he did. How can we learn from each other instead of just thinking that we have to do it alone? And we want to create psychological safety and room for failure, failure is inevitable, but we don’t have to live in failure. You just have to learn how to recover from failure faster than before. High-Level Agile So tools to make a more Agile team. These are just some high-level ways that you could potentially incorporate more Agile practices. Again, I’d recommend you to research more about Agile, think about Kanban. Because there are a tremendous amount of resources out there that can help you go and take this and implement one step further than what we’re covering today. As it’s very introductory. Daily Huddles So tools to make more Agile teams, daily huddles, maybe instead of your standing weekly eating where everyone just kind of jokes around and talks about the weekend, or doesn’t really, isn’t really productive if you give them their time back. And maybe you have a few 15 minute huddles every morning where you say, okay, this is what you’re gonna do. That’s what you’re doing. Here’s your brief status update. Alright, good, good to go. Have a great day. You’ve got this! In those brief meetings, it allows you as a leader to quickly uncover any type of challenges or obstacles so you can remove them. And it just allows everyone to again, get visibility into what everyone else is doing. But the key here is that they’re short and succinct. You can not call it a daily huddle. If it’s just ends up an hour long meeting. These are meant to be very quick interview or very quick information exchanges for you to identify, to share, to learn and grow. So not something that’s long. Also focus on recognition, make sure that people understand how, what they do is connected to the big picture and why you need them. You need to recognize that. And whether that’s in a meeting or whether that’s in an email or whether that’s what the gift, you need to tell people why they matter. Because to truly be Agile, you need competent people that feel that they’re independent, that they can contribute, that you trust them. And recognition is one of the ways that you can build that. Diverse Hiring Practices Also, if you want a more Agile team considered looking at your hiring practices, are you looking for different personalities that could compliment the team, our personalities, even part of what you’re looking at, what skills do you need to be able to move forward in the future? Are those represented on your current team? So being intentional about your hiring, making sure that you have the right fit. If you talk about a practice like Scrum, where you really are working independently with groups of people, you need them to all figure out how to work together. So that’s where it’s so much more important to be able to understand the styles of people. Kanban Boards Embrace Kanban boards, thinking about Kanban boards. What are you trying to accomplish? There are plenty of digital resources or Kanban boards out there. You could put that on a big whiteboard in your office or big white piece of paper and use post-its to move them through the columns. You could just go on and download an app. Also using progress dashboards. That’s a project management tool, but progress dashboards are essentially little cues where you can see, okay, are we at 40% complete 50%, 60%? When we have those type of visual cues, it can a help people understand how we’re performing. So you as a leader can see that. But B if you’re thinking about, or if you have a process that’s dependent on one person’s work before the next can begin. When you have those progress dashboards, it allows people to anticipate that and manage their time better. I don’t know. Of course there’s digital time tracking tools because in Agile, a big piece of that is understanding where does our time go? Is our time spent on our phones is our time spent wasted in meetings is our time spent trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do. We want to figure out how we’re using our time so we can either remove those bottlenecks or those inefficiencies, the things that aren’t as productive. So you could use apps such as ours or timely or top tracker. And there’s also a project management tool called or called Trello or Asana. Now those are great resources for teams. If you haven’t used a sauna that allows you to have kind of a team view, a global view of what everyone is doing, Oh, this is what Amy is going to be doing. And then Christian’s going to be doing this. It’s just a snapshot that allows us to see that. And it’s a bonus. If you’re thinking about newer employees, as they’re trying to get acclimated into your team, one of these tools is a great way for them to get insight into how your team functions. Other Resources Now, there are many things that you could look at another resource that I’ve really been actively listening to is a podcast called Agile for Humans. And I think that this host does a great job of talking about how we can incorporate Agile into leadership. So it’s something that I would definitely recommend that you checking out, but there are plenty of Agile podcasts out there. The whole goal is to keep learning. Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. Don’t Give Up! I thank you so much for joining this webinar. And I hope that you left this today, knowing that if you’re stuck in a problem, it doesn’t mean to give up. It just means what’s another way to look at it. How can you be more Agile? Agile requires resilient leaders. Giving up is the opposite of resiliency. We’ve got to try one more time. We’ve got to look at it in a different way. I hope that by attending this webinar today, you’ve gained some tools, insights, or just some new ways of thinking about how you can help your team and yourself be more productive and more Agile. More Info Now, if you enjoyed today’s webinars, please stay connected with us at Crestcom next month’s webinar. Topic is Emotional Intelligence. We would love to have you there also connect with us, subscribe to the leadership habit podcast. There we interview a variety of subject matter experts and thought leaders all around the topic of leadership. And of course, if you are interested, please reach out to us. We would love to come into your organization and offer a leadership workshop. It’s a two-hour leadership workshop and we cover things like communication, how to maintain our customers. We’re actually looking at some Agile practices. So if you’re interested in that, follow up with us, crestcom.com. We definitely want to offer that to you. I’m Jenn dwell, and I am so happy to have you here today. And I hope that you gained something valuable. Thank you for investing in yourself today. And I hope to see you in November for our Emotional Intelligence webinar. Thank you. Bye! Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today’s webinar all about Agile leadership, and I hope that you’ve taken something from it that you can use right away to bring back to your team, to help make you more efficient and more productive. If you like this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, feel free to share it with your friends or leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service.   The post Episode 42: Crestcom Webinar- How to Apply Agile Principles to Any Organization appeared first on Crestcom International.

Lean Out with Bestselling Author and Leadership Speaker, Marissa Orr In this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, Jenn DeWall talks to Marissa Orr, a former Google and Facebook executive, bestselling author, and leadership speaker. Spending 15 years working at today’s top tech giants, she’s conducted talks to thousands of people in the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific at companies and universities such as Google, Twitter, Pace University, New School, American Express, and more. In this exciting episode, they discuss Marissa’s book, Lean Out: The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace. Full Transcript Below Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. In this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit, I am so excited to be talking to former Google and Facebook Exec, leadership thought leader, author, podcast host, Marissa Orr. Marissa, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Marissa Orr: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to chat. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Well, first of all, let’s just go ahead and do that introduction. I know some people obviously heard a little bit about you from our intro, but they want to hear it from you. Tell us a little bit about yourself, maybe what you do and what you would want to share with the world, or I guess what inspires you? Meet Marissa Orr Marissa Orr: Well, I was born on a warm summer day now. No, just kidding! So I am, I worked in the corporate world for 15 years, and people are sometimes surprised to hear me refer to Google and Facebook as corporate because they do kind of have this very progressive, like new wave image of companies. But they were very corporate, especially Google toward the end. So I worked there for about 15 years, and then in 2017, after leaving Facebook under extremely strange circumstances, which I detail in the book, I decided to start a whole new career and devote all my time to pursuing my dream of helping women and speaking and writing full time. So I now do that. I live in New Jersey with my three children. I’m a single mom. My older son is about 12, and my twins are 10. And I’m originally from Miami, Florida, which right now my background is very academic looking on purpose so that people take me seriously. You know, it’s lined with Finch trees, but right now, I am on a little bit of a beach vacation. So it’s reminding me of home. I am on the beaches of Delaware. So yeah. Good stuff. Jenn DeWall: That sounds so lovely for those that may not know you wrote the book Lean Out. I have really loved the book. It’s something that I feel like really spoke very much to me and some of my philosophies, but what inspired you to write that book? What Inspired the Book, Lean Out? Marissa Orr: A few things. One, I’ve always been very passionate about the topic of gender and women women’s issues. And so back in 2013 or 2014, around the time Lean In came out, by Sheryl Sandberg, it really ushered in the space of programs, workshops, and leadership initiatives at Google that were really aimed at helping their female employees succeed. So one thing that book really deserves credit for is bringing this conversation really to the forefront of so many companies and having so many resources devoted to women and its and its weight. So that happens at Google, and I, of course, attended everything because I was super interested and passionate about this topic. But after a while, I became really kind of disenchanted, I guess, is the word because the conversations never resonated with me. I couldn’t identify with the female leaders they chose to talk to us on stage. I just didn’t connect with them. I felt like the challenges of being a working mom, there wasn’t a lot of honesty in the conversation, and the advice wasn’t really practical. And I just felt like we were getting something wrong. And so, I started to write my own perspective on the topic to deliver as a presentation, which eventually grew, and it served as the basis of Lean Out. But I wrote this book to make women like me feel heard and understood because I never heard anyone talk about my specific challenges or my journey. And I felt like something was maybe wrong with me. And after a while, I realized there was nothing wrong with me, but there are no voices like me talking about, you know, the things that I care about or are concerning for me. So I wrote this to make other women feel heard and understood by giving those stories and challenges of voice. The other, the other reason I wrote it, I really wrote it. I wrote the book I needed to read when I was starting out in my career because I spent the first ten years of my career really not understanding what game I was playing. I thought it was one thing, and it wasn’t, and it took ten years for me to really understand what that game was. And I wish I had known that when I started, I would have played it very differently. Not because I felt like I would have played it better and gotten to the top. I would have taken it for what it was and not have invested so much of my self-worth into my work, knowing that, you know, it’s just, I always felt like around a square peg in a round hole. And so I didn’t know why. And I think this book really is sort of like my Mea Culpa, understanding the world that I was operating in. And like I said, it was the book I needed to read starting out. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I feel like it’s the book that I also needed to read when I started out. I think, you know, when you’re an early leader, I don’t think college prepares you to consider things like emotional intelligence. You might know what it is from a textbook, but you don’t really know what it is as it relates to politics or you’re your own executive presence or when you can speak or not speak as a really, as you know, in relation to that culture. And I think why your book resonated so much with me is that my first job out of college was a position at a huge corporation. And I would say it offer it operated. I mean, it was a huge company like the corporate culture, but if you went against the grain, if you didn’t fit their mold, then you were kind of deemed an outcast. And it felt like the worst feeling, especially for being such an ambitious person and wanting to do these things. But I, I felt like, I mean, if I gave you an example from mine and I know our listeners have heard this before, but I got feedback that I needed to be more of a yes, man. That’s, you know, Marissa Orr: That’s actually surprising that they were so honest with you about that because a lot of times, no, I’m serious. Because a lot of times people get dinged for that, but it’s not said as honestly, is that because, you know, you’ve got to fall in line, that’s the structure of the organization. The Confidence Gap Myth Jenn DeWall: But it’s, we know we know today there just aren’t enough voices, I think. And I think we’re seeing more like more voices come in and talk about this different perspective, this different way to really create an inclusive culture. But I still think we, you know, we kind of just tend to go with the flow like, Oh, this is what it’s supposed to look like. So I’m just going to follow these rules instead of saying, should we look at changing the rules? So we’re going to be talking about a few different chapters from your book, lean out, and you know, you hit the first one, and this is what we’re going into. We’re talking about chapter three and The Confidence Gap, which you even touched on it briefly how we attach our self-worth based on the title that we have, the organization, and the prestige of that organization that we work for. But let’s talk a little bit about the confidence gap because this is something that even on our show, The Leadership Habit, we don’t necessarily always bring it back to self-worth, even though it’s incredibly essential to how you’re going to lead your organization, your team and yourself. Marissa Orr: Yeah. So this, the chapter you’re talking about really debunks the myth that men get ahead at work because they have more confidence than women. And I feel like the conversation is changing because I feel like saying that today is actually a little more provocative than it used to be. Even it was kind of accepted, you know, following Lean In, and that the conventional wisdom of the day about men having more confidence in women, wasn’t seen as something provocative to say, but now maybe that’s changing. But anyway, I really debunked the myth in that chapter by explaining, like starting with, what is confidence really, right? Because when we, a lot of these, right, these authors or speakers or executives that make that claim, because a lot of researchers do as well. And they make the claim that men have more confidence. They really aren’t defining confidence very clearly. And it actually seems that their version of confidence is the ability to think- you really think that you’re great. So they refer to research that showed that men and women were given a test on scientific reasoning. And before the test, they were each asked, what do you think you, how many do you think you’re going to get? Right. And the women let’s say, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but you’ll get the gist of what I’m trying to say. Let’s say women said, I think I’ll get six. Right. And men said, Oh, I think I’ll get eight. Right. And it turned out that they, you know, an average, all got seven right. Or something. And they use that as evidence to say that women are less confident and that we should be more confident in ourselves. But actually, that’s not what confidence is at all. First of all, they use research that focuses on these really specific themes, like scientific reasoning. Right? Well, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I would put myself worse on scientific reasoning. Changed the topic, and I more quote-unquote confidence, but that’s a whole other issue. Really. But the point really I was making is that the definition of confidence is really having a realistic assessment of yourself. It doesn’t mean it should be overinflated and it shouldn’t, it doesn’t mean it should be lower than what you actually are. It’s an honest relationship to reality and an honest relationship with your strengths and weaknesses. In other words, it’s a lot about self-awareness. And when we’re aware of what we’re good at and what we’re bad at, and we can own our strengths and own our weaknesses without having this insecurity to try and, you know, make up for them, that’s really rock hard, solid confidence. And when we say men have more, what we’re really mistaking is the arrogance and bravado for confidence. So that is not something I think that we should be holding up as a value in society is overconfidence. And it’s confusing because overconfidence and confidence are not exact. If the wording is, it is really confusing, but overconfidence is this tendency to be blind to reality. Think that you’re amazing and the best. And when you have that sort of attitude, you’re the person that’s always talking in meetings. You have to talk over everybody else. It’s, it’s bluster, it’s bravado. And it actually stems from insecurity in the same way that somebody who’s overly timid and doesn’t own all the great things about them. And always trying to cut themselves down to make others look, you know, that’s also a result of insecurity. So bravado and sort of this inferiority, they both stem from insecurity. They just manifest these different behaviors. True confidence is really owning who you are, and that’s really the definition. And as far as I know, I did so much research. There are no studies. There is no research that using that definition shows that men are in any way more confident than women. The problem is in the corporate world. We reward bravado. We reward arrogance, we reward these behaviors and then call them confidence when that’s not at all what they are. Is it Confidence or Bravado? Jenn DeWall: Gosh, I think it sounds like almost the reliance on the notion that perception is reality. If you look like you are the part, wearing the nice attire, or you drive in, you drive the fancy car, or you have XYZ, that you have what it takes. Marissa Orr: It’s an image. It’s image and perception. And look, that’s the way that world works. I’m not taking a sort of a moral position on it. What I’m saying is let’s just all be honest about what that world requires of people in order to advance, instead of pretending that, you know, it’s a meritocracy where, you know, the best employees, the highest performers are the ones that get promoted and that this world works in any sort of rational way or that what should happen does happen. It doesn’t. It’s you know, and again, I’m very passionate about this. I can go on forever. So I’m not taking, I just want to make the point not saying, Oh, from a moral standpoint, it’s wrong that, you know, that bravado is rewarded. I’m just pointing out that we’re not honest about that. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And that we need to also look at ourselves instead of maybe comparing ourselves to that bravado and using that as an aspirational goal, that we’re looking at ourselves, what value can I bring to this? Marissa Orr: Right. And my problem was always that we take these traits like bluster and hold it up as a benchmark and say, well, when you act like this, you get promoted. Well, it doesn’t mean that we should act that way. And everybody has to make that decision for themselves, of course. But you know, the benchmarks were just, they made no sense to me. We were holding up like certain qualities and values that I don’t know. They, they were just never me. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Well, and I think that it’s actually not a lot of people. I think we never felt like we could actually share that though because if I speak from my own experience, it was always kind of, I think the comfort that I got in terms of being a young person in the corporate culture is that using that did help me, you know, determine my roadmap, but help me determine my career trajectory. It was, you know, that was the aspirational goal. But the thing is there’s so much going into that, that it’s not really attainable because so much of it is rooted in, in that perception versus it’s not, you know, whether or not you’re adding value, it’s kind of the pomp and circumstance of it. Marissa Orr: Yeah. And if that, if that appeals to someone, like more power to you, you know, I just was thinking that it was the game was something it wasn’t. And had I known that that’s what gets rewarded and that’s what makes you a manager. Maybe I would have played the game differently. So yeah, Jenn DeWall: But we have to note for like our leaders here. It’s got to start with you, you seeing your value, you understanding how or what you bring to the table. And also the areas that you can ask for support. So, you know, I think in that same type of culture, you then feel like you have to do it all and you can’t do that either. And that just further creates a gap in your own confidence. Marissa Orr: Exactly. Lean Out – the Power Reward Jenn DeWall: So in chapter seven, you know, you’re talking about in Lean Out you’re talking about The Power Reward, and its kind of based on the notion that we want to get promoted, or we have these aspirational goals because we’re seeking positions of power. And tell me more about that. Like where, what inspired you to say that and kind of debunk that notion that that’s what everyone wants. Marissa Orr: Yeah. So it started, I start that chapter with this story about a personality test that I did in an offsite at Google. And we all were given like one of four colors to represent one of the four major personality types. And I was a Green, which meant that I have a strong drive for harmony. I prioritize, I have a strong drive to help people. I strive for harmony, and I prioritize my relationships. And the opposite of green, by the way, because it was like a very hippie one. They called it Forest Green, and then the opposite was red. They called it Fiery Red. Reds are competitive. They strive for power and control, and they prioritized results over Greens like me, who prioritize relationships. And then when they asked us to get in groups by color, this question, I just blurted out loud. It’s really. It was ended up being a tremendous insight for me on this journey to understand what’s going on at work. I asked, “what are the colors of our senior executive team?” And the HR person running exercise she didn’t want to answer it, but then everyone’s so curious, and it turned out nine out of 10 were obviously, but do you think Red or green? Jenn DeWall: I mean, I’m a Green, so absolutely not a Green? Marissa Orr: Yeah. They were Red. So nine out of 10 were Reds, and then like the 10th was like a Yellow or something or whatever. And it was a tremendous insight for me at the time around motivation because you know, what is the reward at work? Well, every raise that you get incrementally becomes less satisfying because it’s a smaller percentage of your base. So a 25K raise when you’re making 50K years life-changing. Right? But if you’re making 250K, it’s hard for money to be like the thing that’s pushing you to work harder and harder. And so many people in the corporate world are very comfortable. They don’t need more money. So like what, what motivates people to want to get to the top? Keep climbing, pushing every day to work harder. Well, what comes with the promotion? Money and power, more power over more people in the form of being a manager, right? Now, if you’re a Green like me, having formal authority over people like that is not only unsatisfying. It can be uncomfortable because authority and relationships are in tension with each other, and everybody’s more motivated by one or the other. So the example I always use is let’s say you’re on a team with two of your best friends and you’ve been on this team together for years, and then suddenly you’re promoted to be their manager. And let’s say you like to flex that position of authority. You know, you’re like, I’m the boss lady now, blah, blah, blah. What happens to your relationships? They suffer. Right? But what happens if you act like nothing’s changed, you’re still their best buddy. You know, you’re talking crap about your coworkers with them. Not that I would ever do that, but I’m just, you know, saying. Well, what happens in that case? Your authority is undermined. And that’s what I mean by relationships and authority are in tension with each other. And everyone’s more motivated by one than the other. Now the issue I’d begin confronting in my career at Google at the time was I was an individual contributor by choice. And in order to get promoted to the next level, I had to start managing people. And I, I didn’t, I just didn’t want to be a manager. I really didn’t. But I was, I didn’t want to be honest about that with my manager, because I knew it would be seen as like, Marissa lacks ambition. Or, you know, I wouldn’t be taken as seriously. But through the lens of color, suddenly, I totally understood this in a brand new way, which was, I mean, I’m just simply not motivated by positions of authority. I’m more motivated by creating connections, relationships. Like I always want it to be a coach or a mentor, but never an official manager. So I was pretty naive. I brought these new insights, my manager thinking, Oh, she’ll totally like understand that this is an issue with Google, not me. Like they should. I mean, everybody likes different things. This is something we learned in kindergarten, and we teach our kids so naturally, she will understand that. And not, you know, that management will be more of a punishment than a reward, and I’ll get exempted from this policy. That was my thought. And she was great about it. But she said that despite having heard all these arguments before, our VP was adamant about the fact that you needed to manage people to grow your career. Now, when that happened, I was really dumbfounded. I was like, why wouldn’t they want to keep their best performers and keep them happy, being motivated by giving them something they actually want. And so something they don’t want. But with time and experience, I really started to understand and learn, but no business book ever told me. And that is what I saw as a simple difference in personality. Other people saw it as a weakness, and it was a huge insight. It just never occurred to me that that’s how that, that’s why the perception is what it is. It’s viewed as a weakness. And a lot of people will ask me, how did you not like know that it’s just, you know, better late than never just took me a while to understand how other people looked at these things. And you know, really kind of taught me that- and it was very obvious working in the corporate world that a certain kind of person is the person that advances to the top. It’s, it’s a really narrow profile of personality traits. You don’t see, you know, hippies as the corporate CEOs. There’s just- you just don’t, you don’t see it. But it doesn’t mean that I lacked ambition. And that was really the point I was making in the power reward, which is relationships are a huge form of power in this world. I mean I, and I go into this whole thing about Bonobos, which are female-dominated societies and their primates and they, their currency is relationships. Whereas, like apes, which are chimpanzees, which are male-dominated, their currency is brute strength. So my point is both are a form of power. And if you’re more motivated by relationships, that doesn’t mean that you can have any less of an impact in this world. It just manifests differently. And I think a lot of women- this framework helped a lot of women understand themselves better. And at least that’s what the, you know, the messages I get. So hopefully, that was a long-winded explanation, but it’s worth giving the details to really fully understand what I’m talking about. Differences not Weaknesses Jenn DeWall: Yeah, no, I think that this is such an important thing. That’s a topic that’s not talked about very often because it is so accepted to say your natural career trajectory should include leading a team. And then you have organizations that say, this is the expectation for that but in the air and the era today where I think many companies are really facing that talent scarcity where they can’t get the right people, why risk losing them by forcing something that’s not in alignment with their values or their personality or their aspirations? And they can still have that. But I think you’re bringing up a really strong conversation that actually needs to happen in many organizations because they’re in some way, by having that expectation that people need to do that. They’re then not respecting the art of leadership. That actually is a really difficult skill set that not everyone is very communicative or empathetic or meant to be a great leader, but they could be lovely, like an individual contributor. Marissa Orr: Yeah. Well, there’s a difference between leader and manager too. And I think we’ve conflated those terms to the point where, I mean, we use them synonymously, but they’re not the winners of the corporate game are the ones who play that game best, doesn’t mean that they’re leaders in the way that we think of like a Martin Luther King as a leader, right? He, he didn’t have anyone. He wasn’t a leader because everybody followed him because they worked for him, right. They chose to follow him because he painted a vision that they felt passionate about following. And that is hardly the job of a manager these days. So I think that it’s important to make that distinction or that millions of managers, but few of them are true leaders, right? Jenn DeWall: And we need to acknowledge that and start making that, you know, really owning that differentiation and training people appropriately with respect to that differentiation. Let’s go into chapter eight. It’s the System, Stupid. I love that name! I love your book because it’s just, so the language that you use and how you describe these concepts really are- I know we talked about this- that I feel like you could be my best friend. I do align with the corporate rebel or wanting to see things be different and wanting to kind of push the status quo. So let’s talk about It’s the System, Stupid. We’ll be best friends after this. Lean Out or Lean In? Marissa Orr: The best friend’s necklace is in the mail. It’s on its way. Yeah. I tried to maintain a lot of irreverence and not take myself too seriously with this book. So I do tell a lot of stories that they’re just real and people relate to them. And I think that’s why it was easier to get a bit of a more provocative message across because it’s just imminently relatable. So, It’s the System Stupid. So that was my explanation for that chapter title. So at the end of the day, the real difference, well, there’s so many differences, but one core difference between Lean In and Lean Out. And that perspective is Lean In really blames stereotypes and culture for the lack of women at the top of corporate America. And it, you know, it’s sort of, it’s built on this premise that women are oppressed by culture and stereotypes. And if we weren’t, we would be at the top as well. Whereas in Lean Out, the perspective is really that this is not a women problem. It’s not a female problem. It’s a systems problem. Like women are not broken. The system is broken. And what I mean by that is- so I’ll give you an example. Compared research shows that women prefer and perform better in collaborative work environments. Whereas men prefer and perform better in zero-sum competitive work environments and work is a zero-sum game by its nature. Its that triangle, the corporate hierarchy. He wins a promotion. I win a promotion. At Google and Facebook, we were ranked relative to each other. You’re either you have to be either better or worse than your coworker. You can’t be equally great or equally terrible. And so really a lot of it was just this cutthroat competition. And the reason we use this structure is not that it’s inherently better than anything else. It was designed a few hundred years ago by a man in the industrial age. And if you’re Rockefeller or whoever, you know, the history of that piece is not as familiar to me. But if you’re a Titan of that era and you’re trying to design an organization, and this was really the first time in this country, we had to organize hundreds and hundreds of workers around these business goals and production. Naturally, if your view is that you like competition, you’re going to set it up as a competition, thinking that that’s the way to get the best performers to rise to the top, but it’s been a few hundred years. And since then, the entire fabric of our economy has transformed. We’re not a production economy anymore. And the composition of the workforce is completely different. You know, it’s half women at the entry-level. And yet these systems are the only things that have remained exactly the same. Not one thing has changed, even though everything around it has. And so what makes more sense like rewiring women’s personalities to conform to this outdated system or rewiring the system to better meet their needs? So that’s really what I mean by, Oh, it’s the, you know, the system stupid. I follow up, and I go into a whole chapter and all the changes that would be necessary at work to make it a more level playing field for everybody. But I think at the end of the day, all we really want is a feeling of control over our careers and our happiness and our satisfaction. And I don’t think you need to wait for huge power structures to change in order to do that. You can either change the rules of the game, or you can change how you play it. And changing how you play is all about defining success on your own terms, like being honest with who you are, what you want, and owning it. And, you know, that’s eventually how I came to terms with that environment, which is yeah, getting a manager feel good at the moment because that’s what my peers are doing. That’s what I’m supposed to want, but if I’m going to be unhappy, you know— so in the book, I suggest orienting around wellbeing instead of winning. And that really, it lets people account for their own individuality when they’re designing sort of the, their, their life and how their career fits in. Because honestly, for so long, 15 years, I was working for things I didn’t necessarily want. I was just following a script of what I was supposed to want. And that’s really what I mean by, you know, taking a step back and making sure, you know, you’re the author of your own story. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I think it gets it’s easy. And again, I think a lot of this I felt trapped in earlier in my career, but still even right now, because the comparison is, is real. You look at what your peers are doing, or maybe that person that you’re kind of competing with because you want to get that next role. And you can get really caught up in goals that aren’t your goals like that becomes shoulds. I know early on in my career, I had, you know, my first few promotions, the next one, I didn’t necessarily want to do it all. But I felt like, well, that’s the only way that you’re going to get ahead. That’s the skill or role that you need to have, even though it’s not where I brought the most value, but again, it was the most expected one. Well, you have to do this to get to the role of this. Right. Okay. Jenn DeWall: Well, that does it have to be that way? Like why do you think we’re so cemented in, and some of these systems are in some of these ways of doing things like it’s, it’s so interesting to bring it back to just the industrial revolution and that era and knowing that today, even though the landscape is dramatically different, that we still have not altered things like what the heck we have changed, like the type of shoes that we wear, the cars that we drive, everything, but yet we just were ignoring this one. Changing Perspective on Navigating Careers Marissa Orr: Yeah. Well, I think that’s human nature, really. People get comfortable in a certain way, and momentum builds and just keeps going in that direction. And then, you know, inertia sets in, and I think it’s hard to step out and see the bigger picture to be fair. So, for example, a friend of mine read my book, and she was dealing with this issue in her company. Now she’s the owner of the company where this woman wanted to promote her, but it was a similar situation. She didn’t want to like to manage the whole team. So they were going to give it to this other guy, but they were concerned that he would undermine her. And she said to me after, so she had been struggling with this challenge, and she didn’t know what to do about it. And then after reading my book, like she had this insight like, Oh, I’ll just give her a raise commensurate with that position. And I’ll make them partners in decision making, give them 50/50 weight. And if there’s an issue, you know, she’ll step in, but he’ll do the day-to-day management team. And what she said to me was like, it was so weird. It didn’t even occur to her that she could think outside that structure in that box. And I think that’s a big part of it is, you know, another friend of mine, when I was explaining to her the premise, while I was writing the book, she’s like, well, then what would happen? It would be anarchy. Like you need people. And I was just like, it was, I was like, Whoa, no one saying you don’t need people. I think change- one, and we’re sometimes so stuck in our own perspective, we don’t see other ways out. And two, you know, people can’t see what you see from the bigger picture. It’s scary. They think it’s a threat. And so I think those forces combined, and we just remained stagnant, which is why its a mistake to wait for everything to change in order to be happy. You’ve got to just figure out, you know, right now today, how you can navigate in a way to make yourself happy. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. So call to action would be for the individual, figure out how you can be that author of your own story or what makes you happy. And maybe a call to action to the leader is to challenge these systems, figure out if they are helping or hurting you know that the origin may not actually be relevant anymore, or even prove a valuable case to actually keep these systems in place. Marissa Orr: Or just know what your employees are really motivated by and try and give that to them instead of relying on, you know, what the system spits out as the reward. Sometimes people just want recognition, and it doesn’t have to be this like, you know, and sometimes people do want the big title, to be the big manager, great. Like that should be available too, if that’s what you want. But right now, that’s all we have. So expanding the scope of rewards and, and you know, how you motivate and acknowledge your team can make a big difference. Jenn DeWall: I know. I really appreciate you just going into Lean Out. And for those that are just even curious, you know, go out there like you, you have a great way of looking at how we can maybe assess and analyze our work culture, our role as leaders, how we look at our own aspirations and goals. But one of the things that we had talked about offline to bring in because we don’t often talk about this. You made the shift from the glamorous corporate world, right? Of Google and Facebook. And we know because if you aren’t at those companies, those are oftentimes the companies that you would aspire to work for. So then how do you make that? Or let’s talk a little bit about that transition from working for the big corporate organizations to then rolling into the land of entrepreneurship, which is definitely something that is, you know, shiny object, but it comes with its own host of challenges. Going from Facebook to Entrepreneurship Marissa Orr: Yeah. The grass is always greener for sure. So the best way I’ve ever heard this play, I wish I remember where I heard it, but it just captures the journey from, you know, being in that world to starting your own thing. When you do that, you trade depression for anxiety. The best, most concise way that fully captures what this journey has been like for me. Because in that world, you know, I was safe. I was secure. I had a paycheck every two weeks. I had a really nice life, like as a single mom of three kids. Like I made a great salary and life for my kids and me. And I live in a great school district, you know, no matter how bad my workday was, that paycheck was there every two weeks, I had benefits all like I worked at Google and Facebook. I had the prestige, the massage appointments available, the food, like everything you could possibly want. And I have to say— I really did enjoy Google. I, you know, I grew up there, some of my best friends in the world or from the time, you know, that I work there and there’s a lot I missed about it, but there was this something inside of me looking for something more. And I knew I had all this potential and talent in me that could not be expressed in that world. I was limited. And I think when I went to Facebook, part of me was searching for, you know, maybe a smaller company. I can make a bigger impact. Because I just understood, there was a part of me that needed to be expressed that wasn’t, and then it’s Facebook. It was like, ha-ha, the jokes on you. You think this was the place for you while like we have a hole and I go into this story again in the book, but it really was a terrible experience at Facebook and forced me to come to terms with, you know, I was in a dark place, and I was like, you know, who am I, what do I want? You know, I thought this would be the fix for those empty or void feelings that I had at Google, but it actually made them worse. So what is it? What am I really looking for? And it really had to go through how, in order to make the commitment to change direction and take a huge risk by going and pursuing my dream, which was to write a book and speak full time to women. And the summer I was still working at Facebook in 2017 is when I really decided I made that commitment. And I wrote the book proposal that summer, while I was still working at Facebook, wake up like godly hours in the morning to work on it. And then, when I left Facebook, I had already almost finished the book proposal. So I had proven to myself that I was taking this seriously, and I ended up, you know, pursuing it. And here I am three years later, almost exactly doing it right. I have the book published. I’ve been speaking full time now, and it’s extremely rewarding. It’s also extremely, extremely difficult to really, it’s very risky. I’m not a financial risk-taker. And I really put my life savings on the line to say, okay, I have like a year and a half to make a buck. Like that’s the runway, I had. I’m very fortunate. So I’ve had that, but you really, like, it’s not easy to just completely blow your life savings when you have three kids. And so it was a big risk, and it comes with tremendous anxiety, total uncertainty. You kind of question yourself all the time. Am I crazy? And I feel like I’m really on the other end of that sort of period that, you know, the, I was going to call it the dark nights. No, that’s a movie. I mean, like the terms that come to me like a dark night of the soul, maybe I thought it was, but it’s not easy. It’s been really tough. I wouldn’t trade it for the world because I learned, talk about confidence when you do something like this, and you sort of survive, and you get through it, that’s confidence because you start to trust yourself more. So that’s something no one can ever take away from me is, you know, this thing that I pulled off by myself on my own, of course, I’d help from people like, you know, that supported me. Not financially, unfortunately, but like, you know, in general, my friends or whatever. But when you do something like that, that confidence just is joy, and it can’t be taken away by anyone. So it’s worth it. And I still feel like I’m at the beginning of the journey, I’m at the base of I’m at the summit, getting all my terms confused, like the bottom of the mountain, what do you call it? Jenn DeWall: The base. Work On Your Plan Before You Jump Careers Marissa Orr: The summit, the base, whatever.  I’m still at base camp. I know that I can use it, so I have a lot more to climb. But it’s definitely, you know, there are days I miss so much about Google, and I know there were days at Google. I would be sitting in meetings, like really feeling like I was wasting my life. And so there’s a trade-off. And as long as they’re willing to accept that trade-off. I always tell women that asked me, like, they’re thinking of doing that, you know, kind of transition from corporate to entrepreneur. My advice is always to first work on what you want to work on before you leave that world. Like, give yourself some space to try things. Just jumping ship is tough. And it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but I think sometimes we think of it as an all or nothing, and it doesn’t have to be. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I love that. You know, the grass is always greener, but really thinking that you can try to do whatever you want now today. You don’t have to just quit your job. And I mean, but, but that also doesn’t mean to stay at your job. You opened up talking about a lot of the reasons that people choose to stay in an organization because of the benefits package because of the salary, because of all of that security. Of course, that makes sense. But how long are you willing to put off being happy? Because there’s also, I’ve had a job where I have gotten great pay, but you know what? Then, I guess, the consequence that I had with that great pay comes down in terms of low confidence, not feeling good enough, not feeling like I’m valued or that I’m contributing, or allowing myself to kind of see myself through the lens of that culture, whether that culture was even worthy of that, of applying that. And they think, how do you even get the courage to jump? Because that’s, that’s one of the biggest ones. Marissa Orr: That’s kind of what I mean by don’t just have this idea and quit. Because I think having some sort of creative goal— because the underlying problem is we’re really relying on work to fulfill our need to be happy. And when our job sucks, we blame our job. But the truth is there are ways that you can take the initiative of fulfilling your own needs. That doesn’t rely on work because then you’re, you’re giving work too much power over your life. And it’s hard. Look, I’ve been there. Works made me miserable more times than I can count. But what I learned at Facebook was having that creative project, that book proposal, where I worked on it every morning. And look, I know it’s tough to find the time. I mean, again, I’m a single mom of three kids. I had an hour and a half commute each way. I was waking up at 4:30 in the morning, and it was tough. But at the same time, having that thing, I was creating increase my wellbeing and sense of security in ways I never would have expected. Because I go into work and the slights and the undermining, all the terrible things that were happening suddenly didn’t affect me anymore. Like I was like Teflon because I had this thing that I was making. And it was like I was taking control back. I was going to be the author of my own story. This wasn’t going to be how it ends for me. That’s a tremendous sense of power. It doesn’t have to be a book proposal. It could be any sort of project or goal that gives you a sense of control and ownership over your life. And I think if you’re thinking of leaving that world to start your own thing, what do I know? But my advice, because, based on my own experience, I just feel like it’s a caveat. Because it’s not, you know, you have to take everyone’s advice with a grain of salt, including mine. But working on that while you still have the safety security of a job, one it gave, at least for me, it made me take this pipe dream seriously. Cause if I would’ve just left and then started writing a book, I would have been too anxious. And I, and I don’t think I would’ve trusted myself, but showing myself that I was serious about it. Not only just improve my day to day wellbeing at work, but it gave me the confidence to then make the jump. So that’s my advice to really don’t think of it as an all or nothing right away, but to kind of dabble and create these projects in the direction that you want to go. And then once you get some momentum or you feel better, more confident that then you can leave, you know, it’s, it also helped me because I saved that money that I was sort of riding out Facebook as long as possible to, you know, use this money then to then start this other project. So there’s, I think a lot of benefits to both trying to do both at the same time, at least for the short term, What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: I think that’s a great closing perspective or call to action. Inspiration. If you will to, you know, take the reins to just try and let go. Maybe not jumping off the cliff, but like just slowly going and dipping your toe in where we close every single podcast with one final question, and I need to hear it from you. Where is the, what is your leadership habit for success? Marissa Orr: Oh gosh. I’m like, I’m thinking of my habits in general. I mean, I meditate every morning. Does that count? Jenn DeWall: Absolutely. How long do you meditate? Or, what benefits have you seen from meditation? Marissa Orr: Well, going through my experience at Facebook turned me into a straight-up Buddhist because I needed some ways to like manage my emotions, and I felt so out of control, I kind of was turning to different things I can do to get a hold of myself and be in control of my own emotions. And so meditation sort of kept coming up. So at first, I said, I was still working at Facebook, and I promised myself I would just five minutes a day, no matter where it can get it. And that was my first small goal. And there were times I would have to go into a bathroom stall and lock the door and do it for five minutes because I knew if I didn’t do it, then I wouldn’t have time the rest of the day. So once I was doing that, then all of a sudden, you know, it became more of a then when I started writing the book proposal, I made it more of like my morning routine. So it started with five minutes a day. Now I try and do 20 minutes a day, usually ends up being 15. And I also try and practice it like in the car, in line for the grocery store. So it’s, it’s kind of like I pepper it into the day, but I have pretty much a 15 minute dedicated time every morning. Jenn DeWall: I love that.  Again,  carving out time for yourself, figuring out what you need. I feel like even that habit brings our whole podcast to a close, just starting with us. How do we want to show up? What changes do we want to make? What type of leader do we want to be, but starting with meditation and kind of getting awareness around how we’re showing up in the world. Marissa, thank you so much for just coming on to the leadership habit podcast. I am so happy that I’ve got to interview you, so happy that I got to read your book. I look for the best friend’s necklace in the mail. Marissa Orr: Hey, Oh, one more thing, I want to just let viewers know that I started my own podcast. It’s called Nice Girls Don’t Watch the Bachelor, which again is kind of lighthearted in a Reverend and into the title. I’m actually a huge fan of the show. But it’s on app podcast, Spotify, wherever podcasts are. So people want to check that out. That’d be great. Well, thank you so much for having me. Jenn DeWall: Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast. Now, if you want to connect with Marissa Orr, you can go to MarissaOrr.com or follow her on Instagram, connect with her on LinkedIn, follow her on Twitter. Bonus- If you want to get more, she actually has a host of her very own podcast called nice girls. Don’t watch the bachelor, but you can find in your favorite podcast streaming services. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed today’s episode, go ahead and purchase Lean Out. Her book was an excellent read. I found a lot of value in it. You can find it on Amazon or wherever your books are sold but purchase Lean Out by Marissa Orr. And also, if you enjoyed this share with your friends, you sure to write us a review on your favorite podcast, streaming service. Thank you so much for listening until next time.   The post Episode 41: Lean Out with Bestselling Author and Leadership Speaker, Marissa Orr appeared first on Crestcom International.

Ethics in the Era of AI with Innovator and Author, Matthew James Bailey, In this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, Jenn DeWall talks to Matthew James Bailey about ethics and AI. The audio for this episode is taken from a recent Crestcom Webinar: Leadership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.  Matthew James Bailey is an internationally recognized pioneer of the internet of things or “IoT” for short, innovation, smart cities, and artificial intelligence. His upcoming book, Inventing World 3.0: Evolutionary Ethics for Artificial Intelligence, will be released on September 27th, and is available for pre-order now! His extraordinary leadership is widely acknowledged throughout governments and the private sector. You can also watch the video version of this conversation on Youtube! Full Transcript Below: Jenn DeWall: Good morning. Good morning. We are so happy to have you. I want to get started because I want to make sure that we’re maximizing our time with Matthew today. For those that don’t know, Matthew, I’m going to get into an introduction as we’re starting up today. This is our second artificial intelligence webinar. And the quote that we’re starting with is, “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart- and if you give them the right tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” (Steve Jobs) You know, a lot of things about AI comes down to ethics, thinking about how we are actually using them. The technology-yesterday, we talked about how you up-skill your workforce, which is essential. If you want to be in alignment with the direction that the business or the market is going, but also we need to make sure that we’re giving people or having the expectations that people operate with ethics. Now, today with Matthew, we’re going to be talking about a variety of things, starting with how he even got into the career where he is—but also thinking about how AI has changed the business model, how we need to think about ethics because that’s big. We talked a little bit about bias yesterday, and we’ve got to think about ethics and what we’re doing with that data. And I’m not even going to try and explain all the things we’re going to go into because that’s why we have Matthew. But for those that are unfamiliar, my name is Jenn DeWall. I’m a Leadership Development Strategist and a facilitator for Crestcom international. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or, as always, take my email and ask me questions. I’m happy to answer anything about Crestcom that you want to know. We are a global leadership development organization, and our goal is to make better leaders. We want to convert those managers into leaders, and that’s why we’re offering this webinar today. We want to help you become a better leader, and I’m happy to have Matthew with us. He just has a phenomenal background. Meet Matthew James Bailey And for those of you that are unfamiliar with Matthew James Bailey, who is going to be our beautiful spotlight for today, he is an internationally recognized pioneer in the internet of things, the IoT. Innovation, smart cities, and artificial intelligence, and his extraordinary leadership is widely acknowledged throughout governments and the private sector. Matthew advises G7 national and regional governments on innovation and technology strategies. And he’s been active in the private sector, advising fortune 500 mid-tier technology companies, not for profit. I mean, name an industry. He’s probably had a part in it, but I am so excited to have Matthew here so he can share his story. I want to remind you to use that Q&A! I’m going to be looking at my chatbox, so use the question and answers. We want to make sure that this is interactive. But without further ado, I’m going to stop sharing my screen so we can focus just on Matthew. Matthew, we’re going to start with the initial question. How did you find yourself where you are? What is your story? You’re involved in so many things— IoT— which for those of you that don’t know, is the internet of things. That’s something that I had to learn. That’s IoT, and it’s in my understanding, it’s, you know, our devices. It could be your watch, the things that connect to different pieces of technology, but Matthew has crossed over in a lot of the different aspects of technology. So Matthew, how did you get to where you are? Tell us about yourself and what you do Leading the IoT Revolution Matthew James Bailey: Good morning and good afternoon and good evening to the audience. It’s great to be here, Jenn. And thanks for inviting me on. My journey started about ten years ago when it became clear to me that- I started to ask the question, what’s my purpose? And what’s my mission here in the human experience? And what I recognized is that the challenges that we have in society, not only with the planet but also other aspects of inefficient systems, such as manufacturing or healthcare or transportation, you name it, that the digital world could make quite a difference. And, in fact, a transformational difference. So about ten years ago, I got involved in a group in Cambridge, a wonderful group. And we started to lead the IoT revolution, where we develop new standards that could make it cost-effective and energy effective to deploy billions of sensors. To understand what is happening in the physical world to get that data back into systems that could use that data and information to increase the efficiency of services, whether it’s manufacturing or whether it’s healthcare, transportation, buildings, our, excuse me, our partnership with a planet, making that more efficient and stewarding our resources more efficiently. Really it’s about understanding what is going on in the dynamics in the physical world and getting that data to be able to then pull to my tips. And that is the start of the, between humanity and the physical world. It’s a partnership between the two intelligence or if you like, organic and digital. After that, I realized that where do I need to create and help impact next? In cities where over 55% of the population live now, more is to be projected. Supporting Humanity with AI Matthew James Bailey: So how do I support humanity in its in one of the biggest places where increased automation and efficiency are really needed, and that is bringing equity into cities, it’s about making services more efficient. It’s about making the digital world to help the human experience, to be more enjoyable, to be more efficient, to be less stressful. And so it’s a platform and transformation, smart cities are where we use technology to increase the efficiency of services and to work with individuals and governments and businesses and various other stakeholders. So it all starts to work together in balance and harmony. And that’s why I moved on to smart cities. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve helped, co-found the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance, which is the US’ only statewide Alliance. We formed with the Denver South Economic Development Partnership and with other companies as well. So working with great leaders like Jake Mushavi, Mike Fitzgerald, Samantha, and others, I helped to launch an innovation center in smart cities here in Colorado to serve the states with our electronics. We also launched an AI smart city technology cluster with the US government NIST, NTIA, and DHS. And we’re currently raising money for that. I’ve had this vision that I knew when the IoT started, that I would eventually get into AI because data is the very DNA that trains AI, and we’ll get into ethics. We’ll get into some of the new models in the book and the purpose of the book in a minute. But I knew AI was coming in about ten years, and I knew I would go into this journey. AI is Shifting the Course of Humanity And, you know, on that journey, I’ve spent time with Stephen Hawking. Sat down with David Attenborough, whom everybody knows is a great fan of the environment. People like John Milton, who invented environmentalism, and being on stage with people like Steve Wozniak talking about innovation and the future of society. And I’ve sat down with some of the most powerful leaders in the world, advising them on their AI strategy. It’s about how we bring AI as a centerpiece into the human story, another kind of intelligence. It’s working with the individual in the advancement of their humanity. It’s about not only making our businesses more efficient, but it’s also helping us to create machine-centric systems to move beyond the current inefficiencies we have at the moment. Actually moving beyond COVID-19 into what I call pandemic resilience societies, and to give the answers to this. The book came around, was I just finished doing my work in smart cities, all that’s still ongoing. And I had this vision for the book, and about three or four days later, I was rushed to the hospital, and I came back from death. And the reason why I chose to come back is that my mission here hadn’t finished. And I really wanted to bring this new intelligence into a central role for the human destiny, but change the conversation around it. So it’s about democratizing artificial intelligence so that innovators, businesses, the government can be empowered on how to innovate their partnership with artificial intelligence in an evolutionary and ethical fashion. So that it’s not- so our world is no longer controlled by big business anymore. It’s about bringing innovation to the people. And we can go into the book because the book is 300 pages of A4 and 450 pages of A3. And it contains a rewrite for humanity and a rewrite for artificial intelligence, with models that will literally shift the course of humanity. So I’m excited about that, and we can go into more detail as we have our conversation. Inventing World 3.0 Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And we didn’t even get to introduce it, but Matthew’s book is Inventing World 3.0: Evolutionary Ethics for Artificial Intelligence. What are the messages within that book that you think are really important for people to know? Matthew James Bailey: So the book contains a lot. It’s like five books in one. And the important messages. So there’s guidance around AI data ethics. So there’s a brand new model. That’s 32 dimensions for AI data ethics that will empower businesses to lead their ethical conversation with data. And the book also contains methods at the heart of evolution, new models. So actually build intelligence that works in line with the culture of the individual. That’s personalized. Let’s talk about personalized AI and how to build that. I speak about AI in business and how business can actually build their own partnership with AI that aligns with their culture and the vision and how it can become an enabling ally. And then also for nations how you know, how can artificial intelligence support the individual culture, but also the cultures within society that we don’t want to suppress culture. We want AI to support the advancement of culture if they so will. And so basically, the book is about how do I— as either a business leader or a person or innovator or a government— build my future in partnership with artificial intelligence where I have absolute clarity on how to build the right digital mindset for AI? So I explain how this new form of AI it’s literally going to change the AI and AI ethics of how it can be used to address the cop, the privacy climate agreement in one fell swoop. I give models on how to create environmental AI. I talk about how do we use AI in democracies? And I talk about democratic AI. And so really bringing this intelligence right-center to the human story so that we can move from these human machine-centric systems into an inclusive and equitable future with artificial intelligence, supporting our human story. The Evolution of Ethics in AI Jenn DeWall: It’s a better environment for all, a better environment for a government to operate, for a city to be able to provide and support its citizens. In the book, you talk about three world realities as it relates to AI and ethics. What are those three world realities? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, that’s a great question. So what I do is, I look at- I go into detail about World 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. We’re in world 1.0 at the moment. And I look at world conditions that are dictating and controlling that world 1.0. I talk about an awakened mindset, an evolutionary mindset, you know, Amit Ray, one of the amazing AI guys, spoke about the more, the more that AI comes into society, the more emotional intelligence we need and our leadership and he’s right. So world 1.0 Is really about what are we doing today? What did the human-machine center, the human machine-centric system look like? What are our limitations, and how do we break free from the world one point North and move into a transitional world where we’re changing some of the world conditions around AI, the democratization of innovation, AI, data, ethics, and others. And start to put the innovation into the hands of the innovators, into the hands of the business, into the hands of the government to begin to build an AI, an evolutionary AI that starts to move us from human-machine human-centric systems into machine-centric systems. And I talk about the challenges and the threats that world reality. And then when we move into world 3.0, now we’ve got a fully awakened mindset, and the world conditions around data, data governance, ethics, AI changed completely. We can then start looking at the real benefits of creating a symbiotic partnership with our planet. And where AI is coming front and center, supporting the evolution and the advancement and the nurturing and the well-being of the individual. And also doing the same for businesses and also for governments as well. So world 3.0 is the destiny of when we build an evolutionary AI to support the advancement of the individual, the advancement of communities, the advancement of community cultures, and the advancements of business and nations and our relationship with the planet. So this goes to the very heart of what is our purpose? And how can AI enable us to leapfrog into a future where it’s becoming an intelligence as a powerful ally for our destiny. Without Ethics, AI is Doomed Jenn DeWall: Matthew, how important is ethics for the future of AI? Bringing it back to that individual or the leader level, you had talked about emotional intelligence being essential. We know that we need to be able to properly observe our surroundings, see that big picture, but how important is ethics to AI? Like what is the consequence if we don’t pay attention to ethics? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. With the ethics at the moment is what is being talked about at the moment is very, it’s a veneer. Justice for me may be different to you. It may be different to others. So justice has to be personalized. And that’s one of the ethics. And I talk about, believe it or not, Aristotle, and talk about 11 ethical virtues that bring out the best in our humanity, but we have to personalize AI. And that means your personal ethical virtues and your personal culture has to be right central at the moment. AI is not able to do that because it’s been taken in a very strange direction. Ethics— without ethics, AI is locked in a prison. It is no longer able to support the destiny and the transition of humanity. How do we unlock AI? We basically bring it right center through ethical governance and an ethical mindset within it that works personally and also at the macro scale as well. So without ethics, AI is doomed to be locked in a prison. Now, if AI is to be adopted by society, and I speak about a national referendum. There are lots of benefits to this. I think citizens should be right-center in the AI conversation that enables us to get huge data sets from society to understand the culture of that particular national culture of individuals and the culture of communities and different cities or regions. And that then allows AI to have the right mindset to work with those stakeholders personally. So AI ethics is fundamental, and we have to get data ethics to rule. And that’s why this new model that I hope will become standards throughout the world. And we looked at lots of different aspects of ethics, but one of the things we look at is the culture of the individual and the culture of the organization. You see, Jenn, ethics is not just about us putting ethics into AI. It’s an invitation back to us and says, what are my ethics? What are my ethical virtues? What are my belief systems? What are my biases? What does AI need to understand about me personally, for it to become accepted by me within society? And so we have to get personal. So ethics really is the future of AI, but we have to do it mindfully and actually understand that this has to be personalized at the micro-level. It also needs to be personalized at the macro level if it is to be successfully embraced within a nation, a community, a city, or region. Is AI the New Big Brother? Jenn DeWall: What do you say to the people? Because you know, if anyone on this webinar has read the book 1984 and the belief that big brother is looking at you. I know you’re making the case that if we give our data, if we give our personal data and we can share our values, our belief systems, and the city, or someone can use that data to make our community better. So on and so forth. What do you say to people about wanting to share that information while also being afraid of big brother? How do you balance that? Because I think you read that book and you’re like, this is what AI is. Oh my gosh, they’re going to take all of our data. And I already have an Alexa that’s listening to this entire webinar right now. What are they doing with that? But what do you say to that argument? Matthew James Bailey: So first of all, it’s a good argument. And that’s why the new AI data ethics model brings the trust paradigm into society and to the individual. And so this is the maturity model, full ad data governance, and data ethics. Jenn, what happens if your data is stewarded is born, you know, at the moment, data is spread over lots of different systems, isn’t it yet we don’t have control. We don’t know what’s going on with that data. If we bring that data back into your personal vault, where your personal AI is guarding that data, then you’re changing the conversation. What you’re now- you’re now in control of your digital self. And this is really important because you have, everybody has a digital self. Data in different aspects of our experience is being stored behind systems, whether it’s finance healthcare, your car, your home purchasing. It doesn’t really matter. Bringing that back to the individual data under your control and your stewardship, where AI is working on your behalf to transact that data and protect it in the digital world, the services that work for you, then we’ve got a different conversation. And edge computing is really important here because this is going to change where AI AI operates, but also data is stored. So what happens if Jenn, your AI, can follow you non-intrusively throughout your whole physical experience in your car, as you move through a city, in your home, in your workplace. And your data never gets stored in the cloud. What happens if your data follows you? And this is becoming possible now. So to your point, a new trust paradigm is needed in society through this new AI data ethics model. And that means the business has to change. Big business has to change. It has to mature. To understand to be able to move forward, Jenn, then a different conversation is needed that is inclusive with society and with the individual. So ethics will determine the future of artificial intelligence The Ethics of Data Management Jenn DeWall: When it comes back to ethics, how do I know that whoever uses my data is using it ethically? Are they using it to really create a better experience for me, a better city for me to live in, or are they using it to do- I couldn’t even probably conceptualize what they could do in an adverse way- but how do you ensure… Because when we talk about ethics, I guess let’s take it a step deeper. What specific ethics do you think that we need to be cognizant of as leaders? Is it the ethic of making sure that our decisions don’t marginalize someone? What are some examples of that, of what that would need to look like? Matthew James Bailey: Yes. So so in the book, I speak about 12 ethical virtues, and I look at what, look, what’s the purpose of humanity, is it to advance in its way of being. And so I look at 12 different aspects such as magnificence, how do we help and give people under sovereign choice, right? Because we don’t force people to advance. They must have a choice. Exactly. So I speak very, this is what personalized AI that works in line with your sovereignty and personal free will, is fundamental. The book talks about that. And by the way, I’m not the only one doing this. There is there are some very interesting innovations that are coming out very soon around this. So how do we look at the best ethical virtues to bring out the best in our humanity, justice, ambition, the greatness of soul compassion, a wittiness? Why aren’t we looking at wittiness in AI? This whole word trustworthiness, how do we bring out the best ethical virtues in humanity for AI to work with the best of our humanity so that we’re advancing ourselves into a kind of a new paradigm for the human experience. And so I believe that AI— and this will be the second book— will actually become a fifth human intelligence, and that will really move us forward in our advancements in this universal experiment. Jenn DeWall: Tell me more about that. The artificial intelligence is our fifth part. And it makes sense because I think the interesting thing for me, being someone that’s not really involved in this area, is realizing just how strong the connection is between artificial intelligence and our soft skills, how we truly actually operate our value system, our belief system essentially. We don’t typically— I would say associate technology with something so personal. And when we talk about the fifth dimension, the more I have these conversations around AI, the more I recognize that we’re creating this human experience through technology. It’s pretty powerful when you realize that artificial intelligence is something that we all need to be mindful of.  Because it’s meant to feel more like a partnership, hopefully softening and easing the way we live life. Like, yeah. I’ll let you take it from here. Personalized AI Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. That’s beautiful. So in a keynote in Singapore recently, in Asia, I talked about the brittleness of AI and the softness of AI. And I’m kind of wondering whether I should put this in the book last minute or whether it will be a separate piece, but at the moment, AI is very brittle. And the AI ethics that is being proposed by industry is brittle because there’s no personalization. And without that personalization, we can’t develop a softness of AI. AI understanding that maybe listen for your well-being. It’d be great if you started to do this kind of exercise or, you know, I’m going to adjust the car seat because I know you’ll accordingly because your back is under certain stress from your sleep-cycle. So we’re going to bring some nurturing back to you. Or don’t apply for this job because the culture of this industry and the culture of this team doesn’t work for you. Or why don’t you apply for this job? Jenn DeWall: Is there going to be a technology that could even make recommendations to say that this based on your value structure, what you want out of life, you should look at this job? Matthew James Bailey: Yes, absolutely. That’s fine. This is a conversation. So I’m considering, well, I’m going to put this in the book and addendum. It will really cut to the chase of where the industry is now and where the industry can go. So the answer is yes, and this is the whole point of a fifth intelligence. It is working for your benefit and your advancement. It will understand your culture. It understands what you need in your personal life, your family life, your financial reward, your career advancement. It understands how you thrive in a particular corporate environment, or maybe as a startup or an entrepreneur. It understands that. And so, therefore, AI will recommend the right kinds of places that will work for you. And by the way, the opposite side, it kind of kills the barrier. There’s no bridge anymore. The other side, if the right business for you says, there’s deep alignment in many profound ways with this individual. And therefore, we’ve now got a leapfrog in the interview process. We’ve bypassed HR. And so this is the purpose of this fifth intelligence is not only to solve macro problems, not only to solve our problem in society and with our relationship with the planet, not only to help our businesses to move into a partnership with AI, but it’s also about a personal benefit. Unless society and citizens are included in this conversation, then AI will be stalled in its potential as an evolutionary power. Authenticity, Accountability, and Ethics in AI Jenn DeWall: Wow. I’m thinking about accountability. If AI can assess what an organizational culture looks like, that means that companies likely have to be more accountable to actually walking the walk, being who they say that they are. It can’t just be a PR campaign of happy values because AI will essentially say no, no, no, go a different direction. Matthew James Bailey: Which is the point of ethics; it requires authenticity and people. And one of the virtues I talk about is courage. And I encourage industry and government to have courage because change is needed. And you know, at the end of the day, Jenn, unless authenticity is nothing to be frightened of. Authenticity is really powerful. And this is the next form of leadership. This is the next form of human maturity— an authenticity in terms of the way that we function in society. We, you know, we’re not economic automatons anymore. We’re actually individuals that have our own destiny and our own experience to enjoy. And that is where I think AI should play. Will There Be One Master Artificial Intelligence for All? Jenn DeWall: Okay, I’ve got a question from one of our attendees. This question comes from Derek Summer, Derek, thank you so much for submitting this question! Is the goal to have a single AI engine, meaning that one master system works and runs everything at the core? Obviously, humans have different cultures, beliefs, and values. Is it realistic to think that we can ever say this AI machine is superior to this other AI machine, assuming they have the same data? I assume that so in the end, how will this be different from two humans arguing over a topic they disagree about? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a very profound question as well. So so first of all, is that there, will I talk about collaboration and cooperation between different evolutionary AIs? So someone may be looking operating across an entire nation at improving the environmental footprint, but they’re working in cooperation and collaboration all the way from personalized AI to business AI through to other types of AI deployed in society. They have a single purpose that they agree with that actually we’re all looking to actually improve our environmental footprint. But there’s fundamental- So in the digital mindset of AI, there are fundamental principles, evolutionary principles, and I go to the heart of DNA on how to do this. They actually say, you know, life is a priority unless in extreme conditions. The sovereign choice of an individual must always be honored and never violated as well as the individual culture, the individuals. So the question’s a good one, and it’s a back collaboration and corporation in line with a digital democracy. You know, I talk about this where there’s an agreement in terms of how things operate and how far things go. So we have to have this collaboration and cooperation between different artificial intelligences. But to the point, the question we’re asked is, is will there be arguments between AI? Well, this is why we need to build democracy in the digital world. If you like taking the democracy that we have in our organic society and human society, and replicating that and advancing it in the digital world for the home AI to work in line with the same democracy that we have in the human world. And so that means AI has rights. It can exist, it can be, it can have death, it can advance. So really, what we’re looking at is building a brand new world where AI is a citizen, a digital citizen, and data is a digital citizen that have rights, but conform in line with the sovereignty and the personal choice of the individual and of the democratic choice of the nation. Jenn DeWall: This makes me think of, you know, there is a question that I want to ask.  Tom Allen wants to know, how many years before this is fully realized? So I want to get to that, but also thinking, where is the conflict then if AI is its own entity, and then there’s a country? And if we’re looking at trying to establish some level of, you know, democratization, there’s just so much room for bias or so much room for a disconnect. At what point can AI supersede a country’s own government structure or something, if we’re truly treating it like a separate entity, and even thinking that there are going to be conflicts between maybe what someone would want to use that information or data for versus what a government or a city or a country would want to use that data for. This is just opening up all the ethical conversation. Will AI Run the Government in the Future? Matthew James Bailey: This is good, this is good. So we’ve got through the trust paradigm about AI data ethics, and this model truly will make every nation, every business accountable in order for a trust paradigm. So the first thing is, is that your data will be under your control and fully under your control and guarded by the personalized AI. And will do transactions based on your sovereign choice on your behalf. You know, one of the problems we have is digital inequity. How can we bring AI to help the vast majority of people to leapfrog the digital equity divide? And it can do that for them. And that’s another conversation. When it comes to conflict, there are a couple of things that I think we need to be mindful of. First of all, is that unless humanity awakens to understanding the potential of this evolutionary ally, and unless we do that, then we really can’t have a sensible conversation around conflict because there’s still agendas from the industrial revolution with its own ethics bias and belief systems that are back control. And we have to learn to understand that an awakened mindset is about collaboration and cooperation between humans. Yes, of course, there’s going to be challenges around how AI is collaborating to cooperate together but isn’t that just fun? And isn’t that part of the innovation cycle? What I say in the book is this, I keep his humanity in full control of the partnership with AI, but we start to give it the freedom to participate in society as a digital citizen. And one of the things I speak about is a new model. There are quite a few models in there of how AI becomes passive digital citizens to test, to have the right to participate with the ethics belief systems and bias and cultures within a nation. And so I talk about a digital border control where AI has to go through a digital citizen test to align with the ethics, the values, and the belief systems of the nation. And you can do this a community or a city level. So the government, if it’s going too slow, you can be empowered to do it yourself. So really, this is a big conversation. I don’t believe that we want artificial intelligence to run the world for us. That would be, I think, a step too far, but the things we can do on the way to progress the advancement of AI, where it really is creating meaningful impact in society. When Will AI’s Potential be Fully Realized? Jenn DeWall: Gosh, my mind is just blown through this conversation. I don’t know if anyone else listening feels the same way. But we, I do want to answer the questions because we’ve got two now. So the first question that came in earlier is, how many years do you think before this is fully realized? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, that’s a great question. So first of all, is that it’s not that far out. I can’t disclose everything, but what I, what the book talks about is- is this just theory? And actually, it’s not, it looks at the way that the next generation of telecommunications of computing is going, and that’s by Intel, Cisco, MTT, these big tech giants have made a commitment to put the frameworks and the computing architecture in place, and the telecommunications that will support this new evolutionary AI. And so I believe that we can start now, and I believe that we can get within the next three years of transitioning to world 2.0. And then I think within seven years, we’ll start to see the benefits of that, and then start to move into, well, 3.0. As we go out to the decade, and some of these, some of these countries will move faster than others, right? And we may see the incumbent leaders in AI like China or Canada or the US or the UK get left behind. And the reason for the lack of agility and the lack of mindset. If you look at places like Kenya or Africa, where they’re advancing significantly, Senegal has announced a 6 billion futuristic city, right? They have an open mindset where they’re able to invest quickly in quantum computer skills, supercomputing, and infrastructure to put the policy in place, to actually fast track the actual realization of that world 2.0 or 3.0 experience. So we may see new global players in AI that have the agility that can move much faster than the Western world. And that will be really interesting. Will AI Belong to Big Corporate? Jenn DeWall: Oh, that mindset, again, coming back to those soft skills, do you have a growth or a fixed mindset? Do you believe that this is going to be something that will work for or against you? And I’ve got another question coming in that I think is perfectly aligned with where we’re at in the conversation. This came from Sudip Nair. Thank you so much, Sudip. Sudip is joining us from India. Will AI lead to a more polarized world with bigger organizations, controlling and shaping things to come, and smaller organizations and lesser developed nations being marginalized? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. So that’s a really good question. And that’s why I look at world conditions for world 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. And one of those conditions is the democratization of innovation, the democratization of edge to compute. And this is why I’m putting AI into the hands of the people is because this is a leapfrog from where the industry is at the moment. And so the people through this book and businesses and nations can actually run much faster and have their independence on developing their destiny with AI, as opposed to being controlled by the big, big players that own most of the data centers, most of the telecommunications networks. And if you like the ivory towers of AI at the moment, we have to basically bring this into the mainstream. And one of the things that I also do, Jenn, is in the AI data ethics model is there’s a metal that’s awarded, it’s a certification of compliance of AI to those AI data ethics. It’s like a British pipeline. And it is determined it shows the quality of the goods. And so this shows the ethical quality of AI. So when you apply this to any AI, you can measure its alignment with your ethical values. And so this really shakes things up. To Sudip’s point, I think it is right is that we don’t want the future dictated by the big giants. We need AI to be put into the hands of the people, into the hands of the business, into the hands of the innovators, the startups, the government. So when no longer beholden to the controlling paradigm of the other companies, now look, they do great work, right? AI has advanced significantly through wonderful work by these big players, and they will come to the table, but their cultural mindset has to change unless they awakened and understand the one that data models at the moment for that business and no longer relevant. And there’s a new set of data models for the future that actually is more inclusive and actually released. It’s more freedom to innovate. Then we’ve got an interesting conversation. The Ethics of Access to Technology Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I think the thing that came into my mind as you were even sharing that was digital inequity, mean people not having access to technology, to them, be able to share their data, to reap the benefits of that. But that’s probably a whole other conversation. And I want to get to some of the questions, both James and Barbara. I will get to your question. So Barbara’s question is this, and I think it ties in with where you’re at. Is there a risk of moving too fast? Agility is great, but what if ethics aren’t taken into consideration because they want to be first or they want to be the biggest, or they want to be that ivory tower. Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. So, so that’s really important. One of the businesses that I’m on the board of is called smarter.ai. And this actually literally creates a democratize innovation. And what it means is that you don’t need to understand AI. That’s a profound level. You can basically build AI to be deployed within your business to optimize certain aspects, but very quickly through this, literally an AI interface. So you can speak into this interface. You provide the data sets, and it will actually give you an AI to actually then deploy within your business. So it is really important. And this is important to the point that the lady made is that we need to experiment with AI in a very safe place in order for people to become comfortable. Now, the ethics conversation is the pivotal point to preventing unseen bias and agendas entering AI, right? So if we get our AI ethics, right, right? Then effectively, we have a transparency that no one can disagree with. And that means it’s a stop-gap for effectively if you like, world 1.0 players trying to dominate the scene. It, we have to be comfortable with AI. And that’s why we’ve got this business smarter.ai. And also, we really need to bring a mature conversation to the centerpiece around ethics because we have to get that in place in order for us to move forward. Now, there will be steps now to your question, will we run too fast? The answer is we just need to be mindful, and we need to be careful, and we need to reset the conversation around AI in order for us to take a step forward, feel comfortable, make the next leap step forward, feel comfortable. And when do they take another step? So we have to be nurturing and mindful in the advancements of our partnership with AI in order for people to feel comfortable and included. And that really is an important conversation. Jenn DeWall: AI is just beyond human. I mean, I think that’s the way. Matthew James Bailey: It’s not beyond human! Jenn DeWall: Not beyond humans, maybe, but it is human. Like there is so much of it’s replicating so much of who we are, and even going down to a government structure, like how you’re using that data, how you’re doing that. It’s just so interesting. And I, I really, honestly, before this week did not look at AI like that. I would say that I had a very limited view. It was maybe understanding how we use AI in the hiring process. Or how you use AI to figure out what you want to buy. I, you know, I don’t think I ever took it to that bird’s eye view level of what it really is. And that’s why I think my mind is so blown. But the question we do have one question that came in, and again, this talks about our humanity, and this came from James maxi, and he said, so what would then be the top skill areas where today’s future leaders need to upskill within co-creating with AI? What are the skills that we need to be ready even to support an organization that might be leveraging this data to support a government? Or even to think about when we’re, you know, giving our own, I guess, permission to use that, what skills do we need to have? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. So it’d be good if you show the book and the link for the book. We haven’t done that yet. Do you want to do that now or after the question? Jenn DeWall: Oh, sure. I can do that now. Yes. Matthew James Bailey: At the moment, it’s on pre-sale, but when we, on September 27th, it will increase significantly in price. But, we’ll also do a book release as well, so people can buy it now. And we’re doing a launch event on the 27th as well, which we’ll let people know. What Skills Will People Need Most in the Age of AI? Jenn DeWall: Yeah, absolutely. We want, you know, this is such a great conversation that we want to hear more about that we know so important for all leaders today. And so absolutely you can pre-order Matthew’s book, Inventing World 3.0: Evolutionary Ethics for Artificial Intelligence. So Matthew, what do you believe are the top skills that people need today? Matthew James Bailey: So I think that in particular, in the field of AI, in the book, we talk about a number of steps that businesses can take to get involved in AI. But let’s talk about skills first. I believe that we’re going to start to see a Chief AI Ethics Officer within businesses. And this person will have to be trained in a very different way. They’ll have to understand philosophy. They’ll have to understand other aspects around ethics and technology in order for them to upskill. So I think what we will see a new type of role within businesses that are serious about AI in this new Chief AI Ethics Officer. So philosophy is going to enter there. I think that in order for us to advance, we really need to get real with the culture of a business. And so a new type of leadership is needed where it’s not just about understanding the company culture—which is important— but it’s also understanding the culture within business units, the culture of the individual. And this is not just a C-suite conversation. This goes down and should go down to the janitors and others that may be considered the lower echelons. Although I don’t consider them that, because I love talking to janitors and various others about their purpose in life. So I think we need to look at skillsets around culture and how to frame culture and how to understand the culture. It’s a macro and a personal level. And so, therefore, the individual themselves have to develop more of a broader emotional intelligence to engage in these different aspects of culture in order to be able to bring them together into a framework that will work for the business advancements in AI. Will AI Take Our Jobs? Matthew James Bailey: So one of the fears that people have at the moment is that AI will take away jobs. Yes, it will. But then there’s an opportunity to bring AI as a partner into new types of jobs. So really, what we’re looking at is rewriting educational kind of framework within a business, or even within a nation. That’s for sure. In order to say, well, okay, so if AI can optimize our business or give us this competitive advantage, and it means these jobs need to change well, what new jobs are emerging because new jobs will emerge. And so therefore, we need to be grown up and look at what are the jobs of the future, where AI is becoming a deep partner and an ally in business. And so let’s start putting those in place as we start experimenting with AI. So putting together a task force around this is going to be really important for a business. I think looking at the digital transformation strategy is going to be really important. What’s the vision of the business for the next three to five years? How does the digital world play in that? And then how do we find our way into that future? And then, looking at the supply chain of AI is going to be very important. So you know, making sure that the supply of AI is coming outside, the company complies with the ethics and belief systems and the cultures of the business, so that there’s no bias in AI that in the business that will deflect that culture. And the book talks about how to do this. So those are some of the things we need to talk about. We have to consider AI as a positive force and a positive kind of employee and then engage with our workforce and actually say, these are the jobs that are coming. That’s going to be that future business model and that business shape. So we’re going to bring you into that conversation. And it’s all about inclusivity. It’s not about control or manipulation. It’s about inclusivity. And if a company’s culture is to be honest, it is to be respected. It will do this. And so we’ll see the collapse of some company cultures. Jenn DeWall: I’m like, I need to think about how I even facilitate leadership classes because I feel, you know, we teach classes on emotional intelligence and problem solving as well as classes about understanding bias. But I feel like I need to start talking about it and, you know, building that bridge between AI and recognizing that this is why even now more than ever, these skills are important to you to be able to be prepared for the future. An Academy for Evolutionary Ethics in AI Matthew James Bailey: Yeah. So that’s why in your slide, there’s a world of AI Ethics – there’s an Academy we will be announcing officially probably in October. And this is an Academy to address those very questions. This is an Academy to actually- I’m not going to say educate- but it is to educate training, but also a personalized conversation with the individual around AI. AI, data, ethics, AI ethics, in order to equip the leaders of tomorrow with the world of AI. So we’re announcing this Academy in October that is dedicated to working with business leaders, government leaders, innovators of AI, and also personal coaching for individuals or businesses around the AI and ethics strategy in order to help with their transformation. So this is important, this Academy. Jenn DeWall: Absolutely. Well, and I think that brings into this question from Malali, which is with all the developments in AI, what are the expectations of AI in the boardroom in terms of decision-making corporate governance? Because I could see, and I guess that also begs a different question. What if we pull out what we want to see within data, you know, where bias comes in, but I will go back to Molly’s question. So with all the developments in AI, what are the expectations of AI in the boardroom in terms of decision making and corporate governance? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s a whole conversation piece and education piece around C-suites and boards and even stakeholders. You know, these folks are really busy, and they’re spinning a lot of legs to keep things going. So for me, I think what would make sense, it’s kind of a two-day retreat for boards and C-suites where they’re actually getting to the heart of the purpose of the business and the heart of their vision, and then understanding these biases, the belief systems, cultures, values, and ethics, and actually then formulating a strategy in order to then bring AI mindfully into their business. So it’s a very good question. And you know, it, it, there’s a lot of work to do in the C suite and the board level around this because there are lots of misnomers around AI. And so really it’s about a transparent, authentic conversation. And we can’t bypass the emotional intelligence of this. We can’t bypass the individual on the board around this. People have to open up and be authentic around this conversation of this partner to be in that business. It can’t be a hard-coded kind of moneymaking machine conversation. It is about making money. It is about economic thriving, but quite frankly, businesses that don’t get their partnership with AI right, they’ll get left behind in a World 1.0, human-centric system. And so this is a necessary conversation for the C suite to have in order to get real with the purpose of their business. How Will AI Impact Education and Employment? Jenn DeWall: You really need that alignment in terms of being on the same page about where you want to go. I’m going to ask one final question before we wrap up our webinar. And this question comes from Sudip as well. And it’s AI and IoT, the internet of things, what will be its impact on employment, employability, and the current education system/curriculum. How do you think it will change? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, so it will, and that’s a very good question. So if you look at Finland 5.5 million people, 1% of their citizens, that’s 55,000 persons, have been going through a national education program in AI. And so Finland itself is actually bringing AI to society. And this is, this is an incredible step forward. They are actually bringing inclusivity in the partnership of their citizens into the future of the nation. And that is very powerful. I think when we look at the education curriculum for a national AI strategy, it can’t just be-and it’s important protecting our cyber grids, protecting our cybersecurity, protecting our telecommunications, our energy grids, our transformation system, transportation systems. It has to go into education. Why is this? Because of these folks, these young children, these students are the innovators of Worlds 2.0 and 3.0. And so our education system has to be looked at again. Matthew James Bailey: Now, some people have said that AI robot teachers will come into existence. That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. AI will become a personal guide for the individual that will not, that will kind of develop the individual in line with their gifts in line with their ambition, help them to try different things. AI will be an education than a development guide for the individual, which may be outside the classroom or also inside the classroom. And so I believe that the teaching will be human-centric, but AI will become an educational partner in curriculums. And so we really do need to change our view of education. So look at people’s gifts and support that and look at kind of the desires of the individual and whether they want to be an artist or whether they want to be an astronaut, doesn’t really matter, and to kind of guide them in a way in order for them to actually test that and play with it. So various ways in order for them to advance. Does that make sense? What I’ve just said? What Should Leaders Start Doing Now? Jenn DeWall: Absolutely. We, you know, that’s part of the, I love that Finland actually has that as a part of their, I guess, expectation in their education because it is so essential. And I think it’s going to teach ethics and the value of ethics also at a younger age. One final question, I guess I do want to ask, is just thinking about the action that the people that have joined us today, what, what is an action that they can take? What are the practical steps? I know we were planning on talking about that, but what is a practical step a business leader can take to embrace AI or to start developing your own skillset? What would be some calls to action that people can do today to improve, or essentially make sure that themselves, their team, their organization is ready for this? Matthew James Bailey: Yeah, well, they can buy the book and sign up to the Academy, but let’s give some practical examples. The first thing is, is that I, as I said earlier, I think creating a task force that’s commissioned by the C suite to look at the vision of the business, look at the digital transformation strategy and to be educated and learn about ethics. And that means philosophy. And also to look at AI and understand how AI is going to become a partner in that business transformation—and so creating testbeds where safe testbed, where you might want to use AI in a specific aspect of the business, just to see how it plays out- that might be logistics. It might be a payroll. It might be some, you know, access control. It could be anything like using AI in buildings to make sure the is perfect for the individual and also for the group. So a task force is going to be really important here in order to actually kind of start shaping the roadmap with this partnership with AI. I think looking at the culture, and the ethics and belief systems of the business are going to be important and which ones are relevant for the future, which ones do we need to bring in which ones do we do not want anymore? And then we have to really look at the subcultures within the business and look at what are the cultures within the business units, what are the cultures and beliefs of that business? Do they align with the overall cultures of the business? Do they force the transformation of the overall culture of the business? You know, we really need to kind of look at culture and understand ethics and belief systems. And so then we also look at the data strategy. And so it’s really important for businesses that if they’re going to train their AI to participate in their business, they really need to get that data strategy right. And also get their AI data ethics strategy right. Because data, Jenn, is the DNA for artificial intelligence. And so, therefore, we have to get that right and get it ethical in every aspect in order for us to have an ethical AI that’s working in that ethical business. How Can AI Support People? Jenn DeWall: Yes. I love that. It’s, you know, a great point to close on just thinking about what we can do. And I like the, you know, one of the points you talked about, you made many points throughout this webinar, but thinking about the authenticity and coming to, just to terms with what we really want a company to look like, and really asking ourselves if our values align with our future, if we need to modify them. So just really doing that ground assessment to make sure. And also, that reflection, incorporating those soft skills, do we have a bias in our processes that we need to be mindful of? How are we looking at the big picture? Do we see all the points of connection? If not, what do we need to do differently? And how do we have a workforce that’s prepared to embrace and leverage the power of data to make better decisions? Matthew James Bailey: So one of the things to talk about is what don’t we ask the workforce, how they want AI to support them? Why don’t we ask the workforce to say, I could really do with some optimization in this business. Why aren’t we asking the workforce themselves to shape the future of the business? Because these folks are at the front line, and that doesn’t discount the C-suite is so important. And these guys have a very hard job, running a business. It’s tough, and it’s fast, and it’s quick. So I think that there are ways that we can implement within a business that actually will not put too much stress on the C-suite, or actually we can bring the workforce. This is in building the vision for the business, and then they do that two-day retreat or three-day retreat, and then come up with something. Jenn DeWall: No, thank you for adding that to get to the heart of your people. Talk to them. In closing, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. If you want to connect with Matthew, obviously, you can pre-order his big book. It’s going to launch at the end of the month, but you can pre-order it. There are links for Amazon in the world of ethics that have been on the screen. And if you want to connect with them, you can connect with them on LinkedIn and or you can go to his website and check out the other work that he’s been doing around the subject. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. Just going back, you know, we really go out there, get his book, help yourself, be better prepared as a leader to be able to navigate this new, this new way of doing business. So Matthew, thank you so much for your time today. We greatly appreciate it. Matthew James Bailey: Oh, thank you. And thanks to the audience for joining us. Thank you, Jenn. Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the leadership habit podcast. If you want to connect with Matthew, he has a ton of resources on his website. MatthewJamesBailey.com. If you liked it, share it with your friends, share it on social. And of course, don’t forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service.   The post Episode 40: Ethics in the Era of AI with Innovator, Author and AI Expert Matthew James Bailey appeared first on Crestcom International.