The Leadership Habit

On today’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, Jenn DeWall interviews Marilyn Sherman, the founder of Front Row Leadership, a hall of fame speaker and author. All over the world, we are all going through a tremendous amount of change.  Join Jenn DeWall and Marilyn Sherman as they discuss how leaders can support our organization through these changes by understanding the five stages of grief. Full Transcript Below:  Meet Marilyn Sherman, Founder of Front Row Leadership Jenn DeWall:  Hi everyone! It’s Jenn DeWall here, with The Leadership Habit, and I am so excited to be back in the office, sitting here interviewing Marilyn Sherman. Now you might recognize Marilyn Sherman, and she’s been on our podcast before talking about how you can create your seat for success. But today we’re going to be talking about something a little bit different than that. Maybe not even as light and fluffy, but, Marilyn, let’s just go ahead, and let’s start off. Please give our audience a brief introduction. Marilyn Sherman:  Hi Jenn, good to see you again! I have spent the last 25 years— hopefully, my intention was—  to inspire people with hope and inspiration to get them out of their comfort zone and into their front row, however they define it for themselves. So that’s who I am. I live in Las Vegas because when I moved there, it was the convention capital of the world, and I traveled so much for my business to speak at conventions up until March 9th of 2020 when Vegas shut down soon after. So so that’s what I do. That’s who I am. Jenn DeWall:  You know, and for those of you that didn’t listen to [our podcast episode about] the S.E.A.T of Success, though, I would definitely recommend that you download it now. You talk about the concept of “front row,” or to be a front row leader. What does that mean? Marilyn Sherman:  “Front row” is where you are at the top of your game. You feel great about who you are and what you do. You’ve created a collaborative environment around you, where people love to work with you and support you. And so front row leadership is really people defining what it is to be at the top of their game, because for you, it’s, it’s different than what it is for me. I like to say that, you know, my front row is being in front of an audience, and there are people that would rather have a root canal than get up in front of an audience and speak. So everybody’s front row is different, so I help them define what does it mean to live their life, where they’re happy, and they’re contributing to society. And there are very common obstacles that prevent people from getting to their front row seat. And I helped them overcome those obstacles. Jenn DeWall:  Yes, we need it right now. And there are more obstacles. I would say that we’re still, still probably popping up some resolved as a result of the pandemic. And obviously, we also are seeing unrest in the form of a protest and a Civil rights movement here in the U S. I love the topic that you’re going to come in and talk about today because I think that it’s amazing to talk about our front row. And it’s amazing to talk about creating your seat for success, but sometimes we’ve got to go there. We’ve got to talk about emotions and how they exist, how they show up, what that looks like as being leaders, and holding space for people. Back to the New Future Marilyn Sherman:  Absolutely. Because this is a different day and age. Do you remember that movie with Michael J. Fox called Back to the Future? Remember that movie? Well, now I called this time that you and I are living in is back to the new future because I’m hearing a lot of people as they reopen their doors, they re-engage with their customers. They go back to work. They’re calling this their back to you know, we have a “new normal,” well, guess what? It’s not. There’s nothing normal about this. We have never been through something like this ever before. I mean, even flying here to Denver today, after getting out of the airport, I see parking lots filled with rental cars that are stalled. They’re done. They’re just sitting idle because no one’s renting cars today. It’s so there’s, there’s nothing normal about what we’re going through. Our society is going through whole new ignited conversations. There, we’re going through a time that you and I have never seen before. So it’s not going back to any kind of normal, it’s going back to a new future, and I want to help pave that way to your new future. With some thoughts around looking at the people side of dealing with change, Jenn DeWall:  Because change is the one thing that we all are experiencing right now, it’s changing maybe our employment status or someone in our family or the change of what our role looks like, or even how we have to show up to actually enter the office. Marilyn Sherman:  There are new protocols. That’s the word of the day we have new protocols in place. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. But I like that you talk about back to the, to the new future. And I love that we’re going to talk about the people side, because I think while many people are eager and want to be able for things to go back to the way that they were like, we’re not going back. And we also need to understand the psychological component that is impacting your workforce right now,  as a result of both the pandemic and what we see with the protests here in the U.S., so we’re going to talk about the five stages of loss. The Five Stages of Grief Marilyn Sherman:  Let me describe why we’re talking about that. Jenn DeWall:  Why the heck should they care about that? Marilyn Sherman:  Why should they care? Well, way back in the day, I saw Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross speak in Seattle, where I grew up, and I was just mesmerized because she talked about from her work the five stages of loss and grief in her book called On Death and Dying. And I was really interested in this because I was a psych major or a sociology major with a psych minor. But while I was in high school, I was already into it. So I went to see her when I was in high school, and I was fascinated by her and those five stages of what people go through when they’re dealing with a loss in their life, a loss of a spouse or a loss of a child, there’s a tremendous amount of grief. And although she has a broad spectrum of work, this work around loss and on death and dying was huge. And it’s now having a resurgence because there’s a new book on the five stages of grief. I think with one of her partners that she wrote with before she died. So what I’m doing is taking those five stages that she wrote about, and I’m just bringing them forward as an adaptation of what we’re going through as leaders and what we’re going through as we go to this new normal. So those five stages are denial, denial that you know, this really is happening. There’s anger where people are really angry. I mean, just the fact that they have to wear masks. People are really reacting. I mean, their buttons are being pushed, and they are angry. And you look at these protests that we’re seeing and people want to have a peaceful protest. And all of a sudden, there’s a group of angry people, infiltrating those protests, and it’s turning into something so much worse than what the original intention was of a peaceful protest. There’s also bargaining. Bargaining is a stage where you try to figure out the un-figure-out-able. Well, if only we did this, we would have that. If only we knew about the Coronavirus in December, we wouldn’t have had a pandemic in the U.S. If only we would have just listened to our leaders, we wouldn’t be in the position that we’re in. You know, it’s like, it’s like when you’re in this bargaining stage, you’re trying to sort of make sense of it when it doesn’t make sense. And you’re trying to figure it out. And there’s always an if/then kind of a conversation that you have. Another stage is depression, and that’s where it starts to sink in. It’s like, okay, we have a loss of routine that we’re used to. We’re grieving. The loss of the way things used to be is not going to be the way that things are going to be moving forward. So there’s this depression. Like, Oh my gosh, really? You mean, we can’t do that anymore. Ah, and there’s like this heaviness, and it’s, it’s literally like a, a depression that you go through. And then, the final stage is acceptance, and the acceptance is okay. We have new protocols in place. We followed all the guidelines. We have a communication that’s out there for our customers, for our employees. We have safety protocols in place. We have given our statement about how wrong it is to discriminate against anybody. So we’re accepting the fact that we have to do this. We have to. And the acceptance stage is where we get to say, okay, what is the best way to move forward? We have protocols in place. What’s the best way to let people know about it. We have protocols in place. What’s the best way for us to go out and market our services, even though they look a little bit different, we have new office hours. We have a limited amount of people that we can take at a time. We have middle seats that you cannot sit in on an airplane. You know, those types of things— you become solution-oriented once you hit the acceptance stage. Now here’s the big people side of this for leaders to really, really, really understand. We don’t go through these stages in a linear fashion. We don’t start automatically, we’re in denial. And then we automatically go to anger and then we automatically go to bargaining. And then we have to go through that in order to get to depression before we hit acceptance. No, one day, you wake up with such a dark cloud over your head. You can’t even get out of bed. That would be the depression stage. And then one day you’re like, Nope, Nope. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear it. I’m done. I don’t want to hear it. You know, if you have to have conversations with people who are different from you, and you’re tired of that conversation, you all of a sudden, you find yourself in denial that you, you may have participated in being part of the problem. And so because you don’t go in this linear fashion, when you’re talking to someone that you’re leading, it’s a real good idea to check-in, to see where they are. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. That’s interesting. That’s the foundation. Yes. You need to think. Especially before you’re going to maybe even post something on social media, have a conversation about a sensitive topic. You want to gauge the way that it’s going. You want to go check where they’re at in terms of processing the five stages of grief. Be Aware of What Stage of Grief Your Team is In Marilyn Sherman:  Gauge is a really good word. We need to gauge where people are at because you’re going to lead them differently, depending on where they are. And you can encourage them to let them know you are not alone. You are not alone. In fact, there are five stages that people go through when they’re dealing with a loss, and all of us collectively are dealing with the loss of how things used to be. So it’s, it’s no surprise that you may be feeling some frustration right now, or you may be feeling like you’re, you’ve got all these questions that can’t be answered right now. It’s very, very common. And in fact, if more people understood that what these five stages are and what they mean and how they look, they’ll be able to communicate that. Even if they just start with that, they can open up a dialogue so that when you check in with someone to gauge how they’re doing, you can say, well, so how are you feeling today, what’s going on? And you can sincerely talk about, well, if they’re, if you’re aware of the five stages like today, where would you be? I mean, it could be a good conversation to have as you bring people back, even with bringing people back in a zoom call or some sort of a video conference call, you can check in with people, how are you doing? And allow them to vent, allow them to get it off their chest, and allow them to do so in a safe environment. Because I think people don’t open up and tell someone else where they are. Because let’s say they’re really, really angry right now. They’re so angry and they’re snapping at people. They have a fuse that’s much shorter than before. And they may not know it, because they’re not really an angry person typically. So if they know that this is a stage that they’re going through, the last thing you want to do is say, Hey, calm down. You don’t need to be angry because now what do they do with that? You want to create a safe space to talk about. Well, tell me more about that. Tell me more about why you’re so angry. And if you create a safe space, you can help them work through that anger so that eventually they can get to a place of acceptance. Jenn DeWall:  A place that they, you know, because we can’t, we can’t live in anger. I know that it’s helpful. It can do a lot for us in terms of giving us those, that spirit of energy, you know, to take action, but then. Marilyn Sherman:  Just like conflict. Conflict is common, and conflict is a good place to go to if you’ve got the skills to work through that conflict, but it’s definitely not a good place to live. It’s a good place to visit temporarily, but you don’t want to live there- do not pitch a tent. Jenn DeWall:  You know, why do you think it’s important to be talking about this? I know you touched, obviously, we’re going through, you know, at a global level, everyone’s impacted by the pandemic to some extent. So we all have an experience of loss, but why, why now? Why do you think it’s making this resurgence now where people are finally willing to talk about this as it relates to work? Marilyn Sherman:  What, why are they willing to talk about it now? I think because they have to. They have to talk about it because people, I mean, we are having such a major shift in our society. And in our world today, you can no longer sit back and coast because your business is going under, right? Relationships are challenged. People are dying. And there’s a certain portion of our society there that are in denial about all of that. And so you can’t talk about resolution and solution to the problems of society if people are in denial that we even have a problem. So if you’ve got people who aren’t even on the same page with what’s going on globally, then how can you possibly know how to inspire them to do their job or to lead them in a new direction? Because there is a new direction. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. Communicate in the way that they’re actually going to hear it. Right? So let’s, let’s take a deep dive into each of these five stages. So, stage one is denial. It’s not happening. This is absolutely, you know, I don’t care how much evidence there is. Marilyn Sherman:  Exactly. “It’s the flu? Why did they shut down the country? It’s just the flu. Well, your people are overreacting. I don’t need to wear a mask.” I mean, there are people in such denial. I’m using that as an example- that they become angry because no one is listening to them. And so, so if people are in denial, it’s very difficult to take that conversation to acceptance. Is Your Team in Denial? Change Management is Crucial. Jenn DeWall:  What might that bring about, if you have a workforce that’s in denial, what does that look like? Marilyn Sherman:  Well, it looks like the conversation needs to take place around what they can control, what they can’t control. So if you’ve got someone in denial, it’s like, really? Do we really have to have this in place? You have to be transparent and say, actually, by law, we cannot have the old ways of doing business. We have to, by law, number one, keep you safe. I care about you as a workforce. I care about you as a team. It’s my responsibility to keep you safe. And then very close to that is that I have to keep our customers safe. So we have to have these protocols in place. So that is out of our control. I have absolutely nothing to do with that. My job as a leader is to make sure that you and our customers are aware that these protocols are in place in order to keep us all safe. So we have to have the conversations because you can’t go back to work the way you used to go to work. I mean, I live in Las Vegas, you, they just opened up the casinos and reopened them. And so there are new protocols in place about social distancing and dealers have to wear masks. It’s optional for the customers, but there is a thermal temperature check that when you walk in your body is checked for temperatures, you know, that’s, that’s the reality. So you can be in denial that it’s just the flu, but whatever you want to call it, people are dying from it. So we have to be safe, Jenn DeWall:  Right? We have to look out for each other. Marilyn Sherman: We have to look out for each other. Jenn DeWall:  And you know, sure. Let’s put it. If people are maybe just, they don’t necessarily want to talk about COVID. You talked about change. So maybe if it’s just in the sense of, I’m trying to think of what an example would be in denial and change, maybe resisting a process. I don’t want to do this process. Marilyn Sherman:  And here’s the deal with change. I’ve been speaking about change for— gosh since I left my corporate job and back in the nineties. When you go through a change, and it could be a new product launch, that’s new. You have a new program. That’s a change. You have a new member of your team. That’s a change. You have new leadership, that’s a change. You have new working hours. That’s a change. I mean, there are so many different things that are happening that have nothing to do with the pandemic or social unrest that’s happening in our world. Just any kind of doing something different. And here’s the deal- when you don’t tell people why the change is taking place, they either make up stuff because their brain needs to have a reason why we’re doing this the way we’re doing it now. They’ll make something up, which is obviously not going to be accurate if they’re just basing it on, okay, I have to fill in the blanks, right? So if you’re not transparent, they make stuff up. Or number two, they do what you want them to do temporarily. And then they go back to the old way of doing things. Jenn DeWall:  Meaning they’ll, they’ll comply for a short period of time. Marilyn Sherman:  And then we’ll go back to the way things that used to be. So it’s imperative that we help people get through denial by letting them know facts, figures, outcomes. Just be as transparent as possible. And to say, in order for us to keep our doors open, we need to make this much money in order to make this much money. We have to have this many customers; however, we need to keep you and me safe. So we have to, by law, have these protocols in place. So this is why we have to have patients check-in and then go sit in their car. And then we text them and say, okay, your appointment is ready. You can come in. This is why we have to wear masks when we have more than five people in a room. And this is why we have to have social distancing of six feet apart. I mean, whatever the protocols are, whatever they are, let them know why. This is why we have to do what we do. Explain Why New Protocols are Needed Jenn DeWall:  It starts with the why. Marilyn Sherman:  Yes, yes. And that helps to get people on the same page. And it helps people. Well, I, my thought is good managers. Talk about the why, and then have them collaborate on, okay, what can we do to get there? Right? To get the buy-in of people, instead of just saying well, cause I went, I worked for a finance company, and we were purchased twice. During the time that I worked with this organization, and they wouldn’t tell us anything, they wouldn’t tell us anything. So then the rumor mill was like, Oh, we’re being bought. Who’s going to buy us? And because of the rumor mill, our productivity went down, and management would just say, well, we don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. We don’t know anything. And then we found out later, okay. We did know, but we couldn’t tell you because it was a public offering. Right? Well, we, the people that were not in charge of the change, would say, you know what? It would have helped us to know that there were only certain things that you could tell us, but by law, you could not tell us the who, the, what the, where, the when. But at least if you’re transparent up to the point that you can’t be transparent, then we would be more on board with it. We would understand. And you just do the best you can. Do the best you can as a leader. So what you want to avoid is stopping it at well, that’s just the way we do things around here. Well, that doesn’t really answer. Okay. Well, why do we have to do that? Jenn DeWall:  And especially right now, I think as people are, you know, being more, a little bit more curious, what’s the, what is my company going to look like in a year? Will I have a job in a year? And knowing that we naturally do have these different thoughts that we may not have had six months ago. And if you want them to be productive, it’s addressing that. They might be wondering, should I start looking for another job? And what if the answer truly is no, and you don’t want them to do that, but yet they’re left to make their own conclusions. And they jumped ship because they’re just looking at the signs and coming up with their own conclusion. Marilyn Sherman:  Right. I have a friend of mine who she, one of her top producers, she noticed there was a little bit of a shift with him, and she would check in with him and say, are you doing okay? And he’s like, yeah, it’s all good. And he just was sort of with withdrawing. And then the owner of the company was having lunch in his car, for some strange reason. I don’t know why he was having lunch in his car. But this employee went outside to take a phone call and didn’t know the owner was in the car, and he was doing a phone interview for a new job. And so that opened up a whole dialogue of, okay, we know you’re looking for another job. He’s like, yeah, I’m busted. And he goes, well, this is why I’m looking for another job. And it actually opened up the dialogue because they didn’t know, management didn’t know, the ownership didn’t know that their top producer was not happy. So they actually had a conversation about what was going on, and he ended up staying. So I don’t know why I went off on that one. But it has to do with transparency. It has to do with checking in and gauging people. Like, how are, how are you doing? What’s going on? What can we do to make it better and conversations that are probably happening around D&I, you know, diversity and inclusion? There is going to be probably a proportion of our society that would say, well, why do we have to have D&I here? Well, guess what? Because we have not been as diverse as we need to be. I mean, we, if we are blind to our hiring practices and our promotion practices, we are denying our company for the best talent out there because we’re making assumptions based on race. Jenn DeWall:  Right. We need to start to have the conversation. Diversity and Inclusion Marilyn Sherman:  We need to start to have those conversations. So let’s say you’re a manager or a leader and you, you are, you bring up the topic of D&I and all of a sudden you see some resistance. Well, guess what? There are going to be those people who don’t understand, so they’re in denial, or then they start to push back, and they get angry, and they say things like, Oh great, we have affirmative action. And they say it with a negative, like, that’s not fair. That’s reverse discrimination. And it’s like, Oh my gosh, okay, let’s have a conversation about this. So there’s, well, if we only did this, then we wouldn’t have that, right. So they’re in that bargaining stage. And so the conversations need to happen because people are so raw right now. It’s triggering people in the conversations into opinions, into being– I’m seeing, I don’t know if you see this, but I see just a divisive state out there. And some people are jumping in with both feet into the conversation and offering solutions, and other people are just being silent. And now people are getting upset that they remained silent for so long and they’re having backlash on being silent. So we just collectively need to take a deep breath and open up conversations. Jenn DeWall:  We need to start, right? Like the topic this month is all about, you know, we’re covering on our podcast is all about resilience. And like one of the ways that we create a more resilient workforce is by having a dialogue, you can’t pretend that people don’t have lives outside of work or feelings outside of work that doesn’t come in with them. And we also need to understand, you know, some people are listening and maybe perceiving this as more political, it’s not, it’s about signaling to your team that they have a safe place to work, right? Like, and that’s, we all need that. We need to know that when we’re walking into the office every single day that we feel psychologically safe, heard and that we’re free not to be discriminated against. Marilyn Sherman:  And psychologically safe means that I have a right to speak up. I have a right to be heard. I have a right to know that I’m not going to be judged for having a feeling. But it also means you need to contribute as an individual. You need to contribute to that safe environment. Like you need to make it safe for other people psychologically. Right. So that doesn’t mean you can scream and yell because you’re so angry about having to do something new. So, you know, when we talk about resilience and bouncing back, it takes a lot of perseverance. It takes a lot of thinking about, okay, where am I what do I need to do to move forward? Here’s the thing- when we are, I was on a Zoom call, recently, two days ago, let’s be clear. It was very recently with my association, my speaker association, to talk about what’s going on with race and what we can do to be more inclusive. And, and it was very eye-opening because we talked about, well, what can we do? Because there has been a disparity in what white people make onstage versus non-white people making onstage. And if you look at a panel of experts and they’re all white men, there’s a problem. So we just had a dialogue about what, what our black brothers and sisters in the industry have gone through that we as non-black or other, we weren’t aware of. So we talked about what we can do to be more supportive and inclusive and to invite some of these highly experienced, intelligent, smart, and talented black speakers to join our podcast, to join our team, to come to speak on this panel. And, and just because we were unaware of their expertise and unaware of what they even speak on. It would be hard to- because it typically in my industry, in the speaking industry, we refer our friends. And if our friends are predominantly one color, then we’re missing out on putting the right speaker on the right stage, in front of the right people to make it a fit to make it make sense. But if we’re not aware of what people that aren’t like us and are outside of our immediate circle of friends, there’s a problem. So we talked about solutions. And one of the solutions that I thought of that I contributed to is you can’t be curious and defensive at the same time. So if we are having conversations, like, I don’t know your culture, that’s not my culture. I am curious why fill in the blank. And that could go with any culture, any anybody other than who you are like, help me, help me understand. I mean, I have one of my best friends she’s Mormon, and I’ve never been to a Mormon temple before. And when I said that to her, she later came back and said she was offended because it sounded like, well, I never been in a Mormon church before, like I was judging it. And so I need to be more curious without judgment. And if I’m curious to get to know you to get to know your culture, to get to know your experience, to get to know your expertise. I can’t sit back, sit back and judge. I can’t be defensive. It’s like, well, that’s not right. It’s like, well, then that, you’re not really big curious, you’re being judgy. So the solution, because I really want to make sure that as leaders, we move the conversation towards a solution, the solution is to start with being curious, Jenn DeWall:  Have the conversation, and be curious. You know, we know that people are going through a variety of emotions in the five stages of loss. And we know that there’s going to be a lot of changes that need to happen in organizations to make sure they’re creating a safe space, can find those solutions forward. Let’s, let’s dive into number two. Because we, so the first step or first stage of loss, Marilyn Sherman:  Well, we covered a lot, Dealing with Anger at Work Jenn DeWall:  I mean, I guess even thinking about anger, like how maybe we won’t go through them in a succinct order, but knowing that anger is the second one, what do you think is the solution to help people release the anger and maybe shift into solutions? Anger absolutely has validity, but yet how do we, how do we as leaders help people? I know we have to start the conversation, but give me some tips and techniques of how to, how to either be with someone that might be in anger, how to help them move out of anger if it’s something that’s causing them harm. Marilyn Sherman:  Well, let’s start at the top. And that would be the person that you see when you look in the mirror. To recognize that anger is okay. To recognize behavior that is often attached to anger may not be okay. So here’s what a tip that I like to use when I’m really angry. I call it out. I don’t suppress it and say, I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m fine. You know? Because that just makes it worse. And then you go home, and you kick the dog. So so look at the mirror and acknowledge that anger is okay. And to admit I’m really angry, but then take it one step further. And I love this tip. Give yourself a time limit. I’m going to be so angry for the next 15 minutes, and I’m going to sit in it. I’m going to stew in it, and I’m going to complain about it. I’m going to whine about it to myself in a safe space. And maybe even vent to someone like having an anger buddy and having an anger buddy is another very valid technique. And I’ll explain what that is in a second. But here’s what happens psychologically. When you put a time limit on your anger, you are reminded that you are in control of your anger. You may not feel like it because you’re so angry that you’re shaking and your voice is quivering and your, your eyes are watering, and you just want to scream, or you want to hit something, or you want to throw something. Well, guess what? Your anger is a result of your thoughts, and your thoughts are in your own control. So if you know that there are certain things I can control in this world and there are certain things I cannot control, then I’m going to not invest a lot of my time and energy on those things I cannot control. That’s just like the  E – Energy for the S.E.A.T.  of success. That E stands for energy. You have a limited amount of energy. Do not waste it on that, which you cannot control. So if you say out loud to yourself, I’m going to be so angry for the next 15 minutes. Well, great. Then you don’t take calls. You don’t take visitors; you lock your door, do we have to do. And then you realize, wow, it’s, it’s already been 10 minutes, and I’m not even feeling angry any more because you named it. You claimed it, and you reminded yourself that you’re in control over it. So that’s the first tip. The second tip- Jenn DeWall:  Name it to Claim It. Marilyn Sherman:  Name it, claim it, and then you can let it go because you’re in control. And don’t ever say, you make me so mad. You make me so angry because, well, just in that language, you’re giving away your control and your power to someone else. Jenn DeWall:  You know, just to add on that. I think we both want to be sensitive, but I feel like I have to say it out loud. Like, hey, different challenges, obstacles issues will require different amounts of a certain energy. But I think what’s what you’re saying is it’s most important for you to be intentional. You know, is this anger serving me? If it’s not, give it a time limit. Is this doing that? Because what you’re not saying is to just run through something,  I know you’re not, but I just want to be clear on that. Like, you’re not saying to run through it and just quickly put a 15 minute, but you are saying to be aware, Marilyn Sherman:  Be aware of it because there are society is very angry right now, right? So you want to create a safe space for them to talk about that anger and to vent that anger. So that you can, I mean, have you ever done that? Have you ever yelled and screamed and just like, you know, or worked out really, really hard when you were angry. And then all of a sudden you’re like, man, it felt good to get that off my chest. We need to create a safe space for people to get stuff off their chest, to get that anger out without judgment, without retaliation, without fighting. We just need to allow them an understanding of where that anger is coming from. And you can get to an understanding of where their anger is coming from if you are sincerely curious as to why they’re so angry, and you can’t be curious and defensive at the same time. So you can’t interrupt them, and you can’t say, well, you shouldn’t be angry. Or it’s like, Oh no, that happened years and years ago. Why are you talking about it now? It’s like, okay. You’re not really curious then. So the other thing I mentioned— and I’m not saying to anger is only in the last 15 minutes— I’m just saying, check yourself. So that when you go into these conversations with empathy for other people who are going through the stage of anger, you’re not going to be set off. So the more calm you are, the easier it is for you to say to someone, wow, I hear you. I see you. I see you’re super angry right now. What what’s going on? Where’s this coming from? Well, how’d you come to that conclusion? Where did that come from? And allow them to talk, allow them to vent. And if they say, I feel like screaming right now, you say, okay, let me shut the door, go and scream and know that it’s, they’re just venting. Now you want to move them towards a solution. You want to move them once they’ve vented because you can’t be solution-driven when they’re in the height of their anger. Because they’re not going to hear it. So they need to vent in order for you to say, okay, what’s the best-case scenario? What what’s our part in that? What can we do to fix this? I hear you. I see you. What can we do in our part where we have fallen short, what can we do to fix it? What are your suggestions? What are your thoughts? What do you think about how we would implement that? Let’s have a discussion. Who else can we get on board to support this idea? The second thing I mentioned was having an “anger buddy.” Get an “Anger Buddy” Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. I want to know about this one. I want an anger buddy. Because I absolutely lived in anger last week, that was the stage I was in. Marilyn Sherman:  People have been taught basic communication skills, but they’ve never been taught how to communicate when you’re really angry. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. I feel like we’ve been taught that. I guess what I was taught is I was supposed to suppress my emotions. I’m supposed to not be angry. Marilyn Sherman:  Why are you angry? Calm Down! You’re scary. You know? Because that’s what I learned on the call the other night is that the men were saying, I don’t want to, you know, I’ve been taught to suppress my anger because I don’t want to be seen as the “angry black man” or the woman would say I’ve been taught to go along with the flow because I don’t want to be seen as an “angry black woman” because people react differently when they, Oh, here comes an angry black woman or angry black man. When in fact, anger is okay, it’s okay, how you express it. It’s not okay if there’s a peaceful protest and you take your car, and you run down the middle of a crowd, that’s not okay to express your anger in that way. You see a box of rocks, even though they were intentionally put there by people who infiltrated the passive, you know, the peaceful protest. It’s not okay for you to join in on that instigation and pick up rocks and start throwing them. That’s not okay. So an anger buddy is someone who knows the rules. When you are in a place where you need to vent, you call your anger buddy on the phone; you text them, you bring them in your office, you meet them outside, you do something to have a one-on-one. I need my anger buddy. And as long as they know the rules, then it’s great. And here are the rules. They need- an anger buddy is someone that you trust- because when you’re angry, you say really stupid things sometimes. Right? Have you said something really stupid in anger? Jenn DeWall:  Absolutely. Marilyn Sherman:  Because you suppressed it for so long, all of a sudden it’s like, and another thing, which is so not appropriate, but if you’re doing it in a safe environment with an anger buddy, you know that it’s okay that you can say whatever you want because you’re just venting. So the anger buddy doesn’t judge, and they’re not going to record it. They’re not going to judge you in any way. In fact, the rule is you have the right to vent, and then all the anger buddy has to do- you don’t even have to say anything just once in a while ago, “No!” And then the person would be like, yes, yes. And then this happened, and this happened. “Oh, No!” And then I really wanted to…” Oh, No!!” See what you’re doing is you’re allowing them to just vent. Because if you tell someone if you cut someone off and say, “Oh no, stop, stop, stop, stop. Oh my gosh, calm down.” You’re denying that person of having the feeling that’s been pent up inside of them. Jenn DeWall:  Gosh, I feel like that’s also the conversation that I have with my husband. Like when I’m frustrated, he loves to solution because he doesn’t want to see me upset. I’m like, I don’t want the solution right now. Like I’m frustrated. I want to vent. I want to get it off my chest. I want to feel all the feelings. Please don’t solution this because I’m not ready for that yet. Marilyn Sherman:  Okay. So picture this picture. You have a glass that’s empty, right? It’s completely empty. This is you when you’re calm; everything’s going great. And everything’s just fine. Everything’s in check. But then something happens in your day and let’s say you have a bottle of water. This represents the water in this bottle, represents all the little things that annoy you that eventually make you really angry. So someone cuts you off in traffic that goes into this glass. Its glass is not empty anymore. And then you get to work, and then you find out you have to instigate a brand new protocol that you weren’t planning on, and you have to do it. And then you’re really angry because no one told you you had to do it. So that goes into this, this glass of water, which is filling up now. And then someone got credit for a project that it was 99% of your doing and someone else swooped in at the end and got all the credit for it. And you’re so mad, but you have no one to talk to about it because you’re afraid you don’t want to be an angry person. So that goes into your, so picture this, this water bottle is filling up this glass that used to be empty. It’s now full of water. It’s full of all that anger, frustration, anxiety, and stress, and overwhelm. And then you go home to your loving husband, right? And for our listeners, it’s to your partner or to a roommate or to your spouse. And they say, how was your day? And they can look at you and see that you are fuming and you say, Oh my gosh, it all started first thing this morning, can you believe it? And the people that love you and your life, they want to jump to solution and resolution. They want to jump to the acceptance stage, right? And talk about solution resolution. So they take their bottle of different water, which their bottle is filled with solution resolution. And they poured into your glass. That’s full of water of anxiety and stress and frustration, anger. So, where are all those solutions going? So picture pouring a bottle of water over a glass. That’s already filled with water. They’re not going in. You’re like, what are you talking about? It’s like, honey, you don’t need to be upset about that. And it just gets worse. Right. And then you’re like, you know, listen to me. So an anger buddy could be your spouse. So here’s what you do you say to them? I need my anger buddy version of my spouse right now. I’m like, okay, cool. And so I got cut off. I went to work; I had to do this. My plate is full, and I just want to yell at my boss. And I just want to scream at the top of my lungs in front of my customers. And because they didn’t have judgment and they didn’t interrupt you, and they didn’t give you solutions, you were able to just get it all out. So you were pouring all that out. So now you’re back to that actually feel pretty good. Now you have this empty vessel. And then the second rule of anger buddy, is you have to ask before you act. You have to ask, okay, are you open to solutions? And the reason why they have to ask you if you’re open to their solutions is because the answer may be what? Jenn DeWall:  Absolutely not. I do not want to hear that. I know what I’m supposed to be, but that’s not where I’m at. Marilyn Sherman:  Yes. High Five on that! Because guess what they want to be. They want to be the— I like to say my husband likes to be the knight in shining armor. He loves to have a solution. He loves it. He’s so removed from it. And so logical, he can just give a solution. Hello. Do you not know that I’ve already thought about that? I know the solutions, but I needed to vent. And so I’m always telling my husband timing and tone, babe, timing and tone. Because if I’m in the middle of being really angry and you interrupt that and just give me a solution, your timing is way off. And your tone is not one of being a listener and an empathetic empathic person, listening to me and understanding that I’ve had a day, then your tone is off. So get an anger buddy. It could be your spouse could be your best friend could be a coworker. Doesn’t matter. Just tell them what the rules are. There’s no judgment. This is safe. No recording, no interrupting, and no offering me solutions. I just need someone to sit there. And just every once in a while, just look at me and say, “oh no!” Jenn DeWall:  Oh yeah, I love that. I love having an anger buddy. Like the only thing that I think I’ve ever done is probably, you know, knowing that my background is within coaching and let’s say a girlfriend calls and she’s like, I’ve had a day and here’s, what’s going on. I’ll ask, like, do you want a coach response? Or do you want a friend response? Which one do you want? Or do you want no response? So, you know, just asking people what is going to be the preferred thing because it looks a lot different when you start solutioning stuff that you’re not ready to solution. Marilyn Sherman:  Because not only are they not ready to hear solutions, but now they’re you’re adding more to their glass because now they’ve got resentment and anger for you for not listening to them in the first place. So you’re actually more of a problem than you are the solution. Have the Uncomfortable Conversations Jenn DeWall:  Good point. And you know, I just want to wrap it up because I know that we’re coming close to our end of time, but we talked about the five stages of loss just to really help you understand that you can no longer as a leader, ignore the emotions that are happening. You have to talk about it. You have to talk about the stuff that might even make you a little bit uncomfortable because maybe you don’t have that experience and navigating that conversation. But now is the time where you need to alleviate fears or anxiety or things like that. Marilyn Sherman:  There are, these are awkward conversations, and it’s okay to say, this is an awkward conversation. I am feeling awkward right now, but from my heart, I need to talk about this. It’s okay to say you’re feeling awkward. It’s okay to call the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room. Guess what folks we got, we got an issue. We got a problem. Jenn DeWall:  We’re all thinking about it anyways. It’s just that, you know, I think we’re so reluctant and I, whether this is a cultural or organizational specific I think it is interesting how we’ve and I would say for myself, we’ve developed kind of a knack for not wanting to feel like you’re ruffling feathers or making waves, but there are some points where we really got to do that. Maybe we’ve got to reframe what that even is. It’s not necessarily making waves so much as it’s making it safe or making someone hurt. Marilyn Sherman:  Yeah. And just to sort of put a tie on the other ones that we didn’t get a chance to go on a deeper dive, like with bargaining people are really just trying to make sense of stuff. And sometimes things just don’t make sense. So if we start saying, well, if we only knew about Coronavirus in January, then we wouldn’t be in this position. You just have some understanding that they’re just trying to figure things out. Like, why are we in the position that we’re in? Why do we have to do the things that we’re doing and just answer what you can and then just say, you know what? That ultimately there’s nothing we can do about when we knew what we knew and how we responded to it. There’s nothing we can do about it. All you can do is focus on moving forward so that, so you acknowledge, you understand you let them talk, you let them ask the questions you have, let them ask the unanswerable questions, and then eventually say, you know what? I can’t even answer that question. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Owning that. Saying, Hey, I can’t, I can’t answer everything instead of just skirting it and saying, I wish I had the answer or I have enough information, you know, there are so many ways you can answer it. Marilyn Sherman:  And I don’t want to leave this podcast without saying that depression is a real, real thing. And so if people are depressed to the point where a conversation with a boss or a friend or an anger buddy, and you’re still feeling it, and it could very well be a definite chemical imbalance within that person’s brain or body, right? So please get professional help. I am not a professional counselor. I’ve just been studying leadership and motivation, inspiration, but I am not. And I used to be a suicide prevention counselor. So this is near and dear to my heart. But please, if you have any kind of thoughts of hurting oneself or someone else get professional help and do it sooner rather than later, Jenn DeWall:  And understand that it’s totally normal for someone to be showing up depressed right now, there’s a lot of mourning going on. Gosh, I miss, you know, a lot of the things that. Marilyn Sherman:  They’re mourning the loss of their routine; they’re mourning the loss of their coworkers. They’re mourning the loss of being in an office. They’re mourning the loss of a morning commute. I mean, when I went to the airport this morning, my husband’s like, Oh my gosh, I’ve never been so happy to see traffic. It’s like, how did that come out of your mouth? Like, you know, because it means that we’re getting to a new future, right? We’re coming back to work. So, depression is a real, real thing. So get help. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to get help. And even helpers need help. Because they’re very, you know, levelheaded people who are not normally depressed and they’re going through anxiety that they’ve never had before. And it looks like depression, and they can’t get up, and they don’t have the energy ask for help, get help, talk about what you’re going through. Jenn DeWall:  And if you can’t, I feel like there are many providers that offer employee assistance programs. That people can connect with a therapist or a counselor or just someone to talk to. So you know, that depression doesn’t take them down a different course or, you know, they can just get help, and everyone needs help. I feel like everyone needs a coach, or they need a therapist. Like we all need to talk about our stuff. Marilyn Sherman:  And you talk about new protocols in place for safety. Don’t forget the protocols in place for emotional safety. And people feel safe at work to talk about being down or talk about being angry. This is a safe space for them to do that. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. I’ve loved our conversation. I think it’s good to go there. I think this is probably one of our few podcasts where we might have ruffled some feathers, right? We might have talked about some things that people don’t necessarily talk about in leadership. And I don’t think it’s for lack of awareness that it exists. I think it’s because of the awkwardness of the conversation or not knowing where to start or, you know, a lot of other variables, but it’s obviously a very, very important conversation. You Can’t be Curious and Defensive at the Same Time Marilyn Sherman:  And don’t forget people. They have one persona when they show up for work; you don’t know what they’re going through with their family. You know you go, I mean, just think of a Thanksgiving dinner where all of a sudden you haven’t seen your uncle Joe in a while. And he’s got very, very definitive opinions about things. People come from families that aren’t safe to talk about stuff, and they have very differing opinions. And so they’ve never been taught that to be curious of someone who doesn’t look like you and to have a conversation. Wow. Tell me more about that. Tell me what it was like growing up like that. Tell me what it was like working in an environment where you were the only one that looked like you. I have no idea what that feels like or what that looks like. So I’m curious, how did that feel, and how did you react, and what was the response? And remember, you can’t be curious and defensive at the same time. Jenn DeWall:  I think that’s a great ending point. Marilyn, thank you so much for joining us and our listeners. I hope you enjoy and stay tuned in the, in the closing to hear how you can connect with Marilyn. Marilyn Sherman:  Thanks, Jenn. Jenn DeWall:   Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the leadership habit podcast, featuring Marilyn Sherman. I know that we’re all going through a tremendous amount of change, and I hope that through Marilyn’s insight, you’ve gained some valuable tools or perspectives on how you can approach change in your organization. If you like today’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, please share it with your friends or go to your podcast streaming platform and leave us a review. Stay tuned for next week when we discuss how to be a more resilient leader.   The post Episode 32: Leading in the New Normal – How the Five Stages of Grief Affect the Workplace with Marilyn Sherman, Founder of Front Row Leadership appeared first on Crestcom International.

Conscious Leadership with Kaley Warner Klemp In this episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, Jenn DeWall interviews Kaley Warner Klemp, who is a highly sought after speaker, certified Young President’s Organization (YPO) Forum Facilitator, and transformational executive coach. Kaley advises senior executives on how to uncover and address core challenges, provides them with proven tools and methods to reach new heights, and uses her years of experience to guide leaders towards achieving their goals. Additionally, Kaley uses conscious leadership practices to help high-performing teams create a culture of authenticity and deliver superior results. Join host Jenn DeWall as she discusses Kaley’s book, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall here, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, I am so excited to interview Kaley Klemp. Now you heard her bio, but I want you to hear it from her first. Kaley, will you tell our listeners just a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what makes you kind of the expert of the leadership space, and what do you love about leadership? I just asked you 20 questions. I’m sorry. Kaley Warner Klemp: Well, let’s see if I can take them a couple at a time, Jenn, thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here a little bit about me. So as you heard, I spend my time with leaders in companies and the Young President’s organization. I’ve loved different leadership tools, whether commitments of conscious leadership or the Enneagram. Really what I love about this work is helping people get that aha. That lets them be their best self more of the time. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, the aha moment. I mean, and I love that you also work with leadership at all levels, too. So you see the different challenges that people face, the probably the obstacles, or maybe even the areas that you can have later on in your career that you didn’t realize. Leaders are Lifelong Learners Kaley Warner Klemp: I think that’s so true that the most effective leaders at the highest level. So I have the privilege of working with lots of CEOs and presidents. They are lifelong learners. I have yet to meet a leader that sort of checks the box and is like, you know what? I’ve learned everything there is to know. They’re really the people who I am most inspired by are the ones that keep learning and keep growing. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. And that’s, I mean, lifelong learners, I think that’s funny. So it’s when we think about people that are in those successful positions. Yeah. So you don’t, when I teach leadership classes, I’ve never like, you don’t see the people in leadership classes that are kind of being a little bit lazy in their development. You see the people that actually want to do it, which is awesome. Kaley Warner Klemp: Absolutely. Absolutely. Self-Awareness is Key to Conscious Leadership Jenn DeWall: So I know one of the things that is your specialty and, or not necessarily your specialty, but one of the tools you use are Enneagram tests. That is a new word for a lot of people. Could you just tell us what that means? What is the Enneagram? Instagram? No, I’m kidding. Kaley Warner Klemp: Any of them just means a system of nine. And really what that’s about- a personality system kind of like Myers-Briggs or the PI or the Birkman. But what I love about the Enneagram is that it’s all about why. Why are you doing what you’re doing? It’s a ton about that motivation behind the action. And so, whereas some systems will give you just a behavior set of characteristics. And at least to me, it sort of felt like, sorry, good luck with that. You’re done. The Enneagram really gives you a path. So it gives you some of your home base characteristics. So for me, I’m motivated by goodness and really wanting to be good in every domain in my life. And so that will show up like principles that will show up like responsibility. But it also helps me flag all the ways that amazing principal will go sideways and then get me in trouble. So then I start to catch myself being perfectionistic, right. I catch myself being really attached to needing to be right. I always want to go, okay, I know this movie I’ve seen this before. And what I love about the Enneagram is it doesn’t just stop there. It says, okay, well is what you’re striving for happening? Are you getting that deeper desire? And when you’re not, it’s a great opportunity to pause, take a deep breath, shift, and see if you can find a more effective way. Jenn DeWall: So you see people use it just to think about, you know, the differentiator between a standard behavioral or personality test is that they can really understand maybe at a deeper level, their inner desires of what they want and how they may be, I guess, achieve gratification or happiness and so on and so forth. Kaley Warner Klemp: Totally. And so then it operates on a couple of different levels. I always say, start with yourself. So you want to type yourself first, get really clear on sort of what are your motives, but what it also facilitates is empathy. That when I know why you’re doing what you’re doing, behaviors that to me might look completely baffling or, in some ways, actually counterproductive. I can take a step back and go wait a second. Okay. Jenn is not doing that to irritate me. Jenn is not doing that to try to control me. She has a positive motive. Let me see if I can find that. And that creates a bridge between the two of us, both in understanding who you are, why you’re doing that. And then it creates more possibilities for effective communication. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. I love that so much because it’s true. Like when we don’t understand the motive of someone else, we have a tendency to go to that dark place of personalizing it. And assuming that, you know, there might be ill intent or maybe they’re making assumptions against us, but really it’s just about practicing curiosity with understanding how someone else shows up. Kaley Warner Klemp: I love that you brought those together. Because it really is. It’s about curiosity. It’s about being willing to drop my own story. It’s about assuming positive intent, but not in like a LA LA land sort of, oh, I just assume that everything you do is positive, but being able to stretch and find something that is real that’s in there. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. So do you do this with teams then too? Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes. So I use the Enneagram actually kind of everywhere in my life. So I started with me. I actually wrote a blog post about this, that I got completely hooked by the Enneagram because gosh, about ten years ago now a little longer, 12 years ago, I would argue that Enneagram saved my marriage. So I use it with individuals, I use it with couples. My husband and I actually just finished. We turned it in on Friday, a new manuscript. So we’re writing a new book, the 80/80 marriage. So it’s not necessarily built on the Enneagram, but a lot of those principles of curiosity and generosity show up there. But then I use it with one on one coaching, helping executives really understand themselves their leadership style and then absolutely with teams. How do you work together? Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. That’s awesome. Thank you so much for walking through Enneagrams because I think it’s something we see more and more of, and it just sounds so valuable to be able to not only understand yourself, to be patient with yourself or practice curiosity with yourself, but to also think about how you can come together as a more cohesive team that respects and maybe treasures each other’s differences. Kaley Warner Klemp: Absolutely. Yeah. All the emphasis on how diversity is actually an asset. It’s a diversity of a different kind, which is a diversity of personality types. It just, it can really help teams really differentiate themselves and be even better. The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership Jenn DeWall: Heck yes! So I wanted you to be on the podcast. You’re an author as well, and you have written a few different books, but one of the books that we’re going to be talking about is the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, which you co-wrote. But we want to talk about what that looks like. What are the 15 commitments of conscious leadership? We’re not going to be able to talk about all of them, but I know we’re going to talk about a few, and I’m super excited. What inspired you to want to write a book about conscious leadership? Kaley Warner Klemp: So that is a great question. Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman and I— so my two coauthors and I— we were looking at all the different experiences that we had with various individuals and teams and had been trained in lots of different systems and modules, and really thought if we could bring these different tools together in one cohesive way, it had the ability to help leaders individually and their organizations transform. And really the inspiration was that we didn’t think that the models we saw of leadership that had existed to that point were sustainable. And we thought if people were able to bring these new tools forward of conscious leadership, we could start to transform how our corporate systems work. And even in shelter-in-place, we spend a lot of time at work. So if that dimension of our lives can be enhanced, it seems like a really valuable thing to do. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, absolutely. Well, and getting people to— I think you touched on it earlier with empathy and the Enneagram- but just being aware that by stopping or slowing down to speed up, being more intentional, you can create a lot stronger results, a lot more dynamic and cohesive team that there’s so much there with just being conscious and not just feeling like, you know, that you’re reacting to everything. I love it. I love it. Just the whole notion of it. Because I think there’s not a lot of people, I think traditional leadership, you might’ve seen more of the wall do as I say, because I say so, or like you’re going to bend to my approach, whereas that’s we know that that’s not the number one way, like you’re not going to motivate and empower people just by telling them what to do and demanding authority or power. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you touched on something really valuable, which is this notion of self-awareness and presence. That if you can pause and come back to the present moment, getting grounded and really responding rather than reacting. So many more choices become available, and a lot more energy also gets freed up because it’s not being drained by drama or gossip or integrity breaches. And so you’re really available to engage in the purposeful work and exchanges and collaborations that are possible. Jenn DeWall: I guess I love talking about energy. Like that is such a big thing, knowing that some of these, the challenges that we have in the workplace, whether it’s the stressors of, you know, conflict on a team or a product echoing the right way or a process going sideways, that we know that how we show up, how we respond to those things will have a level on our ability to invest our energy into our work, invest our energy into our family, to invest just and be present in our own lives. Yes, Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes, absolutely. I think, you know, every moment that I spend rehearsing an argument is a moment that I don’t have available for things that are really meaningful in my life. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. I get, I like to think of it as working from home. Like you’re working unpaid from home when you’re thinking about all that stuff in your brain, you’re just being, yeah, you’re working off the clock, and you’re going through something, and you’re not likely yielding any type of return on investment for yourself. Kaley Warner Klemp: It’s so fascinating that you say that because I think there was actually a study done where people measured the time that they were actually working versus the perceived amount of time that they thought they were working. And there was a huge discrepancy between the amount of time people thought that they were working and what they realized was all of that was the time that they were rehearsing things, that they were replaying conversations. If they were upset about something that they hadn’t cleared directly or been candid about, all of that was really just lost time. Taking Radical Responsibility Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. Yes. Okay. So let’s talk about how, how can we plug-in? How can we essentially get some of that time back? We talked about a few of the 15 commitments, but the first one we wanted to talk about is one of the commitments is taking radical responsibility. What does that mean? What does it mean to take radical responsibility? I like the word radical there. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. Well, so it isn’t just responsibility. It’s radical responsibility because it’s this notion of a hundred percent responsibility. And when you do that, it’s really taking responsibility for everything that shows up in your life. I’m getting curious about how you’re creating your own life experience. Really the counter commitment here is any time that you spend in the role of victim; life is happening to me, villain, where there’s blame. And I like to be really clear that blame can go out. Like, why did you do that? What’s wrong with you, but it can also go in and that form of an inner critic, I can’t say that what’s wrong with you, but that energy gets drained to you or the hero where I’m taking on more responsibility than belongs to me in an effort to create temporary relief. And so this notion of “radical” is really saying what belongs to me and how can I claim that fully energetically through my time, through my actions, through my thought processes. Jenn DeWall: Ah, so we’re talking boundaries too. We’re talking about like with what you’re saying with being the hero of some of that. And I know there’s someone listening that absolutely likes to quiet their anxiety by volunteering or taking on more responsibility, even though they don’t have the capacity. So taking radical responsibility means owning your circumstance. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes. And I love what you’re saying around boundaries. Because it’s owning that choice. But I think one of the primary things that distinguish being above versus below the line is the ability to choose and being able to say, gosh, even though at the moment, the easier answer would be to say yes to this request. I actually don’t have a yes to it. And so I’m going to step into my courage and say, that doesn’t work for me. I’m going to make a clean agreement. I’m going to say, no, I’m going to empower someone else. I’m going to say it’s not a priority. And that keeps me both in integrity with myself, with you. And it keeps me from stepping into that hero where I go, Oh, I’m going to take on more than I can handle because at least in my experience, I don’t know about you Jenn, but it in my experience, people don’t last as heroes very long. That pretty quickly, there’s a slide back into victimhood, and it’s sort of that martyr slide. It was just so hard to be doing four people’s work right now, where that’s actually a victim stance. It started “hero.” I can take that on. I can take that on, but it wasn’t sustainable. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. It’s not, Oh my gosh. There’s, there’s no way just the stressors. And even right now where everyone is or not everyone, but a lot of our listeners are working from home, which you had touched on that in the beginning. We know that people are overworking right now because they are working from home. And so you might be doing the job of four people, but then all of a sudden you’re taking on more and, Oh, that’s just from a mental health perspective or from a productivity perspective, from everything. It’s just not good news Kaley Warner Klemp: Completely. I think you touched on this a little bit with the boundaries, but especially in this work from home environment, a lot of what I’m seeing with leaders is that the line between work and home got really, really blurry because it literally got blurry where is work and where is home? And so depending on how much anxiety people are feeling, they’re stepping into that self-soothing in different ways. And interestingly, work can be a form of self-soothing that if I don’t want to feel how hard something is or how scary something is or how sad something is, I can just go to work and society might give me a temporary thumbs up. But the cost energetically to my relationships, to my resiliency, is actually quite high. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. And I think it’s so easy to do that right now, just to throw yourself into your work, without realizing that the avoidance maybe is just going to be something that hurts you in the long run. I know that’s one of my things, cause I, you know, if you think about the people, if you’re an achiever or I wonder what I would be in an Enneagram perspective, but like knowing that your an “achiever,” that if I, if things aren’t going right and maybe the personal side, then I can go into my work and at least I can control that. Kaley Warner Klemp: Absolutely. Absolutely. We’re blending our modules, but that’s exactly right. So Enneagram type three is the achiever, and threes love metrics. I’d love to know that I’m successful. And when I put out a podcast, when I get accolades, when it’s, when a client engagement, those are pretty easy to measure. Whereas in our personal lives, it’s much harder to get those accolades. It’s harder to get that metric of success. I have an eight-year-old, and it’s not very often she’s like, mom, you just crushed homeschool today. Jenn DeWall: Like that. Yeah. That’s cool. You bring up an, Oh my gosh. I feel like we can go in 20 different ways because I like that you bring up like the need for self-validation, that it’s something that we don’t do as often as we should. We might be a little bit too, I would say dependent on that external validation, wanting those accolades from someone else, but not realizing that we have to provide it ourselves. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. And you’re, actually, you’re touching into one of the commitments, which is around sort of sourcing my own security approval and control. And this notion of sourcing my own approval is a really powerful shift away from looking for all of my accolades and approval outside myself and then really being at the effect of other people’s perception of me. Now, this is not to say, go be a jerk in your life, but instead, when I find that that grounding sense of I’m okay. Internally, rather than hunting for it and behaving for it and putting myself out for it always. Feeling all the Feelings Jenn DeWall: The answers are always within. So taking radical responsibility, that’s one of the commitments. So looking at where you are today, figuring out what you can take ownership of and leveraging your power of choice, another commitment, and I love, love, love, love this, this concept, feeling all the feelings. That’s another commitment, which I think is so important because we are, we just have a tendency to pretend that emotions don’t exist at work, which always just cracks me up. What is feeling all the feelings? Kaley Warner Klemp: Feeling all the feelings I think is to your point, it’s acknowledging how much wisdom is in our feelings. And there’s actually quite a bit of research. Now that’s showing that we feel first, so often we’ll go looking for an explanation, but we feel first, and there is wisdom there. Often our feelings are even faster than our cognitive minds. And so tapping into what is the insight or what is the wisdom in anger as a, for instance, is it a boundary? Is it a no? And so being present to that allows you to set a boundary or to hold your “no” or sadness. As a for instance, gives us the wisdom that there’s something to be, let go of. And in this particular circumstance, I’ve been quite attuned and naming the sadness with a lot of my clients around not just loss of life, but also loss of dreams, that loss of perception of the way things were loss of control. Kaley Warner Klemp: That there’s a lot of grief around. Wow, I need to let go of that. It isn’t here anymore. And with all the feelings. So we talk about anger. We talked about sadness, fear, joy, creativity that, in those feelings, there is insight. There is wisdom; there is power. And when you are able to match them. To match your expression with your experience, but they move through and stay that powerful ally of insight, of wisdom, of really being alive, too life and yourself and having that full range because occasionally people are like, I want to feel all the good feelings, but I don’t want to feel any of the bad feelings—two things for me around that. First is there’s only sort of one channel of feelings and they all run on the same channel. So there’s, there’s no such thing as I felt my full spectrum of joy, but no sadness for me. Beyond that, I actually, I don’t think any of the feelings are bad. Kaley Warner Klemp: All of the feelings are huge allies in life that if I never felt fear, I couldn’t be as awake as attuned. I wouldn’t have that insight around when do I want to bring all of my presence? And I sort of bring my “A” game that my fear is really helpful in being attuned to that. However, there’s a way that all of our feelings can also, especially if we repress or deny them or we start to recycle them, they lose some of that power that instead I could tell you a whole story, right? Feed my emotion with a story. And now it’s lost its power and become drama instead. I’m just going to complain. I’m going to righteously blame. You can actually hear how it takes us down a path that no longer is it of an ally for choice, but instead, it’s sort of a sinkhole I get lost in. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I love that. You talk about it as wisdom, because I think, you know, the initial experience with emotions is we go into maybe shaming or judging ourselves to say, Oh my gosh, I can’t believe that you got so upset by that meeting. Or I can’t believe that maybe you, God forbid cried, you know, or just had some type of emotion. But instead of looking at it as something that’s bad or pretending that we only experience joy here at ABC company, look at it as there, like there’s some wisdom to be learned here. How do, how do you get, especially those people that are operating maybe so quickly or in such a busy stress-induced work environment, how do you get them? Or what advice do you give your clients to help them check in to be like, Hey, what’s the wisdom in this? Practicing Conscious Leadership Kaley Warner Klemp: So I think a couple of things are allies. One is the pause, even just one or two deep breaths. And that’s not only to access the wisdom of emotion that’s to access the wisdom of your full brain, that our brains run on oxygen. And if I’m moving so quickly that I really am not even breathing, it’s unlikely that I am my wisest self. So a deep breath for sure. And then I think there’s also the body that sometimes our bodies wake us up to our feelings before our minds are even ready to admit it. So if all of a sudden you’re noticing huge tension in your shoulders, or if you’ve got butterflies in your stomach or you notice that your throat is constricting, that’s a time to pause and to check in and to get curious about what’s going on here. You know, emotion is sometimes just energy in motion, and that will show up physically. It is a great opportunity to go pause. What’s here? Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Check-in with your body. I know that I carry it absolutely. In the stress or when I’m, you know, I think even what I’m discouraged. Yeah. Just like closing and going in which that happens to all of us people. I know that there is someone on this audience that might have a time where they feel like they were rejected if they were shut down. But looking at that as an opportunity to notice and sense your body, take that pause and think what, what can you learn from that? Or how could you even maybe be nicer to yourself in those situations? Kaley Warner Klemp: That’s really true. And sometimes it’s just the compassion to feel it and to let that feeling be there and have permission that they are,  and embrace and acknowledgment and acceptance of it, even if it doesn’t make sense, or even if I don’t have a good reason to be feeling this way I do. And that, that emotion being inherently valid and having a space, which does not mean that I have permission to go, you know, punch walls, if I feel angry or to, you know, go, you know, right down and sob in the middle of a boardroom. You know, there’s appropriate social cues. And can I create space just to say, this is how I feel. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, my gosh. And then can you do that for your team too? Because the power, if you can just allow them to do it and hopefully functioning it or siphoning it in a way where it doesn’t, you know, turn on the hose of, this is my negative feedback for what we’re doing, but just having it as a space of, Hey, let’s talk about our challenges, our wins so on and so forth. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes. Yes. I think that feeling those feelings is important, and its almost a prerequisite for candor because if I can feel my feeling, know that wisdom and match it such that it’s moving through. I don’t know that there’s a like I felt it, and it’s done to check that box. Because sometimes, there are waves of emotion that occur, but at least if there’s movement to it, then you can really be candid knowing that it’s not emotion recycling or leaking or being projected out on others. Speak Candidly Jenn DeWall: Let’s talk about another commitment. And I love this one because I think it’s truly something that so many people as leaders really struggle with, the commitment is to speak candidly. And why do you think people struggle with speaking candidly, Kaley? Like why the heck is this? Because I’m sure, you see it all the time where people are just a little bit more reserved or just don’t want to share their opinion. Why do you think we struggle with that? Kaley Warner Klemp: It’s such a great question. I think there’s actually a really interesting overlap between people’s personality types and where they’ll have a hiccup around candor. And so for some people that withhold is because I just want to keep it peaceful. And for other people that withhold is around, I really want you to like me, and I’m worried that if I tell you what I think that you won’t like me as much. Some people interestingly will hold back on their candor because they’ve been told that they’re too much or too powerful. And so there’s a sense of overcompensating for their truth because they’ve sort of been told over time, you know, enough and that’s with your directness. So I think, and there are different pieces of it that people will struggle with as well. So candor has three components. The first of which is being honest- is what I am saying true? Kaley Warner Klemp: The second is completeness. Is it the whole story versus sort of cherry-picking things that are true, but aren’t actually the complete story. And then the third is, is there self-awareness to it? Am I bringing my own awareness around projection or pass insights to make sure that what I’m saying it’s true, complete, and self-aware. And I think having all of that, that’s in some ways a pretty high bar. And so people will withhold. I want to be nice. I want to be liked if it feels hard; it feels yucky. And so I think that’s where the power of this commitment and really getting partners and teammates engaged in that dialogue with the same level of commitment to candor is so powerful. Jenn DeWall: Like, I love the full picture, like getting people to think before you maybe share something, am I sharing the full story, or is this just something that I’m assuming to be true and making art, I guess, setting that bar where people communicate with integrity. But I, I love that you touched on the need to be liked because I think for leaders that, that is oftentimes one of the things that we all crave because we know that to have influence, we need people to like us, to influence them. And then it tips over where people maybe become too sensitive. So how do you, like, how do you, what balance, and I know we didn’t plan on talking about this, but like what balance are we supposed to strike in terms of wanting to be liked? What then saying, Hey, but I can’t always be your best friend. Like how the heck do we start those balances? Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. Well, so if I think about the principle of liking, there’s actually some really brilliant research by Robert Cialdini. And I believe he’s with the University of Arizona. I’d have to double-check my facts. But one of the things that he talks about with liking is that we like people who we have something in common with, and we like people with whom we share a goal. And so I think it’s powerful to authentically look for what do we have in common and also what is our shared goal? And if you have neither of those two things, then I’m probably giving myself a little bit, or I sort of, you know, over-rotating towards, let me pretend that I care about things that you care about so that you liked me. But I think staying with that authenticity actually, in the long run, does create more liking. So there’s the truth and the completeness of, here’s what I stand for. And there’s the stretch. Here’s what we have in common that we’re both looking toward and that we’re both striving for. Jenn DeWall: I love that finding the shared goal and bringing the shared goal, Hey, we’re on the same team. We’re not, you know, against each other, we’re working together to drive this strategy, to help this customer, to grow our revenue for our organizations and finding that like that. Yeah. If you struggle from a personal level to maybe find likeness or similarity is looking at how you can show that you’re actually more of the same, which may be, you know, even right now with thinking about COVID, this is what are the rare times throughout history that there’s a universal norm that we can all relate to. Well, like this shared experience that we all have. So if you are struggling before COVID, this is now the perfect open the door to help you walk in and relate with someone because we are all impacted by this in some way. Conscious Leadership and Psychological Safety Kaley Warner Klemp: And to your point, I think there’s a moment of appropriate vulnerability. That to be able to say to someone, Hey, I have good days, and I have bad days. And today I’m on that downslope of the rollercoaster, I’m having a hard time staying with my motivation, or I’m feeling scared about the state of the world, or gosh, I’m tuning into the sadness of my family, and I’m working to, you know, maintain my own presence rather than letting that overwhelm me, that kind of revealing creates psychological safety. And that lets you step further into these different commitments. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, psychological safety is so essential, and it’s just, you know, to think about your perspective as a leader if we’re not aware of what may be our team is going through, you might start to like personalize, Hey, they didn’t check my email, or they didn’t get this when you have no idea of like the things that might be going around. So it is important. And to be, you know, I thought about it, but just to ask people, Hey, like, how’s it going outside of work? Like, how are you as a human being today? You okay? You struggling? You know, I think people like to pretend that if we start to show a little bit more of that personal side, then all of a sudden we lose all of our influence. Kaley Warner Klemp: I think, ironically, it’s the opposite. I just completed a 360 for a really remarkable leader. And he started doing a daily COVID diary where he was sharing with his team and ultimately became so popular that it was, you know, the company and then the board and what they were saying is the level of, again, appropriate, but vulnerability and transparency around things that were working and weren’t. But his level of trustworthiness and influenced skyrocketed, Jenn DeWall: Yes. I love him for doing that. That’s great that he was able to share. And I think it’s especially more important for the people that are younger in their career. That just think that everyone’s got it all figured it out, even though we’re all just figuring it out as we go. So that’s, that’s so great what a strong leader to be able to share that and just, I kind of like drop down that I have to be a professional all the time. That’s that’s inspiring. So practicing integrity is another one of the commitments from your book. And that’s something that I think is so important cause it’s, you know, ethics and integrity are things that we like to talk about because we know that they’re important to have as leaders, but sometimes we may not act with integrity, or we might be doing things. So what does it mean to practice integrity? Practice Integrity Kaley Warner Klemp: I think that this, the smallest piece that really informs integrity, is this notion of clear agreements. Do I know what I’m doing? And for whom by when and getting all of those pieces really clear and that the people with whom I’m interacting also know that. So who’s going to do what by when it sounds so simple, but actually in teaching this, this commitment, sometimes you feel like this is, this seems too easy. And then we look at it in real life where, how many times have you left a meeting where you say something like, Hey, so you’ll get me that thing ASAP. Right? And both people go, yeah, cool. And then you leave and go. So what exactly are they going to give to you by when exactly, because my definition of ASAP was by the end of the day and their definition of ASAP was two weeks from now. Kaley Warner Klemp: And the quality of the work, is this a draft, is this a final product? And what that creates is a lot of fuzziness in the system, but then either creates resentment or people taking over. There’s a lot of hero-ing and stepping in or babysitting, all of which undermine the quality of the relationships, the work, and the integrity and trust in that organization as a whole. So while I think there are certainly, you know, is what I’m saying true, right? That candor informs integrity. Am I feeling my feelings and tapping into the wisdom, informs integrity. I think that a new piece of do I make and keep my agreements differentiates a kind of average leadership from conscious leadership. Jenn DeWall: I love it. Yeah. It’s like, do I follow through, can you trust that? I’m going to say and do what I said I was going to do? So important. I mean, I that’s the, you know, for me it is just such a pet peeve, and I struggle so much. I cannot, I get so frustrated when people over-promise and under-deliver like it drives me bananas and I wish it, I wish it didn’t, but it does because it strikes an integrity chord with me, like do what you say you are going to do. And I want to do what I wanted to do, and if something comes up, that’s okay. But just tell me, like, I hate how people, what to create the illusion of perfection or the illusion of I’ve got it all figured out and under control and then they over-promise and under-deliver. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. Yes. Well, I think that you need a couple of things that are super important to highlight here. One is we can’t all be perfect all the time. Humanity. It’s like being human exists, and having things come up happens. It’s really the question of how quickly do you communicate it and how well do you clean it up? And so I think, well, I’ll speak for myself. I don’t know people who wake up in the morning. They’re like, I wonder how I can breach my commitments today? I wonder how I can have a lack of integrity? That sounds awesome. I don’t think at all that that’s the motive, but it’s, it’s recognizing the self-delusion that will happen. Oh, I can make up for that lost time. Oh, I’m sure that I can squeeze that in. Oh, I’ll just stay up late or wake up early. Recognizing there actually aren’t enough hours between now and when I committed to having something done to complete it. And so rather than tricking myself or trying to dilute the other person, it’s coming clean. And it’s interesting that that trust is actually so much more enhanced when I’m willing to say, Jenn, I blew it. I didn’t plan my time well. No excuses. I’m going to miss our commitment for Friday. I’d like to renegotiate from Monday. Does that work for you? And then being open for whatever comes up on your side rather than getting defensive or making excuses or rationalizations or whatever else I might try to do to feel better about myself. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. And I feel like that is something that I think leaders can really teach their team. Like, Hey, come clean, come clean with where you’re at. Then you don’t have that additional stress from saying, Oh gosh, now I have to get this done, or I didn’t do it. And what are they going to think? Like all that other junk that comes up with that, but just, it’s a way of like leading your team to just get them to be more accountable or practicing. Like, don’t just talk about it. Be about it is another expression that I love so much, but yeah, just, just, I guess, owning it following through. I think that’s so important to be able to obviously follow as a leader, but also just to treat and create a culture where people feel comfortable saying, you know what, I may not have handled this right. I think there probably is a piece where cultures reinforce that. Where, you know, if they adhere to traditional leadership where they’re thinking, well, like I have to look like I’m doing this or I have to do this, then it, then they’re more inclined to maybe I would say deceive because they don’t want to come off in a different way that it doesn’t align with what the culture looks like. Authenticity Vs. Persona Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. And I think what you’re describing is this notion of I’ve created a persona that I think you’re going to approve of. And then I promote that persona rather than living in authenticity or integrity, and in the long run, that will usually come and bite me. Either because of the glitches between what’s happening and what my persona is promoting, they become really distant. And so other people start to notice. Or I would argue even more commonly, the distance between how I really feel and how I’m behaving becomes so great that that internal cognitive dissonance and heart dissonance makes it so that I don’t maintain it. And then really unfortunate consequences will occur. I feel like I need to leave. Or someone calls me out on something, or there’s a big lapse of integrity rather than just catching almost micro-moments and cleaning them up. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, I love that. You said feeling like I need to leave because I think that that’s a reason when people feel that stress or that they’re not adding up, we just get into our heads and we want to run—but recognizing that, not only for yourself as a leader, but also that your team is going through that as well. And how can you at least create a space for them to feel comfortable if mistakes are made if they do that? So they don’t run, and you don’t lose your top talent. I love that. You just shared that because it’s such an important piece of how we can retain our top talent. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes. Yes. One of the things I talk about a lot with teens that I think is so cool is I forgive myself and others for mistakes. And the notion there is that mistakes are things where I am stretching, taking a risk, learning, and sometimes just being human, but there’s a moment where you go, Oh my gosh, that didn’t work out. I made a mistake. How can I come clean? How can I learn from it? How can I forgive myself and experience forgiveness? And then we move forward. I think that that does not create excuses for, you know, systematic failures to perform. Those are not mistakes. Those are patterns. But if there’s room for mistakes that actually really fosters a learning culture. Jenn DeWall: My gosh, I love that touch. And I want to work in that culture where it is okay to be perfectly imperfect. Like no one wants to work in that fear-based culture where they’re afraid they’re gonna lose their job if they don’t do this. And if you, as a leader, are afraid that you’re going to lose your job. I mean, start asking those questions, like what is going on that you feel that is there? Does there need to be a shift in how we communicate and how we set expectations because that’s not doing anything for the health of your organization? Kaley Warner Klemp: Completely. And I think that in order to win in today’s environment, there’s so much around innovation and pivoting and creativity and those things really aren’t available. If you’re caught in defensiveness or drama or their integrity, lapses, or people are afraid to reveal. If there’s a lack of candor, you know, gossip that will really pull away from all of the differentiators for the companies that are going to win. That people want to move to and work for. Jenn DeWall: Yes, those are the organizations. I want to be a part of the ones that are open, the ones that are progressive, you know, that they want to achieve great things. Excel in Your Zone of Genius Jenn DeWall: The last commitment that we’re going to talk about of the 15 is excelling in your zone of genius. So what does that mean to excel in your zone of genius? Kaley Warner Klemp: So I love this commitment and just to sort of build what his zone of genius even means. What does that mean? That there are really, there are four zones where you could operate. So, you know, you could operate in your zone of incompetence where you’re not good at it, and you don’t like it. I recommend again that you can operate in your zone of competence where you can do it, but really lots of other people are better at it than you are where many people get stuck is excellence. I’m good at it. I’m actually better at it than most, but I’ve lost that joy, and it feels like work. Kaley Warner Klemp: Now, I’m not going to pretend that we won’t all do things that are in our zones of excellence or competence, hopefully not too much time and incompetence, but really what we’re striving for is genius, which is where I am better at it than most really. There’s a sense of flow that starts to show up. I love it. I’m good at it. I get recognized for it, but the reason it’s a zone of genius and not just excellent is that there’s often a risk that there’s a sense of, gosh, am I allowed to do something? That’s this fun? Wait, is it work supposed to be work? Am I allowed to love what I’m doing? And yet what we find is when leaders themselves and really when they empower their teams to come to know what their superpowers are. What are there, what are those activities? They do the things that they lead, the environments in which they show up where it doesn’t even feel like work because they’re so connected to their innate strengths, and the things that bring them joy, that the performance is incredible. Kaley Warner Klemp: And time disappears in the good kind of way. And so I just, I love this commitment for individuals, and I love this commitment for teams. What I think about here is this is not to say like, Hey, so Jenn, Oh gosh, I’m so sorry. I really your zone of genius, you should have been a gardener. This is not about the job that you should do. This is about the qualities of the work and the characteristics of the environment where you thrive. Jenn DeWall: Well. And I think I love talking about even the zone of incompetence. I think that sometimes we, as leaders, might delegate tasks to someone that it really is on the opposite side of their skillset. And that can create so much friction because the person just can’t feel successful. They don’t feel like they’re doing what they should be doing. And it’s just a way that if you keep piling that on, and I think it happens a lot in, you know when organizations might lack structure, I guess, I don’t know. Where do you see organizations that maybe are leaders that operate into the place of incompetence, where it is? Are there any areas that you see that specifically show up more common than others? Kaley Warner Klemp: I think that it will show up in places where it feels like I should be able to do this. And so these are things where, you know, it’s four hours later, I’m still trying to fix my own printer. Where like, that is absolutely the zone of incompetence, but it feels like I should. I think it shouldn’t be that hard versus recognizing that there’s somebody else who could do that in 30 seconds. Right. Or these are things like, Hey, I’m going to build that weighted spreadsheet by myself because I should be able to do it. Shouldn’t be that hard. And I think that will get in people’s heads and lead them down a path of incompetence rather than taking a pause and saying, I am not good at this. How can I ask for help? Jenn DeWall: Yes. Or as a leader, if you’re going to delegate and you think that it’s a should like, Hey, this should be able to do this in four hours. But if you don’t have the understanding, then what can you do to at least give the support the training? Cause I, I feel like this is such a training opportunity instead of just assuming someone should be able to read a book or Google it or do something, you know, when you put them in that position of the zone of incompetence, that’s where their workday is going to feel awful. So what can you do to help them feel a little bit more competent? Kaley Warner Klemp: Yeah. And sometimes in true incompetence. Sometimes it really just doesn’t matter how many books I read, how many Google sites I go to. I can get there from here. And it’s not a real issue or really even a skill issue. It’s like the combination of both of them. I actually find people are less stuck in their zone of incompetence. And more stuck in the zone of competence I can. I’m just not great at it. And so that’s, I think a particularly powerful place to start to look at how else could this be done? Sometimes there’s just a roll up your sleeves, and it’s got to happen, but I think sometimes creativity can get lost, and that’s a place where it could actually help you make a shift. Oh my gosh. Jenn DeWall: So what you’re, so what you’re saying, people, spending time and like, yeah, I’m okay at this. I guess I can do it, but it doesn’t necessarily bring me joy. I don’t necessarily have this benefit. So like trying to get them to shift to the place of how can you focus on your sweet spot? How can you really just kind of bring that out? Or I don’t know what word I’m looking for, but how can you exploit that? I guess. Yeah. So would it be fair to say then that if people are in the zone of competence and just kind of focusing on their area of competence, that they, they might in some way be unintentionally, because I don’t think it’s intentional, but operating in a place of mediocrity like that, they don’t even know their true potential. They don’t even know the things that they could do because they haven’t challenged themselves to push outside of it. Yes. Kaley Warner Klemp: Yes. And I think that sometimes it feels like it isn’t an opportunity in certain environments. And so it’s okay to stretch and say, I am going to do the very best work that I can from, you know, whatever hour I began to, whatever hour I finished my job and I start to explore where do I feel most alive and then stretch into those spaces? What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, Kelly, I have loved our conversation. I love talking about the 15 commitments of conscious leadership, which we’re going to give our listeners a link in the outro on how they can find it. But I want to wrap up our podcast interview with the one question that we ask every single person that comes onto The Leadership Habit podcast. Which is, if you, I know that you read, you’re an active, lifelong learner; you interact with CEOs. You’re probably learning so much on any given day about leadership, but what is your leadership habit for success? Kaley Warner Klemp: My leadership habit for success is getting present first thing in the morning. So for me, for me, that means I exercise, and as often as possible outside, I live near the mountains because what I find is that when I can start my day from a place of feeling centered and grounded, I can come back there throughout the day. And I know that I can return to that centered feeling and place and that everything else that happens, it’s going to be okay. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, I love that. Well, and for those that are listening, which maybe this is a note for myself, that means not just mindlessly scrolling through social media or first thing, checking your email. It’s, it’s about connecting with yourself, thinking, doing self-reflection. It’s not there should that actually probably be technology involved. It should be something where you’re maybe a little detached. Kaley Warner Klemp: It can be either that I definitely, we kicked our electronic devices out of our bedroom, which I highly recommend because then there’s not a temptation on that bedside table, but it is sometimes I’m listening to a podcast, or I’m listening to an author, or I’m listening to a book, or I’m listening to a thought leader or a spiritual teacher while I’m on that walk. And often, it’s quiet, and I’m really just present with what’s occurring in nature of what’s occurring in my body so that I can start that day from the centered place that I know will help me be my best. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. So was that difficult? Can I just ask like the initial, cause I want to do that? I want to take our cell phones and put them in a place, but I think sometimes you go into, but I need it close. I need it close. I need to look at it. Was that a difficult adjustment at first to remove those from that space? Kaley Warner Klemp: I think that there were definitely some withdrawal symptoms. But that made it easier to maintain because it highlighted the temptation of the addiction. Jenn DeWall: Yes, I, gosh, I love that last like that tip, but now Kelly, thank you so much for just coming on the show. Thank you so much for sharing so much of your, what I would consider like just progressive leadership of being present, being connected, being conscious, and aware that we as leaders control everything that we see. I really appreciate the wisdom that you shared with our listeners. Thank you so much for taking the time, and I just, yeah, if they want to connect with you, we’ll be giving them additional information. But do you have any last things you want to share with the listeners? Kaley Warner Klemp: I am so grateful for this opportunity, Jenn, thank you for your great questions. I guess my last thought for all the listeners is to build on each of these commitments as a practice, but there’s no such thing as a conscious leadership performance. It’s a practice that happens day in, day out, where there missteps and mistakes. And I certainly slip off and fall below the line. But the more practice we have, the more time we get to spend living in the space where it is freer, with more energy, more joy, and more space. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, Kaley. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habitpodcast, featuring Kaley clamp. For those that are interested in learning more about Kaley, you can head over to KaleyKlemp.com, or you can find the link in our show notes. You can also find her book, the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership. You can get to know more about Enneagrams and just get more connected with Kaley and how she’s helping to shift leaders to become more conscious in their practice. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to share it with a friend, let them in on the good insight that you’ve gained. And of course, please rate and review us on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for listening until next time.   The post Episode 31: Conscious Leadership with Executive Coach and Author, Kaley Warner Klemp appeared first on Crestcom International.

Finding Your Everyday Innovator Style with Tamara Ghandour In today’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, Jenn DeWall sat down with author, speaker, and founder and president of Launch Street, Tamara Ghandour to discuss being and everyday innovator and her newest book, Innovation is Everybody’s Business. Innovation is Everybody’s Business is for those looking for solutions to the daily pain of how to improve our work, a reality for many people, whether they work in the C-suite or on the front lines, this book will resonate with those that recognize that being more innovative is their ticket to being indispensable. We truly enjoyed this conversation with Tamara and hope you do too. Full Transcript Below: Jenn DeWall:  Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall, and today on The Leadership Habit podcast, I am welcoming back to the show, everyday innovator Tamara Ghandour. She is going to share her new book with us, Innovation is Everybody’s Business. Tamara, thank you so much for coming back to The Leadership Habit. I loved talking to you before, and I’m so excited to share your new book with our listeners. Tamara Ghandour:    Well, I am excited too, Jenn. So this is, we’re going to dig in like we did last time and just we’re going to go where the conversation takes us. Yeah. It could be anywhere. Jenn DeWall:  And Christian will sit on the side, just wondering how long it’s going to be. So you know, for those that may not have listened to their first podcast with us, could you just do a quick refresher or just introduce yourself to those that may have never heard of you before? Tamara Ghandour:    Yeah, sure. So, hello, I’m Tamara. You’re supposed to say hi, Tamara. Jenn DeWall:  Hi Tamara. Meet Tamara Ghandour, Innovation Expert Tamara Ghandour:    So here’s the kind of reader’s digest version. So I’ve been playing in the innovation space for 25 plus years now, and I started that journey in advertising on Madison Avenue, but really in innovation and brand strategy. And what that meant was it was my job to give companies new product and new service ideas. So they would come to us and say, the market is shifting, or we need to serve our service, our customers better. What do we do? It was an amazing experience. We worked with the best of the best in the world to all the fortune 500 companies. Everything that you’re going to find in Target and Safeway and kind of all the box retailers. However, over time what I came to discover was that it was a little bit of a fool’s errand because here we were these outside people coming in and saying, Hey, here’s all your new innovation. We’re going to go behind a black curtain, figure it out and come to you. And the ideas might be brilliant, but nothing ever really happened with most of those ideas. And that happened time and time again. It wasn’t just us. It was just across the board in innovation. And I had this one experience that really made me realize that you know what? The higher impact way to go with innovation is to help people understand how to innovate. So that’s really what took me down this path of like the neuroscience and behavioral psychology and all that behind it to say, well, how can we as humans drive more innovation in everything that we do every day? How do we unlock that in ourselves? And I think more importantly, how do we get to a place where we are contributing and adding value? How do we get to a place where our voices are heard through that innovation, through that creativity. So that’s the short version of how I got to sit across the table from you today. Jenn DeWall:  No, but I love that because you bring up one of the most important things about innovation is that it’s something that we should be doing every day, no matter what our role is, what organization we work for. It’s not something that just needs to take place with a consultant behind a black curtain, and then the results appear. Tamara Ghandour:    Well yeah, and I think we have this funny kind of myth that we buy into that it’s like certain people in certain times and certain segments kind of all these certain points in time things and the reality is the best innovation happens when we’re doing the work, right? Whether that work is in front of our computer, out in the field, doing something on a construction site, you know, whatever it is that we’re doing, there are so many moments where we can contribute our incredible value to the world that right now we tend to just kind of look over and like, yeah, yeah, I’ll, I’ll just, I’ll deal with it. I’ll keep going. But if we took a moment and said, how do I think differently about this, we could create incredible outcomes and value for ourselves and the people around us. So to your point, right, it really doesn’t matter who you are, what you do, what matters is that you have this ability in your brain that’s innate to all of us, that if we unlock, it just leads to tremendous value. Innovation is Everyone’s Business Jenn DeWall:  So I feel like this completely segues into the title of your book. Yeah. Innovation is Everybody’s Business. So maybe expand on that a little bit about how you came to that title. Tamara Ghandour:    So, you know, it’s funny. So that is the most requested keynote. That’s how the publisher, and I kind of decided on the topic. So you’re like, Oh, well, obviously people want this. That’s what we should give them. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, that’s- is that marketing one-on-one or something like that? That’s what your marketing guests can tell you if we did that. Right. But to just to back it up kind of further for a second. So years ago in my career, I was working in advertising, and I was actually working on a big food brand, and we had this big creative meeting where we’re going to set the strategy for the year and say, this is what this is, this is the creative strategy we’re gonna use for all our advertising, all our marketing, all our promotions. Really what that meeting was with all of us sitting around the room, everyone that touched the brand and listening to Steve. Steve was the creative director who had all the brilliant ideas. Maybe you know the guy, right? He walks down the hall, and we’re all just behind him with our notepads and our pens going, I hope he says some wisdom. Oh my gosh. Maybe I’ll write it down. I can go implement it. But that’s what the day was supposed to be. Really. We were just there for Steve, and we had easel pads up. We had scented markers out like we were ready to capture his brilliance. Well, that day, Steve decided that he didn’t feel the mojo. So he didn’t show up to the meeting. So the clients were there. The account management is there. Accounting, media buy like everybody is there. But the one person that we thought we needed, and I failed to mention, Jenn DeWall: Keyword- thought. Tamara Ghandour:    Exactly. And I also failed to mention that I was in charge of this meeting. So I thought my career was over because I was like the one person I was supposed to like corral into the room, did not show up. So here’s what happened. Started out with total awkward silence, right? I sat down and said, Steve’s not coming. Nobody knew what to do. Nobody said anything. And then the person from accounting raised their hand and said, Hey, I know I’m not creative, but I’ve been seeing this interesting pattern in the numbers. And that led to an idea. And then the guy from media guy said, Hey, a media buyer. I said, Hey, I’ve been seeing our competitors doing this. And it led me to an interesting idea, and before I knew it, the entire room was bubbling with innovation, and we set an incredible creative strategy for the year that led to increased sales. Without Steve. Now, that was early, early on in my career, but it is what got me obsessed with this idea that innovation is something for everybody if we have the room for it. And I used to think that we needed Steve, right? We had to have the Steves to get that creativity. We see it on the cover of the magazines, right? They’re cool guys and their hoodies from Silicon Valley, no offense, I grew up in that area. I love Silicon Valley, but that they aren’t the only ones that innovate. And some of the best innovation I’ve seen in my experience has been from the customer service representative, the receptionist at the desk, the operations person. It really does come from everywhere. As long as we don’t hold that one person on the pedestal and say, Oh, it’s just for Steve and sorry Steve, I’m still telling your story. Everyone can be an Everyday Innovator Jenn DeWall:  I love that, though, because it goes back to even that leadership quote, like whether you think you’re a leader or not, you’re right. Whether you think that you’re an innovator or not, you’re right because you truly have it as something that you can contribute based on your own unique experience. You can add value. It’s not something that just has to be deferred to Steve, but it does require a level of confidence and knowledge that your idea can be shared. Tamara Ghandour:    It’s interesting that you mentioned the word confidence cause I think that’s, you know, if you would ask me a question, why did you develop the assessment that tells people how they innovate? So, right, we quantify it and then give them the tools to channel that power within them. I like to call it a superpower because I think it’s super in the fact that it leads to this incredible outcome, but ordinary and the fact that we all do it. But if you would ask me why I developed the assessment, it was exactly for that to give people a confidence to go, Oh I’m, I am the innovative one that I am an everyday innovator. That is me. Because I think most of us were trained out of it. So we just have to work our way back in. And confidence is really step one. It’s not to say we know all the answers and that you know, we are going to step up and suddenly be the shining star. But to have the confidence to recognize, Oh, I innovate in this unique way, and that’s something that I bring to the table that nobody else can. Jenn DeWall:  See your value. And then being able to build. Because I mean even what you just talked about with that story with Steve, it was everyone working together, learning, and just building on other people’s ideas. So recognize it’s not, it doesn’t have to be a solo journey. Innovation is a Team Sport Tamara Ghandour:    Not only does it not have to be, but it also shouldn’t be and really isn’t. So one of the things that you know, we’ve come to realize in our work is, you know, we idolize the one person, the lone innovator in the garage. But the reality is it’s just, and it’s BS. So it’s just not the case. And in fact, if you looked at any of those people that we idolize, they have teams around them that contribute, that get things done that actually add to their vision. So innovation is a team sport. There’s, yeah, I kind of think of it like, I mean I’m a little bit of a football fan, so I think of it a little bit like football, right? The quarterback is supposed to be the best quarterback, the wide receiver, the best wide receiver, the offensive line, the best line. Like all of them have their roles, and their job is to that at their best. But their job is also to support everybody else and win together as a team. So I think to be a brilliant team, you have to be your best at yourself, but also as the team. Jenn DeWall:  So, you know, to hit back at this like, and I know we’ve touched on this a little bit, so being innovative has always been something that’s reserved for the select few, but you say that it’s for everyone. So how did you initially come to that belief? Like beyond maybe even that meeting with Steve, what are other things that you noticed in your career, throughout your expertise from over two decades of work on focusing on innovation. How else, what other data do you have that helped you come to that conclusion? Tamara Ghandour:    So when I decided to really delve into this, I actually took a step back and said, okay, I think this is true. I’m seeing it all the time. Right. in fact, let me give you just a quick story about Lisa. So Lisa was this receptionist at this company that I really wanted to work for, and I walked in and my red three-piece Ann Taylor power suit, maybe you’ve seen it. So at some point, yeah, hello the nineties, but in a scrunchie and matching shoes, I’m pretty sure of it. But she was amazing. So she was one of these people that just at every moment would turn a challenge into an opportunity for a solution. And I walked in, and the CEO was late to meet me, he, I was supposed to interview with him. So she comes around the corner, and she goes, well the first step of the interview, Tamara, is I’m going to sit down with you, and I’m going to start off with some questions. And then when Simon’s ready you guys will meet. So she sits down with me, and we start chatting, and I think this is all part of the process, right? And then Simon comes in, and this is where I got the first clue. So Simon comes on, excuse me, Simon comes around the corner, and she jumps up, shoves the clipboard that she’d been taking notes on in his chest and goes, Simon, this very declarative tone. Here the answers to Tamara’s questions for the pre-interview portion. You can use it as a springboard for conversation. And she doesn’t let him speak. And she shoves us in the conference room. So I have an interview with Simon, and I get the job. Three months later, I’m sitting with Lisa at this in the same conference room, and I said to her, Hey Lisa, I just wanted to let you know the reason I really wanted this job is because I thought it was super cool that everybody at the company interviewed me. You know, everyone from the receptionist to the CEO like that says a lot about the company. So she starts laughing. And she goes, Tamara, that wasn’t the process. She said, here’s the deal. She said Simon was running late, and he’s the CEO. He had fires to put out, and she said, you know, it presented a problem. And I thought to myself, well, I can let you sit on that vinyl bench. She made a joke about my red three-piece suit. I was like, and you obviously wanted the job. You were in the power red suit. She said, or I could figure out an innovative solution right then and there and do something that made everybody look good. She said my job is to keep this place running smoothly. So that’s what I did. And if you ask Simon why that company went on to be millions of dollars in revenue and ultimately get bought out, he’ll tell you. It’s because of innovation from people like Lisa, who just did it every day, did it every day in their jobs regardless. Right? Jenn DeWall:  Without even thinking. Innovation is a Whole-Brain Experience Tamara Ghandour:    Without even thinking. So I kept running into experiences like that and thinking, wow, this is innovation. Why are we talking about it as this magical thing that’s only about technology in certain people? So I kept seeing this. So then I decided I need to understand like what’s really going on here? And here’s what I discovered. This is the part that I thought was so cool. All of us have the structure for innovation in our brains. So it’s not something that only a few people have. And here’s the part that is really good for people like me who did not get good grades. It turns out the neuroscience shows that the structure for intelligence and the structure for innovation are actually two different things. So think of intelligence as like superhighways, deep lanes, and grooves. Think of innovation as loose side roads all connected together. So innovation is actually a whole-brain experience, and one does not rely on the other. So how smart you are does not impact your ability to innovate. Yeah, there’s like a baseline at the bottom. But in general we actually all have the ability, the science actually shows it. And then on top of that, our brains are super flexible. They’re kind of like a muscle. They’re not really a muscle, but it acts like one in this way. And basically, the more we flex it, the stronger it gets. And it’s pliable, which means that if we teach it new things or look at things in a different way, it actually stretches and grows with us. So the science actually shows that innovation is 100% possible for all of us. And if we look around us at any given time, there are hotspots of innovation happening everywhere. Jenn DeWall:  Yes! I love that whole point that you just made because I think people do often correlate or associate innovation and intelligence. Whereas you could actually argue that the more intelligent than you are in some ways, the deeper your expertise, the less innovative you actually are because you’ve stopped seeing solutions you’ve started adhering to. Tamara Ghandour:    You’ve almost gone too deep. Right? Yeah. That’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but you’re absolutely right. It’s, it’s intelligence is brilliant, right? It’s are superhighways, but all those side roads are what leads you to new and interesting findings and different ways to look at things. Have you ever gotten lost? And even if you’re like, Jenn DeWall:  Yes, I’m probably lost right now! Tamara Ghandour:    But you know, you notice things that you never saw before, even in areas that you’ve been in. So you’re like, oh, I never noticed that billboard before. Oh, I never noticed that store on the corner. Oh, I’ve never noticed that. So that’s what happens when we travel those loose side roads in our brain. We see things in a whole different way versus being on that superhighway, which is very just like point a to point B, gosh, I love this conversation so well, and I think that’s why it’s, I think that’s why a lot of what we do really resonates with people’s because we’re not saying here’s a new tool and here’s a new process. We’re saying, Hey, you have this hard wiring in your brain. We’ve got to go for some resistors, which we can talk about if we have the time. But you’ve got the ability. It just might be a little bit dusty because you haven’t focused on it for a while. I think Dolly Parton, who’s one of my favorite people in the world if you’re listening to Dolly, I love you, call me. But I think she said it best. She’s, it was something to the effect of, “Figure out who you are and then do it on purpose.” And I might be botching that a little bit, but the point is the same. And with how we innovate, it’s the same thing. Figure out how you innovate, figure out how that lights you up, but do it on purpose every single day and just start flexing those muscles. What is an Everyday Innovator Style? Jenn DeWall:  So you said every day and the title of your book obviously like brings in every day. What is an everyday innovator style? Tamara Ghandour:    Ooh, so here’s the part that’s cool. Your style and my style are totally different. And in fact, our brains are as unique as our thumbprint, so no two are the same how we’re wired. So if you think about all the experiences and perspectives that go into it, right, it makes a lot of sense. But what we discovered in our research, kind of digging into neuroscience is that there are nine triggers of innovation. We call them triggers because they activate innovation in your brain. But nine ways that we as humans can innovate. And your style- Yeah. And it ranges from everything from being a risk-taker, which means you like to get uncomfortable and, in fact, innovate best in those uncomfortable moments to people who are more collaborative in how they innovate. Meaning they pull disparate people and ideas and experiences together to make innovation happen, to futuristics, which are all about ten steps ahead and being in tomorrow land. So we are some combination of that. So your everyday innovator style is unique to you. It’s the top two power triggers. So the way you innovate the most, the most natural, the strongest. It’s your wellspring of innovation. So it’s those two plus a dormant trigger, which is how you innovate the least. So I’ll give you an example of mine just to kind of bring it to life. So my power triggers are risk-taker and experiential. So, and you know me a little bit, it kind of makes sense, right? Like I like to get uncomfortable. I’m willing to lead when other people tend to get held back. That’s how I innovate, right? I innovate in those uncomfortable moments. It’s not to say other people aren’t risk-takers in the sense of like willing to be daring and try new things. But that’s my innovation zone. Like if I leave, Jenn DeWall:  Some people don’t love risk. I mean most humans, yeah, they kind of run from it. So it takes a different type of skillset to be able to embrace it. Tamara Ghandour:    It does. And I, and I think that for those of us who find it, who discovered that we’re risk-takers on the assessment realize that that’s not only a willingness for us, it’s where we play at our strongest and where we innovate the most. So put me in an uncomfortable situation, and I’m good because I’m going to actually find the innovation in that space, in that space. And then for me, experiential is all about learning emotion. So experientials are all about the tangible, the touching, the feeling like seeing it in 360 you have, you innovate by doing. So for me to hold back and keep stuff in my brain, like everything, every idea I’ve ever had is duct tape and paper somewhere in my desk because I have to visualize it to innovate. But when I get it out of my head, I can create incredible things. Now, not every idea moves forward, but, but that’s how I innovate. My dormant trigger is collaborative, which when I first took the assessment I was like, but I like people I don’t understand. Hold on. No, this can’t be right. Like I built the assessment. I should be good at everything that is happening here. But as I said earlier, collaboratives pull in nuggets and create a whole innovation. They’re brilliant at that. I bring ideas to about 80 and 90%, and then I get feedback. So I don’t innovate- as well if you put me in a brainstorm, totally cold where I’ve got to pull stuff out of people, I actually go a little bit like, like a deer in the headlights. I’m like, Oh no, like this is not. But if you asked me to get uncomfortable and think about things and play with things and then put me in the brainstorm, I’m great. Tamara Ghandour:    So we all have these different ways of doing it and an understanding that I can create a work and a life and, and a method that works for me and brings out the best in me as much as I can. And then you can do the same for your team. Jenn DeWall: Now, for those of you or for those that are listening that aren’t aware or don’t have any idea about this assessment, tell us how you can get this assessment. Where is it? So understand that for yourself. Tamara Ghandour: Super simple. All you have to do is our website. So gotolaunchstreet.com and its there, and you can take it, and it’s great because it takes five-ish minutes online, ask you a bunch of questions, and then you’ll get your results and find out your everyday innovator style. So it’s really exciting. It’s great to see the light bulb go off for people. I think, you know, I gave myself as an example, but the reason I love it is that other people get to figure out their value and their uniqueness. And I’ll give you a quick example. Her name is Kelly. She works with the Army research lab. So talk about a highly structured, regulated, this is how we do things kind of environment. Now they have this incredible leadership that recognized if they were going to stay ahead of the game, they needed to really get out of the silos, and they needed to bring more innovation to everybody. So these are the people that are responsible for keeping our soldiers safe technology like an advantage on the battlefield, right? So they’ve got big jobs. So there’s all these researchers and scientists and people doing amazing things with robots and chemicals and whatever. And there’s the operation staff, which is where Kelly was. So they weren’t considered the innovative ones at first because they’re not the ones right in the, in the labs, which is structured, they’re too routine, and their job is to process, right? Ultimately her job is to keep that, those operations moving efficiently. So Kelly took the assessment along with a lot of people, and the ops team and a couple of generals, which is by no means intimidating when you’re standing in front of them and their fatigues. I was not intimidated at all. Kelly realized she’s a collaborative tweaker style. So here are two things that she did. So in realizing that she set up these cohorts with her teammates cause they were in the silos. So she broke down silos in the organization, helped them share best practices and challenges, and actually leverage each other better. And she gets to be more innovative because she’s pulling from disparate people and ideas all the time. So she set herself up for success and also broke down silos in the organization when she realized, Oh, this is my superpower. Like this is how I innovate. And then with the tweaker side, so for tweakers they’re all about editing and evolving and optimizing. So they are, they bring brilliant optimized innovation to things that already started. So Kelly is brilliant when things are stuck, right? Someone started something, and they’ve hit a brick wall, they don’t know what to do next. Kelly realizes about herself. So now you better believe that the minute she sees a project that’s stalled, she puts herself in the situation to be on that project. Because she knows as the tweaker side of her, and that’s how she innovates it. She’s going to move them forward. So she, to me, is, I just, I really admire her because she’s a brilliant example of someone who said, Oh my gosh, this is how I innovate. I’m going to do this intentionally. And in doing that, she’s recognized by leadership all the time, and she’s made a huge impact across the organization. A Mental Model for Innovation Jenn DeWall:  I love the story of Kelly. I mean, he was going back with where we started our interview today, thinking about how confidence plays into being an everyday innovator, but then she quickly identified through the assessment what her strengths are and then started to lean into them, which helps build their confidence. And the other piece that I like that you just talked about is the celebration of where innovation can occur and how you can impact it in the process. Whether you’re the one that champions the idea or comes in when things are stuck, there’s value in. You need everyone at different pieces. But one of the things that I want to ask about, because I know that it comes back to confidence, it comes back to what you would call in your book a mental model that we have to have. So you’re adamant that what we’re going to talk about is not just another tool or process. We’ve seen tons of them, but it’s a mental model about how we can approach innovation. Why not just give people another tool? Why focus on the mental model? Tamara Ghandour:    you know, here’s the thing with tools, right? They’re easy. They feel like shortcuts. You think, Oh, I mean, we see this across as magic, right? Whether it’s collaboration or weight loss like you see, it was like, Oh, just give me the tool, and I’ll apply it. But I think we all know that 95% of that doesn’t work and it doesn’t work. Because we’re not, we don’t have the mental model to actually do it. But let me share an example with you that happened recently. So I’m at the airport. I’ve been on the road for 12 days. Right? You’ve experienced that, you know the mindset you’re in, right? Where you’re sitting in the waiting room and, or the waiting room, or the terminal. Waiting. I call it a waiting room. I was like my usual lounge. There’s my seat. So I’m sitting there, I’ve got one person on each side of me, so there’s three of us and our plane or the terminal thing. The little sign is doing the whole like delayed 20 minutes delayed 40 minutes, right. Delayed 60 minutes. Like I can see it coming, the flights getting canceled, and I’m frustrated as I’ll get out because I said I’ve been on the road forever. I just want to get home. I want to sleep in my bed, and I want to curl up with my dog. I want to see my kids. Like I, I’m not in airports, don’t bring out the best in me. So I’m just going to say that out loud. Now if you see me at the airport, I’m sorry, I apologize. But the cancellations line goes on and over. The muted speaker, you know, the person’s like a flight has been canceled, and all of his Denver people are like, Oh my God. So the guy on one side of me says, well, this is totally out of my control—nothing I can do. I’m just going to go have a drink at a bar. He goes over. He gets a flight out, two days later, the person on the other side of me gets all irate. They can’t do this to me. How dare they? I need to get home tonight. I need someone to complain to. I’m getting in line, and I am telling them everything that I think about this, right? So it gets in line with every other enraged passenger and gets up to them, I think, okay, it must take him an hour and a half to get to the front. And he also gets on a plane two days later. So I’m sitting there, and I’m going, okay, well this isn’t fun, but I’m at a major airport, so there’s gotta be other flights to Denver. It’s not the weather, right? It was mechanical. So there’s gotta be other flights. So here’s what I’m gonna do, right? There’s gotta be an opportunity here somewhere. So I’m going to get online with customer service, and I’m going to go on the website and go onto Kayak and every other app. So I’m gonna do it all at once and see what, what ha, what kind of pops open first. So I find a flight 30 minutes leaving 30 minutes later on the other side of the terminal, book it go rushing down the terminal, make it as we’re about to close the doors, and I get home at like one o’clock in the morning. So I got home late, but I got home. The reason I share that is not to say I’m some amazing traveler because I am not, I don’t like to travel, and I’m never in a good mindset, but each of us had a very different mental model at that moment. One guy’s mental model was things are outside of my control. I can’t do anything about it. Right? I just got to go about my day and whatever happens, happens. The other mental model was, Oh my gosh. This is a disaster. This is horrible. I’m never going to be able to solve this. Those two mental models lead to bad results on the backend, right? Right. So our mental, our mental models are what drive how we behave. It’s not just how we think. It’s how we behave and how we act. So if we have a bad mental model, it sabotages our behavior. If you always think the negative is coming, the negative is always coming. If you think there isn’t an opportunity, there isn’t an opportunity. So a bad mental model equals bad actions, and a strong mental model equals strong actions, right? So when I think about innovation, what I think about is layering on a mental model on all of our brains actually allows us to see that there’s an opportunity to think differently about what’s right in front of us. That there’s an opportunity for something to happen differently for there to be a new solution, not to say it’s always the solution you want. I didn’t want to run across the airport and sweat and then jump in the middle seat and get home late. Like none of that was fun. But, but the mental model drives the action. So for us in this book and the Innovation is Everybody’s Business. It was really important to me that people understood that I’m not trying to give you another tool for the toolbox. It’s going to get dusty, and you’re going to put it aside. I really wanted people to understand that if they had this ability to see how they innovate and then layered on that mental model to see that in front of them every day, that they can create powerful outcomes and everything. Jenn DeWall:  It’s all starts with you and your mindset. Yeah. How you’re approaching that situation. I think that’s a great example because how often as a leader do you see maybe someone else taking a path one way, and then you see another person doing it another, and then you might go a different way, but it is all up to you. What path do you want to take? What is one going to yield that result or outcome that you seek? It’s important to take responsibility, to understand that. Also a no, I mean, I love this expression like for an entrepreneur, like you eat no’s for breakfast. So a no from my airline and saying that your canceled means okay, I guess I’ll give up. I know for someone else means, okay, well maybe there’s just another way. Tamara Ghandour:    Exactly. And again, I might’ve been stuck there for two days. I can’t control the outcome of, you know, what the airplanes do, but I can control how I, not just how I respond to things, but how I act and how I follow up if I think of my myself in a leadership role now if I have a mindset that Hey, innovation is possible, we can do more with less. Our resources, we can look at that a little bit different then we can create different outcomes. And when we look at teams in business who do incredibly well, there’s a, there’s a couple of factors, but one of them is they see innovation as part of their jobs every single day. And they see the opportunities that can create has nothing to do with resources or you know, the backing of the C suite. I mean, all that stuff comes into play at some point, but it is not the driving factor of why some teams and why some businesses are successful. Everyday Innovation Starts With You Jenn DeWall:  Innovation starts with you. Tamara Ghandour:    It totally does. And then it like ladders up the team, and when everybody’s doing it, it’s like a party. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh. Just think about what that is. But it is taking that responsibility that you too can do it and that you’re responsible for attributing to it. You can’t just leave that to someone else as well. It’s your responsibility to leverage that and see how you can add value to the team. Tamara Ghandour:    Well, I think in being innovative is a choice. And by choice, I mean you can choose to unlock that part of yourself or you can not, but that’s up to you. So when I meet people who say to me, well, I’m not innovative, or I don’t like, this isn’t for me, what they’re really saying is I’m choosing not to put the effort in to make that happen. And I’m sorry to those people out there that have said that to me. But that’s the reality, right? Because science shows us that everybody can do it. So there’s really no out if like talking to my kids like there’s no out in this here. Like it is what it is, but it’s our decision to make it happen. And that’s why I think you know, in the book we have a lot of, I call them innovator experiments cause the mind likes experimentation more than activities. So you say to someone, we’re going to experiment on this and that person’s brain goes, Ooh, discovery. Interesting. Let’s see what happens. But if you say, I have an activity or a task. Your brain goes, Ooh, that’s a lot of energy. I don’t. I don’t want to do that. That’s a lot of work. Let’s not. So it’s also at the subconscious level, but they’re experiments in here because I want people to put innovation into action. I want to give them the ability to make it happen. But it starts with this mindset and understanding of here’s how I innovate and, and yeah, I believe I can do it, and I’m going to make it happen. Jenn DeWall:  So how does unlocking your everyday innovation like your everyday innovation style help you in a time that’s defined maybe by dizzying rates of change? Like right now, where technology is forcing us to think about doing things differently or, there’s continuous disruption, and there’s just so many impacts. Like how, how does unlocking your everyday innovator style help you succeed in this new environment that most businesses and leaders are operating in? Tamara Ghandour:    Yeah, it’s a little bit crazy town, isn’t it? Because we, that the rates of change are so fast yet they’re only getting faster. So the moment we’re sitting here right now, having this conversation is the slowest it’s going to be in the next 20 years. Like it’s not gonna slow down. It’s, it’s, it’s almost mind-blowing when you think about it. But I, I think that the, let me back up and make one point first, which is, you know, we talk about change and disruption and these big case studies, right? Jenn DeWall:  Buzzwords, too, right? Tamara Ghandour:    Total buzzwords. It drives me a little bit bonkers because it’s like, Oh, like these companies went under and Oh, this person found themselves irrelevant. But, I think the thing that we have to recognize is that underneath kind of these big media statements and case studies are people being drastically affected by it. So our relevancy in work, our life cycle for that is shorter than it’s ever been because of change, right? Because we have to keep up with it. We have to be. We have to adapt. Being adaptive is now part of our work, right? It’s not, it’s not something we could kind of rely on maybe once and then move on. So I think we have to recognize how personal change really is. That it’s not just about the big case studies is really is about us as individuals and how we manage it. Now, I totally lost track of your original question because I went down that path. What was your question? I. Unlocking Your Everyday Innovator Style Jenn DeWall:  No, I mean, if you like, how does unlocking your everyday innovator style help you navigate these circumstances? Tamara Ghandour:    So thank you. I got off on the track of like how personal it is because I do because I have so many one on one conversations with people like that’s all great tomorrow that these businesses don’t exist. But here’s what I’m personally dealing with. So there’s a couple of layers to it. So layer one is when you understand how you innovate, and you apply that you actually get to work smarter, not harder. Jenn DeWall:  So smarter, not harder. That means less time, less resources, but the same result or better results. Tamara Ghandour:    So I think oftentimes we work hard, right? We double down, it’s a little bit like being stuck in a riptide in the ocean. It’s like you think swimming harder’s the way out, but actually swimming sideways is how you get out of the riptide. So you see people flailing, flailing, flailing, and actually, I write about that experience in the book because I almost drowned when I was 12 trying to double down, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. So we’ve got to shift and bring innovation in. When we do that, we get actually much stronger results, better results because we’re thinking differently, which means we’re not tackling the same challenge over and over again. It means our results are more meaningful. So we’re working smarter, not harder. So that’s number one. The second thing is we perform at our peak more often. So have you ever had that moment where actually it can even be hours where you’re in that state of flow as we talk about, right? And like the world around you disappears and time goes away, and you’re just, you are in it, and you’re giving your best work, and it’s like, Oh, the clouds part, and… Jenn DeWall:  And it feels effortless! Tamara Ghandour:    Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you said that. Yes. Effortless. When we unlock innovation, that’s how we get into the state of flow. And the cool part is, is this wonderful cycle. So we do an activity as we have in the book, or actually, I should say experiment, not activity. We do an experiment as we have in the book that gets you into your mindset, whether you’re collaborative or tweaker, or whatever you are, right? We have things specific to you that get you into that mindset. You get into the state of flow that actually leads to a solution and an idea that a-ha thing, like that feeling of accomplishment that you get when you’ve been in that zone and working so well, and you know what you’re producing is so amazing. So that then leads to releasing dopamine and feel-good in your brain. So it actually being innovative taps your reward center, which I think is awesome because who doesn’t want that more often, right? Like that’s why when we solve a sticky challenge, even if it’s like figuring out how to get into your house, when you’ve locked yourself out, like something little like that or some major thing at work, when we actually innovate and create a problem-solve, we tap that center in our brain because we’re in that state of flow. And it feels really good. So why wouldn’t we want that more often? So when you look at actually job engagement and productivity and happiness is there’s actually a direct correlation to being innovative and the room and the ability to do that. So on the individual level, right? We work smarter, not harder. We perform at our peak. We get in that state of flow. We tap our reward center. And then I think at the team level. It also allows us to leverage each other and for people to leverage the best in us, which, as I think, as we all know, right? We said it earlier. You can’t do it alone. So, and who wants to really? We’re humans, and we’re tribal. We kind of want to be together, but I, but understanding how we innovate our everyday style actually helps us then leverage each other. Tapping into Your Everyday Innovator Style Jenn DeWall:  So, what’s an example of someone’s everyday innovation style? Or I guess how, I mean, what type of things come to mind when you think about someone that was able to tap into their innovation and like what type of, I guess results or success did they create? Tamara Ghandour:    Yeah. So I’m going to give you a team example. Because this was recent. I was actually a Colorado company, so his name was Morty. He’s the leader of the team, and he’s an imaginative, I know what a great name, right? I did the look on her face. It’s like, I know. He’s like, yeah, I think my grandparents named me. I was like, Aw, that’s so sweet. So he’s an imaginative-futuristic, and he is responsible for a team of about 25 that does operational excellence, excellence for the company. So that means that they audit processes across the company and to figure out how to improve them to make everybody’s lives better. Right inside the company. This is not the sexiest position. This is not the customer-facing one; it’s not marketing or sales, right? These are in the guts of the company. So I went out, and I led a workshop for them. Tamara Ghandour: And so Morty is this imaginative-futuristic, and he’s standing at the front of his team. We’ve done all these really fun exercises with M & M’s actually, to help them understand how they innovate their different styles in the room and as he imagined a future futuristic. He said, Hey guys, I have a question. What’s our biggest challenge? What’s the thing that we’re constantly facing? And like they’d have this conversation a hundred times. Everybody in the room said how to get the stuff we need in a timely manner and fast enough from our clients, which are the other internal. Jenn DeWall:  Did they even think about how to do that in a different way if they memorize it? Right? Tamara Ghandour:    I mean all of them, right? Like they all said that at the same time, I just almost fell over laughing. But it was clearly their biggest challenge is getting what they need to do their jobs. Right. I mean, we’ve all been in that position, so he’s a futuristic and he said, Hey, what if we thought differently? Like what if we thought with the end in mind, right? Total futuristic, like let’s go to tomorrow land, and we’ll work our way backward. And he said, what if we thought of something totally new? So that’s the imaginative side, which is all about the novel than the gaps. So he throws that out there and then someone who’s an inquisitive, raise their hands and they’re all about innovating in the questions, not the answers, digging deep, pulling back layers of the onion. He goes, that inquisitive goes, what if we’ve been thinking about this wrong? What if there’s a different way to think about this? Like why do we just assume that’s the way it has to be? Brilliant, inquisitive, everyday innovator style right there, right? Then the collaborative-tweaker. Steven was actually his name. He goes, Oh yeah, cause now he’s heard from all these different people, and he can optimize it. He goes, I have an idea. What if we started with how do we have everything we need at the beginning? What if that’s the problem we try to solve? So they went through the room, and all these different perspectives, tapping the power of the diversity of thinking in the room came together to realize, Hey, there’s a different way to solve our biggest challenge. They took that starting point and then created whole new processes out of it that’s going to ultimately save the company millions of dollars, not just in time, but also in resources and actual dollars. So that to me is a great example because of the imaginative, futuristic look to the future. And I was like, what’s possible with the forest through the trees? And then the inquisitive dug deep and said, let’s challenge assumptions. And then the collaborative-tweaker was like, Hey, let me build on what you’re saying. So I love them as a team because, to me, that was, they just, they embraced the fact that, Hey, we all do this differently and let’s leverage each other. And then all of them just at that moment did it, I mean, honestly, Jenn, all I did was facilitate the conversation. They had all the brilliance, and it was awesome to watch. Jenn DeWall:  Well, absolutely. And you’re watching them leverage their own individual strengths in your book. Innovation is Everybody’s Business. You talk about everyday innovation and how it can be used for a competitive advantage. And clearly, that’s one example of how that team then could create something that saved the company. They ended up being more agile or saving and resources. What are other things that you’ve noticed by people embracing more of that like everyday innovator style?? Everyday Innovators Know that Small Innovations can Bring Big Results Tamara Ghandour:    So I’m going to give you an example. Someone, actually I interviewed on my podcast, I’m a while back now—Mike Dubin, who’s the founder of Dollar Shave Club. So so I don’t know if you use Dollar Shave Club for those who haven’t heard of it or don’t know of it, right? You get, it’s a razor subscription model. So here’s the thing about dollar shave club. So I don’t know about you, but buying a razor is the most frustrating experience ever. Right? I was there the other day, and I was looking at the razor aisle, and I was like, why is it one blade and a pivoting head and two blades and a moisture strip and three blades and two blades like I don’t even know. Jenn DeWall:  And how do I remember what razor I buy because I will buy the wrong razor heads? Tamara Ghandour:    But here’s the thing, when Mike came onto the scene, there was no innovation in that category. In fact, everybody was trying to one-up each other. It was like three blades turned to four blades, which went to five blades and a pivoting head like it just, it was getting ridiculous. So I interviewed Mike, and I said to him, Hey, how did you come up with Dollar Shave Club? So when Dollar Shave Club came on the scene, it was like you could only buy razors in the grocery store, and it was a razor blade, right? You bought the razor, and then you refill the razor blades. That’s how the companies made their money. He comes along, and he says, no, no, I’m going to do a subscription model. In fact, I’m not going to make the product better. In fact, it’s just a single blade, but I’m going to deliver it to your doorstep every month. So I asked him, I said, well, how did you come up with this idea? I mean, you took on the Titans of the industry at the time, right? And that was at the time when subscription models were not as common as it is now. In fact, barely anyone was doing it. So like did you come up with this? And he said a couple of really interesting things I think relate to your question. One he said was, here’s the deal, Tamara, I, I’d be talking with friends, and we’d have these ridiculous conversations about how frustrating buying a razor was. Like why is buying a razor so hard? And he said, you know, I thought to myself, I can take the frustration out of this. There’s got to be a way to do this. But here’s where I think thinking differently about what’s right in front of you to create an advantage. This is where I think Mike did it brilliantly. He said, you know, I could’ve come up with a better razor, right? Something that like, you know, maybe talk to you and told you your vital stats and like some ridiculousness because that’s where the industry was headed. This is your blood pressure. And he said, or I could think a little bit differently. And he looked at some other business models and said, what if I just made this a subscription model? So he didn’t change the product, he changed the distribution path. That’s it. That’s all he did. It’s a tiny little innovation that led to being bought out for $4 billion by Unilever in 2016. So, right. So to me, Mike is a great example of every day being an incredible everyday innovator because all he did was think a little bit differently about what was right in front of him. How do I take the frustration out, and how do I deliver this product in a way that’s meaningful to customers and that nobody else is doing? Because here’s the thing, and this is another thing that I think having understanding how you innovate your everyday innovator style where this really helps, we get stuck in something I call the ER trap. So it was like -er, right? It’s like better, faster, or stronger or smoother. Like we always try to find all the -er, right? We all try to out ER each other. At the end of the day, the problem is you’re on a hamster wheel, and you’re doing the same thing over and over again because your competition can out ER you tomorrow, and then it just, you leapfrog from there, right? But you’re staying on the same kind of path together. It’s hard to win by just being better. Tamara Ghandour:    You have to be different and innovative in today’s market, but the beauty is you don’t have to be blue skies breakthrough. You just have to do something small like Mike Dubin did. Jenn DeWall:  Small, which can yield gigantic results, $4 billion. And I think that’s the great thing about innovation that is probably the misconception that you see is that people think that it needs to be something grand and has to go and align with those buzzwords that we know like disruptive and it’s something that’s so novel whereas it’s not that. It’s just applying a different way of looking at it. Tamara Ghandour:    And if we look at any of us, and listeners- look at the brands and businesses we love, chances are they just did something a little bit different that really spoke to us. That’s really what being an everyday innovator is. You know, it’s not, it’s usually not the big technology that we’re like, Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. It’s just this little thing that made all the difference. And frankly, I know, I think we have this tendency of thinking that like innovation in technology, new products or maybe like clever marketing and it can be all those things. But as all the examples I’ve shared, it’s everything else. And you know, I even, and. Jenn DeWall:  There’s not just one track. Tamara Ghandour:    No, it’s not one track. And then, the introduction of this book, I use that to kind of set up the framework for the book. Like how do you think about this book? Because I didn’t want it to be just another toolkit. And one of the things I talk about in there is I do not share stories about Steve Jobs. Elon Musk, even JK Rowling, love all those people. They’re brilliant innovators. But, but that’s not the rest of us. Right? And the rest of us have this incredible opportunity to be innovators in the way that works for us and the lives that we lead. We don’t need to be like them. In fact, we’re not. And one of the neuroscientists I interviewed for my book said it best. He said creativity is common; genius is rare. And we confuse the two. We’re all creatives. We’re all, I use the word innovative for a lot of other reasons, but regardless of what word you use, it’s actually common. We all do it. We look at those geniuses and mistakes that we have to be like them, but we don’t. That’s their thing. And good for them. I love what Tesla’s doing, but totally different. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. And we don’t have to compare ourselves to that. The more that you compare, the more that you’re likely building, I would say, like bad judgments or just things that are going to detract from your ability to actually be innovative. Tamara Ghandour:    So you’re a while back when I was working in consulting, I had this incredible boss named Alpa Pandya. So, hi, Alpa! She’s the best. I’m still in touch with her today, and I was at a place in my career. Kind of to your point about being like other people where I thought that in order to be successful, I needed to be like the leaders in my company, right? So super buttoned-up, always professional, never a smile like that. It was a great company, but that was kind of what the professional person at the time was supposed to look like. So I tried really hard to be that person. And you, I mean, you can all hear me now. I’m not that person. Like I cannot, not smile. It’s just doesn’t work like this. I want to embrace myself for what I did. And for the longest time I was trying to, something that I thought was a person you needed to be like, step into those shoes, fake it till you make it, like all that right. And I did fine, but I was just fine. I was fine. And I’ll never forget one day, and I write about this more in-depth in the book. I was sitting in Alpa’s office, and the real me came out, sure what happened. And I had a like, Oh, no moment. I was like, Oh God, Oh my God, she now knows that I’m actually this kind of crazy risk-taker experiential person. Oh no. And she embraced it and I just never forget her at that moment, that realization of like, Oh, Oh, there’s actually value in my uniqueness. And Alpa was one of those people who saw that uniqueness, and everybody pulls that out of them and recognize them for that uniqueness and what they could bring to the table. And I think it’s really powerful when we understand what’s unique about us and actually bring it to the world and really meaningful ways. And I think sometimes we get, and I totally suffered from this at multiple times in my life, but we get trapped in this, I need to be like someone else. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. It’s so easy to live in that. Anyone can be an Everday Innovator Tamara Ghandour:    And all the posts you see out there are top 10 ways to be an innovator. Top 10 things used to be like Steve jobs, right? I know what Beyonce does in the morning that you can too! I love you, Beyonce, but no, not happening. So I don’t talk about any of those, any of those people, my book, there are in none of my stories. I specifically say that not because I don’t admire what they do, but because we need to be us. And that that is the best value we can bring, and that’s the highest impact we can make because only us, like only Jenn, has Jenn’s point of view and Jenn’s strengths and only Tamara has Tamara’s. So the book hopefully gives people that mental model for being able to unleash that into the world. Jenn DeWall:  What would be the piece of advice that you would want people to take from your book? If you think about those everyday innovators? Like what do you want them to walk away knowing? Tamara Ghandour:    Ooh, I feel like that was the Oprah couch question. I think I actually think there’s really two things. One is, is it innovation is possible for all of us, and for you specifically, whoever you are picking up the book. And the book is 268 pages of the mindset and the rationale and the science and the style and the stories that I think really prove that. So I really hope to change people’s views on what innovation really is. And I hope that they walk away going, Oh my gosh, I am innovative, I’m just as innovative as everybody else. I just am going to do it in my way, and I can apply it to my world. I have this crazy dream of unleashing 1 million everyday innovators into the world because I think if a million of us understood how we drove that or how we innovate and bring that to the world, the problems we could solve, the opportunities we could create, the satisfaction we’d all feel like, I think we could actually shift. I think we could shift the world if we all kind of had that inside of us and brought it out. So that’s the first thing I want people to realize like, Hey, this is me. Like I am an everyday innovator just like everybody else. This is not for a select few. And the second thing is what, and we’ve talked a little bit about this throughout. I really hope that people understand and come to realize that innovation is right in front of them. So I think, you know, our definition is thinking differently about what’s right in front of you to create an advantage. So it can be the stay at home mom, the stuff she deals with. It’s the leader that’s got the team that needs to drive new results. It is the, you know, a worker at the counter who’s trying to have a stronger voice because they’re like, Hey, I’ve got ideas. Even though I’m only a part-time cashier, you know it, it is possible in everything that we do. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah. So those are, I think, great. But that’s, those are the great parting messages that people, I think, really want. I really hope that our listeners walk away understanding that because there’s a lot of value in your book. Thank you so much for taking the time and walking through your book. Innovation is everybody’s business. For those of you that have enjoyed the conversation with Tamara today, you can get her book on Amazon. You can also find it at gotolaunchstreet.com. If you want to order a set of books for a group or organization, Tamara will also throw in additional freebies that come with that, so I would definitely check out gotolaunchstreet.com Tamara, thank you so much for sharing with us your insight on how we can all be every day innovators. Tamara Ghandour:    Well, thank you for having me. It is always nice to be surrounded by other everyday innovators because we all have it, so thank you. Thank you for listening to today’s episode of the leadership habit podcast with Tamara Ghandour. You can find her newest book, Innovation is Everybody’s Business, on Amazon. If you want to learn more about how you can become a better innovator, how about over to gotolaunchstreet.com. There you can book Tamara to speak for your organization and find additional resources on how to move innovation efforts forward. If you liked today’s episode, please share it with your friends, and don’t forget to write us a review and rate it on your favorite podcast streaming service.     The post Episode 30: Finding Your Everyday Innovator Style with Tamara Ghandour, Author of Innovation is Everybody’s Business appeared first on Crestcom International.

Meet Productivity Expert Neen James Jenn DeWall:   Hi everyone, Jenn DeWall here, and on this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, I was lucky enough to interview Neen James. Now for those that don’t know Neen, she is a leadership expert who delivers high energy keynote presentations that challenge audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life. Audiences love her practical strategies. They can apply both personally and professionally and she’s the author of many books and today we’re going to be talking about two of them, her books, Folding Time and Attention Pays. Enjoy Jenn DeWall:  Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning into this week’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast. I am so excited to finally have productivity and time management expert, oh my gosh, the woman that can make you manage your time more effectively, Neen James. Neen, thank you so much for joining us on the show. I’m so happy to have you. Neem James:  Well hello, Jenn. What a treat it is to share with your listeners and to serve in this way. Love your podcast. Love that you featured amazing people. Mark Sanborn, Simon Bailey, Shep Hyken, you have it all going on for your listeners. It’s my privilege to be here. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And you are just, you know, you’re a force to be reckoned with when it comes down to how we can actually maybe do more with less or just be more intentional. And I’m so excited to really dive into, you know, a few of your books that you’ve written, which I know our listeners will just really connect with because even right now in the state of COVID-19, we’re struggling with how the heck to manage our time and it feels like we don’t have control over it or mainly because it was pushed, right? We had to go and shift to this virtual state without much thought behind it. But before we go into the content, please just tell us a little bit about you. For our listeners that may not have ever met you, I want them to know what you do, what your expertise is. So tell us about you, Neem. Neem James:  Well, I grew up in corporate business in Australia. So for those of you attempting to locate this accent, I hail from Sydney, Australia, and in my corporate life, gosh, I was in retail banking, telecommunications, and the oil industry. There’s not a lot of chicks in oil when I was there, but as an attention expert, I am obsessed with helping people get more done, and I want the world to truly pay attention. You know, I’ve had the privilege of working with 1450 fortune 500 companies across the globe, and so what I’m often described as it’s the Energizer bunny for a meeting. You see, what’s unique about me is the fact that I am Australian, so I have a global perspective, but I also became an American citizen, so I have a local perspective as well as the author of nine books on this whole idea of productivity and intention. You can see I’m so obsessed with this particular topic. I’m the oldest of five. I sound like I’m five. So there’s that. But what often happens, Jenn, is people kind of come to me and they say things like, Neem, there is never enough time in a day. Or they say things like; there’s so much to do, it doesn’t even know where to focus, right? Well, they might say, Jenn, I’m exhausted. And what I do is I fix that. Because I’m going to put that super practical, tangible things they can apply immediately, whether it’s at work or home. And, Jenn, the reason I do what I do is I just want the world to pay attention. I think that when we pay attention to our relationships are deeper, we take care of our clients, have colleagues and communities. And you know that’s how I think to make a greater impact in the world. So that’s why I was so honored to be invited to share with your listeners today. Jenn DeWall:  I think your why is so powerful. And it’s often maybe not the first place people look when they think about how can I really enrich my life? They may not immediately go to productivity or attention, but I think what we’re going to talk about today is just really truly giving people maybe the awareness over something that they have control over, that they had no idea that can make a meaningful life. And that’s why I’m so excited to be talking about this as we need to make this a primary focus that people think, Oh, things aren’t going right. Maybe this is one of the first places that I can look to feel out to figure out how I can make it better. Oh yeah. No. If you, you can go on to, Effective Managers Get Things Done Neem James:  You know, Jenn, one thing I realized in my career, I was watching these people who get promoted, and I think how are they getting promoted? And I realized they could get things done. The people that were getting ahead were the people who were productive, that could deliver on projects, that had integrity, that they were able to keep their word. And I noticed early in my career that if I could get things done, I could get ahead. And so while everyone listening may not have aspirations of promotions, but they want to be strong leaders in their role. And what I wanted to be able to do was to truly make a bigger impact in whatever role I took on. And this is where I think my fascination with productivity and intention really started. But I had this insight very early in my career that time management’s out the window. That’s a stupid concept. We can’t manage time. Neem James:  I cannot believe I went to time management courses, and I had a fundamental issue with them that I had no control over time because time’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. You and I get 1,440 minutes in a day. It doesn’t matter. So people who want to do time management. But I’m like, that’s so dumb. It doesn’t make sense. You can’t manage time, but you can manage your attention. And what I realized was that if we were going to have a greater impact in the world, it wasn’t just about being accountable for our time. It’s also about managing our attention and leveraging our energy. And that’s why the first book, Folding Time, was so popular was because I was able to say to people, it’s okay if you feel like it’s not managed time because you can’t. It’s a stupid goal. But you can manage your attention, and that’s why Attention Pays became so popular as well, which is my latest book. Because we were able to share with people sometimes that getting back to those fundamentals, Jenn, if you want to be a strong leader, it’s about really mastering your attention and being intentional with that, and being able to then have strategies behind it of how you can get more done. So productivity is an outcome of how you manage your attention. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh. You just said so much there. I mean nine books and we’re fortunate enough to be able to talk about two of them right now, which first we’re going to jump into folding time, which as a bonus to all of our listeners, Nina’s offering you to get this book for free. You can download it from her website, so we’ll give you those details at the show notes and at the end. But let’s jump into folding time. What does it mean to fold time? For those that maybe are like, what is that concept? That sounds different, to like fold time. You Can’t Manage Time, But You Can Manage Attention Neem James:  Well, as I said, you can’t manage time, but you can fold time. And what I realized was when you combine your ability to be more accountable for your time, to manage your attention and leverage your energy, what happens as a result of that is you start to manage your workflow very differently. You filter your decisions in a completely different way. And then what happens is you invest in the most impactful things. You also are a person of integrity who does what they say they’re going to do, and that’s how you make a greater impact. So when readers download the book, if they want to go to page 27, they’ll see a contextual model there that outlines what folding time is really about. As I said, we really have to think through how are we managing our attention so we can make the most of this moment. Neem James:  We have these crazy to-do lists, Jenn. We wake up with to-do lists. We have a to-do list in the shower. We think that must do this. I must do that. Our brain is constantly telling us to do things. I say in air quotes and what happens often is people are very busy, but busy is not necessarily productive. And I realize when I was interviewing all my CEOs for the book, for Folding Time, is they were saying the same things. There are never enough hours in the day. They couldn’t get everything done. There were too many projects and what came really clear to me was that they were trying to sometimes be really busy, but that wasn’t necessarily getting them closer to their goals, and that’s why folding time is the combination of being accountable for the time you have, managing the attention you have and leveraging the energy that you bring. Jenn DeWall:  Yes, you give quite a few different recommendations in the book on how we can fold time, and I just pulled out a few that I thought might be helpful for our listeners and one of the first ones that I pulled out, and you just touched on it, is accountability. I think that I pulled it out because I think people forget that they can hold themselves accountable. They always, again, it’s always we’re at the mercy of someone else’s standards, deadlines, accountability to them, but not accountable to ourselves. So what does it mean to truly be accountable? Neem James:  You know, I think everyone gets this concept, but they think about it more for someone else. We won’t let someone else down, but we will happily disappoint ourselves. For example, let’s say it’s January, and you’re in Denver, and you have a new year’s resolution of getting fit. And so you decided to set your alarm again and go to the gym, and you’re going to work out, and then it gets a little too cold or it’s just a little too early, and after a couple of weeks you’re like, I’m sick of getting up early, and I don’t want to do this anymore. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, can you see inside my house? Leverage Accountability to Increase Productivity Neem James:  But if you had a friend and you said, I’m going to meet you at that 6:00 AM class in Colorado, right? Yeah. You don’t want to let your friend down. You’re not going to bail on them. You’re not going to turn the snooze on your alarm, and you’re going to get up, you’re going to get dressed, you’re going to go to the gym, you get to meet your friend because public accountability drives private accountability. So if the people who challenge, who find it a challenge to be accountable to themselves, I believe one system to leverage accountability is to get an accountability partner. I’ve been doing this for years, Jenn. My accountability partner, her name’s Tams, and she lives in Boston. And so every Monday I send Tams and a list of things I’m going to achieve this week. And then, every Friday, I send an update. And so what this does is I declare to her, you’re going to hold me accountable for these things, and we have consequences. But literally, I use this as my to-do list, and I cross things off in the week. And that accountability partnership drives my behavior. So think about this as leaders, we hold our team to these standards. They have a job description. They have deliverables. You have performance management in place. So we’re really good at doing it as leaders for our team, but we have to be good at doing it as leaders for ourselves. So find a colleague or someone outside. I also believe people pay for accountability. This is why we have great executive coaches. We have mentors. So being able to help people understand this is what I’m working on when I work with executives in my mentoring program. Jenn, we establish an accountability plan for 90 days, and we say these are the things you are going to work on and so that they become hyper-focused on the achievement of that accountability plan. So if you want to become more accountable so they can get more done, choose what’s going to be most important. Choose maybe someone who can help hold you accountable, and choose to think in 90-day cycles so you feel like you can have an amount of time where you can get those things. Accountability. Like I said, public accountability drives private accountability. Once you tell someone, you’re going to do something. You’re less likely not to do it because you don’t want to let them down. You can use it to drive yourself. So, for example, if you have a status report you have to send to every Friday and you know your boss is expecting it, then you set up an accountability relationship with your boss and say, I’ll get that to you by 5:00 PM East coast time on Friday. And you know that’s going to drive everything you do cause you don’t want to let your boss down. Neem James:  But you can do the same thing. Set timeframe, set guidelines. And for those of you listening who have, you know, I have clients in APAC, in the US and all the Americans and stuff. And so we have to talk timezone, that accountability too. So we’ll say, I’ll have this to you by four o’clock East coast time zone on Friday. So you have an hour to turn it around before the East coast closes down on a Friday night. So we can actually use time in our language no matter where we are in the world. If we talk timezone, it’s an easy technique, and people listen if you talk time and thinking more about it. Jenn DeWall:  Ah, I love that. I have one question about the accountability because I think if I’m talking about myself, sometimes I can be talking with someone and we’re like, okay, we’re going to hold each other accountable. You’re going to do this, and I’m going to do this. But I think that the reason it falls apart for me is that I don’t experience the true consequences. So what are some recommended consequences that you’ve seen be maybe successful in helping to support that behavior change? Neem James:  I had a girlfriend, and we decided to set upon a fitness journey. And we decided to set a very significant goal that would stretch both of us, and there was a financial consequence. If I didn’t achieve the goal, I had to write a check to my friend for an amount of money that made me very uncomfortable. And so the consequence was financial, right? I have another friend who, through trauma, tends to self-soothe with candy. That is the way that they tend to feel better is candy, sugar. So there were consequences. So they made a commitment. They weren’t going to have candy or sugar, or lollies. Whatever, I’m Australian, we call them lollies Americans call them candy. But, so to my Australian listeners, you know what exactly what I’m talking about. But there were consequences to him if he had that candy, there were consequences. So I feel like consequences can be as simple as not being allowed to do something, or they could be as complex as having to do something like that hurts you, right? A check, make a payment. Um, one particular challenge, I still with some of my, is they, what their consequence was, was to donate to a particular charity. So it was for the good of other people, right? So you want to think through what the consequences are. If it’s not just enough to be embarrassed to feel like you’re letting the person down, then you have to think what would that really look like? And it has to hurt a little bit. Like, you know what I mean? Like you’re not allowed to do something or attend something. Or buy some things. So, you know, this doesn’t work for everyone, but I think that accountability can be very internal for some people and they’re wired that way, which I admire. Those people and others of us are externally motivated, and external accountability is very helpful. So I think it’s really important that people understand that. We talk about this in one of the books, and I think if you can understand, are you a person who needs accountability publicly, then finding an accountability partner or a coach or colleague you trust. If you are internally motivated, you’re very motivated and accountable to yourself. And what are the consequences if you don’t achieve the things that you’re not declaring in the world. Does that help? Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, absolutely. I need to make my consequences a little bit higher. Because of it, you know, I, I do get a little bit, but I can quickly dismiss like, well, I’ll just try it again. So they will do that. You know, we have all of our personal excuses, but I don’t want to spend all of our time there, but that does absolutely help. Another concept that you talk about in terms of folding time is to be leveraged. And I thought that was important to pull out because I still think maybe some people aren’t as familiar with the term systematization, or to systematize your time, and so I was hoping we could talk a little bit about that for the people that may not be familiar with that concept. Create Systems of Attention to Boost Productivity Neem James:  Yeah, and one of the things that are really popular now keynotes is we have this whole section on systems of attention and so creating systems of attention. If you think about the whole idea that systems create freedom, you know yourself and people listening to this, chances are when you get up in the morning, you have a system for taking a shower. You probably do the same thing in the same order most days. Rarely have I ever met any clients to get out of the shower, and they think, goodness me, I forgot to wash my body. Why? Because you have a system for taking a shower. Chances are if you drive to work, if you’re commuting, you do the same route every day to work, and sometimes you might get home from work after you’ve driven home and thought, Oh my goodness, I don’t even remember the drive home. Why? Because you have a system for getting home and getting to work. These are systems. We have systems of attention in our life. The beauty of creating systems of attention is what you’re allowing your brain to do if you do the same thing, right? You’re allowing your brain to be freed up for more creative are that kind of uses and so one system that we talk to all the time, no matter where I am in the world, no matter what audience I’m serving, is one system of attention. That’s been very powerful for our leaders. Neem James:  It’s called the 15 minutes system, and what I encourage everyone to do is to have a strategic appointment with yourself every single day. Now it’s only 15 minutes. It’s at the top of the day. But the reason this is very useful is that what I’d invite people to consider is what are your top three non-negotiable activities. So before your head hits your pillow tonight, what are three things you absolutely must do? You have not negotiables. And this strategic appointment with yourself early in the day is going to set your priorities for the day. We call it prioritizing our priorities. And what this does as a leader is it gives you three things. Now, well, I have tried every app, planner, paper, analog, digital. You name it. I’ve tried it. And what I came down to was I have this strategic appointment with myself, this 15 minutes system, and the way that I do it now, people may want to write this down. It’s pretty fancy. I literally grab a posted note, and here’s what I write on the top of the post-it note. I say, today, I will because it’s an agreement with myself that I will hold myself accountable to and I write three not-negotiable activities. Now, these activities will be very personal to you, but they are things that will drive your business forward, your objectives. These are things that, as a leader,  are important to you. Because the challenge that many of our listeners might face is because they’re in leadership roles, they constantly serving people around them. As leaders, you have a team you manage, and so you’re helping them achieve their goals. You have a boss who wants your attention, and you’re helping achieve her goals, right? So you’ve got, you’re sort of stuck in the middle of the leaders, right? So you might be in the C-suite listening to this where you’ve got a board to answer to. You’ve got shareholders. So we all have another leader we answer to. And we’re often leading a group of people in our church, a community at the temple, wherever it is. And so as lead is, we need to think about how can I prioritize my priorities to allow me to focus my time and attention on getting things done. So I carry this silly little post-it note with me, Jenn, all day because it becomes a decision filtering system every time I would much rather play on Instagram, then do an RFP for a client. I see this a little post-it note that says, Hey, by the way, did you finish that proposal? And so what it does is helps direct my attention. Not waste time, but really focus my attention and to get those things done. Here’s another reason why we love it. We love crossing things off. I mean, I wouldn’t be willing to admit on this podcast, there are people, so I bet you any money in the world, but they write things on a to-do list just so they can cross them off. That’s the reason we do that is we want to notice something we did today that mattered. We want to know we made a difference. Our brain craves completion. You see, every time you ask your brain to do something, it’s like opening a new tab on your computer, right? And so there’s a great guy in Denver called Scott Halford and who wrote a fantastic book called Activate Your Brain. One thing that stood out to me in his book, he’s a genius, by the way. He’d be a great guest if you haven’t already had him on, but Scott talks about this idea that when you ask your brain to do something, it’s like opening a new tab on the computer and what your brain is craving- is completion. So the act of writing something down and crossing it off your brain gets so excited, it gives you like a little shot of dopamine, a happy drug, right? And so it’s like a high five from your brain. And so we crave this completion, kind of the reason people feel so overwhelmed, so over-stressed, so tired, is they have so much incomplete, and it’s the incomplete projects, those things that are weighing us down that make us feel less productive. So I want to encourage listeners to try my 15-minute system. It’s outlined in the folding time book we’re giving to all of you, and I just want you to spend for the next week, just try it out 15 minutes every day, identify your top three, not-negotiable activities, and then write them on a post-it note. Carry them with you until they are complete, and then it feels so good at the end of the day, Jen, cause you can scrunch up that piece of paper. You can throw it in the trash. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And just thinking about, you know for me and how I kind of talk about when we have all those things bumbling around in our heads, it’s like having someone poking a finger in your ribs, and it’s just like this annoying pain that continues on and I love the 15 minutes, the 15 minute kind of schedule at the top of your day to really just focus on that because they feel like you get to release some of that stress. I don’t think enough people realize and make that connection to their mental health and how they feel with how they manage their time, and I love that’s just giving people back that help and boost that we need to even support and sustain our mental health. I think that that’s powerful. Managing Your Thoughts for Better Focus Neem James:  Jenn, you make a really good point too. One exercise that encourages all your listeners to do is to do a brain dump. So take 15 minutes with a piece of paper and a pen and write down all the crazy things that are floating around in your brain that feel incomplete. All the things your brain keeps saying. Remember to do this. Have you phoned about that? And have you made this appointment? Have you finished that? We filed that. Do you need this? Your brain’s constantly giving you all these things that it wants you to remember. We feel exhausted. So if you can do a brain dump, write them down. Then you can choose what requires your attention. You can calendar the things you need to follow up. You can make an actual plan, but while your brain keeps reminding you, it’s that poke in the ribs. That’s such a good analogy that you use and make it really simple for your brand and say, okay, I get it. Let me just take 15 minutes, write it all down and then you can choose what you want to do about it. Jenn DeWall:  Ah, Yes! I love that. I feel like I need to do that directly after this podcast. Neem James:  Great idea. We all need to do that right away! Jenn DeWall:  Oh, I love that. I’m so inspired for what all I’m going to do, and I’m actively taking notes, so I know that our listeners will be too. I want to talk about one, probably one more concept before we go into your newest book, cause I definitely want to talk about your newest book. Oh my gosh. I feel like we could go on and have a five-hour podcast talking about your book, if not longer. But to wrap up talking about your book Folding Time, I wanted to talk about what it means to maybe increase your investment. What does that mean for when we’re thinking about how we manage our investment? Neem James:  We often think of investment in dollars. We think if I manage my portfolio, if I grow my bank account, if I grow my superannuation, my retirement, my 401k, wherever you are in the world, whatever you call your savings, right? That’s true, and that’s important. But what I believe we need to think about is where we’re investing our time, attention and our energy and are, we’re getting the return we want, and we talk about ROA, return on attention, what you know, what are those relationships you need to invest in that are going to give you the return that you really want and deserve? What are the activities that you can invest in that will really help you drive your results? I had mentioned earlier at the beginning of our podcast, that busy is not necessarily productive. It’s really easy to give your attention to lots of people and lots of things and lots of projects, but yet you don’t get the return, and the challenge as a leader is everybody wants your time. Everybody wants your attention. It constantly pops into your office, and they say, do you have a second? Do you have a minute? Do you have a second? Do you have a minute? It’s never a second. It’s never a minute. We know that as leaders. And so investments mean really make sure that we are very strategic in the relationships we’re building in the time that we’re investing in getting that return on our attention. So I think you need to choose who deserves your attention, what deserves your attention and how you are going to pay attention to the world. Jenn DeWall:  Okay. And then you go back to focusing and being intentional about that. Because I know that you could probably gather from being on this podcast, I’m a pretty social person. So if someone comes up to me and says, Oh my gosh, Jenn, like how are you doing with this project? Or how was your weekend? And subconsciously, I am in that conversation. I’m not even thinking about everything else. And then all of a sudden, probably even halfway through the conversation, then I’ll start to get the stress where you’re like, Oh my gosh, I’m not doing this. I don’t know how to get out of this right now, and I’m falling behind on my stuff. You know, it is that struggle with, I think when you put some things off. On the face of it, it’s really easy for me to say no. But when you have those organic face to face moments, then it’s harder to say no, because you feel like you have to finish a conversation. I don’t know. I’m sure some people might struggle with that, and just feeling like we don’t feel like we’re paying attention to how we can actually manage our time and set some boundaries in place in that conversation. ROA – Return on Attention Neem James:  And that’s the key, right? Because people, if we take their investment, pay attention to where their portfolio is in this state. They pay attention to their bank account balance. They balance their checkbook. They spend time protecting that and making sure they’re not wasting money. Or maybe they are totally your choice. But one thing that I want people to consider is that with time, once the time is spent, you never get it back. So you’re never going to get a duo. You don’t get the opportunity to go back and have that conversation to go back, and we don’t have time to travel. We don’t have the luxury of going back and changing how we invested our time yesterday or who we invested our time with. And so, the boundary setting is really important. And one of the things we talk about in both books, Folding Time and Attention Pays, is specific words and choices you can make to invest in the right activities, the right projects, the right people, the right passions you have. So the investment is very, very personal. There’s no prescription. But you do have to understand what is really driving you. What do you really want to achieve? What relationships do you want to invest in? And as I said, go back to that return on your attention, Jenn DeWall:  Return on your attention. I love that ROA versus ROI. People, we have to be thinking about it for ourselves and not for the ROI, purpose of the company. What is it? What benefit are we going to see? So now let’s talk about your newest book. So again, everyone, there’s so much great content in Folding Time, you are going to be able to download that for free. You’ll see it in our show notes. So the book that we and some of the content that we just discussed, but now we’re going to talk about your newest book. Attention Pays, which I feel like I could go 20 different directions talking about so many of the concepts that you had, even in just your first chapter, it is bananas. One of the things that I just loved about the book, attention pays is your distinction between an attention deficit society versus an attention surplus society. What does that mean for the people that don’t haven’t read your book yet? Neem James:  So I think that we– I’ll be really honest with you, one of the phrases that make me very challenged, is people say, Oh, I have ADD, which stands for Attention Deficit Disorder. And that’s not always true. They’re just lazy. And ADD is a real thing. I have a little brother who was medicated for this very young and before it was like a cool thing to say, right? And so I really take issue with this excuse. People will say, Oh, I just have ADD. Maybe you’re just lazy. Maybe you’re just not focusing. Now some people genuinely have it, and I’m not talking to those people. They know how to medicate for that. It’s a true thing. But living in this society where we are constantly being distracted by anything and anyone and we’re tired. We talk about in the book that way over-stressed, over-tired, and overwhelmed. And the challenge is yes, and I bet people listening to this and especially you know, if you think about things that are happening in the world at the time of recording, we are currently quarantined globally. Because we and also people that are seen as leaders, they’re not just leading their teams and spending 12 plus hours on Zoom. But they homeschooling their little people, they’re taking care of medications for their older parents. And so what’s happening is we are living in this time in history like none other before where these things are magnified. I’ve heard so many executives say to me in the last two weeks. I’m at a level of tired I never even knew was possible. And so attention deficit, I think when we’re in this attention-deficit society where we’re giving away our attention to everything, social media, email, long meetings that don’t even need to occur. We are, we are wasting time and energy, watching the news for ridiculous amounts of time, rather than finding ways where we could create an attention surplus economy and attention. The surplus economy is where I would love us to aspire to be, where people feel seen, where they feel heard. Where we are directing our attention, and we’re investing in the right thing. See, I always believe that when you pay attention, you reap dividends forever. Because when people feel seen and heard, when we’re, when we’re investing intentional attention, that’s the difference. We’re moving from this transactional way of doing things to this intentional relational way of doing things. And that’s what an attention surplus society is to me. Why Intentional Attention is the Key to Productivity Jenn DeWall:  So, yeah. So what does intentional attention mean? Neem James:  You know, I think it’s the intention that makes attention valuable, and we have to really choose very consciously how we want to act. So acting very deliberately, and that’s how we transform. It’s about the choices we make and the actions we take, and as leaders more than ever before, we need this intentional attention. Because as I said, anyone and everything will take your attention. Everyone claims they’re busy, busy, like a badge of honor. In most countries I’ve worked in, we think we’re so good, we’re so busy. It’s not necessarily how you’re going to have an impact on the world. So I feel like if you can really choose consciously and act very deliberately, that’s how you invest in the right things. That’s how you transform organizations; that’s how you would transform individuals. That’s how you transform your own results is by being very, very intentional. Jenn DeWall:  You know, when you were just talking about how this is something that’s global that many of us are, you know, play and wear busy like a badge of honor. How do we, as leaders, kind of educate people that that’s not necessarily the most important thing? Because I think there are people that still very much hold on to that and think that if I, you know, you talk about it in your book, if I, as long as you’re in your chair at eight until like six or if you’re there longer, you know, 10 hours, then you must be working really hard. How do you educate people that that’s not necessarily a sign of a top performer or a sign of someone that’s super productive? Because it’s not. Neem James:  This the situation on the planet with COVID-19 changing from people being seen at work to now being seen on a computer screen because we’re doing everything’s remote. People are working from home. And what I’ve noticed in coaching, some of my executives, especially the CEOs, they’ve realized they don’t need to see people see the results. And so as a leader, we have to shift that thinking. We have to measure the outcome, not the activity. We have to think, are they delivering on the projects, are they honoring the commitments? Are our clients happy? Is the team cohesive? Are we collaborating? Hours in a seat does not equal return. It just doesn’t. And I think that old leadership thinking is so archaic. Now in saying that, Jenn, there are some industries where team members need to be together. They need to serve clients. They need to collaborate more. Neem James:  But COVID-19 has highlighted that there are different ways of doing business now than we’ve ever looked at before. And what we are also now challenged with is a completely different way of doing business. So working from home has its own distractions, its own commitments, its own interruptions. I feel like if leaders could start to role model and if they could be more focused on measuring the results rather than the activity. Is the client satisfaction increasing? Are sales increasing? Is the team collaborating more? We have to think about what projects we are monitoring, what passions do we have, the people that we’re serving, and we have to rewrite the rules. We have to change the measurements that we used to have in place. I think that attention is the evolution of productivity. We used to measure productivity, and that is important in some industries, but wouldn’t it be interesting if we started to measure attention? Wouldn’t it be interesting if we started to think about, do my clients feel seen and heard? And the way we can tell that is if they constantly come back to us. Do they refer us? Are they our advocates? We need to move our clients into this position where they become our sales force. They’re our advocates. So it’s moving from transactional to intentional. Jenn DeWall:  Oh my gosh, I love everything about this. Plus I personally want to sign up for this reeducation and a new focus on outcomes versus that– because I know that early on in my career when I spent time at a Fortune 500 I had someone that was a position above me and we all sat in a cube together and I was doing a portion of his job plus a portion of someone else’s job, and I was working fewer hours, but I initially got flack that I had to work through that people were like, well, Jenn’s coming in at eight-thirty, and she’s leaving right at five every day. Because I was like, why would I sit and stay here? I’m already getting all my stuff done, and I’m glad that he does it, but he’s clearly not as productive. And it was so frustrating. And so I’m just, I’m so happy to sign on because I do think by holding people to those standards, you are also depriving them of maybe opportunities for work-life integration where they could be feeling better and then that recharge time could be better invested back into the organization. Like there are so many benefits from it. So, whatever we can do to help you know, shift that so people can see that that’s not, that perception piece isn’t necessarily the true predictor of performance or attention. Neem James:  Jenn, for many leaders who are listening, you know, I have clients that span from global manufacturing clients, global media clients to local trust companies, and they’ve all had to revisit their policies, their procedures, their culture, their employee engagement. And so as a person in leadership listening to this goal. You’ve got to think through what do I want the employee engagement to be like, how am I going to help educate the shareholders on this new model? How am I going to convince the board? This is something that we need to do? How am I going to partner with my HR person to ensure we have the right policies to support this? What culture am I creating? There are so many questions you can ask yourself, and so we have to think through what it is that we really value as an organization. If it’s our people, then our policies need to represent that. We need to create environments where our people will thrive rather than feel like they’re dying because these policies are so restrictive. Jenn DeWall:  Let’s talk a little bit, and I know that you’ve woven this in, but truly by shifting it to being more, intentional about our intention, what benefits can leaders or organizations see by being more focused and deliberate with their attention. Paying Attention to Your Team Increases Their Productivity Neem James:  They can attract the top talent. I think that’s not just attraction, but retention of top talent is one of the benefits of paying attention because the employees feel like you see them and hear them, and you value their opinion. Obviously, it increases things like productivity because people want to work with you, and they want to get things done for your business. It obviously increases our sales. However, you measure that, right? So it could be about the add-on sale, it could be about new business, it could be about- there are so many metrics that just make sense. If people are paying attention, if your customers like you are really speaking to them and you’re personalizing it, and you’re tailoring it, and you’re customizing it for them, they are going to feel so much more loyal to you. Therefore, customer loyalty is going to increase. Not only are they going to do that, as I mentioned earlier, but they are also then going to be advocates where they are going to tell others about you. Neem James:  Every leader aspires to the referral business. Every leader wants others to share how great the experience was. It doesn’t matter how much you put into advertising. Advertising is important, but if someone personally recommends you, and I know that if one of your girlfriends recommends a service to you because they had an amazing experience, you’re more likely to take their word than you are if you saw an Instagram ad, correct? And so we want to think through if paying attention, it’s not just about attraction and retention of employees, it’s not just about productivity, it’s about creating these amazing opportunities to have these cascading relationships where your employees also become advocates for you because they start telling everyone else about it. There is a ripple effect that happens when you pay attention to what really matters. Jenn DeWall:  You know, I love the connection that you had made between seeing your customer, focusing your attention there, and then taking action. Because I think oftentimes you might sit in a room thinking about how do we evolve this product to make it better? But we’re not necessarily seeing the customer. We just know that, based on the Excel spreadsheet that our numbers are not where we want them to be. And so I think that you know, it’s important to really, put on that human side of like seeing them. And so I love that connection because that is truly when we, one of the ways you can generate or increase your revenue. Neem James:  Oh, yes. I started my career in banking, and I remember very specifically that when I was in banking, I learned that it costs us $50 to attract a new client to the bank. What I also learned was, if a client had an average of four accounts with us, they were less likely to move to another bank. So I made it my mission to ensure that every client that I served, every customer that came into the bank, that I would check to make sure we not only took care of their savings accounts but also their investment accounts, their insurance, their travel needs. And so I was a huge advocate of the add on sale. And so for me, what I wanted to make sure was, does that customer feel like we can meet all of their needs? How can we help them? I was always referring them to our life insurance person, to our travel department to increase the, you know, to set up savings accounts for school, for the education, for their kids. But what I saw very quickly in my career is if that customer felt loyal to us, not only would they- and to me, because I would want to develop that relationship where I can personally look after them but also they would then tell the family, they would tell their friends, they would tell business partners. It has this ripple effect. And so one simple act is making a decision that it costs more to get a new customer than it does to provide service for an existing customer. Then totally changes the metrics. So imagine if all of you listening to this, if you have the opportunity, when is the last time you called a client or a customer and said, Hey, thanks for doing business with us. That’s it—no other agenda. Just I still appreciate you doing business with us. Imagine the response people would get. No hidden sale, no hidden agenda. No. Oh, by the way, we have this new product. Nope. Just thank you. Thank you for being a client. Nobody does that anymore, Jenn. Jenn DeWall:  And that’s sad. That’s sad because we do need to be seen. It’s simple. Neem James:  All we want is to be seen and heard. It’s all we want. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. I love that you. So I do life and career coaching outside of leadership development. And so I feel like that’s the number one thing I think I see is that people just want to be heard. And I love how you weave that into how we look at managing our attention. Because I think that that parallel needs to just be, or just that message that people really want to be seen. Like everyone needs to know that that exists in every single aspect. Like we just what to be seen, and even the most bullish of people that think that they don’t care, they care! Listen with Your Eyes Neem James:  Yeah, we don’t need everybody’s attention. We just need somebody’s attention. You don’t have to be the center of attention, but you have to be the center of somebody’s attention. And so whether you’re listening to this as an introvert or an extrovert, one’s not better than the other. They’re just different. I think attention as a word gets a bad rap because of social media and words we throw around like influencers and followers. And we say, Oh, she just wants attention. So attention has got this bad rap, which is such a shame, and I’m on this mission to change that. I really believe that if we look at things through the lens of intentional attention, if we think about how can I truly make sure that I’m making the right choices and I’m acting very deliberately to help this person feel seen and heard? One of the stories we talk about in the book that people are welcome to read is I learned this lesson from my little friend, Donovan. Neem James:  I remember Donovan and I was sitting in the kitchen of his mom’s house, and we were debating about who is cooler? Is it Superman or Batman? I mean, these are the things you debate with the five-year-old, right? We’re in this very heated debate with two of us, and he kept asking questions, and I thought I was answering him, but he got so annoyed at me because he didn’t think I was paying attention. He got so mad, Jenn, he jumped in my lap. He grabbed my face with these tiny little hands. He turns my face towards him, and he said, this- Neem, listen with your eyes. He was five. Jenn DeWall:  Oh, he was five. Neem James:  I know it took a five-year-old to remind me. We don’t just listen with our ears, we listen with our eyes, we listen with our heart, we listen with our soul, and as leaders, we have a responsibility to listen with our eyes. That’s how we pay attention. Jenn DeWall:  My gosh, I’ve loved our podcast interview. I know we have to wrap up, but I just want to you know, we’re going to offer all of our listeners the ability to access Folding Time from you, but how do they find Attention Pays? Where is that? Where’s that book? Neem James:  Wherever your favorite books are sold, you can find Attention Pays. It’s a global release by Wiley, so you’ll be able to access it wherever you like to buy books from. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, there’s so much content that we didn’t even talk about yet. So I know that you know, for those of you listening, trust me that there’s, there’s a lot that you’re going to be able to find. And I just truly appreciate that you took the time. Like your time to invest in helping our listeners think a little bit differently about how they can improve their quality of life by shifting their attention. And so I know I have to ask you the final question, but before I do that, I just want to say really thank you so much for that because I think what you’ve given all of our listeners is just a gift of being able to look at ourselves and the way we do things in a different way, to hopefully be more meaningful and get that know return on our attention that you talked about. Neem James:  It’s a privilege to share in this way. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success Jenn DeWall:  So my final question, and it’s the final question we close every podcast with, is what is your leadership habit for success? Neem James:  Listen with your eyes. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Listen. See people. Well, Neem, thank you so much for joining us today. It was just such a joy to interview you and to hear from you. You are truly just someone that I admire in your expertise, and I’ve just learned so much. So thank you so much for giving us your time today. Neem James:  What a treat to serve your listeners, and I’m so glad we got to do this. Thank you for inviting me on the show. You’ve got a fantastic offering for so many people around the world. Jenn DeWall: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit podcast, featuring Neen James. To download your free copy of Folding Time, head over to NeenJames.com/books, And while you’re there, subscribe to her newsletter for more leadership and time management tips. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, remember, share it with a friend or feel free to leave us your review on any of your favorite podcast streaming services. The post Episode 29: Productivity and Focus with Leadership Expert, Keynote Speaker and Author, Neen James appeared first on Crestcom International.

Workplace Culture with Undercover Employee and Leadership Expert, Nora Burns What would you learn about workplace culture and leadership if you stepped out of the executive suite and out to the front lines and mopped the floors, stocked the shelves, or made the deliveries? Nora Burns, a leading expert in leadership and workplace culture, did just that. As a fortune 200 executive, Nora Burns witnessed the phenomenon of disconnection between the boardroom and the break room and its cost to organizations. She became obsessed with trying to understand that disconnect and how to bridge the gap between titled leaders and informal leaders while remaining in touch with all levels of the organization. And the year she invested in analyzing leaders and working as the undercover employee for big brands, Nora uncovered some truly remarkable stories. More importantly, she discovered the four attributes that create a stronger connection and a more effective workplace culture. Now, more than ever, understanding and prioritizing these elements is critical to organizational success. She takes her coffee black, so with us on the podcast today is keynoter retreat facilitator and consultant, Nora Burns. Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. It’s Jenn DeWall, and today on the show, I have leadership development and workplace culture expert Nora Burns. Nora, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. Nora Burns: Thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. Jenn DeWall: Nora, for those that may not be familiar with you and who you are and what you do, just give us a little bit of a rundown about who you are. What is an Undercover Employee? Nora Burns: Well, as you shared in the intro, I have this background in human resources and organizational development working for large and small organizations. And probably the most unique qualifier to me is the fact that I am an undercover candidate and employee, the undercover candidate, and the undercover employee because I did a whole lot of independent research into this when I saw those disconnects between different layers of the organization. Jenn DeWall: So, what does that mean to be an undercover employee? Nora Burns: To be an undercover employee- I worked on the front lines of five different Fortune 500 organizations, where they did not know that I’m an expert in leadership and workplace culture. But instead, they saw me as the cashier or the customer service rep, the warehouse staffer, delivery driver. Right. So as far as they were concerned, I was every other person on their payroll. But what I was doing was studying how that leadership interaction was taking place and what was happening with the workplace culture from the front line instead of from the executive suite. Right. I’ve been looking at that for the last dozen-plus years. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Right. I think there’s a lot of stuff that gets missed as it trickles down from that C-suite board room to when it gets to the front line. And that’s, I’m sure what they see is when maybe the strategies tend to unravel because they don’t necessarily know whether the front line employees have the same access to information or even the same commitment to that strategy or also understanding why they are trying to do what they have to do to support that strategy. Nora Burns: Yeah. The “why” is huge. The “why” is huge and how things get translated in essentially a huge game of telephone that we’re playing from the boardroom to the break room. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh. You know, that’s just what I’ve, I would love to talk to you. I feel like hours on end about your undercover research, but prior to this, we were talking a little bit about, you know, just how things have changed. I know that me in leadership development, you in leadership development, we’ve obviously seen a big change as a result of Kobe and you had mentioned before we went live, we were just talking about how employee needs have changed. Share with our listeners kind of what’s different about leading today and how maybe our needs are a little bit different or our employee needs are different for organizations. What Employees Need Now Nora Burns: Yeah, it, the employees have changed dramatically in the last month to two months, three months, depending upon where in the world you are and where you were when COVID really took over your space. Right? But we essentially taken employees back to the very baseline understanding of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Right now, we’re talking about baseline safety and security issues. It is no longer you know, the Foosball table in the break room, the fact that we’ve got happy hour every Friday, you know, kind of a thing. It’s how do you take it back to making sure that people have core safety, security, and an understanding that of where their company is going and what their role is in it. And in order for people to be really productive in their jobs right now, which is a tough ask, quite frankly, they need to make sure that those other things are taken care of, right? Like this is, this is always true, but it’s, but it’s accentuated right now. Is my mortgage getting paid? Is my rent getting paid? Do I have a safe methodology by which to take care of myself, my family, my community? Jenn DeWall: Yes, and there are things that, you know, I like to say that up until today we could kind of skirt around not addressing emotions in the workplace, but I feel like everything that we see as a result of COVID is naturally lends itself to emotions and that we as leaders really need to step into that space of maybe discomfort and talk about emotions, address the safety of your team, address. You know how they feel about their role in the organization. I mean, if you’re a leader, I can guarantee that if you’re in an industry that might be impacted negatively right now, that you might have someone on your team that is very afraid of losing their job and that fear is going to trickle into how they actually show up for the job. Nora Burns: Oh, without question. There has never been, I think, addressing the fact that people show up as their whole selves with all of their emotions is important in any situation, right? Because we need, one of the elements that I talk about in the Echo Effect is, is the humanizing it, right? Like to humanize your workforce. And that means accepting the person in their whole and understanding the emotions. And right now, because of the level of fear and anxiety that’s happening in the unknowns, all of that is elevated. All of that has been taken to just a heightened level. And there’s nothing to hide behind because we now have no choice but to deal with those emotions. And there’s never been a time where emotional intelligence was more important, at least in my lifetime here at work, right? Understanding emotional intelligence, how you show up, what your emotions are, how that’s having a ripple effect on your team. Nora Burns: All of it really needs to be addressed because even if they’re not worried about having a paycheck, right? Because there are some industries that are going to flourish in the midst of this. If it’s not even worrying about having a paycheck, it’s, it’s the idea that they might transmit this to their family if they’re an essential worker and they have to be out of the house and out on the job. But also what’s happening with the other members of their family and elderly parents or grandparents or nieces and nephews and other people around that they don’t have firsthand contact with. Jenn DeWall: It’s a really, really difficult time. And it’s a, you know, it’s a new time. It’s a new experience. You had touched on it. We haven’t seen it before in our lifetimes. How quickly the state of work changed. But you talk about the “Echo Effect,” which is essential– I love it because it’s a way for us as leaders of things that we could be doing today to position us to be ready for what tomorrow brings. Tell us a little bit about what your concept of the echo effect is. Developing Workplace Culture – How Will You Show Up Today? Nora Burns: Well, I have long said that there’s always this echo that happens with every touchpoint that a leader has with members of their team and that every team member has with other members of the team, right? It impacts for a longer time than what we realize every single touchpoint that we have. And again, right now, it’s, it’s even more true. So in developing your workplace culture, in looking at what you’re going to stand for as an organization, mission, vision, values, not only what’s up on that break room wall, because quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what you wrote up on the break room wall, what matters is how you show up in a day to day experience. And I think before, pre-pandemic organizations were able to hide a little bit of that, of the truth of who they really were as organizations. Nora Burns: And they, they might hide behind what that mission, vision, values are. And right now, there’s nothing to hide behind. It’s all kind of stripped bare and, and you’re showing up. Your workplace culture is kind of out on display because of how you’re talking to your employees every day and that that has a ripple effect. It has what I call an echo effect in that it continues to go on and live on is your employment brand, both with your current employees as well as potential future employees. And that is, that encompasses the experience that your employees have from the time they’re candidates until the time they’re hired, and then they leave. It encompasses the level of communication that you have with them in terms of, especially right now, right in times of chaos and change, we need to communicate even more, but how much we’re communicating effectively with our employees. Nora Burns: And it’s the level of humanizing. One of the biggest issues that I saw as the undercover employee was the really the lack of humanization of team members across the organization. There was a lot of just insignificance kind of feelings on the front lines. And then the O in our echo acronym is to “own it.” And this is really critical right now. Because what I mean by that is the number of times I heard from front line managers, supervisors, directors, right? Like general managers locally- things like, Oh, well, you know, that’s, that’s the policy. That’s what headquarters said. That’s what, that’s from home-office. Like this, I’m washing my hands. It’s not a great metaphor right now. I’m washing my hands of it, right? Like everybody’s washing their hands of it, but they’re taking no ownership of why we’re doing things or, or digging in and being that bumper to go up and get more information if it’s necessary, they’re just kind of saying, Oh, that’s just how it is, and that’s not going to help to grow and engage your frontline workforce. Nora Burns: So, so the echo is both understanding that there is this echo effect, right? Like the things we do are heard not only today but tomorrow, the next day and the next day. And now I’d actually argue that the things that we’re doing with our teams right now, the decisions we’re making, the behaviors that are taking place in our organizations will have an impact on our organizational reputation. Not only for days, weeks, and years but truly for decades. Like this will have a legacy, be it a good one or a bad one. But it’ll echo through many, many years to come how employees are being treated right now with regard to each of those elements. What is the ECHO Effect? Experience. Communication. Humanize. Own It. Jenn DeWall: I love the description. I especially love the emphasis on ownership because I think that’s a really easy thing to get lost, especially with the quick transition from face to face to a virtual setting where we’ve maybe had to adjust some of our policies, which if people aren’t taking ownership, it’s a lot more difficult to maintain business as normal. But you talk about ECHO- and it’s an acronym, right? Nora Burns: It is an acronym, and it is a reality. So, the acronym is Experience. Communication. Humanize. And Own it. And those are really four key elements to developing effective workplace culture and to managing your way through any kind of tumultuous time like we’re in right now. And it is very much reality in terms of the fact that people share their experiences with family, with friends, with the community now we share them on Glassdoor and on you know, out on people actually share on Yelp, their employee experiences, which sometimes get edited off of there, but also out on Indeed and other boards that have opportunities for voice to say, Hey, what was it like to really work there? And now that echo has gone beyond that, communication has gone beyond those levels, and now it’s going into the news, right? Nora Burns: Both good and bad. Like the exciting stuff. The exciting stuff is the fact that the really positive echos are the CEOs, the executive teams that have put their own finances aside for the benefit of the frontline worker and for their organization. So we’ve heard about several CEOs who have said, I’m going to not take a salary or bonus at all during 2020. Or who’ve said, I’m only going to take $20,000 or $30,000, and the rest of what was going to be my salary and bonus gets donated back to the organization to make sure we’ve got masks and gloves and enough pay to pay extra overtime for those who are really having to work a lot of hours right now. And they are taking care of the frontline at their own expense. What an awesome echo, because five, ten years from now, people are still going to say, remember when. Remember when they actually waived their own finances so that we could make it through that. Jenn DeWall: That’s how much they care. Nora Burns: And that’s where I want to work. And you think about it now, that’s going to be how people talked about the Google pods, right? So all the stuff that came out when Google made a Google, the Google complex Googleplex, that’s what its called, where there’s like sleeping pods, and there’s you know, the free vending machines. And remember when those things were the first kind of coming out, and people were talking about them and like, wow, what a crazy thing and how awesome. And the people will be like. I want to work there. Right? Because how cool is that that they have all of this stuff? And I think right now what we’re finding is the organizations that will be that, in another five and ten years. When people say the CEOs, who rolled up their sleeves, the CEOs who donated their own pay back, the executive teams who made sure that our community was taken care of, that not only I was taken care of as an employee, but my spouse, my family, they’re taking care of transportation. They’re taking care of making sure we’re safe, right? With gloves and masks and all of those types of things. Those are the organizations that people are going to be talking about for years to come in a positive way. The same way we’ve been talking about the exciting changes that Google brought into workplace culture for the last ten years. Jenn DeWall: I love how that connects with what you were saying earlier that right now, workplace needs are changing. So what was appealing once about Google, which sleeping pods, free vending machines, is not necessarily the thing at the forefront to employees today? That they actually want to be at a place that is concerned about whether or not they will be safe or healthy or can eat. Or that they have a human leader that connects with them and cares about that. You know, there’s a value shift in terms of our employees and what they’re really wanting. Nora Burns: And they are, and I am confident in Google’s making that change. They’re not a client of mine, they’ve never been a client of mine. And I also think highly enough of them as an organization that would be super surprised if they’re not leading that in a lot of ways in their own organization. But the idea right now of a sleeping pod that somebody else has slept in is actually a little horrifying, right? Like it’s kinda like watching television of any kind. Now you’ve got, I watch it and what’s interesting to me is I’ve never watched a lot of television, and I’m watching even less right now when you would think I would have more time. But part of it is when I do watch anything- a commercial or a show- anything and people are touching and doing it, and you’re like, NOOO, right? Like, because our frame of reference from society has changed. Nora Burns: So some of those things like, you know that had been offered are probably not as appealing and really needing to transition and say, okay, now some of the important things are there’s a huge of course hygiene and how do we make sure that everything is clean and everything is safe? And what were we sharing before that doesn’t make sense to share now? Right? We’ve had lots of shared workstations, and for a lot of organizations who had a big boom in growth, that was a very popular thing to do where you had shared workstations, and at least for the next several months, that’s really unappealing. Unless we’ve got really strong protocols in terms of how we make that transition from one employee to the other. But the safety and security elements are going to be huge. What Employee Experience Says About Workplace Culture Jenn DeWall: Yeah. Absolutely. Basic human needs. Going with how you started it. So the echo effect that he for the experience. So is “experience” about what we have in terms of the operational experience, whether we have our resources to do our job, or is it kind of like the experience of knowing that we’re supported by someone? What does that mean? Nora Burns: I take experience down to the very specific employee element. What has my experience been with the organization, with the brand? And are we making sure that individual employees have that positive experience? And I think for right now there’s going to be a lot of focus on that, safety and security. So I think of it is a re-imagining, which I spend so much of my time re-imagining kind of that candidate experience, the hiring process experience, and then the onboarding experience. Right? So right now, there are some organizations that are really flourishing, and they are growing, and they’re adding staff. Well, how do you do that differently in a COVID-19 world, right? What resources are we providing for our candidates in terms of doing video interviews and are we training our hiring teams on how you interview via video because it is different, it’s a different experience, and we’ve learned all of these things. Nora Burns: A lot of people have learned these things like body language signals and signs that are going to be different on video. Because one of the things, a lot of people don’t know if they’re interviewing on video, for example, to look at the camera and not to look at the screen, because if I’m looking at the screen some of those hiring managers are going to read that as I’m looking shifty because I’m actually often looking down, I’m looking off to the side cause I’m looking at their faces. Which has nothing to do with if I’m looking shifty, or telling the truth or not telling the truth or all that kind of a thing. It’s a technology issue. Right? So, so anyhow, so back to the original question, which is what is that employee’s experience with their hiring process? When they first came on board, were people expecting to see them where they, you know, were they treated with, I respect all the way from the beginning. But now we transition them to a COVID-19 world. So it’s not only are you getting back to people and are you responding to resumes and to calls about from candidates and those types of things, but it’s, are you making sure that they are safe through that process? Are you addressing their safety and security? And are you ready to answer their questions about how your organization is dealing with COVID-19 to make sure that they’re coming in with a positive story about your organization looking out for them? Jenn DeWall: Yeah, and you already have to be prepared to answer some questions that you maybe wouldn’t feel that you had to answer outside of COVID, such as even like the state of the business. Are we going to make it? Will I have a job? That’s something that I think many organizations, especially private organizations, wouldn’t necessarily feel as inclined to share, but right now it actually becomes a tool that you can use to help soften or alleviate some of that anxiety, which is naturally going to occur as a result of COVID. So let’s talk about the C -Oh, wait, were you going to add something? I want to hear, Nora Burns: Yeah, I can go down the path of any one of these elements for an extended period of time. As I pull forward, you know, experiences as that undercover employee. And I think of kind of where we are, what our current state is in terms of safety and security and a lot of organizations. And, and quite frankly, it’s, it’s a little scary to me. So I’m really excited and hopeful that organizations are going to step up to this because I’m flashing right now in my brain to, to things like cutting my hand while I was working and a little, a little cut, but looking for a bandaid and nobody knew where the first aid kit was. And then when we got the first aid kit, everything in the first aid kit was expired. And not by like a little, but by like four years. Nora Burns: And I’m thinking that’s, that’s a pretty baseline OSHA-audit checkoff, right? Let’s make sure we’ve got a first aid kit that takes care of things. And so we are, we are asking organizations to go from, I didn’t have a first aid kit available that had all of the like up to date basic needs to, we have to protect them from a, from a pandemic virus, right? So that’s a big gap, and I’m excited. I’m excited that the kinds of people who listen to your podcast, right, the kinds of people who are continuous learners, and leadership are exact, who is going to step up to that challenge and say, okay, wait, what are we doing? If I shift perspective- and that’s my biggest ask of anybody- is can you shift perspective and pretend for just a little bit that you are working on the frontlines of your business, that you are working at the customer-facing point and, and, and really immerse yourself in that experience and that idea and do that thought experiment and say, what would I want? What would I need? What would I want to make sure was available? And I’m excited that the people who are listening to this are the people who are willing to do that thought experiment. That makes sense to me. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. A shift in perspective. This is just such a great time to be able to think that there is a different way that we can do things, and maybe it’s by force, or maybe now you can look at it as an opportunity. You can start a new chapter in multiple facets of your organization. Now I want to continue to go through the echo effect. So we talked about the experience. So the experience that that employees have in your organization, that right now as a result of COVID, we really need to be sensitive and aware of that experience. What does the C in ECHO stand for? Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! Nora Burns: The C is for Communication, which should be like a huge capital C of course – Jenn DeWall: Communicate, communicate, communicate!!! Nora Burns: And when in doubt, communicate again. This is, this is shockingly a gap that I recognize as the undercover employee. And it’s interesting because again, having been an executive, having put together the communication plans for a variety of different things, both good news, and bad news, you know, everything from hiring to being bought out by a bigger company, to layoffs, to product development, right? Having been part of communication strategies for a lot of those, I had a very specific look at what corporate communication looked like. And then I’m on the front lines, and it didn’t translate, it didn’t come through it. It missed a chain of command. Nora Burns: It missed somewhere along the line to the point that here was one organization that I was working at- and it’s worth noting, I never ever disclose the names of the organizations where I worked-so it’s not about blame and shame. It is about what we can collectively learn from the trends that were present across all five organizations. And so I don’t ever disclose the organizations or, or say anything that would give them away. Right. So it’d be easy enough for any organization to look in their payroll records and see if my name’s there to know if I was there that they find it out. We don’t need to, and we don’t need to share that. But I was working at one organization, and I had been off work for just two days, ironically, to go deliver the opening keynote at a medical conference, which is a slight shift from working my cashier job. So then I got off, and I’d done my normal job. So I’d gone and done this opening keynote at a, at a conference down in New Orleans. Nora Burns: And I came back, and something was just off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I’m like, something has changed. Like just like this disturbance in the force type feeling but not knowing what it was and nobody was saying anything in particular. There wasn’t something obvious. And I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was, and I thought, Hmm, something’s off. And I actually thought it might have to do with the fact that I had done this big shift from, you know, being the keynote speaker, which is one very specific role to being back as a cashier wearing my polyester uniform. And so I kind of thought it might have to do with that. I thought, Oh, I’m going to think about that and what, what’s going on with me on that. And then, as I was leaving work that day, I looked off to the right-hand side in the entrance to the store. And I noticed that the General Manager’s photo was no longer behind the plexiglass where it said welcome to our store, our General Manager is- the photo wasn’t there. And I was like, huh. And I turned back kind of go back to the security guard where I showed them my bag to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything from the store. I said, Hey, how come you know, so and so’s the photo isn’t up there? And He said he had quit and walked off the job two days ago. Nora Burns: So my boss quit while I was out for two days and nobody said anything. Nobody made sure that the people who were not present that day, at that time, when that happened, were aware of it. And I was like, Oh well, that explains why there was this weird air in the room the whole time. Right. So I mean like that’s a pretty significant element to not communicate to your team. And if we’re missing big things like that, then we’re missing lots and lots of little things. And I watched it happen where if you weren’t present at that one meeting where that information was shared, there was no way for you to have that information. Because things were shared once and when things are going smoothly, when things are going well, you need to communicate information that’s important to the organization and to all of the team more than once. Nora Burns: Now, in the middle of this, the pace of change in terms of how our communities are dealing with this in terms of how our families are dealing with us, our companies are dealing with us. It needs to be on a regular basis. You really need it and not, and it needs to be effective. It can’t be another email that goes out to everybody that says, here’s the update and the status of our COVID-19. Oh my gosh, I have now, I have all but put a filter on those. I’m so close to just putting a filter that if the subject line says COVID-19, it just goes into spam because that’s not the communication that people need. They need to know- Jenn DeWall: Well, people have already evolved to understanding like- I think there’s something to be said about understanding your audience. What they’re going through and what’s important to them. I think, you know, I’m sorry to kind of jump in, I think that’s where we’re seeing some challenges in terms of the world of influencing and celebrity and how, you know, there have been some that have really been criticized for their lack of considering their audience. Maybe feeling a little bit tone-deaf or out of touch. And your organizational emails can also create that same effect where you can feel tone-deaf. If your employees are really concerned about where and what their job is going to look like and you’re trying to get them to celebrate, you know, 100 years at the company, even though that’s a great thing, that’s not going to mean that much to them right now. Nora Burns: Yeah. That has to get reframed. That has to get reframed, and it does come back to both tone-deaf, as well as the emotional element. Right. Is it something that I want to open? I want to read. I want to look at it. If there’s important information in there, it has to be sent in a way that I want. I want to open it and have the subject line be COVID- 19 updates aren’t going to do that. Not for your employees internally and not for your customers externally. There are sensitivity and this awareness of what’s happening now. Here’s, okay, here’s one element of that, right? We talked a little bit about safety and security, and I think about this idea is Colorado looks towards the future and reopening restaurants, bars, that kind of thing. And we don’t have a date as we’re recording this. Nora Burns: We don’t have it the date for when that might happen. But one of the things that was shocking to me on the front lines that I had been tone-deaf about that I had not considered. I have the luxury of being a person who has a safe home, right? That I have enough space for myself. I don’t have to shove six people into a two-bedroom apartment. Right? And that is, that is an absolute luxury. And the part of that that I hadn’t fully appreciated was the fact that I have a washer and dryer in my home. Where when I come home at the end of the day, and I smell like whatever food that restaurant happened to be making, where I was serving, I could take all of that off and put it straight into the washer and not give it another thought. And realizing that I was the only one at that particular location for whom that was true. Everyone else either had an apartment building where they had to go and pay $2, $3, $4 to wash their uniform. Or they had to go to a laundromat, and that escalates that. So I think about an easy, easy baseline thing is maybe before we gave everybody two uniforms and now we’re going to give them five so that they can get through a whole week. Because I don’t want anybody in the age of COVID-19 re-wearing any clothes? Right? I don’t want you to re-wearing your uniform top from today to tomorrow. And I know and appreciate that you don’t have the methodology to wash that in your own house. And I don’t want to make you pay almost an hour’s wage in order to wash it. I don’t want people trying to wash them out in their sinks. Right. So an easy, easy way to enhance that and to say we really do care about you, is you have a uniform for every day of the week, whatever that uniform is. If it’s an apron, if it’s a vest, if it’s a tee-shirt and polyester pants, whatever that is, there’s a minimum of five that’s dispersed to everyone sends the message, we care. And it says that you’re not tone deaf about the situation that most of them are living in. Jenn DeWall: Oh my gosh, I love that idea. I never even thought about that. Like another way that you could just consider or just, you know, kind of anticipate, or step in their shoes and think about how you could make it easier, especially right now when those, you know, the essential workers, the front line employees are likely experiencing more stress than they’ve ever had on the job before. And so the little things that they can do, my gosh, I think that’s such a great consideration. Let’s go on to the H. So the echo effect. So E is the experience. C is communication. To communicate, communicate, communicate. Especially right now. What is H? Humanizing Workplace Culture Nora Burns: The H is Humanize. One of my greatest shocks as the undercover employee was the fact that when I go into the break room and talk with my friends, fellow workers, and they saw me as a peer- because again, they don’t know that I’m an expert in Leadership and Workplace Culture. They’re saying as peers, the cashier, the housekeeper, etc. And I’d sit in the break room and say, sell, what do you do here? Like, I’m new, what’s your job? And what the answer was- consistent, so consistent- because the answer was I’m” just a” and then whatever their job title was, right? I’m just a cashier. I’m just a warehouse employee. I’m just a Department manager. I heard it all the way up to General Manager, which is a little shocking, but I’m just a, and it didn’t matter who I was asking in which organization I asked. Nora Burns: This happened across the board in all five organizations where people would say, I’m just a -. It’s just so fascinating to me and incredibly sad. Because we are, in fact, a capitalistic society. We do not pay for any job that does not need doing, right? Every single job within our organizations has significance. And we’re going to have some work to do on that when we get back into everybody being back at work because this whole who is essential needs to be not misunderstood as who’s important. Right. And because it’s, it’s different from what’s essential to keep a society working on a day to day basis to in the larger scheme of life. Right? It’s, it’s all of those jobs are, all of those folks are really important. But yeah, but getting past the justice and realizing there are no”just a” jobs and what are we doing on both big kind of strategic ways, but also in day to day contacts with our candidates and with our employees to send the message that they are highly valued and important to us as the organization to our customers overall. So really needing to get the human back into the whole concept. Jenn DeWall: And I think there’s like, the one important thing that I would note is don’t confuse being human with thinking that you can try and show them that you’re human. And what I mean by that is I think sometimes people misuse the word authentic because they, you know, want to try and seem like they might be more human or more approachable, but people can kind of tell that they’re not necessarily truthful in that. So be honest, be transparent. Especially right now, if you are a business leader, I would be surprised to hear that you’re not stressed, that you’re not too considering and questioning what will the future look like for our organization. It is okay to talk about the fact that you might share some of those same fears, some of those same like cautious questions, you know, don’t pretend that everything is amazing when it’s not for the sake of trying to be relatable and try to be a cheerleader because people will be able to see right through it. Nora Burns: Oh, I totally agree. I totally agree. And the humanize element totally is on both sides of that relationship. Right. And I think it’s, it’s to, to recognize the fact that we are as leaders we have our own humanness. And to recognize that all of the people that work with and for us and, and within the organization have their own level of humanity and where they are at any given moment might be different. Right? Cause we are in the middle of a really big grieving process. And just like any grieving process, people are at different points at different times, and there’s no right or wrong way to grieve like the loss of a loved one, the loss of an opportunity, or in this case, it’s the loss of what was normal. Right? And so we’re at those different points. But to be able to, to honor that I think right now part of that big “humanize” element, is the fact that we can’t expect people to be able to turn off their emotions about all of this when they log in at the beginning of the day or when they, the people that are showing up physically at work, when they cross that threshold, that doesn’t take away the reality of everything that’s happening in their reality as a human being right now. Nora Burns: So while we want to help people get focused at work, and one of the best ways we can do that, of course, is to what we’ve talked about, make sure they do feel safe and secure, and they know that we’re being taken care of them. I think to assume that as soon as they log in, they switch from life to work in this scenario. In this day and age, it just isn’t the reality. Jenn DeWall: No, it is funny that people kind of I think to operate under the notion that humans are able to compartmentalize. Our brains are extremely sophisticated, but that should exactly show you that they are going to work in a career or work, career, personal life are all going to be tied together. We can’t just look at one in a vacuum. You get both of them. And that’s not necessarily an employee bringing their personal problems to work. We just have a, and we have a global pandemic. Right?. Now, this is something, and it’s actually if we’re thinking about humanizing things, COVID gives you the opportunity to speak from a shared experience beyond even just your organization. So if you are someone that struggles with personally connecting, this might be one of your ways to finally start to show them that you are human because we are all going through this. No matter where you are in the world, you are impacted by this. No matter what your economic class is, you are impacted by this in some way. And so if you’re looking for those points of commonality to relate with people to be more influential, the time is now. Nora Burns: Yeah, yeah, totally is. And it’s getting it, I had this conversation in the day with one of my coaching clients, and they shared something along this lines of like, I kind of feel like I always have to be the strong one and I always have to be whatever. And I said, now do you think the same is true when you’re talking to me as your coach? Right. As the Executive Coach, do you think that I have to be always in the yes, optimistic, positive? And he sat and sat with that for a second and went like, no, I would be really worried if you didn’t express any concern about this because I would be worried that that level of compartmentalization. Because it actually shows a very different issue. A psychological issue. And I said no, as you go through this, there are going to be easier days, and they’re going to be harder days. Nora Burns: And on any given moment, and actually quite frankly, like with grieving, there can be an easier hour and a harder hour. I said, and you need to develop the methodology and the means to make emotionally sound and emotionally intelligent decisions so that you’re expressing all of those emotions appropriately and to the right person at the right time and all of that. But to completely say that they don’t exist? You will disconnect from the people around you to act like nothing has changed right now. Jenn DeWall: Business as usual. Nora Burns: That would be really super scary and would not feed your workplace culture well, not at all. Jenn DeWall: Let’s go into the fourth. So let’s talk about the fourth piece. The final piece, the O in ECHO, which I think if I’m remembering, is ownership? Is that right? Owning It – Take Responsibility for Your Workplace Culture Nora Burns: It’s own it! It’s “own it. Just go out there and own it. And this comes out of the fact that lots of times as that undercover employee, I experienced managers, leaders saying, Oh, well, that’s what the home office says. That’s what corporate says. That’s what the policy is. Without really digging in and explaining or providing some “why” or really owning it themselves as part of that family and getting some of those whys to be able to, to share with people on the front lines. And so there was always this, Oh, actually one to the extent that they said, well if you guys don’t start doing this, the corporate’s going to take away this other benefit over here, this completely unrelated benefit. I was like, and there’s no way that’s going to happen. There’s no way if we don’t start hanging up our uniforms here that they’re going to take away personal time. Nora Burns: Right? Like, but it was, they were so used to using headquarters as the stick that they didn’t have anything else in their toolbox in terms of getting us to do what they wanted us to do and explaining the why of why we need the apply they needed. Those uniforms hung up right there and how that helped to feed the process kind of a thing. So to really own it, to, to have some managerial courage. And like right now, I mean like to have people, the managers, leaders, directors, whatever your particular title happens to be within that or if you’re a non-titled leader within your organization, the fact that you’re willing to, to ask the questions, to push and give suggestion and say, could we possibly do this other thing? And to take some individual ownership and not just say, Oh, I’m going to wait for somebody else to make that decision. I’m not going to give any of my own ideas. I’m not going to suggest anything. Because what it does is if you’re saying as a leader, as a manager, as a director, that you’re not going to share any ideas. You’re not going to bring anything up to try to solve and be innovative during this time. You’re actually sending the message to the people on the front line that they don’t need to bother coming up with innovative solutions. You’ve got so many great innovative solutions on your front lines. People who can solve so many of the challenges within your organization. If somebody will just ask and then listen. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, ask, and listen. And I think the other piece that leaders forget if we want people to own it, we’ve got to designate that certain level of authority or autonomy to own it, which means if you don’t give someone any discretion, to make a decision. Like to go above headquarters. You know, I think, but in customer service, if you don’t give people the flexibility to try and serve the customer. Or say that they have to just follow the policy, well then they aren’t going to think about what they could do to preserve and make that a great customer experience. And said in another way, if we don’t give people the authority to make decisions, how would they be innovative for us? Because they feel like they don’t have the power to make an impact. So if you want people to own it, you’ve got to make sure to give them some power. So that might require you as a leader right now to just release a little bit of the reins of the control, especially because you may not know what’s going on because this is new for all of us. And open up the possibility for other people to step up and be greater leaders than what you could have ever imagined. Nora Burns: Oh, this is a huge opportunity to see where you’ve got some incredible leadership, top talent through your organization. And I’m not saying like give up all control, all power, everything’s, you know, like you don’t, you’re not accountable to anything then if we’ve been managing from this place of, I liken it to like a highway or road, right. If we’ve been managing from, you have to keep it between the yellow lines, right? Where you have to keep it between the white lines or you, have to keep it right. Like is there a way that we could get closer to the gravel? Can we get closer to the ditches? To say, just keep it. These are the barriers. Like, keep it between the ditches, like you have some free reign to do these things. This is the budget that you have to do these things. Trust Your Front Line Team to Innovate New Solutions Nora Burns: People will come up with some incredibly useful and innovative solutions both for their clients as well as for their teams. And can you absolutely hit the nail on the head, John, in this concept of, you know, if you say you want them to, to have like that entrepreneurial spirit, you want them to have that ownership, then you need to be willing to demonstrate the fact that that’s a high value that, that has significance and they will be rewarded and not punished for having practiced it? And I think on with one of the organizations that I worked at they had as many organizations do, had a price matching policy in play and at that time. Except the cashier wasn’t trusted to do it. So if you, as a customer, came up and you were buying something from me, and you showed me, like, here it is on your phone, and this is the beautiful thing about technology right here. Nora Burns: Here it is on your phone that XYZ company is selling this exact same product for, you know, X numbers of dollars. I, as a cashier, had to verify it, but then I had to call a manager and wait for them to come and override it. I did not, and even though I was following the policy, I didn’t have that authority to say yes, they had to look at the screen themselves. They didn’t trust me as a cashier to look at the screen. And the messaging that that sends in terms of how important I am and if I’m trusted and all of that. But it’s definitely telling me not to be innovative. Because it is locked down. You’re to be robotic in the, in the methodology. So I think that’s what that brought to mind when you said that. Like you have to give the bandwidth for that to happen, for ownership to happen across the organization. Jenn DeWall: Yes, I love that. I think if you put it in the example of parenting like you can’t do everything for your children. Otherwise, they won’t understand how to think for themselves. I think when we look at it through parenting, people very much understand that. But when we apply it to work, it’s like we forget it. Like you can’t force-feed your employees because you want them to know how to problem-solve. You want them to be critical thinkers. And so we do have to allow them to practice exercising that. We can’t just say, well, this is exactly what we want to do. Of course, there are some things that have to be done that way, but if you want to have a more competent workforce, we have to start giving and empowering people the opportunity to maybe even amaze themselves, but solve problems, make decisions. You’re a grown adult, we trust you. Nora Burns: We have the exact opportunity right now, right? So this is what we need to do. We need to make sure that we can get product to our clients without having human touch. Right? So that’s what we have to do. That’s the project. And then being able to allow the people within that team, they’re going to come up with some ways. Now, it doesn’t mean we’re not going to, you know, like talk about it and what’s the final decision. They’re going to be there. They know what the routine is every single day. So they’re going to be able to come up with a great pattern and a great methodology by which to do that, that we can then have become how we do it across the board. Right? And then that’s how we do it. But it came from the front line, and it didn’t come from somebody sitting where I have sat in an executive row behind the mahogany desk. Right? So it’s just going to have different power and a different authority when it comes, we give them the problem, share the problem with the front lines and then allow them to come up with a solution and then take it on from there and then push that out across the organization. Jenn DeWall: Alright. I love the whole concept of the ECHO effect. I think to talk about it today. I hope that what our listeners get is that at a point where we may feel like we don’t have a lot of power or control. It sounds like the echo effect is something that we can actually use that’s tangible, that can help us feel back in control. Like these are legitimate things that we can control. We can control the experience. We can control how we communicate. We can control how we show up and humanize things, and we can show up, or we can also control ownership by giving authority. I think that is such- I like that tool. That insight is such a great way to look at it. And I’m just so glad that we were able to share your expertise with our listeners today. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: I have to ask you one final question that we ask everyone that’s on the show. I know it’s the big reveal, the big question, but the question is there are a lot of leaders that are listening to this podcast, and many of us obviously are listening to podcasts because we want to grow, but we also want to learn from each other. So the final question is, what is your leadership habit for success? Nora Burns: What is my leadership habit for success? I love that question. I also love the fact that there’s not one, right? And so I will pick a because I do think if there’s only one thing you’re doing, it’s probably not enough as a leader. There’s just too much complexity to leadership. So I’m going to say- and I’m going to actually apply it to something that I do all the time that has been really beneficial during this COVID-19 pandemic. And that is that I, in practicing the humanizing, I look for a shift in perspective and try to tell a different story. So for every situation that comes up, I try not to go to whatever my default story is. That is like, Ugh, they’re just trying to make me crazy or the right. Because the default story usually is not a particularly generous story to the other people involved, right? Nora Burns: So it’s like, I’m stopped at a traffic light and the car in front of me when that light goes green doesn’t change, right? So if you’re at a traffic light, you’re behind one car, and the light changes green, and the car in front of you doesn’t move. Why don’t they move? What’s the story? They’re texting, right? So the story’s often, they’re texting, they’ve got to get off their phone. It’s not a particularly generous story to them. Now it’s possible that they actually just looked off to the right and they actually see that there is a car that’s about to blow the stop sign. And if they go into the intersection, they’re going to get hit. Right? But that’s not usually the first story that we tell because we’re not that generous in our stories. So I do constant editing of my stories and looking for the shift in perspective. Like why would that behavior have just taken place? What is why would a reasonable and rational human being do what just happened? Because I’m going to trust that that person is a reasonable and rational human being. And if they were somebody that I really loved, honored, and adored, why would they have done that behavior? And then, it shifts my ability to hear them and to take that information into my decision-making processes. So I think constantly looking for a shift in perspective and looking for the positivity of why would a reasonable, rational, and good human being have done that and how, and bring up that idea and how can I then use that for my benefit and the benefit of our organization? Jenn DeWall: Okay. I love that leadership habit. I think that’s so helpful even in managing everything that many of us are exposed to right now, just thinking, you know, what’s that story, and could it be seen differently? And if so, why not apply it that way? That’s such a powerful, the ability to shift, the ability to re-frame. That’s such a powerful takeaway. Nora, thank you so much for just sharing all of your wisdom, sharing your experience with us. For those that want to get in touch with you or find out a little bit more about you, where should I send them? I know I can send them to theleadershipexperts.com, right? Nora Burns: Yep, Leadership Experts, with an s, dot com. They can find me online there. They can also find me on Twitter and on LinkedIn and on all the things like that. But probably LinkedIn would be the best way to connect. And then I would be thrilled to hear from anybody with their unique questions and glad to get back to them with my perspective from what I’ve been going through and my own research and what I’ve invested in taking a different perspective as the undercover candidate and the undercover employee, so that they can find out about me there, or about having a conversation about doing consulting, about coaching, about any of this. I’m, I’m glad to help your listeners. Jenn DeWall: That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Nora. We really appreciate it, and for those of you that missed it, you’ll see the leadership experts.com that link will be in our show notes. Thank you so much for listening, and have a great day. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast. To learn more about Nora and her work, visit her website, www.theleadershipexperts.com. While you’re there, you can pre-order her new book, HR Undercover, or sign up for her virtual programs designed to help organizations develop a powerful workplace culture, or explore having your keynote, your next virtual or in-person conference. You can reach her by email at Nora at theleadershipexperts.com. And if you feel like you want to share the ECHO effect with a friend, what Nora just shared with us today, please be sure to share this podcast, and if you enjoyed it, make sure to like us on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time. The post Episode 28: Workplace Culture and the ECHO Effect with Leadership Expert Nora Burns appeared first on Crestcom International.

Leadership During Coronavirus In this episode, Jenn DeWall talks about leadership during coronavirus with Crestcom leadership trainer and facilitator, Abdulrahman Edrees.  He received his degree from ASPU in Jordan. He began his training and facilitation journey at IKEA Saudi Arabia in 2008, where he was one of the key employees in their HR department. He left IKEA to lead the training department at several local companies in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or KSA, including Magrabi Retail, where he led the training and development for all KSA and Bahrain. Today Abdulrahman leverages his expertise in training and development to develop leaders in a variety of subject areas from problem-solving and communication to business ethics and much more. On the show, Abdulrahman will be sharing his experience in helping leaders navigate this new normal as a result of our global pandemic. Jenn DeWall:              Hi, everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall, and I am so excited to be joined by Abdulrahman, all the way from KSA, Saudi Arabia. Thank you so much for joining us on the show today. For those that may not have met you before, can you just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Leadership is a Mission Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Thank you, Jenn, and thank you for all the audience. Hopefully, everybody is safe at home and in good health. Well, I’m born and raised in Saudi Arabia. I’ve been working with Crestcom for now – this is my fourth year going on. In the leadership and training field- it’s for me, it’s at 12 years of success, and I’m going to say 12 years of the mission. Life mission. So I’m living in Jeddah, nowadays. Jenn DeWall:              When you say life mission, you’ve been in the leadership development space for 12 years, what about leadership inspires you or, said differently- Why is that your mission? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay, good question. The minute I got the certificate as a Train the Trainer and I become a professional trainer and a facilitator, I took an oath to with myself that this is not the job. It is the starting of the mission, my mission to help people and managers to become future leaders. So it became a mission more than a job for me. Jenn DeWall:              Why is that an important one to make people leaders? Like why is that important to you? Because sometimes people have a tendency not to think that leadership is maybe that important. But why is that important to you? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        We always want a better life, a better world. That’s why I’m trying to help to have a better life for each one of us. Leadership Challenges During Coronavirus Jenn DeWall:              Oh, I love that so much because it is, leadership is a way that we can design a more meaningful life and even a more meaningful life for the people that we lead or manage that we can have a big impact on them. So what kind of challenges are you seeing for our listeners that may not have visibility into KSA? What type of challenges are you seeing leaders face as a result of COVID-19? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        So, one of the things that we’re seeing, especially let me talk about business- in a business way. What we’re seeing that a lot of organizations are rejecting or failing to keep developing their people. I think it’s the opposite. We need to be stronger in developing our people. We need to be facing and continuing to develop them. So this is one of the big challenges. Another one, what I’m seeing is other organizations, and maybe countries were stepping away from being more innovative. So we just, we’ve got this Coronavirus that came out, and people like paused or stopped. They didn’t want to adapt to the change. They didn’t want to take that view that, okay, what’s the next? How can I change the business? How can I shift the business and keep going on and on and on? So I, this is what I’m seeing. Another thing, the other challenge is that I’m seeing is managers and leaders are mostly afraid to let go of being micro-managers and instead of being the coach for their people. So this is what I’m seeing. This is from my point of view, what I see now Jenn DeWall:              And I think those are really great observations. You know, especially coming down to innovation, that when a crisis arises, we become more reactive instead of proactive in how we look at our business. And so that’s a really interesting observation about how organizations are forgetting that innovation is a valuable part of how they can respond, how they can change their business to make sure that it’s operating three months, six months, nine months from now. Innovation is a big piece of that. I don’t know if you have anything you wanted to add.  But also just thinking about, I think it’s important to acknowledge that one of the first things that we sometimes forget is the importance of developing ourselves, developing our leaders. Why do you think that that matters now given the environment that we’re in? Having the Right Leadership Mindset Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Well, let me say it in a different way, maybe. What we’re missing is having the right mindsets, having the right mindset, and taking in, developing our people. If we have the right mindset in developing our people, it will be a benefit. It’s a plus for us, and it will affect everything. So if we have the right mindset of developing our people, we’ll have more innovations. If we have the right mindset of developing, our people will adapt to the change that we’re facing. If we have the right mindset of developing our people, we would have a better life again. So I think it’s a link going back to the mindset and developing those people. And before we develop the people, we need to be prepared ourselves with the right leadership mindset. Jenn DeWall:              Oh, I love that. So one of the solutions that you’re offering right now as a result of the COVID or Coronavirus pandemic is as a leader, if you want to create success, if you want to maintain innovation, the first place that you have to start is with your own mindset. What happens if you don’t start with your mindset? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        You’re going to lose everything. If you don’t have the right mindset, the right leader’s mindset, you will lose everything. We can see it globally. In each country, in each part of history in this world. The right leaders with the right mindset, you will find success going on in that country. That’s what’s happening. And that I think this is the main thing. So we really need to have the right mindset of leaders to adapt to the change that we are we’re in. I’m going to give you just a short example of me personally. So when Coronavirus started we get all of us, we went home, we started working at home. So what happened with me, if I didn’t have the right mindset in a positive way, I don’t think I would be here now. Or doing this interview with you. Why? Because I’ll be like running out, or I’ll get Coronavirus. I might get Coronavirus, but I had the right mindset of adapting to the change, understanding what needs to be done that will keep me in a positive mood and how that affects my family too. So again, it’s the whole, for me, what I see is having the right mindset The To-Do List and the STOP List Jenn DeWall:              Mindset. And it sounds like there is a little bit of– with your mindset. It’s about focusing on what you can control. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yes. Jenn DeWall:              What are some of the things that we can control right now? Right? I know that people can feel maybe that they don’t have a lot of control because their job or their organization may have shifted, and their lifestyle has shifted. But what are some of the things that we can control right now? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Time is number one. You can control your time. So one of the things that I have done, it is arranging my daytime. So I have time to work. So this is working time. I have time to exercise, and I have time to eat, I have time to entertain myself, my family. So dividing your day with time, the to-do list, you need to have your own to-do list. And then in a part of it, having the stop list, this is one of the things that we talked about it in one of our topics in the leadership training. You need to have your stop list. Jenn DeWall:              A Stop List? What is the stop list for people that don’t know what that is? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay. We’re doing a lot of activities on a daily basis. Okay. So some of those activities, we don’t get any outcomes from it. So it’s, you’re doing it, but you do not see the benefit. So those activities, you need to shift them to the stop list like you have a to-do list. So those are the activities that I need to stop doing it the next day. That is not showing any benefit or outcomes to me personally and maybe to my organization. And perhaps now it’s a family, your family at home. So this is the stop list looking at the activities that you’re doing on a daily basis that you’re not getting any benefit out of it. Jenn DeWall:              So essentially for me, I guess from a personal note, I think if I’m thinking about things to stop, part of it is watching the news, but the other part of it is social media because I find that it’s really easy to invest a lot of time in social media, but I don’t necessarily get a return on that investment. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        I think one of the number one stop lists globally is to stop walking to the kitchen! Stop going to the kitchen and opening the fridge. So this is, I think this is number one globally because we’re all at home, so our activity is going to the fridge, eating some food and going back. So we need to stop doing that. Jenn DeWall:              Oh my gosh, that I, yes, there have been people that talk about it as the quarantine 19. Saying that they put on so much weight because we are working from home. But I think that’s important to your point about the stop lists, but also how you look at your time. Even though things are accessible, schedule a time when you are going to go into your kitchen and eat. Don’t make it something that you just do when you’re bored or maybe when you’re stressed, which is, you know, something that we like to do when we want to avoid that problem that we may be having. But schedule time that you will do that instead of mindless about that. You know you had talked, I love that you know, the to stop list and the to-do list and to focus on where we are getting the most benefit to maybe our own professional goals or personal goals. You had talked about listening as being one of the things that are also really important right now in terms of how leaders can show up and support their teams. What did you mean by that? The Best Leaders are Good Listeners Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay. Listening. Let me say, before talking about listening. I think one of the things that leaders that they need to do that will take us to the listening. They need to start being or wearing the hat of a coach. Leadership during coronavirus means this is the time of being the coach more than being a leader. Okay. We took the manager to become leaders on a normal basis. Now with the Coronavirus going on, this is the time for leaders to become coaches. So one of the things you need to do to become a coach is listening. It’s not only just listening to your employees and their ideas and what is going on, but listening and engaging with them. This is one of the things, and one of the questions that I heard a lot from people, especially during our sessions that we’re doing online. They’re asking how you can keep those people engaged? How can you keep them more motivating? This is the coaching part is you listen. You ask them questions and listen to the response. This is how you keep them motivated. This is how you keep them managing your people online or virtually. So that’s why listening, I think it’s a number one needed tool for us as leaders, especially in virtual. Jenn DeWall:              And you know, in what ways, I guess what I think about listening, it’s, you know, right now and why that’s important is we don’t have visibility to everything that everyone is doing. We also have just unique circumstances where people might have more challenges or be struggling in a different way. And as listening, you can just hear them as a person. What are your thoughts on that? What specifically do you see in terms of the benefits of listening? What are you seeing maybe leaders do, and how is that impacting the way that they lead during coronavirus? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay. I’m going to take it from a manager because most managers don’t listen. So I think this is the right moment for them to practice listening. For leaders, it’s good; it helps them now to develop their coaching skills. Because, as a leader, you need to have that coaching skill or the habit of being a coach. So one of the keys is listening. So we need to listen more than talking more. And again, it makes the person in front of you more engaged. It’s just listening. Leadership During Coronavirus means Building Relationships Jenn DeWall:              Yeah. And it’s, I mean, I know one of the challenges that leaders face right now is building trust because we don’t have the same face to face interaction and it might not feel as personal. But it sounds like if we just really focus on listening and practicing curiosity, putting on that coach hat, it can help us still maintain some of those relationships and also build some of the relationships in a way that people might feel they can’t do because they’re not face to face with them. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yes. Because again, coaching, part of it- most of it- is building a relationship with the employee or the person on the other side. Because again, you’re not seeing them as you said, you don’t see them. And if you see them, you don’t know what’s going on behind the screen. So as an example, if you’re in a meeting virtually, you don’t know if that person is really with you, engaged or not. So again, building a relationship as you said, and keeping it moving, the number one skill now is listening. A Message from Crestcom: Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall, and I just wanted to drop in with a quick note. Do your managers know how to build an effective team? Can they create an environment where teamwork is encouraged while setting appropriate benchmarks and delivering projects on time? Are they able to align expectations, so their team works effectively toward common goals? You hired the right team. Now let us help you develop them. Crestcom offers a robust leadership development program that focuses on results each month. Participants learn and apply key leadership skills and tools that will unite teams and drive organizational growth. We are serious about accountability. After each class, we help participants apply those leadership skills in group coaching sessions. Are you ready to take your leadership development to the next level? Contact us at Crestcom.com so we can help you develop your leaders. And now, back to our podcast. Jenn DeWall:              Listening. That’s the number one skill right now. Hearing what’s not being said, hearing what is being said, even in terms of listening to, you know, knowing that we’re in a remote environment, that we actually really need to do a lot more communication to make sure people understand. Maybe how goals have changed, how processes have changed, and to make sure that they understand those adjustments. And I feel like listening is the one tool that’s going to ensure your business can still operate because you’re making sure that people understand how their roles have changed. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        And can I add one last thing to that? Jenn DeWall:              Yeah. Be Aware of Different Cultures Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Think about understanding the different cultures. Maybe I’m talking about here in Saudi Arabia because we have a different culture in every business. So when you’re face-to-face, you can still get the full communication, but when you’re just only listening, and you don’t know the other side of the other person’s culture and his background, it will be harder to understand them. But if I listen to him and I understand his culture, then I know when he raised his voice, it’s normal. When he lowered his voice, it’s normal. It depends on his culture and depends on how he has been raised. So I think one of the things to add to the listening is understanding the other person’s culture. It would help more in communicating with people. Jenn DeWall:              Ah, that’s such a great addition. Really focusing on our ability to have empathy or to take the time to respect and see someone for who they are instead of maybe how we think someone should be or how we were raised. Respecting that there is value In diversity. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yes, you’re right. Jenn DeWall:              I think that’s such a great point to add. One of the things that we were also talking about before we actually recorded was the challenge that leaders have in motivating their employees right now. Because they don’t have the same accessibility to them. What are things that you would recommend that leaders could do to still motivate their employees? Create Water-Cooler Moments, Even When Working From Home Abdulrahman Edrees:                        I say, I’ll give you a short word for it- the water cooler moments. Jenn DeWall:              What does that mean? What does a water cooler mean? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay. Is having, you know, in our normal lives we have those times where each company has a water cooler, and you find employees standing there chatting taking off the pressure by interacting with others. So we need to create that moment even virtually, we need to do that. Jenn DeWall:              Creating the opportunity for them to connect. What, why is that so important? Why does, why do we need to focus on, you know, that water cooler moment? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Well, we need to have it because it’s part of the listening. It goes back to the listening part. It goes back to understanding each other. So again, it links to you’re employee listening to them and building that relationship. So one of the things that we did is creating the cooler moment is yes. So what we did, I’m sorry- I’m trying to get you to the example that we’re doing. It might help others because it helped us a lot. So one of the things that we did in our organization is each one hour to two hours, we played that water cooler moment. We stopped talking about work and started listening to each other, asking how they feel. What kind of challenges they’re facing personally and professionally and giving each other some recommended things. So this is the water cooler moment. Jenn DeWall:              I thought that’s such an important, you know, it’s so important. I love that you talked about how, when you create this water cooler moment that it’s not, you know, just to be used to talk about work. It’s to be used to connect at a very human or maybe a little bit more of a personal level than what they would typically do. Asking about their emotions and asking about their challenges. You know, I think that’s one of the first things that we might forget is that we are all going through a shared challenge. That is something no one has seen before. And so there are going to be emotions about that, and it’s important to be able to talk about that. When would you recommend that people create these water cooler moments? When do you think they should do it? Or what could that look like? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Okay. When silence starts, so if you’re doing a meeting or you’re having everybody on virtual, online, when you see that there is silence. Nobody’s talking, and nobody’s sharing. This is the right moment to create a water-cooler moment. Okay. As a leader, you start it and let them go with you Ask More Questions Jenn DeWall:              What kind of questions could you ask to create that moment? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        What have you done yesterday? What kind of movie did you watch, what kind of dinner you had, what you did yesterday? What have you learned? So there’s a lot of questions you can ask a person. Jenn DeWall:              Yes. But I think people honestly, especially if they’re not maybe as outgoing as you and I- because you and I are both pretty outgoing people- but for those that maybe aren’t, you know, comfortable, those questions I think can help them. So yes, just being simple. What did you do yesterday? What have you been enjoying watching on TV? What have you learned? One of the questions I like is, you know, to add on, what have you learned is, what is one thing that you’ve learned that’s going to stick with you after the pandemic is over and we go back to business as usual. What, you know, do you have something that you’ve already taken away? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        You can say what is the first place you’re going to visit after the Coronavirus leaves? Jenn DeWall:              Where’s the, where’s that going to be for you? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yeah. Oh, for me, I’m going to visit my mother and father. I didn’t see them for a long time. So, and my animals. So those are the two places that I’m going to visit. Jenn DeWall:              Yes. And what do you think you learned about yourself as a result of being or having to adjust to a completely different way of doing business? What is one of the things that you learned personally that you want to continue to focus on? Leadership During Coronavirus is About Serving Other People Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Personally, it is to keep serving people. I think that now, now, this is the time to serve people more than anytime else. And again, I might be crazy. Let’s say this, but I’m going to say it. Okay. I’m glad to have Coronavirus, to be honest. I’m glad to have to see Coronavirus coming up because it shows us the truth about a lot of things. It shows us how we need to be grateful in our lives. It showed us who are the true leaders and who are not, who are just pretending they’re leaders. Now during a crisis, you can see the right leaders and who is pretending. Being positive is one of the things that makes your life happier. So yeah, this is it. Jenn DeWall:              I think that’s a great perspective that obviously there is a lot of maybe undesirable things obviously about Coronavirus, but you point out the opportunity within it, which is to maybe slow down. Or to, you know, that right now with Coronavirus we’re seeing that shift where people are focusing on those values that are very, very important to them. I, you know, I love that perspective because I think a lot of people are focusing on the negative consequences of Coronavirus, but there’s a lot of valuable lessons to be learned from it. That we can connect in a different way, that we can work in a different way. That we maybe need to see leadership in a different way that you can’t hide behind the business anymore. You have to be open as a leader, and people are going to be able to see whether you’re a good leader or maybe not as effective. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yeah. And again, understanding your own personal truth in you, this is the time. I always told my wife during this time. I always tell her when you feel that you’re down, imagine the glass in front of you- half of it is full, and half of it is empty. The way you look at it, is it empty? Or is it full? This is how you look at the crisis that we are in. Jenn DeWall:              So yeah, glass half full glass, half empty. I mean, it’s right you about this. One of the benefits, this is a unique opportunity to focus on gratitude. What are the things in our life, professionally or personally, that are important to us that we are just happy to have? And to be able to think about how we can maybe show gratitude or at least place greater importance. I know you’ve talked about n the beginning, just time. It is making time for the things that are important to us. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Yes. Time. I think we’re repeating ourselves. It’s time, coaching, listening. I, if I want to pack it up, it is keeping yourself motivated and in positive emotion. This is it. This is, this is the right way of leading yourself and leading others. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall:              You have to walk the walk. You’ve got to do it first before other people can follow you. Yes. So we close every single podcast with the same question. And so I want to ask you, what is your leadership habit for success? Or said in another way, what habit do you have to create happiness for yourself or success for yourself? Jenn DeWall:              When I see that people are enjoying the change in themselves and see the truth, that makes me proud that our happy to become a leader or to help them. Maybe, maybe I can say it in a different way. When I start helping to become better, this is the success for me. And what I see when they come to me and tell me, thank you, Abdulrahman, you have changed a lot in my life. This is success. I feel honored at that time. Jenn DeWall:              So focusing on the development of others. Yes. I love that. We are making them as we know from one of our courses, making people greater than yourself. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Making them happier, making them happier. This is, this is it. Jenn DeWall:              Yeah. I think that’s a great point to end on. What can we do today to help make other people happier or make their lives easier? What can we do as leaders to make a greater impact? Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Listen to them, listen to them, Jenn DeWall:              Listen, hear them, provide support! Allow them to be, you know, humans with emotions. You’ve shared a lot of great tips on the podcast today, and I just want to thank you so much, Abdulrahman. I keep, you know, I’m going to work on that. I know I can say it differently. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        You can call, call me Edrees. It’s easier for you. Jenn DeWall:              Thank you so much, Edrees, for offering your insight, for taking your time and also just for giving tips on what we can do to be better leaders during this challenging time. It was really great to connect with you. Abdulrahman Edrees:                        Thank you so much, Dan. Thank you for the audience for listening to us, and hopefully, everybody is in good health, living a lovely life. Jenn DeWall:              Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode of the leadership habit podcast. If you liked today’s episode, don’t forget to share it with your friends and leave us a review. If you want to connect with Abdulrahman Edrees, head to our show notes there. You can find the link to connect with him on LinkedIn, and you can also find his phone number, which he has provided in case you should have something that he could help you with as a leader. Until next time.   The post Episode 27: Leadership During the Coronavirus Pandemic with Leadership Development Expert, Abduhlrahman Edrees appeared first on Crestcom International.

Virtual Leadership in the New Normal In today’s episode, Jenn DeWall talks to Dave Lawrence, President of Apogee Leadership, a Crestcom franchise. Apogee works with over 30 small mid-market and fortune 500 companies to develop critical management skills and train leaders in areas like effective communication, developing people, managing change, problem-solving and strategic thinking. He has a B.A. from Bowdoin College and an MBA from Duke University. Tune in as Dave shares with us tips on how we can inspire through virtual leadership, work from home more effectively, and deal with the new normal. Jenn DeWall: Hi, everyone. It’s so great to have you here on this episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast today. I am fortunate enough to be talking and interviewing Leadership Expert and the President of Apogee Leadership, Dave Lawrence. Now for those that may not know who Dave is, Dave, please tell us a little bit about who you are and what we were talking about just earlier how you came to be because you’ve got a pretty interesting international path. Dave Lawrence: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, Jenn, thanks for the opportunity just to chat today. I guess just a little bit of a background on myself. I have been working now with Crestcom for quite a few years, about three years. I am predominantly working with small and medium-sized companies in South Florida to really develop their management teams. I mean, what we often say is that most people become managers by default, right? The same way they became a parent. And you know, leadership and developing individuals. That’s always been a passion of mine. In my, shall we say, earlier career, I was really focused on working predominantly in Latin America. I lived and worked in about three different countries in Latin America and always worked with teams and was still passionate about running and managing teams. But one of my true passions was really getting people to be working at their optimum performance. So when you had a lot of managers or directors that were shying away from that quarterly performance review, I actually really enveloped it and really enjoy sitting down and kind of, you know, looking at how we move the needle on their development, which is something that’s been passionate for me. But yeah, I lived in Latin America and, and it’s a kind of second home to me. Leadership Challenges Throughout the World Jenn DeWall: Yeah. You know, one of the things that I like to say that’s unique. And, I what I think is so cool, for lack of a better adjective, about Crestcom is that we are teaching classes every single month and leaders around the world, they’re all going through pretty much that same curriculum, which means that leadership and our leadership challenges transcend borders. As much as we think that we’re different, we actually share a lot of the same challenges. And I just, I don’t know. How have you noticed that difference between working within Latin America or within, you know, Florida? Dave Lawrence: Yeah, I mean, it’s a great question, and it’s a question I’m often asked. I had a number of different business owners or H.R. managers or whoever it may be, and I’m often asked, you know, well, we’re different. And yes, every company is different. Every industry is different—everyone’s unique. However, when it comes back, so managing and leading and motivating and driving people to great results. It comes across, and you know, it boils down to a couple of core competencies, right? And so regardless of the culture, regardless of the language or where you’re managing and leading teams, I think it comes down to some key components. Things like communicating, delegating, holding people accountable, all these areas. So you know, I think at least in South Florida, very dynamic, very international city, with an obviously strong connection to Latin America. Still, also there’s a large European African population here. So you’ve got people from all over the world, Caribbean, etcetera, etcetera, which makes the classrooms, and the role in what I, what I do that much more interesting. Jenn DeWall: Yeah, I love that so much. I mean, I just think it’s important that we can recognize that we are all more alike than sometimes what we think that we are different. Dave Lawrence: Oh, absolutely. Virtual Leadership and Working at Home During COVID-19 Jenn DeWall: So we wanted to do this podcast in the midst of COVID to just kind of give us some reminders and to help people, you know, maybe consider new ways of doing things. There’s just to help guide them as they navigate this virtual world that we’re all now living in. And one of the things that we talked about, and I’m sure that some people have likely, they’re all set up, they have their remote workspace, but one of the things that we talked about is what do you need to design a true workspace. One that’s going to be effective for you. One that’s going to be productive for you because it’s not just as simple as being like, well, I have a laptop. It’s okay, perfect. I can work now. Dave Lawrence: Yeah, no, that’s a great question. You know, it’s not simply just having a laptop. I think that often when people are thinking, okay, I’m going to start working from home and it’s just the laptop, I think there’s a lot of components behind it. I think, you know, the infrastructure is important. Infrastructure, I mean things like laptops. But if you’re going to require your team, your direct reports to participate in video conferencing, and their laptop doesn’t have a video conferencing capability. While you might also have to provide them with a webcam. If you are asking for them to print, maybe they need to have a printer, right? Or a high capacity printer. There are these extra components, right? And, and it’s really important because when we look at businesses, we’re not just looking at shall we say the quote-unquote the white-collar, but also blue-collar, right? Dave Lawrence: So if you’re running a manufacturing organization, many of those employees, if they haven’t been furloughed they might need a laptop now. So that’s something to consider. So you’ve got the infrastructure component. As far as setting up and being able to work from home. I guess fortunately and unfortunately I just naturally do it, so I do work from home. So it wasn’t as much of a shift for me. However, it was a shift when I did start working from home, and it was a learning curve and working with my clients and, and working with and just speaking with friends and family, they obviously have to go through this challenge. And one of the challenges they mentioned it, I just don’t know when I clock out for the day. Right? And so one of the things is setting guidelines setting a calendar or following an agenda, right? So it’s really easy to sleep in till ten every day during COVID. If someone’s not calling you to say, Hey, you didn’t send me the email or the report, but literally living by a schedule. Scheduling things into your calendar so that not all of a sudden it’s five o’clock and you haven’t done much for the day. It’s really easy. What I find is it’s really easy to do nothing during the course of the day. Right? I mean, if all of a sudden it could be five o’clock and you’re like, Oh wow, the day went by. Right? And so scheduling things into your calendar is important. Also, if I know, we’re about a month and a half now into, at least here in South Florida and probably also in Colorado into the pandemic. And I mean that by saying a lot of people starting to work from home, other parts of the world are little forward or further ahead or a little further behind. But if you haven’t done this already and you’ve just started to work from home, or you’ve been working from home, and it hasn’t been as effective as you want, you know, set up a quote-unquote office. So what did your office look like before you started working from home? So, for instance, you know, if in your office you worked in a cube and now your office or makeshift office is your dining room table, and there’s nowhere else in the house that you could set up your office. Well, maybe put something up in the dining room, so it kind of quasi-resembles your previous location, right where you work. Put up some pictures, put up a calendar. We may be in this longer than we’d really want to be. And again, certain areas of the United States or areas of the world may be going back to a new normal sooner than other areas. But it’s important, pretty critical. Just remember that we just need to establish an ambiance, an environment where people are going to be able to work in, right? So you need to kind of set that up. You want to set up an area that is energetic, right? You don’t want to be working from a walk-in closet. I mean, again, if that’s the only space in your house that you have available, and all of a sudden you have three teenagers also working and studying from home and a spouse, well guess what? Make that walk-in closet as excitable and as energetic as possible. But these are different things that you really need to do. You need to make it an office, like as you can so that you’re going into your work environment each day, and you’re not loathing it, right? Creating Boundaries While Working from Home Jenn DeWall: Okay. And I think what I’m getting there is that there’s, there’s a boundary, you know, you talked about that one of the pitfalls that people have with working remotely is that they don’t turn their work brain off. And part of that could be that their workspace is too, I mean obviously, we’re home, so it is connected to your personal space, but we don’t have a strongly defined boundary. I’ve even heard of actually someone they too operate off of their dining room table just as I do. This is a small two-bedroom condo. But they, what they do to kind of separate is they actually have a sheet that they then put over all of their equipment. And so this is considered like, we’re not looking at work right now. We are not paying attention to it. So I just thought that was an interesting thing. I’m like, you could technically, yes. Like cover your workspace, so then you don’t feel like the keyboard is calling. I can jump on and just do this work at eight o’clock at night when I’m exhausted. Dave Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah. You know, it’s really important to be able to kind of have shutdown time. Again, it’s more challenging if you have kids at home, and you have to do schooling and things of that nature. But this isn’t now. This was actually about maybe five or six years ago when I was between jobs, and I was looking for employment and I started, you know, looking for a job is a full-time job. And I remember back then I had this small little desk, and I set that desk up in our bedroom, and that’s where I was looking for work. So basically, what was the first thing that I did when I rolled out of bed every morning was I looked at the desk, and I was like, Oh no. Right? And so one kind of inspiration was my wife has said to me, why don’t you move out and go into a different part of the house so you can sort of close down that section of the day when it’s time to kind of log off for the day. And I think that’s important, right? So either put a blanket over the dining room table or do whatever you can. So you can say this is work time, this is playtime. Or this is personal time. Right? It’s critical. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I think you touched on one thing, you know, many of us obviously didn’t anticipate this. Many of us may or may not have the right equipment, but the thing that we do have to do for- we obviously have to-it’s a twofold consideration. We have to think about what can we do to ensure that our team has what they need to be successful, and then what do I need to do? And you talked about making sure like if you’re going to want them to video conference, that they have a computer, that they have a functioning webcam. What are other things that you might want to consider to have or offer to your employees that maybe is an afterthought or that you might want to invest in now? Virtual Leaders Need to be Empathetic Dave Lawrence: Well, you know, it’s, it’s challenging because when all of a sudden we’ve gone from you know, companies of 50 people or 5,000 people and pretty much overnight, they’re all working from home. It’s literally throwing a wrench into the motor, right? And it’s a big change for a lot of organizations. I think a couple of things that you need to do. You know, I think you need to establish some ground rules, right? For instance, things as simple as, okay guys, we’re going to have a weekly check-in calls and let’s do those twice a week. Those will be done over zoom, or there’ll be done over Skype, there’ll be done over some video conferencing. We’ll also establish some kind of clinical business protocols in the sense that if you have some urgent, send it to me by instant messenger or Yammer or Slack or whatever is your internal source of communication. If you didn’t have one before, you might want to get one. Right. And then obviously just normal phone calls. So I think you need to establish some kind of guidance, ground rules for how we’re going to work in this new normal. I also think as managers and leaders now more than ever, we need to really get a good pulse of how our employees are doing it, right? I’m not saying being their therapist, but if you sense that you haven’t heard from someone in a few days and you sense on the phone or in that video call at that person isn’t, you know, gung ho, have a conversation with them. I also think that now is a good time for people to not necessarily start off maybe your weekly management meeting, diving straight into the numbers and the KPI, you know, the key performance indicators, but rather say, Hey, you know, Jenn, Frank, Tom, how was your weekend? How are things going? Right. Being a little bit empathetic and really figuring out how your team’s doing because we’re going to have to coach people through this challenging time and, you know, it could be a lot longer, as I said before than a lot of us hoped. Jenn DeWall: Thank you. If, can I just interject something, because while you were talking, I think you hit on something that I think until, you know, the pandemic we were, maybe it’s still a little bit resistant to acknowledging emotions. So I think that as much as before the pandemic shore, you could have skirted around maybe talking about personal life or someone’s feelings. Now it’s more important than ever to be asking how your team is doing, checking in with yourself to see how you’re doing. Because this is, it’s emotional. People are nervous about where their next paycheck is going to come from. They’re nervous about the health of their friends and family. I mean, we could probably think of name off, you know, hundreds of things that people have anxiety about right now. Yeah. And that’s competing with their work as it should. It’s natural. Increase Communication, but Decrease Meeting Lengths Dave Lawrence: Think about it. You know, you hear the news, or you watch the news, you see that the headlines, we’re in scary times. And let’s put it this way. If you’re isolated and you’re isolated for a few days, unfortunately, the mind starts to wander. So having these regular check-in calls, I mean, for instance, one thing that I’ve done is I’ve increased the frequency of my quote-unquote management meetings. So like before, if I had an hour and a half call on a Monday, now I’ve broken it into maybe two or three meetings during the course of the week, which shortens them. To increase the frequency, decrease the time. The first one’s a little bit more about, you know, strategy for the week. And then the second one is from one of our, you know, from Andy Bounds, one of our mentors there something called Best, Next and Help Meetings. So, you know, what was the best thing that happened to you since the last week, or since our last meeting. The second is next, you know, what’s next on your agenda, what’s your next goal, and or objective? And then finally, how can I help you? And that’s normally kind of the second meeting I have later on in the week, typically on Thursday. So Monday and Thursday, so that you’re touching base with people. It’s not so, you know, you’re not so hard-lined, but at the same time, you can also allow for that, that conversation and communication. Jenn DeWall: I love that. I think that’s great guidance for how people can look at structuring the workweek that, you know, there’s a point that we can celebrate what the best thing is. Then there’s, Hey, like what’s coming up and then how can I support you? And I think, you know, the thing that we know that we need to do is become over-communicators because we don’t have that shared workspace. But I like that you’re not trying to take a meeting and have that one meeting be the primary source of all the information that you want to discuss because we know that right now, we’re competing with all of those other thoughts and worries right now. And if you catch them on a Monday where it’s not a great day for them, chances are they may not get your message. And it’s not that you didn’t craft it well. It’s not, you know, you don’t have to personalize that. But it’s that we’re competing with a different type of like personal distractions right now. So we have to be mindful of that and our communication strategies. Dave Lawrence: Yeah, there are lots of distractions out there. Obviously, if you have to home school, which, you know, mid-life, I’m realizing that being a kindergarten teacher is not my forte. But listen, we’re all having to play these different roles right now. And heaven forbid if you have a family member or someone that’s suffering from this right now, I mean that’s extra stress, the extra burden. So we do need to be empathetic, and we need to do a little bit more listening as well when we’re working with our remote teams. A Message from Crestcom: Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and I just wanted to drop in with a quick note. Do you lose staff due to burnout? Do your leaders have the skills they need to deal with the stress of working in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment? With Crestcom’s leadership development program, your team can see measurable results that are proven to change behavior. See why our program has reached over 1 million individuals around the world and counting unlock your team’s true potential and give them the tools and skills they need to manage. The challenges of tomorrow, contact us at Crestcom.com So we can help you develop your leaders. And now, back to our podcast. Setting Up a Home Office Jenn DeWall: So we hit some of them, I want to jump back and cover our basics. We want to dive into what it’s like to live the multiple roles that you experience as well as many other people, our listeners. So just for those, for the keys to virtual leadership, just that office set up, you want to think about your computer, do you need to give your, your team members dual monitors because their productivity could drop if they’re not used to working on a single monitor. So you might think about making those investments or the accommodations to get them that. Also, you know, just giving guidance on what’s appropriate over video conferencing. I liked that you said or you suggested the ground rules, but you know, I’m video conferencing. I sometimes think that because it’s not face-to-face and because it’s not necessarily a work setting, we might sometimes slack a little bit in our appearance and our language. Dave Lawrence: Oh, Absolutely. Jenn DeWall: And so just making sure that you’re, you know, telling people and giving them guidance like, Hey, this is still work. We don’t, you know, just because we’re in a more, I guess just less like work, like setting doesn’t mean that we’re going to be more relaxed in how we communicate or that we’re going to compromise and you know, how we show up, still get ready for the day. And also consider your background if you are in that place, that walk-in closet, you know, be mindful of that. Do you need to add an extra light so people can actually see your face or think about where your camera is? Are they only able to see you from the nose up? Because you might want to make sure they can see your mouth. I mean, the challenge that we don’t have those nonverbal cues, so we have to do what we can to replicate that in a virtual leadership setting. Dave Lawrence: Very much so. Yeah. Jenn DeWall: You have anything else you want to add on the basics before I dive into asking you about, you know, well, managing your virtual life. Dave Lawrence: So again, I think for monitors, it really just depends on the company and what that individual needs to do. I mean, obviously, you might potentially provide software, right? So if there’s certain software that they have in the office, but they don’t have access to that, you might need to provide that. Yeah, I think you know, those are the basics. I’m sure depending on the industry, depending on the role, you could, you could add a litany of other stuff, but it’s not exhaustive by any means, but yeah, it’s obviously important to get your employees set up in the right manner so that they hit the ground running as fast as they can, given the environment. Jenn DeWall: Alright, now I want to shift it to a more personal note. So we talked about the basics, but you’re a business owner, you’re a facilitator, meaning you have to learn content. You’re a father, and you’re a husband. You’re now basically a teacher. What has this adjustment been like for you? Dave Lawrence: You know, listen, if I said it hasn’t been stressful, I’d be lying. Jenn DeWall: Yes, you would. Dave Lawrence: I would say that the biggest challenge to meet personally is seriously having to now juggle that role of the kindergarten component. Because like I said before, for me having worked from home before, and just the nature of my business, it wasn’t as much of a shift as it was that now I have my six-year-old son sitting next to me for a good portion in the morning and I’m having to coach him and teach him, and my wife is doing the same—we kind of tag team to do that training and education. And you realize that there are certain areas that you’re strong and there are definitely areas that you’re not as strong. Obviously, other components, that have been challenging is, you know, just the social distancing and not being close to clients, not being able to see people in person. Had to go to the supermarket today and it took twice if not three times longer than normal because you’ve got to, you know, you’ve got to clean this stuff when you get home, etcetera, etcetera. But I would say at least from a work perspective that would be the biggest challenge. I mean, the extra component of the family life, but also not being able to be out and about and interact with people on a personal level. Find Ways To Connect with Others Jenn DeWall: Yeah, the social component, just being able to connect because we’re all social beings and not being able to have that. And especially, you know, it might be perceived as easier when you have a family because you have people there, but there are people obviously that are living alone that you know, that’s going to hit them the most. And anything. You had talked about that before. If you’re thinking about people to check in with your people or your employees that might be living on their own or may not have a ton, they might be more introverted in nature. Those are the people that you might have to think about a strategy to connect with them more Dave Lawrence: Spot on. You know, I obviously I have a family, so you know, I’m interacting with them every day, but I definitely feel for those individuals that are single or right, they live alone or whatever it may be their family on an assignment or they’re healthcare workers, and they don’t get to see them, or they’re living elsewhere. Right. To protect our family. So yeah, you definitely need to touch base with those people on a regular basis, Jenn DeWall: That’s for sure. What were some of the early learnings that you had for yourself when you had to combine all of those roles? Because I think there’s a lot of learnings like that people had to go in and think about, okay, how do I prioritize my life differently? What were some of the things that you kind of learned early on that you made a rule or a practice, or how did you incorporate and restructure? Communicate, Communicate and Over-Communicate Dave Lawrence: I think first and foremost, you’ve got to communicate. You’ve got to communicate, and you get to over-communicate, right? Because people get things in different ways. So at least for, from like a client perspective, you can send out emails, but you also have to reinforce it through newsletters, and you have to reinforce it through conversations and reinforce it, right? I think just that over-communication of trying to repeat the same thing in multiple ways, so people understand what you’re trying to get across. I think another thing like I said earlier, it just structuring my day. So that I wake up and in my calendar, I know that even though it’s okay, it’s, you know, two o’clock in the afternoon, I’ve got to shift to this other activity. You know, pre-pandemic or I like to call it B.C. Before Corona, you know, B.C., I like most busy professionals, you have a jam-packed day, and you may have a couple of 20-minute gaps between meetings and conference calls. And now we’re given almost too much time. So I think that scheduling time into your day, including time for yourself to exercise, to walk the dog just to get out of the house if possible. Right. That’s important. So I would say those two key components, the communication and adjusting for this new normal and adjusting how to communicate effectively and then structuring your day. It’s critical. Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I love that. I love your point about structuring because think, and you and I can, you may have had this experience, but when I started my entrepreneurial journey back in 2014, you know you, you go and you, you have these high hopes when you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re like, oh, I’m so excited. I get to be my own boss. I get to control my time. Yeah. And you, you know, you leave the job, and then you go into an entrepreneurial world, which you very quickly find out that no one cares whether or not you take any action. No one cares what action you take. So there’s no accountability component. And I think that we forget that work as much as we might want to be our own boss. That even the physical aspect of going into work gave us a sense of structure. It gave us a sense of like, okay, now I’m at work. And so this is how I’m going to start the day. And now that we’re home, it’s kind of like where do I start? How do I know what I’m supposed to do, like start doing these specific tasks? It’s difficult to self-structure. So I think that’s great. Great feedback. A Message from Crestcom: Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and I just wanted to drop in with a quick note. Do your managers know how to build an effective team? Can they create an environment where teamwork is encouraged while setting appropriate benchmarks and delivering projects on time? Are they able to align expectations, so their team works effectively toward common goals? You hired the right team. Now let us help you develop them. Crestcom offers a robust leadership development program that focuses on results each month. Participants learn and apply key leadership skills and tools that will unite teams and drive organizational growth. We are serious about accountability. After each class, we help participants apply those leadership skills in group coaching sessions. Are you ready to take your leadership development to the next level? Contact us at Crestcom.com So we can help you develop your leaders. And now, back to our podcast. Structure Your Days Jenn DeWall: So we’re just talking about structure. What advice would you have for people that maybe are struggling with structure? Dave Lawrence: Yeah, so again, like I was saying earlier, what I would focus on is really scheduling things into your calendar. You know, if you’re a busy professional before Corona, you’ve probably had a very, very busy calendar. And during that schedule I or during that day, you might have 20 minutes here in 20 minutes there, eat lunch and have a break and just review your email. And so what we’re finding is you really need to schedule time into your day to be, you know, to achieve these activities and these objectives that you need to set for yourself. And the other thing that I’m at least doing for myself is that, let’s just assume for, you know, for this you know, for this example that I used to accomplish ten major activities a week or ten a day or whatever it may be, what I’m trying to do now is reduce that number because a lot of us are dealing with a lot more on our plates now and what I’m trying to hold myself accountable for is just getting two major things done every week rather than trying to get as much as I did before. So kind of lowered the bar on how much I’m expecting out of myself. Jenn DeWall: That is such a great point. We have to redefine our definition of success. It’s not the same. The environment has changed as you said like there are roles that have changed, responsibilities have changed and so it’s unfair to set yourself up for failure by expecting that you’re going to be able to do everything to the same ability as you were before. I like that, that advice of saying, if you used to do ten a day or ten a week, drop that back down to two a day. You know, readjust how you define success and accept that it’s not that you’re failing, it’s that the environment, there’s a lot of other changes that have happened. Dave Lawrence: Yeah. We’re all doing more risk roles and responsibilities. And as I was kind of joking about, but honestly saying, you know, now I’m having this new role of teaching my son kindergarten classes and stuff like that, which is an extra role and responsibility and taking a large part of my day. And as a result, I can’t focus on what I normally focus on and where I’m most efficient. Right. So like you said, we need to lower the bar a little bit. Don’t beat yourself up because we’re not producing at the rate that we were producing, shall we say before, How Can Leaders Motivate Their Teams in a Virtual Workplace? Jenn DeWall: You know, I want to shift gears a little bit, but I love all this personal insight that you’re sharing. There have been a few questions, and I’m sure you’ve probably seen it too, that leaders are kind of struggling right now with how to motivate their teams because they don’t have that same contact with them. They can’t just, you know, run over and talk to them and say, Hey, what’s the status of this? Yeah. What ideas do you have for leaders to be able to motivate their teams in a virtual setting? Dave Lawrence: Well, I think first and foremost, you, yourself as a leader, need to be motivated, right? And you also need to trust them. You know, and you, you need to. And how do you trust them? Well, you give them the tools. You give them the training. And you basically your review will be based on what they produce, what are their outcomes are. I think that I’m honest like we were talking about before, being empathetic. Being a good listener to hear what they’re going through, the challenges that they’re facing. And like I was also saying before, I really think that constant contact, constant communication with them. May it be video conferencing calls or emails or whatever it may be, are really critical. So that you can motivate those teams, and also when you’re communicating, set those expectations, let people know what is good, what is better, what is best, and what you’re striving for and let them know what the deadlines are or when are you planning to achieve that objective. Right. So I think first and foremost, you yourself as a leader have to be motivated. You have to, you know, have that strategic vision and say, okay, this is the end goal. And then clearly communicate that to the team. Jenn DeWall: Yes. I want to add something to the piece of what the leader being motivated because I think a lot of it is also walking the walk. But I mean this and actually a way that maybe we don’t think is a big deal, but it actually is, if you want to encourage face to face interaction and then you maybe jump onto your team’s virtual meeting and don’t use your camera, well then that’s going to tell everyone else that they don’t have to use your camera. So you do have to walk the walk in terms of how do you want them to show up. If you’re going to show up in, you know, a sweatshirt or, however, if that’s appropriate, that’s totally fine. But you are the one that sets that example for what people should be doing and how they should be acting at this time. Lead By Example Dave Lawrence: You’re absolutely correct. And you know, we have joked a couple of times about people being more casual. You know, it’s normally when I meet with clients, I’m business casual, and it’s a jacket or sports coat, whatever it may be. You know, I think about it before I get into kind of some coaching sessions and one-on-one with some like and I think should I wear a t-shirt? But you also see your own clients and, and, and, and partners or whoever it may also are dressed down. So as far as like appearance and as far as attire, that’s at least for me, a little less of a concern. Except when I’m actually doing my workshops. In those situations, I’d be dressed normally. Yeah. However, as far as interactions, you’re spot on. I mean, you know, we lose so much when you don’t have that eye contact with people. And so when you do want to get across a really important point, you want to be able to see how someone’s reacting. And they’re not just giving you lip service. Right. So you, you also have to walk the walk. You have to get on the conference calls. You have to be punctual. You have to, you know, if you say, this is our agenda, you follow that agenda. And also you might want to kind of prep a little bit ahead of time, right. You want to maybe call on people. You probably want to minimize, like I was saying before, the length of that presentation or that, that meeting maybe do some icebreakers, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I think there’s a lot that you can do in order to ensure that you know, at least these virtual and video conferencing calls are, are effective. Jenn DeWall: Yes. And I think, you know, the other thing that, I guess maybe it’s worth noting that is really difficult is we don’t have eye contact in a virtual meeting because I contact is that it requires you to look at the camera, which is not at the person. We have to remember that. We don’t have that. So we do have to try a little bit more to be able to try and create that interaction and that non-verbal communication. Because you and I both know that nonverbal communication is, is very powerful, and it’s something that we use as the majority source of our communication. And now, if we don’t have a video, we lose all of that. Dave Lawrence: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, that’s critical. I mean it just, it’s so important to have that, those visual cues, the body language, the eye contact and also, you know, walking the walk, as you were saying before, as the leader setting that example. What is your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Dave, you’ve shared some really great to have said, I hope that this helps all of us or all of our listeners tuning in just to understand how they can be more successful in leading in this virtual world. But I want to wrap up by asking you our final question, which is the question that we ask everyone that joins us for the podcast, which is, what is your leadership habit for success? What do you do to create success? Mr. Lawrence? Dave Lawrence: Wow, that’s a, it’s a challenging question. It’d probably be difficult to put the finger on just one thing. But okay. I think it’s somewhat similar to what we were talking about before. Having a system in place, so structure. You know, you can set all the objectives and all the goals that you want. You know, we all have our new year’s resolutions, and a lot of them stopped by January 15 or January 10. But you know, if you put a system in place, a structure in place so that you can follow through. So that you’re effective. Maybe managing your inbox and maybe losing those 10 pounds from the holidays or from COVID 19. You know the COVID 19, right? That’s going around, right? That’s not the Freshmen 15. It’s the COVID 19. Right? You need to put together a system in place. So I put together a system, excuse me so that you can follow that system. And so that is how I try to at least do it for myself and obvious for the people at the companies that I work with. And you know, living by that system, being disciplined to follow a system. Again, if it’s an email tracking or not, email tracking, email filtering process so you can get all your emails done or if it’s holding yourself accountable for just getting the AIitems done today, the B items done this week, and the C items done in the next two weeks or whatever it may be. So I think really establishing a system so that you’re effective and you can really be working at your peak performance. Jenn DeWall: That’s a great tip for everyone to realize that if you can create or incorporate a system that your productivity will just be higher, your confidence will be higher, but it does require your discipline. That’s a great, great closing, a great habit to start. Dave, thank you so much for taking the time to share your expertise and just tips on how we can lead in a virtual environment. It was so great to have you on the podcast today. Dave Lawrence: Thank you very much, Jenn. I appreciate it. And be safe. Wash your hands. And we’ll get through this. Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode of the leadership habit podcast. If you want to connect with Dave, you can reach out with him through LinkedIn, or you can go to crestcom.com to find out how you can get Crestcom trading in your area. Dave, as he said, is in South Florida, so if you’re interested in training, don’t hesitate to reach out. If you found these tips helpful, feel free to share this podcast with a friend, and if you liked it, also remember to rate and review it on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you for tuning in. The post Episode 26: Virtual Leadership and Working From Home with Dave Lawrence, President of Apogee Leadership appeared first on Crestcom International.

The Six Keys to Success with Karl Mecklenburg In today’s episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, Jenn DeWall interviews former Denver Broncos Captain and All-Pro linebacker Karl Mecklenburg. Karl Mecklenburg rose from being a college walk-on, and a 12th round draft picks to a pro career that included six pro-bowls and three Super Bowls. Considered the NFL’s most versatile player, Karl played all seven defensive front positions, and in 2001 he was inducted into the Denver Broncos Ring of Fame and the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame. As a highly regarded speaker, Karl tailors his presentations to the needs of the group while addressing and inspiring his audience. His legendary NFL career draws many attendees to events, and the content and delivery of his presentations sent his audience home with a renewed commitment to their goals. I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast where we interview Karl and where we’ll be discussing his book, Heart of a Student Athlete. Jenn DeWall: Hi everyone. It’s Jenn DeWall, and I’m so happy to be sitting down virtually with Karl Mecklenburg, former Denver Bronco, huge accolades under his belt. Karl, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. I’m so grateful to have you here, and I’m just excited to be able to share your message with the world today. Karl Mecklenburg: It’s good to be here. Jenn DeWall: Karl, for those that may not have met you or maybe, weren’t around during the Orange Crush days of the Denver Broncos, maybe could you just walk through and tell us a little bit about yourself? You are Either Getting Better or Getting Worse, You Can’t Stay the Same Karl Mecklenburg: Well, I grew up in Minnesota. I played at the University of Minnesota and did my college career there. Then the Broncos drafted me in the 12th round. They only have seven rounds now, but I was the 310th pick of the draft. Fortunately, I came in at the right time, right place at the right time. So I made the team. Ended up playing in three Superbowls, six Pro Bowls. I played all seven defensive front positions. They could move me around and play me anywhere. Sometimes I played all seven front positions in one game. I was a team captain, had a great time playing professional football, and since that time, I’ve been a professional speaker, so I travel around the country. I do 35-40 keynote speeches a year. This year it’ll be a little less. I love to get out there and meet people and share my message. Jenn DeWall: And you do have such a powerful message that I think people can find a lot of value in. And before we kind of went live with the podcast, we were talking a little bit about COVID because we have to acknowledge it right now. This is something that everyone, in some way, is being impacted by. But you had talked about periods of overcoming uncertainty. And can you tell us a little bit about maybe like, just some tips or like feedback that you would give to help someone be able to, I guess, weather this, this wave of uncertainty that many of us are experiencing right now? Karl Mecklenburg: Well, change is inevitable, as Dan Reeves used to say, you’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. You can’t stay the same. And, and we’re all going to come out of this, you know, and in a different point. And the fact of the matter is you decide what that point is. I played professional football for 12 years. In that time, well in my football career, including the, all the way through, and since being done, I’ve had 18 football-related surgeries. At least 10 of them were during my football career with the Broncos. And when you have surgery, I always had it in the offseason. You play with the injury, and then at the end of the year, they’d fix you. And while you’re rehabbing from these surgeries, everybody else is getting ready for the next season. They’re lifting weights, and they’re running, and they’re running, and you’re just, you’re just trying to walk. You know, you’re just hoping you’re going to be able to walk again. There is uncertainty. You don’t know how you’re going to come back. You don’t know if they’ve already replaced you in their minds. And, and, and it was difficult, but I understood, and I learned to, to not worry about what I couldn’t control, worry about what I could control. I could control my attitude in the training room. I was the rehab captain, right? I was in there, enthusiastic and got everybody else going. When you’re on a professional football team there, there are cliques that the offense hangs out with the offense. The defense hangs out with defense. The old guys hang out together. The young guys hang out together, the white guys hang out together, the black guys hang out together. And it’s not because it’s on purpose. It’s just because it’s convenient. So I crossed those lines. I started hanging out with some of the older guys and with some of the younger guys and across racial lines and across position lines and, and, and really I think opened up possibilities for later when, when I needed to talk to somebody on the team as a captain, I already had that relationship. So, what you can do now, whether you’re a speaker like I am or whatever business you’re in as you can, you can build those relationships. Everybody’s going through a hard time. Now building those relationships I think is, it is vital when you come out of this thing, you’re already gonna have those connections, and our people are gonna, you’re gonna know who you are. They’re going to trust you, and they’re going to want to do business with you. Focus On What You Can Control Jenn DeWall: And those are things you can control. And I like, you know, just as you brought that up, that everyone is going through this experience together. We all have a universal shared experience, which isn’t something that walks in front of us all the time, that we all have something that together we’re facing. And so being able to use that as maybe a point to initiate the relationship or blossom their relationship, but leveraging that and at the moment and what you said, focusing on what you can control. So then when we come out of this that you know, life looks a little bit different, and it doesn’t necessarily have to look as maybe doom and gloom as what we’re kind of thinking it’s going to look like in some way. Karl Mecklenburg: Sure. There are always positive things you can do, whether it’s building relationships with your family or building relationships within your community or building relationships anywhere. I mean, it’s possible even if you can’t be inside 6 feet from each other. Jenn DeWall: There’s still the ways, I mean, you know, Hey, we’re still connecting virtually, and I know that you’ve been connecting with a lot of people virtually. So it is neat that we have had to adapt all together to kind of figure out a new way to connect and socialize. And I’m glad that we have it because it does allow you to still maintain a little bit of that normal. Like, you know, to still have that normal routine and connection, but we have to be a little bit more intentional about using it. Sure. So, Karl, I wanted to have you on the show because I heard you speak, I’ve heard you speak a few times now. You’re a hilarious keynote speaker. You’ve got such just great stories of perseverance and all-around just how to be a great leader. And so we have you on the show today because we wanted to talk about your book, the Heart of a Student Athlete. And I’ve just. I’m so excited because I think that right now during this period where people are just a little, you know, they’re uncertain, they’re a little afraid- that I think that they can really find a lot of value in your book and how maybe this is what they can focus on to allow themselves to get a sense of calm during this time of uncertainty. So what was the, what was the inspiration when you wrote this book, Karl? Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah, that the inspiration. I went to NSA, and we’re both NSA members National Speakers Association. Oh, early, early on in my NSA life, I had people asking me, where’s your book? It’s like, you mean I have to have a book to be a speaker? It took me five years to write it. But it really is the same concepts that I use when I speak. Some of the same stories obviously. And in the 15, 16 years that I’ve been a professional speaker, the stories have adapted and changed, and I’ve moved on to some newer stuff. But I talk about universal keys to success. Like I said earlier, successes, overcoming obstacles on the way to your dreams. That’s the main message you’re going to get if you hear me speak or if you read my book. I talk about teamwork, with leadership being the ultimate expression, teamwork, courage, the courage to try new things. And the courage to be decisive. Dedication, which I described as hard work, constant learning, refusing to quit desire. That’s the dream, the passion, the mission, honesty, and forgiveness with yourself and self-evaluation and with others. And finally, goal setting, reasonable short-term specific steps that get you to those desires and those passions, those missions. So that’s, you know, the book in a nutshell. Obviously like you said, there’s some humor, there’s some– obviously, it’s based on stories. I’m a storyteller. I’m not an industry expert. I’m not going to give you some charts and graphs as much as I’m going to get into things that’ll put you in the direction that I think you should go to. The First Key to Success – Teamwork Jenn DeWall: So let’s talk about those six keys to success. You just briefly outlined them, but let’s go a little bit deeper into them to help our audience maybe understand what your story is focused on or what the book is focused on and maybe some actionables that they can do or what they, what they can do to implement, and I guess start aligning their life for those keys. The first key that you had talked about in the book was teamwork. Karl Mecklenburg: Right? Yeah. When I look at my job, one of the big pieces of it is I want to remind people that they’re on teams. It’s really obvious when you’re watching a pro sports game or watching your Badgers who’s playing like a team or not like a team. People can tell when they’re watching a sporting event, right? You know the Nuggets have it today and they’re passing the ball, and they’re playing like a team or, or if they’re not. But they don’t see that in their own lives. They don’t see that in their business. They don’t see that in their families. They don’t see that in their communities. But, but it’s just as true. If you’re going to relate with other people, it’s best done as a team. Now, when I talk about leadership, I’m not talking about the CEO. I’m not talking about the CEO, although the CEO should be a good leader. It’s not. It’s not only the CEO. When you’re in an organization, when you’re in a family, when you’re on a team, there should be leadership throughout the organization. I describe leadership as the clarity and consistency of the cornerstones of that group, of the commitment of that group, and of the connection of that group, the cornerstones. That’s the priority. That’s a Dairy Queen’s -we serve ice cream, right? That’s the Denver Broncos. We’re here to win championships. When I first started with the Denver Broncos, a guy named Edgar Kaiser on the team, Edgar Kaiser, was a financier out of Edmonton, Canada. He didn’t know anybody on the team. He never hung out with the team. He had no idea what the team was other than an investment. Our cornerstone, our purpose was to make Edgar Kaiser money. He sold that team to Pat Bowlen. Pat Bowlen was there all the time. Pat Bowlen had relationships across the organization. Pat Bowlen brought in the cornerstones of we’re here to serve the community, and we’re here to win championships. And because of the oversight of that, that leader that trickled down throughout. And we had leaders all throughout that organization, we knew where we were going, and this is where we’re going. So yes, the top guy has to set the cornerstones, but that commitment to the team, passion, the team mission has to trickle throughout the organization. And it will if the top guy insists on that. So commitment to the team, passion, the team mission. And then connection, that was unbelievable with that. I mean that he was in the training room. He was in the weight room. He was in the locker room. He was on the practice field. He knew my wife’s name. He knew my kids’ names. You know, he knew what I was capable of, what I wasn’t capable of. Pat just turned that thing around. He was an amazing leader, and I’ve never met anybody like him truthfully from that standpoint. OK. His connection. He was, he was there, he was everywhere. So, from my standpoint, leadership has to be throughout the organization, but it’s the clarity and consistency of your commitment to the team. Passion, the connection with the other team members, understanding what their strengths and weaknesses are, using their strengths to help the team succeed. Using the team strengths to cover for their weaknesses. And the only way that happens is if you know the people you’re connected with. So cornerstones, commitment, and connection. Jenn DeWall: And those are three powerful things that I think sometimes we can forget, especially the importance of just connecting as you had said that Pat paid attention to detail, that he knew your wife’s name, he knew what you did well, and he knew maybe what your areas of opportunity were, what you couldn’t do. I think that sometimes as leaders, we get so caught up in the business that we forget that those well might feel like minor details in comparison to some of the priorities or deadlines that we have are actually really, really important to be able to achieve your strategy or your goals. Karl Mecklenburg: Sure. And I, and I’m not talking about, it’s not like I hung out with Pat. I mean, I don’t recall ever doing anything with them outside of Bronco football. You know it was, it was not, it was not a, and I didn’t hang out with Dan Reeves. I didn’t hang out with Joe Collier, except at work. But they understood who I was because they paid attention—a lot of times. As you say, you get caught up in this your own little world, and you’re as a leader, and you lose track of the people around you. The fact of the matter is the business you own. The family is in, the community you’re in, are these people. That’s the strength of it. And if you’re not, if you don’t understand what that, what those people are capable of, you have no chance of using their talents and putting them in a position to be successful. I mean, what do the new England Patriots do other than cheat? Jenn DeWall: OK (Laughing) Karl Mecklenburg: Bill Belichick studied under Joe Collier. That was his first job in the NFL. He’s as good a guy as I’ve ever seen as far as understanding what the strengths of his individuals are and building a system to fit them. He had a four tight end offense a few years back. Nobody had, I’d never seen that before in my life. But they went into training camp. He figured out. You know what, that four of our top 11 offensive players are tight ends. I got to figure out a way to get them all on the field at once. And he did it, and it was very successful. They went to the Superbowl that year. He is a tremendous firm. Have you ever watched him during the game? He sits there with a hoodie on, and his arms crossed. He might as well buy a seat. He’s not doing anything. He’s just watching the game. Jenn DeWall: Wait, are you talking about Bill Belichick, are you talking about with the sweatshirt cutoff. Karl Mecklenburg: And there he was with his arms crossed, but he doesn’t do a thing. But the fact of the matter is he’s already put the work in and he’s put people in a position to be successful and put together a game plan with his assistant coaches and delegated authority and allows them to be leaders. They’re all pushing for winning championships, and they’ve done it over and over and over again. And yeah, they cheat. But that’s not why they win. Jenn DeWall: Well, yes, we’ll say that. No, but I think, you know, you also mentioned another great piece of a team is lending proper authority, giving people the authority to be successful, to take the lead, to make a greater contribution or leverage their strengths. I think that’s a really valuable component of teamwork. Karl Mecklenburg: Sure. That’s part of that clarity and consistency. You want to be somewhere extravagant. That desire, that passion, that mission, that should be an extravagant, long term, somewhat general thing. From an individual standpoint and from a team standpoint, you don’t set your cornerstone of, you know, we’re going to be middle of the road this year. People don’t do that. I mean, it should be, we’re here to win the championship, and that should be it. A message from Crestcom: Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall, and I just wanted to drop in with a quick note. Do you lose staff due to burnout? Do your leaders have the skills they need to deal with the stress of working in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment. With Crestcom’s leadership development program, your team can see measurable results that are proven to change behavior. See why our program has reached over 1 million individuals around the world, and counting, unlock your team’s true potential and give them the tools and skills they need to manage challenges of tomorrow. Contact us at Crestcom.com so we can help you develop your leaders. And now, back to our podcast. The Second Key to Success – Courage Jenn DeWall: So let’s talk about your second key to success, which is that your book, Heart of a Student Athlete. The second key is courage. Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah. The courage, the courage to try new things. It’s something that people struggle with. I’m not a technical guy. The fact that I’m doing this is pretty amazing. Jenn DeWall: You’re doing so good. Karl Mecklenburg: My first time I got a smartphone, I spoke at the Global Speaker’s Summit in South Africa, and we were when early so we could do a photo Safari. So we, I brought my wife and my youngest son and my dad and his wife, and we all did this photo Safari thing in South Africa. Beautiful, unbelievable country. But we’re on the truck. The Zulu guide is driving the truck, and we’re going from site to site to see the elephants and the hippos and the crocodiles and all this stuff. And he pulls out his cell phone because that’s how they communicate with each other. There are three trucks out there and, and if they find something cool, they call each other. So we found the hippo, so he pulls his phone out. It’s the same phone I’ve got. That’s when you know it’s time to upgrade. I got a real phone when I got back to Denver. So yeah, technology is, is not my thing. So having the courage to try new things allows you to keep up. It allows you to thrive when others aren’t thriving. And it’s, it’s, it’s a tough thing. It really is. But, for me, especially technology-wise is a challenge. But for me, in other ways, it’s not a challenge. I love to have the opportunity to try new things from a work standpoint. As a player, as I said, I played all seven defense and front positions. I came in as a nose guard. They moved me to the defensive end. They moved me, the middle linebacker, they moved it outside linebacker, and then they just started moving me around between them all. Nobody’s ever done that before. Or since. And if I hadn’t had the courage to try new things, that never could have happened—my business as a speaker, same thing. Well, life gives you opportunities to change directions. And a lot of times it’s something that you originally saw as a negative. Like, oh, I lost my job. Right? I lost my scholarship at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. So what am I going to do? Well, I went to the University of Minnesota. Well, I went to the University of Minnesota. Oh man, I didn’t, I didn’t do really well my senior year because we were behind all the time, but I had a really good game against a guy named Chris Hinton. Chris Hinton was the offensive guard for Northwestern. I had two sacks and had had a bunch of things that go well for me. The Broncos drafted Chris Hinton first round in that year. They had watched film of him over and over, and I was the only guy that was eating him up. So they figured out, well, maybe we should draft him. He’s available still at the end of it, at the end of the draft. So, so things that look negative from the start and turn out to be positive things. So, so when you come out of this, and we all come out of this COVID-19 thing, there’s going to be opportunities. You just have to have the courage to be decisive and take advantage of them. And that’s the next courage. I want to talk about the courage to be decisive. I run a 4-9-40, for those of you who don’t follow football, that’s too slow to play major college football, let alone Denver Bronco football or you know, all-star football. But I found out early on in my career. If I could take the first step in the right direction before anybody else did, all the angles would change in my favor. Everything would change. Other, the tight end couldn’t pin me in. The guard couldn’t cut me off. The fullback couldn’t keep me from getting the line of scrimmage. Everything changed. And that’s not just in football. If you can be decisive, if you can take the first step in the right direction before anybody else does, all the angles change in your favor, in business, in relationships and community. And you know, anyway, anywhere you’re at the question is, how do you do that? How can you be decisive? Well, it’s through anticipation, thorough preparation. It’s you’re looking at what who you’re going to meet that day and how you can help them. I get up every morning. I do a little Bible study. I think about what my desires, my passions, my missions are and, and what’s going to come that day, who I’m going to run into, what, what opportunities are there for me and what opportunities are for me to help somebody. Because ultimately, that’s a success. It’s, it’s, it’s breaking through in those relationships and, and then the relationships lead to business or the relationships lead to friendships. Jenn DeWall: There’s a little bit of trust that’s in there. It sounds like too. It’s trusting that things do, and we’ll work out with your effort, with your, you know, an action that when you are courageous, you can defy those odds or turn a situation around and find silver linings or just find that next opportunity. Karl Mecklenburg: Certainly. There are always going to be opportunities. If you think about your life, I can think about my life and think of all the different times if I’d have acted when I knew it was time to act instead of waiting a little bit, I would have been in the front of that wave of success rather than behind it. And, and it’s happened to me a number of times, you know, if I was the Zoom guru, right? Everybody be calling, and I’d be great, but you don’t know, you do what you do, what you do. You look for opportunities wherever that opportunity lies, and sometimes it’s an unexpected place. Jenn DeWall: How much do you think giving yourself permission to fail comes into that? Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah. In the NFL, they film everything. They film every game from two different angles. They film every practice and now they even film meetings. So theoretically you can sit in a meeting watching film of yourself, watching film of yourself practicing. Well, everything is filmed, and everything is evaluated. They evaluate you both on technique and on assignment. If you bring it out 90%, you’re an All-Pro level player. That means 10% of the time you’re wrong. The coach is sitting in that room, hollering at you right in front of your teammates cause he wants to let the other guys know what’s right and what’s wrong. And you have to be able to handle a failure. You’re going to fail. Failure is part of success. Success is overcoming obstacles on the way to your dreams. Obstacles are situations that, where are you going to fail? I mean, it’s, it’s a challenge is a, it’s a battle. Don’t give up. I, I’ve played in three Superbowls, and we lost all three horribly, all three Superbowls. But in each one, I had to show up for work the next day. You know, you go back and, and you reevaluate. You look at what you did right. Look what you did wrong. If you set up the if you set up a day to day approaches to life that you can follow, whether you win or whether you lose, then you got a chance to continue to move forward. We went back to work. You know, we figured out what went wrong in that thing. We fixed things. A few guys got fired, a few other guys got hired or, or moved up and, and we moved on. This COVID-19 thing. People will lose their jobs, but, but maybe it wasn’t the best place for you to be. You don’t know. There are other opportunities. There’s a yeah, there’s things that’ll come up that you’ve gotta be decisive and ready and, and, and take advantage of them. And if you’re not, it’s nobody going to be beating down your door. You, you’re the one that has to initiate. And, and I guess maybe that’s what you were talking about, that ability to handle the feet is that is you’ve got to come back, and you’ve got to initiate and you gotta have enough confidence to say, you know what that was then, this is now that wasn’t the right situation for me, but this one is. Jenn DeWall: I love that. That’s a great piece of feedback, and I think so many people need to hear that right now is many people listening might have been some of those ones that just lost their job but are looking for that next opportunity and kind of hard to see that. But knowing that, you know, just have the courage to be brave and look at that new challenge or to pick yourself up even if it didn’t work out. And, you know, just try again. Karl Mecklenburg: I was going to say–my daughter worked for a t-shirt company. She got her degree in graphic artistry. So she was a graphic artist. She was working for a t-shirt company for years. She kinda hit the ceiling of where she was going to go within that organization. So she started doing some online classes. She started working on data because she understood that data is kind of the direction the world is going. Right. She became a data architect, and now she’s working at the University of Minnesota or University of Virginia in their medical school as a data architect helping to solve this COVID problem, which is pretty amazing. But she did it on her own. It was, it was looking around and saying, you know, what are the opportunities? What can I do? She took these online courses. Built-up her knowledge base applied for some jobs, and now she’s, she’s really taken off. So, yeah. It’s possible. You don’t. You don’t have to. You don’t have to sit around and wait for the opportunity to come. It doesn’t come. Opportunity has to be grabbed and has, it’s, it’s moving by on the conveyor belt. Right? And you can just sit there and watch that thing say, Nah, that’s not it. Nah, that’s not it. When, when, when an opportunity comes, if you’re not decisive, you don’t make that move. All right. It’s gone. So, so take advantage of your time now. Think about what you’re good at. Think about what you like to do if you’ve lost your job or if you’re going to have to change directions after this thing, and then go after it. The Third Key to Success – Honesty and Forgiveness Jenn DeWall: Yeah. I love that. Let’s, let’s go into your third, your third key for success, honesty, and forgiveness. What does that mean? Karl Mecklenburg: Well, we already talked about the NFL film. And ironically, you wouldn’t think having a coach holler at you every time you do something wrong is something you’d miss. But ironically, that’s something I miss. Jenn DeWall: How did you not cry? I would have cried. I mean, we’re not the same, but if they’re yelling at me, I would be crying in front of the entire team. I know myself, though, that I’m way too emotional. Karl Mecklenburg: Well, you got to understand why right? What I looked at it as, OK, here’s somebody who knows how to play linebacker way beyond what I could ever imagine. He’s been involved with linebacker thing his whole life. He can look at me and say, you’re doing this right, and you’re doing this wrong in the end, let’s fix it. Right? So all of a sudden, his motivation is to make me and make the team better. So I know, I know where his corrections are coming from, it’s, it’s not to attack me, it’s to build me up. It’s to make me a better player. So I look at it as, yeah, of course, it’s embarrassing, but I’m in the room with everybody else. You know, I’m getting yelled at 10% of the time he’s getting yelled at 15%. And we share that. But what we, but we also share is, is the drive to get better. So what came out of those things, and it didn’t matter whether we won or lost? We’d still go through that same film study where we’re. The coach would be brutally honest with you. You had to be able to forgive yourself, set some goals, reasonable short term, specific steps to get you back to, to, to playing better against that thing. And then the next week something else would go wrong. And you got to set some goals, work on that and practice and get ready. And the guy next to you is messing up too, right? You see him getting yelled at. So you’ve got, you’ve got to be able to forgive him. You’ve gotta be able to forgive yourself, and then you’ve got to be able to set those goals. He’s got to be able to forgive you. He’s gotta be able to forgive himself, set those goals, improve, gets better the next week. And, and it’s, it’s a constant and, and it really is a, a great exercise in that not only does it allow you to be honest and forgiving with yourself and with others, but also it really nips complacency in the vibe. A lot of people get real comfortable. And the art, as I said earlier, getting better, getting worse. OK. They don’t see that. They just kind of stay the same and, and you can’t stay the same kosher. He said, you know, Karl, you’re either getting better, you’re getting worse. You can’t stay the same. And he’s exactly right. We, as human beings, get comfortable. Right? Obviously, this is not a comfortable time. But I was pretty comfortable before this happened before COVID happened. I wasn’t, yeah, I want, I’m one of these days, I’m going to write that book. One of these days I’m going to try to do a zoom conference, and I was really comfortable. When reality is reality, I’ve gotta be able to forgive myself. Oh, I’m not up to date on zoom. I’m not up to date on, no, I haven’t written a book for 10 years. It’s time to start doing those things. So, so I think anytime you make a move forward, anytime you make a move, you’ve gotta be able to be honest, and forgiving with yourself. Jenn DeWall: I like that you talk about forgiveness. So I do coaching outside of this with, you know, like life and career coaching. But I think one of the things that I see in a lot of the different people that I coach is that they can’t let it go. It’s hard for them to forgive because they might feel a lot of like just frustration for how they showed up or shame and embarrassment for how they showed up or what they didn’t do right. If they made that mistake, and so it can be really hard for them to forgive themselves, which only keeps them stuck in the place that they don’t want to be. And so I think that’s such an important thing for us to recognize that. You know, forgiveness, like some things are going to be harder to forgive than others, but you still have to work on your own forgiveness so you can move forward. Karl Mecklenburg: Everybody knows bitter people that they just can’t get past whenever it was and, and because of that, they can’t move forward. Jenn DeWall: Do you know? And I think even talking about how honesty plays into that, we, I think, you know, depending on the generations, depending on how you grew up and maybe how you were parented or the impact of your employer or teachers, you may be more, I guess accepting to direct feedback. But I think that the thing that’s great about someone being honest, giving you their honest feedback, giving them, the honest opinion is that they’re allowing you to focus on something that might actually be more tangible, that you can focus on to grow instead of like a fluff concept that you can’t really do anything with. Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah, yeah. There’s, there’s great power in honesty. There really is. And there are companies out there that are, and they’re just brutally honest with each other. I’ve run into two or three people that said, Oh yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s what we do. You know, it’s not personal. We’re trying to all get better. And then that if you realize it’s not personal, but it’s for the team’s improvement and for the individual’s improvement, honesty is vital. The Fourth Key to Success- Dedication Jenn DeWall: Yeah. So let’s go into the fourth key to success, which is dedication. And I think that right now, given with everything that’s going on, we’ve been knocked off of a lot of our maybe routines or our normal. And so dedication might be a new thing that we have to reinvigorate. What does dedication look like for you? Or what, what inspired you to write about dedication as a key to success? Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah, well, a hard work, constant learning, refusing to quit, that’s dedication to me. I was like I said, I was not a great football player as a kid, as, as a junior in high school, I played JV football. I didn’t make the varsity team. The senior in high school, I made the varsity team. I wasn’t big enough to play major college football. I was six feet tall and 200 pounds. So I went to Augustana in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on a one-third scholarship. In my first year there, I grew three inches and gained 40 pounds. And I got good. In my second year there, I led the team in sacks. I played every down a defense. I was the best defensive player on the team. When they gave me the one-third scholarship, the way the coach explained it was they were late in the recruiting season. They didn’t have a full scholarship for, but if I contributed and that, and I did a great job for them, they’d give me a full scholarship later. So I went into this meeting with the head coach after that second season when I was the top player on the defense by the numbers. And then just by the I and I was expecting to get a full scholarship. We had that debriefing session that every coach has where they call you and sit you down and talk about last year and what to expect next year. And I’m thinking he’s going to give me this scholarship. We talked about my family’s living room. The first thing out of coach Swisher’s mouth was Karl. We know your dad’s a doctor. He can afford this school. We’re going to take away your scholarship and use it to bring somebody else in. Ah, my passion, my mission already was I’m going to be the greatest ballplayer that ever played the game. It just wasn’t going to be at Augustana, So I left Augustana, and I walked on at Minnesota. I worked and struggled; I earned a scholarship there. A week after the game of the scholarship, I tore a ligament in my knee. They tried to take the scholarship back. You can’t take it back in the big 10. It’s a four-year contract, so they can’t take it back unless I give it back. They made it difficult for me. The next year I led the big 10 in sacks, and there was no question about whether I belong. I was the 310th pick in the NFL draft. I was not expected to make it. I had the same number as a starter on the team. They wouldn’t give me a pair of cleats. They wouldn’t give me socks. Success is overcoming obstacles on the way to your dreams. And the only way it happens is by being dedicated. It’s hard work, constant learning, refusing to quit. It’s if it was easy everybody would do it. It’s not easy. Success is not easy. You’ve got to struggle, you gotta fight, you gotta be dedicated. It’s gotta be a day to day thing, year to year thing, and the season to season thing. It’s something that one of the things that I have a problem with is, is people who believe that it was easy to be successful. Okay. Every day, everybody who’s successful, if you, if you talk to them and you get to know them, there’s, they have a background of overcoming. You can see it once you get to know him. But from a distance it’s like, oh, well they, they were born into it, or they were lucky, or they were fortunate, or they were, it’s not that way. Hard work is, and if it was just hard work, I get up, and my speech would be hard work and sit down, and it’d be a really short speech. But that is a piece of everybody who is successful DNA their, their approach to life. So, so to me that, that, that dedication, that hard work, constant learning, refusing to quit pieces, it’s, yeah, you’re not going to be successful if you don’t have those things now, you might not be successful yet. And you have those things that that happens. There are people who work super hard, but if they don’t have the other keys that I talk about, they’re going to have a hard time being successful. I know a lot of people worked super hard and didn’t get anywhere, but more often than not, it’s because they don’t have that desire, that passion, that mission, that place they’re trying to get to pinned down, and they’re not setting goals in that direction. They’re just scrambling around working super hard, just trying to keep their head above water instead of having a focus and moving in a direction, Jenn DeWall: Have a focus that you can be dedicated to. So, and then keep trying. Don’t think that it’s going to be easy. I think that those are so important things to say. I love our conversation right now, Karl. I think there’s just so much value in terms of how people can apply this to current circumstances. And the one thing that you kind of just skipped over, which I think is a good point to call out, is that when you went to your first practice, I think if I understand this correctly at the Broncos, they gave you a Jersey that had the same number as the starter, which meant that if you’re going into that, you’re not necessarily thinking I am probably going to play and they really, really want me here. Right. That was a hard, Karl Mecklenburg: Back in the day, they would have 110 guys at training camp, and numbers in the NFL only go up to 99. So 11 of us had somebody else’s number, too. And it was usually a starter’s number because they, you know, and it was usually the guys at the very back end of the roster. Yeah, I tried to go to the equipment manager and get a new pair of cleats. He asked he told me I had to wear the same cleats I wore in college. I got a hole in one of my practice socks, and I asked him for a new pair of socks. He said, what’s the matter with the other sock? I, you know, I know what it’s like to be at the bottom and build up from there. Once again, it doesn’t happen without hard work, constant learning, and refusing to quit. A Message from Crestcom Hi everyone, it’s Jenn DeWall. And I just wanted to drop in with a quick note. Do your managers know how to build an effective team? Can they create an environment where teamwork is encouraged while setting appropriate benchmarks and delivering projects on time? Are they able to align expectations, so their team works effectively toward common goals? You hired the right team. Now let us help you develop them. Crestcom offers a robust leadership development program that focuses on results each month. Participants learn and apply key leadership skills and tools that will unite teams and drive organizational growth. We are serious about accountability. After each class, we help participants apply those leadership skills in group coaching sessions. Are you ready to take your leadership development to the next level? Contact us at crestcom.com so we can help you develop your leaders. And now, back to our podcast. The Fifth Key to Success – Desire Jenn DeWall: Let’s talk about desire. That’s your fifth key to success. That just is a natural build, right? Like I love desire. Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah. That’s the dream. The passion, the mission. That’s the extravagant, long term, somewhat general thing you’re always trying to get. For me, for the longest time, it’s, I’m going to be the greatest football player that ever played the game. When I made decisions, I was going in that direction. When I set goals, I wanted them to go in that direction. When I got up in the morning, I thought about it when I was confronted with a decision that was of any consequence whatsoever that weighed into it. How was this going to help me be the best player that ever played the game? Obviously, I’m 59 years old now. I’m not Tom Brady. I can’t still play. I have other desires, other passions, other missions in my life. As a husband and a father, I want to give unconditional uncompromising love for my family. As a Christian, I want everything I say and do to reflect God’s love. As a speaker and an author, I want to inspire long term, positive change. Those are my desires. Those are my passions. Those are the directions I’m going in because I know where I’m going. I have a chance to get there., those things I can, I can set goals in those directions. I can. I can be honest and forgiving with myself and say, okay, I’m right here. Now. I, this is where I’m trying to get to. How do I get there? Well, those are the reasonable short term, specific goals you take to get to those extravagant, long term, general things. So yeah, that’s desire, passion, mission. That’s something you’d pursue relentlessly even when you get knocked down. That’s where the dedication comes in as you move towards those things because it’s not easy. There’s a. There are a million little kids who would love to be a professional football player. My desire, my passion, my mission was beyond that. And I want to be the best that ever played the game. I saw guys with unbelievable talent come to training camp every year. Whose desire? Whose passion, whose mission was I want to get invited to an NFL training camp. And they sold themselves short. They got invited to the NFL training camp, and then they didn’t know what to do, and they got sent home. I was beyond that. I wanted to be the best that ever played. Not I’m gonna make it. Not I’m going to just get invited. There’s a difference. A lot of people sell themselves short. They don’t believe that they can be the best of the best. They’ve had too many people tell them in the past that they don’t belong. That’s not true. There are a thousand different ways to get to the top. But, but they all lead through your dedication and your desire. You have to know where you’re going if you’re going to get there. I’ve got dyslexia. It means I don’t know my left from my right. If you watch my highlight videos that played on either side, I didn’t know I didn’t care. I don’t, and I think that’s what it’s like for a lot of people who are very dedicated but don’t have that desire, that target, that place they’re trying to get to. Once again, they work super hard, but they don’t, they don’t have the focus so that they don’t know where they’re going. Yeah. Jenn DeWall: And I think, you know, Oh my gosh, there’s just so much there. What advice would you give to someone that might struggle to find their passion or their desire? Because I think there are some people that could also be listening like, Oh well, they’ve all got it figured out. They know what they want to do, but like, I don’t know what I want to, do you have any tips that you kind of like, throw in along the way? Karl Mecklenburg: Yeah, no, it was a, it was interesting when I retired from football, I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t. That always been my focus, my passion. That was always a huge part of my life. But that was over and I, and I knew it was over physically. I just couldn’t do it anymore. And it took me a while. It took some soul searching. It took some time. My father’s an obstetrician and obstetricians, while they’re waiting for babies to be born, they stand around telling stories. I grew up around a man who told stories all the time. And I loved that. I, that, that storytelling piece, was something that was part of me too. I wanted to have an impact. I wanted to do something that was significant in people’s lives. And I found speaking it was an opportunity. I was looking. I didn’t know. But when the opportunity came, I was decisive again. A gal named Deep Dukart talked to me. She knew I was somewhat interested in speaking. And she got me to join the National Speakers Association. She said, hey, you know what, if you’re actually thinking about doing this here’s an opportunity. And I got involved and went to the winter conference. It was here in Denver way back when. And my career took off from there. That was something that, but I was lucky. It’s, it’s not an easy thing to, to change direction. It never is. There are there. There are skills that everybody has, that are underutilized. I mean, as a professional football player, I guess I got interviewed a bit and allowed me to do a little bit of speaking and storytelling. But ah, that was something that I had never looked at as a possibility, and suddenly the opportunity came, and I was decisive. The Sixth Key to Success- Goal Setting Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for sharing that. Let’s go into your sixth and final key to success- goal setting, Karl Mecklenburg: Goal setting. We’ve kind of bumped into that a couple of times. Yeah. Reasonable, the short term specific steps that point you towards those desires, those passions, those missions. Those are the extravagant, long term, general things. Those are the big target that you’re setting the goals towards. Now, first of all, you have to be honest with yourself and say, yeah, and know where you’re at. You don’t know where you’re at. It’s really difficult to set goals in the direction that you want to go. So establish where you’re at. Measure that against where you want to be. And then the goals are, in my mind anyway, a somewhat obvious most of the time. I need to fix this. I need to change that. I need to move in this direction. I needed to take advantage of this opportunity. I need to. I need to get involved with this person or this group and take those steps that get you closer and closer. Once again, you have to go back, and you have to evaluate. You have to be honest and forgiving with yourself. Did that move me in the direction I want to go? Is that towards that desire, that passion, that mission? So it’s a constant evolution of, of reasonable short-term specific stuff to get you to where you want to go. This COVID thing had I lost maybe at this point, seven different keynote speeches that I was going to have through April, and I had to sit down and think about what can I do? That’s a positive thing that can help move me forward in inspiring, long term positive change. One of them is to do more podcasts and, and, and get my face out there and get my, get my voice out there and get my ideas out there. Another was to work on that book I’ve been thinking about for years. I’m talking more about leadership than I was in the past. So I’m going to write it more of a leadership and teamwork book rather than a keys to success book. And those will be, and that’ll be coming out eventually here. But I’ve started that. I’ve done some things, but, well, once again, I had to be honest and forgiving with myself and say, you know what? I didn’t anticipate this. I, you know, I don’t really have a network of podcast people that I work with, but that’s all right. I can still do that. I’ve been thinking about that book, but I’ve been putting it off all of a sudden. I’ve got time. Hey, there is a goal. I can get started on that book. Now I’ve started on the book. Now it’s a, you know, I’ve gotta write so many hours a day or so many words a day or, you know, make sure you know, it’s just that’s how I do goals. And I know there are a lot of people who said, who say you have to set yearly, quarterly, monthly, daily goals and write them all down. That’s not how I operate. When I find myself drifting away from my desire, my passion, my mission, when I’m honest with myself and say, Oh, you know what? I’m not going in the direction I want to go. Then I set goals back towards that desire, that passion, that mission. So it’s not a, I don’t have a big chart hanging on my wall with goals written down. I don’t do that. I know some people operate the way I don’t operate that way, but I do internalize the goals and make sure that those are things I’m doing. Jenn DeWall: I think that’s important to highlight when you’re talking about goals because sometimes people can really just be upset by themselves if they don’t miss their goal when they don’t realize that maybe their passion has changed. And that that goal doesn’t matter anymore. And so they do have to set a different goal to get them to where they want to be. I think sometimes people feel like they still have to follow through on some of these goals because it’s written down on a piece of paper, even though they found out that it actually isn’t a goal that maybe is important to them anymore. I think showing people that there are other ways to do that and then you can always fluctuate and adjust and adapt your goals to what you’re going through and new observations or new awareness that you have with being honest to yourself. I think that’s important to share that there are different ways of doing that. Karl Mecklenburg: Appreciate that Jenn, and, and truthfully that happens to a lot of people. As you, as you age, as you grow, as, as things happen in your life where you’ve been focused on, on, on one desire, one passion, one mission. When my wife raised kids for 34 years, right? We had kids around the house forever, and now we don’t. And, and her direction has changed. And, she’s realized that and she’s, you know, doing other things. And that’s, that’s cool that that’s what you need to do. You need to say, OK, this is, this was was the direction I was going on setting goals in this direction, but when I retired, all of a sudden, you know, football’s not it anymore. So it’s these other things. So if you don’t know what your desire, your passion, your mission is, that’s the first step. Then be honest with yourself. This is where I’m at. This is where I’m trying to get to. How do I get there? I set reasonable short term, specific goals and take steps towards that. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall: Thank you so much for walking us through the six keys to success. Karl, I know that people are going to find a lot of value in everything that you shared today, and I’m also going to hold you accountable now that we all know you’re working on this next book. We are going to expect this. This is where we are going to push you to do it. And I know it’s already a goal, but seriously, I’m excited. I’m looking forward to a book by you because I think you just have so many great ideas to share, and you’re also coming at it from a place of community and just being more intentional with our time, with our resources, with how we interact with people. I think there are so many great messages that are relevant to how we can thrive as leaders today. I wanted to close, as I do with every single Leadership Habit Podcast episode with our final class question, which is what is your leadership habit for success? Karl Mecklenburg: Right. Yeah. And actually, I bumped into both of those already in this conversation. I think getting up every morning, centering yourself. Well, with me, it’s, it’s through a Bible study and prayer. And then thinking about what’s important to you. You know, for me it’s, it’s faith and, and, and inspiration, working, working on my speaking and on my speaking business. And how those are going to be encouraged today. How you’re going to pursue those things today, what you’re going to get done today that’s gonna make a difference in those areas. So that, that routine of, of focusing every morning is huge for me. And the other thing is decisiveness. Like I said, I run that 4-9-40. I’ve overcome obstacles in my life, including, you know, I’m a published author twice over now, and I’m going to be a third time. And I’ve got dyslexia. Oh, I’m a slow white kid from the suburbs who you know is an NFL All-Pro. As a kid, I was in speech therapy classes in first and second grade, I had a lisp, and now I’m a professional speaker. Success is overcoming obstacles on the way to your dreams. Nope, nobody’s going to hand it to you. You’ve got to earn it. Hard work, constant learning, and refusing to quit. Teamwork, leadership, dedication, desire, honesty and forgiveness, goal setting, all those things put together will allow you to be successful regardless of whether it’s on the football field, whether it’s as a husband or a wife or a kid as a professional in any way circumstance. Success is overcoming obstacles. Jenn DeWall: That’s a great point to end. Success is overcoming obstacles. Thank you so much to you, Karl Mecklenburg, for joining the Leadership Habit Podcast. I know that our viewers or audience is really going to enjoy this, and I just, I thank you so much for taking the time to be able to share your experience and these techniques for success and all of your stories. Thank you so much. Karl Mecklenburg: Thank you, Jenn. Take care. Jenn DeWall: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of The Leadership Habit with Karl Mecklenburg. To learn more about Karl, head over to karlmecklenburg.com, or find the link in our show notes. There, you can book Karl for events, sign up for his newsletter, and purchase his book, Heart of a Student Athlete. If you know someone who could benefit from this episode today, be sure to share it with your friends, family, and coworkers, and if you’ve enjoyed it, be sure to rate us and leave us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service!   The post Episode 25: The Six Keys to Success with Karl Mecklenburg, Former Denver Broncos Captain and All-Pro Linebacker, Author and Speaker appeared first on Crestcom International.

Grow Your Sales and Influence with Merit Kahn In this episode of the Leadership Habit Podcast, Jenn DeWall interviews Merit Kahn. Merit has more than 20 years of sales, sales management, coaching, training, consulting, writing, and speaking experience. She has worked with thousands of clients across multiple industries, with one goal in mind: grow sales and influence. Today Merit is going to share with us how we can be more influential leaders. Full Transcript Below: Jenn DeWall:  Hi everyone and thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of the leadership habit. I am so excited to have Merit Kahn with me today. She is going to be talking all about how we can grow our influence, which we know is essential no matter what career or industry that we’re in. If we want to be effective leaders or if we want to actually sell a product, we have to understand what we need to do to be influential. Merit, thank you so much for coming on the show today. We are so happy to have you. Merit Kahn:  I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, very. For those that may not know you like I have or seen how funny you were like I have. Could you just briefly tell, you know, tell our audience a little bit about you. Be Worthy to Earn Sales and Influence Merit Kahn:  Well, let’s see. I’ve been in sales- sales management training since 98 had my own business. My business is called the Merit-based Business because everything, my core philosophy is everything. You have to be worthy to earn business, worthy to earn influence, worthy to have your leadership. So no participation trophies here. And I think the thing that people find most interesting about me is that for stress relief, I do stand-up comedy. Jenn DeWall:  How did you get into that? Merit Kahn:  2014, I took a workshop with a standup comedian, and I just learned to take things that were difficult in my life and process them through a lens of comedy. And I, I just, it changed my outlook for everything. I just, once I did my first seven-minute set, I was absolutely hooked. I’ve never looked back and I, I just can’t wait to get on another stage to make people laugh. Jenn DeWall:  Oh gosh, I love to see you in that capacity. And I know there’s two sides of the Merit coin. There is the sales expert, the speaker that’s there. I know you have your two-day sales intensive and then there is the, maybe it’s not necessarily nighttime, but yeah, the comedy side of you, which I think just makes it that much more engaging, especially when you can combine the two, I’m sure when you’re speaking. Yeah. You know, when I, when I, the reason I am enrolled Merit Kahn:  In that workshop was I wanted to just learn how to be more deliberately funny in my keynotes. And what happened was I became, I sort adopted this identity amongst my friends and colleagues, and they expected me to show up funny. So I had this permission to step into this funny part of me that, you know, I didn’t really bring to my work and now I can’t separate it ever again. It’s just, Sorry, you’re going to get, you’re going to laugh at my sales training, sorry. Jenn DeWall:  And that’s what you need because I’m sure that like in any type of training that we experience, it can’t just be all content, right? We have to bring that to light with humor or stories or just different ways to engage and really cement that into the learner’s mind. And so I am so happy that you’re one of those people that aren’t just talking at someone with no personality. You’re actually giving it your all and sharing unique and comical insights, Influence with Humor Merit Kahn:   Which actually creates an environment for the participants where they’re more open to receiving whatever it is you are teaching. So I think humor, really understanding it, and being more deliberate about baking funny moments and experiences into my programs. Whether it’s keynotes or sales training things, it actually made it easier for people to apply what they learned because they were having fun during the session. And that I think makes a huge difference. You know, we talk about being more influential with other people. They have to want that want to be influenced, right? They have to want, do they have to be open to that? And what better way to open someone to understanding and learning and, and being in a moment, there is no better way than helping them learn how to laugh or just be present. Jenn DeWall:  Yes. And laugh at themselves. I love that you know that laughter is the key to gain and one of the keys, not the focus of what today is one of the keys to being able to gain influence because laughter can get you permission to be able to share that. So we’re going to talk all about our mindset, emotional intelligence, a lot of different things that really all are the underlying factors that determine how influential you truly are. You know, one of the things that we talked about offline was emotional intelligence. So let’s kick off our talk. How do you possibly develop that mindset for success? To be influential? Merit Kahn:  Yeah, I think the underlying learning is, well, let me say it this way, the best, the best piece of advice I got when I was learning sales and when I was an entrepreneur early entrepreneur was to learn as much as I can about other people. Learn as much as I can about the people I’m trying to sell to the people I’m trying to influence. And I thought that was great advice, but it left something out because the person that was in every single one of those conversations where I wanted to be most influential was me. And what I didn’t understand until much later in my career was that I had to if I wanted to be more influential with other people, I had to get very clear on the things that had influence over me. And that opened up for me when I took my own emotional intelligence assessment. And then, when I started using that in my business to coach my clients, I really saw the difference. So I could have- I had two guys in my training class. It was kind of funny. It was, they were, they were young guys. They were both hired at the same company at the same time. They sold in the same territory, the same products, and services at the same price point. They kind of looked alike. I mean, they’re like same, same, same. Steven and Daniel and they sat next to each other in my class, learning the same sales techniques from the same person in the same class, like the basic case study, right? The perfect case study. Well, Steven knocked the cover off the ball. Like he, it was like every conversation turned to gold. Like he could do no wrong, he crushed his sales quota and Daniel, you know, kind of eked by like he did all right. He didn’t, he wasn’t a complete failure, but he didn’t knock it out of the park. And I was intensely curious because how could I take credit for Steven’s success if I didn’t also take responsibility for the fact that Daniel just did okay. Like you don’t get to celebrate, and that’s not fair. I couldn’t take that win. So I had, I was interested in emotional intelligence, and I gave both of these guys this assessment and was so clear was that they were fundamentally wired differently. Steven’s self-regard was higher; his level of assertiveness was higher; his optimism was higher. And those are three of the most important things for being successful in a sales role. So rather than teaching Daniel– like pushing on him the sales techniques, I had to work a layer beneath that. Boost up his emotional intelligence attributes because once he was stronger in those areas, then yeah, I could layer on these skills, and now it would start to work for him. And that’s exactly what happened. How Does Emotional Intelligence Help You Gain Influence? Jenn DeWall: Why do you think people don’t first turn to emotional intelligence as a way to gain influence? Merit Kahn:  I think it feels very much like a soft skill even though there’s tons of research, and it’s been written about in many books at this point. You know, when I first started talking about emotional intelligence, I had to really define it for people, and now people have been exposed to it. It’s, you know, a decade and a half later. And I think, I think people want to go immediately to that concrete, what can I do? What do I say? How, you know, what should I hold people accountable for? If I’m a leader who wants to be more influential, what do I do in a sales call if I’m a salesperson who wants to grow my influence? And I think that’s; we’re walking, we’re working the wrong end of the problem. So I do believe that skills and action plans are important, but I think fundamentally it’s getting comfortable with understanding our own strengths and our, I call them not-yet strengths. I don’t like to use the term weaknesses because you know, it’s just a, it’s a weaker area because you haven’t put any focus on it. I’m a terrible basketball player because I don’t play basketball. Not my, not yet my strength. But if I put some time in, I could probably be less bad. Jenn DeWall: I like that. Oh, cause you know, with emotional intelligence, it’s one of the topics. It’s new. But yeah, it seems so obvious for me. And maybe that’s because I live in the leadership space to say, yeah, hello. If you want to have influence, you need to have emotional intelligence. They go hand in hand. Yet, if you talk about, maybe, maybe it reflects, it’s reflective in the difference between Daniel and Steven, but when you think about someone and the instance of sales that has high EQ, emotional intelligence, or low EQ, that high EQ person, what does that look like? What’s the difference between them in terms of how you see it? Merit Kahn:  Yeah, so the difference is you can be, you can, you can have high self regard as an example. And that’s a strong, that’s a good attribute on an emotional intelligence spectrum, but you don’t want so much that it’s out of balance with some of the other strengths that you have. So, for example, I’ll use myself, I’ll use an example for my own reports. I’ll throw myself under the bus a little bit. I’m really high on the optimistic scale, right? I’m one of- I don’t see the clouds. I see the silver lining. I look at everything through rose-colored glasses. Now. I always knew myself to be upbeat, optimistic, but I didn’t always understand how that, in combination with some other emotional intelligence attributes and men, my score in those areas, how being optimistic could hurt me in a sales situation. So in the sales world and leadership world, I was lower scoring in something called reality check, like reality testing. So you would, you might say to me, Oh, I’m really interested in your two-day sales intensive, and I would go, great. And, and then that would be it. Like I would think, Oh totally, Jenn’s going to sign up for that like a done deal. That’s not what you said. It’s just what I heard through my optimistic, happy years. Once I saw on paper, the reality of optimism was so high in reality-check testing was very, very low. Then I could work to bring those more in balance. And what that looks like is now I would say, you know what? I appreciate that you are excited about participating in that course. I must’ve missed something. I didn’t pick up on that. Like, tell me why you really want to do that. And now I’m getting you more excited because I’ve asked you a good question. Now I have a better sense of, Oh, okay, she really is going to do this. Or like I might even ask like, so does that mean you want to be in the February class or the April? Like I might close it, but before I’m going to let, I’m going to lead with my optimism, and it’s actually going to lead me astray Jenn DeWall:  If you go too, too deep. And do you feel like that’s because people have a natural tendency where they can’t see the forest from the trees? Merit Kahn:  Absolutely. Jenn DeWall:  Like we can only focus on one small piece of data. So it either is what we want to hear because we have that confirmation bias, and we just run with it. But then it can lead to assumptions that are faulty and don’t yield that end result that we’re looking for. Earning Sales and Influence by Asking Permission Merit Kahn:  Exactly. Which is why we can’t see you know, who we really are. The question I ask is, you know, who do you need to be to accomplish the goals and aims you have for your life and if who you need to be is a more influential leader than you want to pull out all the stops to learn what, what things like optimism, self-regard, self-awareness, interpersonal relationships, your level of empathy, those things are influencing you and your reactions to other people. You don’t even know if you’re not aware of the emotional impact you have on other people. You can’t, and you’re powerless to be more influential youth. You’re going to try to push your influence on others as opposed to allow them to be influenced by you of their own choosing. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, I love that. Talking about the push because you know when you do see that a lot with people that have low self-awareness, they’re constantly pushing. I mean, I feel like I feel it on LinkedIn. I haven’t even met a person and all of a sudden, you know, they send me a request, they want to connect, and then they’re just pushing information at me as if I was saying yes by nature of connection. I wanted you to send me every single thing that you possibly had that I didn’t know about that I won’t read. Thank you. No one wants that, but yet when you’re so out of touch, I think you just naturally assume that, well, if I just keep doing this, like by statistics, someone’s going to pick it up. Whereas now I’ve received that as a seller is, I never will want to do business with you again because there was no, you didn’t ask if you could push at me, you just pushed. Merit Kahn:  and you just said the magic. The magic question- you said you didn’t ask if you could do that. And the rule is that permission changes everything then you can use. That applies to every area of our life. When you have permission to ask a question to send some to kiss someone, I mean, it’s a different ballgame. Without that permission, you could be in for a world of hurt. And, and it feels pushy and aggressive. So I think to access and, and to be more influential with other people, we want to be very mindful of asking for permission. And my magic question that I’ve been teaching for years now is, are you open to and then fill in the blank. So if I were to connect with you on LinkedIn and I knew I wanted to bombard you with all of my amazing stuff, the first thing I would do is say, Hey Jenn, we know some of the same people. Are you open to having a conversation to see if it makes sense for us to talk in detail about what we each do? Like that’s a different conversation. Jenn DeWall:  And that feels a lot better. I think that in the digital age, people, especially over LinkedIn where it is so much more of a networking tool and platform just by its nature, that when you do accept a request, people I think love to jump in and assume that because you’ve accepted that request, that all of a sudden it means that you’ve given permission. Whereas it’s kind of misguided. I think it’s then creating that point, the opposite effect. Now you’ve made an assumption where I wasn’t actually there, sorry. But if they would’ve just reached out and said the simple, you know, ask that magic question that you had shared, that would have felt a lot better. Yeah. Merit Kahn:  I mean, you can use that question in a lot of different applications. So think of a leader or manager who has to have a tough performance improvement evaluation conversation with one of their you know, direct reports. Well, it’s a different conference. It’s like, okay, we’re here to have your 90-day review. Well, that’s an environment that puts me and Headspace of defensive. Like I’ve got to defend everything that I’ve been doing. Versus if that meeting were to start with, you know, are you open to first hearing some things that I’d like to celebrate about your performance, but are you also open to some moments where I think, you know, some coaching would be beneficial. Are you open to having a conversation about some of the things I think would be helpful for you to focus on for improvement? Well, that just puts me at ease because nobody doesn’t want to be open. Merit Kahn:  Right? And sometimes, and when you ask permission, you create this space for somebody to say, yeah, I am, I am open to that. Okay. I kind of call it, I call it the open mic environment. You know, you want to set an environment or mood for people to be playful and light, and here you, your leadership, your wisdom, your coaching, your advice. You want them to be able to receive that. So you want to set up this kind of open mic environment. When a comedian or a or a musician goes to an open mic night, they are there to play and to experiment to see what works with an audience or what doesn’t. So however it goes, it really gives them information that they’re going to use to improve their performance. So there’s no bad outcome. I mean, you know, a comedian could bomb at an open mic, and it might not feel good at the moment, but if they really think about it, they’ve had a great experience that’s going to help them in the future. Jenn DeWall:  Yeah, they have new data. Merit Kahn:  They have data. Exactly. Three Keys: Open Mic, Open Sesame, Open for Business Jenn DeWall:  To back that up. So what we’re going into now, to our listeners, is the three keys essentially to opening your door to success and to be able to influence. And so those three keys, what Merit just touched on was Open Mic. The second is Open Sesame, and the last is Open for Business. But going back to the open mic, people get so hard on themselves. It’s that perfectionist culture where they feel like they should get it right and so when they fail, then it becomes more about, Oh my gosh, I’m not good enough. I didn’t do that, and sometimes they give up. Whereas if they went in with that mindset, that said, all right, let’s see what works and doesn’t, I’m not here to say I got it right. I’m just here as a scientist to collect data. There’s a different energy there. Merit Kahn:  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Jenn DeWall:  I wish more people would set themselves up for the open mic. Why do you think people resist it? Merit Kahn:  I think they’re just, and I just think they haven’t been invited to participate in something like that. Like you’ve been to plenty of brainstorming sessions, but how many times have you been, have you had an idea that’s been shot down in a brainstorming session. That’s really not what brainstorming was intended to be? So I think one of the things that are, is that leaders can do a better job is to set the tone of something like a brainstorming meeting or any meeting where they want to invite people to have that open mindset. So you know, whether they’re, they’re verbally saying, you know, no idea’s a bad idea in here. We’re just, we’re looking at the top of the mountain 360 degrees at all of the options. We’re going to see who we’re going to celebrate, the absolute craziest idea that comes out of this conversation. Like you have to be really open and invited to participate at something at that level. Can I tell you a story? Jenn DeWall:  Please do. Create the Environment for an Open Mind Merit Kahn:  You know, I think a great example is how this whole thing comes together, as is my dad. My dad has been volunteering with the Make-a-Wish foundation for more than 40 years, and Make-a-Wish, if you’re not familiar, is an organization that grants wishes to children with life-threatening diseases illness. And over the years, my dad’s done lots of different things. Like he’s picked up, with families at the airport and got them settled in the rental cars so they can take their journey to whatever the wishes. He’s organized events. He’s, you know, done fundraising. But his favorite role is as a wish granter and the people who are wish granters for the Make-A-Wish foundation, and they’re the people that get to sit down with these kids and say, okay, if you could have been or do anything in the world, what would be your wish? And I think, you know what, when my dad tells me these stories of these amazing conversations and these wishes that these kids come up with when I’ve asked him, like, how does a kid open up to you like that? Because he’s a stranger to them and he says, well, he creates an environment of play, let’s say it that way. So, you know, if the child is, you know, an artist, he might draw with them. If they’re into music, he might have them sing their favorite song, right? He might have put on music and have them dance. It’s really about creating that environment, that open mic environment where they get to just play. And what happens is he’s really, whether he knew this, you know, deliberately or not, he’s preparing their brain to think big. And I think we could learn a lot from that in the leadership world by, you know, how are we preparing our teams to think beyond what the goals are or what they think is possible. So my dad, in doing that, takes a kid from, you know, I want a new TV, or I want to go on a shopping spree, or I want to go to Disney World, which is a great wish. Nothing, no disrespect to that wish. It’s the Disney World has set up an amazing, you know, to be able to do that. But he takes them to the level where they get to do what I call the next step, which is Open Sesame, which is kind of like, you know, the genie in a bottle. Like legitimately, anything is possible. So the open mic is setting the stage. That’s the environment that you need to see the possibilities that open Sesame is. That’s where you declare and share what the big wish is from a place that you wouldn’t have thought of had you not been in that open mic environment. Okay. So open Sesame is when, you know, little Claire, six years old gets to say, I want to be a mermaid or Jack a six-year-old, from Denver who wanted to be a superhero. And the next thing you know, he’s rescuing the entire city of Denver from the Red Villains as his alter ego, the Green Blaze. And it’s this incredible, amazing story in this. This child is just so full of possibility, and he gets to take that presence, that identity to his medical treatments and be the green blaze undercover of course, dressed as a child, right? But he who he really is is the Green Blaze. And that just adds a whole new level of possibility for how he takes on his medical treatments. So how, how could we do that in the business world? You know, what’s, what’s the, what’s your environment where you think bigger than anywhere else? You know, what gives you access to that? Do you need to walk your dog in on a nice beautiful day? Do you need to sing at the top of your lungs on the way to work? You know, like what gives you access and then you declare that big dream and then it’s Open for Business. Cause my dad’s role is to go mermaid. Got it. Absolutely. Your wish is my command. And then he just gets an entire team of the most amazing people you’ve ever met at the Make-A-Wish foundation. And they make it happen, and Claire becomes a mermaid. Jenn DeWall:  I love that so much. But you know, they’re all so important because we think about all of the things that can happen that stifle our creativity, that stifles our ingenuity, that can prevent us from having influence, but what you’ve just given us as, for our tools and ways that we can look at things to expand our mindset, to be able to see possibilities. When you’re in a sales capacity or any influencing role, you need to be able to unlock that with other people to get them to do what you want them to do. And so in that case of your dad saying, no, let’s think bigger, even though you might have that fixed mindset and only be exposed to what you’ve experienced, how can you help them see a different thing? Cause in the lens of sales, your product may be the perfect thing, but they just can’t see it yet. Merit Kahn:  Leaders, or sales professionals, or you know, pick an industry, our ability to be more influential with other people starts with our ability to create an environment where they can see a new possibility for themselves. And sometimes my work is as simple as asking a question like, have you already decided that it can’t get any better than it is or are you open to a new possibility that could 10-X your business growth? And they’re like, what? Jenn DeWall:  I want that. I’ll have what she’s having! Merit Kahn:  Exactly. But you know, if I were to just try to convince you that I could help you 10-X your business, that’s pushy. You are, you have no choice but to push against that, to protect yourself from being sold by the Sales Guru or the Leadership Guru. Like that’s, that is putting somebody exactly in a space that you cannot be more influential with them. So to unlock what’s possible for them, it’s first being open. You know, I kind of look at it like, do you remember that movie? The Sixth Sense, right? And it was like, you know, the guy’s like, I see dead people – or the kid- like I see dead people. So like my superpower is, I see possibilities. Like I just see stuff for other people. And my job as an influencer in whatever capacity, whether I’m speaking on a keynote stage or leading a small training workshop or coaching people, my job is to help them see the possibilities that I see for themselves. Jenn DeWall:  And so when they, so it starts with the Open Mic, which is just kind of that environment. So creating the right environment, we’re talking about how you can influence, you have to create the right environment for them. And then Open Sesame is unlocking their brain to be open. And that Open for Business would that be described as, okay, like I’m in alignment with you, like I’m ready to see where this could go. Is would that be how you would describe it? Create the Possibility Merit Kahn:  Yeah, I would just, I would maybe tweak the Open Sesame part is that’s where they, they create the possibility. So open mic is the environment where that thinking will take place. Open Sesame is, I’ve written it down, I’ve shared it, I’ve created the bigger possibility and then Open for Business is, okay, let’s get down to work. Like what do we need to actually do? Can we make this happen? Jenn DeWall:  What kind of questions, would you ask? If you were in, you’d already created that environment, and you went through the Open Mic phase. What type of questions would you ask for someone once you’re in the Open Sesame phase? Merit Kahn:  Great question. So I ask in that phase, I asked, you know, what have you done? You know, what have you achieved thus far? Like, how far have you gotten in this area without anything else? Like, where are you now? Right? Where are we starting from? And then I want them to either want to ask about, well, what do you think is realistic? So sometimes people will think like 10% growth is realistic, or, you know, opening up another office in one other city is realistic. So they’ll dream what I call a possible dream. Merit Kahn:  Now I want them to dream bigger. It doesn’t mean that the possible dream isn’t worth shooting for. It just means it may not pull them- really pull them with a passion that a big, you know, a big, and what might others might term the impossible dream will pull them towards like you could rally around the wish you know, that a child might, might share with you to go on a shopping spree. That’s, you know, that’s a legitimate wish that children have had and in that organization and, and has been delivered on. But the energy that comes from a wish that seems impossible like a superhero, you know, they didn’t just get a padded costume for this little kid to put on and like bam, you’re a superhero. They had to invent the evildoers and the crimes that the superhero would save the city from. Like that’s enrolling. So how do you, how do you get people to think like let’s 10-X that dream? And it would just be questions like, well, where are you now? You know, what’s, what’s you know, how much growth have you experienced? What’s possible, what’s realistic? And then what would it look like if it was ten times growth, not just 10%. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Getting people to see and think beyond their own limitations. I know you have so much experience. What type of results have you seen with people when you can get them to that place of 10-Xing your business? What have you seen people accomplish once they’re in that place? Merit Kahn:  You know, to be perfectly Frank, I haven’t seen everybody, you know, get to that the big impossible dream. But they sure got a lot farther than they thought was realistic. They had a lot more fun along the way. They allowed, when you think bigger, whether it’s 10-X or whatever, you know, because that’s not necessarily new information. Right? You’ve probably heard other people say, you know, 10-X your business, right? That’s not new. But what I see that people are able to create is by thinking that much bigger about what’s possible. They have to come up with that many more options to get there. And so if, if somebody, like I had a, a client of mine who had a million-dollar sales goal. So I said, okay, what’s realistic is he’s got four different revenue streams in his business. So what he originally did was he said, okay, I’m going to come up with a way to get to a $250,000 sale or you know, worth of sales in each of these four revenue streams. And I said, okay, that’s what’s realistic. That will get you to your million dollar goal. What I’d like you to do is think bigger than that, and I want you to build a plan that would have you do $1 million from each of these four revenue streams. Now, he may not make his goal in each of those four revenue streams, but just by virtue of the fact that he now thinks that it could be possible, he’s now, you know, what are the resources, if this channel was going to be a million-dollar revenue stream versus a $250,000 revenue stream, that’s a different set of what do I do. That’s a different checklist to be open for business. And so I say, just build the plan for the bigger dream. And then if you fall short, you’re still probably getting higher than the original goal. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. That’s the midpoint. And that’s still where a place where you can see the progress that exceeds your expectations. And I think that it’s so important because people really do become limited or jaded or too conservative in play-it-safe mode. And so we don’t necessarily stretch ourselves or even challenge other people in that way because we’re not thinking bigger. And if we’re putting That into the context of an organization, if you’re not challenging your employees to think bigger, do better, you know, add more value, be more innovative, you’re likely going to fall behind your competition or to those people that are actually creating those spaces for people to think big. Having the Right Mindset to Grow Sales and Influence Merit Kahn:  Exactly. Yeah. You know, it’s, it’s interesting because I think if, if you are professionally the same place, the same level that you were three years ago, it’s not because of what you know how to do or your game plan, it’s because you have some belief that is driving all of those actions and it’s keeping you playing at that level. I’m often telling audiences, you know, there are three things that you need to focus on to be successful in anything. And you know, it’s a mindset, right? It’s having the right mindset. That’s what we’ve been talking about. But it’s also being skilled in the mechanics of what you do. So the mechanics of sales, the mechanics of whatever your particular offer is, your product, your service. You’ve got to know that stuff. You know, the mechanics of what it is to be a good leader. There are things that good leaders do and things that bad leaders don’t do, right? So there’s mechanics of that, but then there’s also being in motion, right? Being in action, working your plan. So mindset, mechanics, and motion, those are really the fundamental things that I, I base all of my work on, it goes back to those, those keys. But if we go to mindset it, you can break that down into three parts, too. There’s the internal mindset, right? That’s what you say to yourself. There’s your behavioral mindset. That’s what your actions say to other people. And there’s your emotional mindset, which is really how, how much your emotions impact other people, whether or not you’re aware of that. Right? So that’s where, you know, as we talked about at the beginning with emotional intelligence, it’s your awareness of your emotional triggers for yourself and how you might be triggering others is going to impact your ability to influence. Jenn DeWall:  It’s called tact. Yeah, exactly. That’s, I mean, that’s just what came to mind in terms of leadership is that oftentimes not understanding or thinking through how someone could possibly respond. Because once you say it, perception is reality, and it’s going to be so much harder to reverse that. How You Buy Influences How You Sell Merit Kahn:  Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, but that internal mindset, that’s what’s gonna keep you stuck. So what you said earlier, you know about you know, sometimes we kind of sabotage ourselves, but it’s, it’s our beliefs about money. It’s our beliefs about how our own self worth, and it’s our beliefs about you know, if they’re the CEO, they must be the decision-maker, right? If you believe that you’ve made an assumption that could be false, right? They might have a board of directors that they run every major decision by, so there’s, you know, we, again, it’s– here’s another example. So how we buy impacts, how we sell as an example. Oh yeah, this is a good one. So talk about, you know, being, wanting to be more influential with others, but again, needing to understand what has influence over us. So if I asked you what play will you play with? Game with me. All right. So tell me about the last thing you bought. That was like $500 or more. Jenn DeWall:  The last thing that I bought my pair of skis. Merit Kahn:  Okay. Pair of skis. Perfect. And what was the process you went through when you bought those skis? Jenn DeWall:  I went to, you know, I went to REI. I talked to an associate, and we compared brands. We talked about the level that I was at and what I was going to be basically and how I was going to be using the skis. Merit Kahn:  Okay. Did you go to any other stores? Jenn DeWall:  I had gone to a few, but I knew I wanted to make the purchase at REI. Merit Kahn:  Because? Jenn DeWall:  Because I’m a member of their co-op. Merit Kahn:  Ah, okay. So you were going to get some money back on your purchase for future purchases. Smart. So you’re a smart shopper. What about, did you shop for sale? Did you wait for the coupon? Jenn DeWall:  I did shop for the sale. It was an unintentional sale. They just happened to have a pair of last season skis, and I decided I didn’t care if they were last season, they were $300 cheaper. So I would buy those. Merit Kahn:  Okay, perfect. So how you buy impacts, how you sell. Now for the leaders listening or sales managers that hire salespeople, that is an awesome interview question. They have absolutely no idea why you’re asking that question. And you are going to learn volumes about the objections that your salesperson might not be able to overcome because of the way that they buy personally. So if, if I would, if you were selling to me and I said, you know, Jenn I don’t know if I really want to buy these skis. I mean, I dunno I might want to, I wanna go somewhere else. I’m not, you know, I want to save a few dollars if I could shop around and find this somewhere cheaper. Even if you were highly trained in what to say, you might say I can totally understand that I would do that myself. If I can be of any more help to you, just let me know like something like that. So that’s a great example if you want to pay attention to what has influence over you, like your buying style and because and look at does that impact how you conduct a sales experience for someone else? So you don’t have it. I didn’t pick up on any real negative buying habits from you, like your buying habits. Jenn DeWall:  No, what I think I picked up on one as you’re talking, I feel like the aha that I’m having is it is so important for me to have choice. And so the second that the pressure is on like I want to be able to walk in and just talk about things. I don’t want anything to be forceful, and that’s the same way that I would want to sell. I want people to always feel like they have a choice. Merit Kahn:  Right. But you also, you have a very, there is a very positive one I want to highlight for you. You went to REI, you had two specific reasons. So a loyalty program was important. So in your sales offer, it might not make sense to you if somebody didn’t want to buy that was part of your company’s loyalty program, you would be like, well, why would you go anywhere else? We’re going to give you this back, or you’re going to get points or whatever. So you might really appreciate it, you might want to think about how can I add a loyalty program to my offer, right? That might give you a clue about something that other people might find attractive. The other thing was REI is well known for having real experts on their sales floor. Like it’s not, you wouldn’t have me, a non-skier, selling skis in the ski department. You’d never have that because they are real outdoorsy people that do the activities in the department of the store that they work in and they’re very well known for that. So you value expert advice when you’re making a purchase that’s a high dollar amount. And so you are going to learn as much as you can about your offer so you can be the expert that other people can go to. And I think that’s a strong buying habit. Ask More Questions Jenn DeWall: What, I mean, that’s an awesome interview question, and I just love all the reflection that’s there. Look at yourself. How do you make decisions? How do you buy? And then, you know, looking back and reflecting on your selling because selling isn’t just selling your product. Sometimes it’s selling an idea and think about how you need to package that in a way that ensures influence. Merit Kahn:  Yeah, and I mean, think about you know, being on in that sales role for whatever your offer is and asking somebody, you know, are you open to it if I ask you a couple of questions about what’s important to you in making a decision like this, because you know, you could go a thousand different places to buy a pair of skis. Tell me why you came in here. You know, are you open to it? If I asked you a couple of questions, you wouldn’t expect somebody selling you skis would ask. Well, sure. And now, I’m just building the relationship. But even in that question, I’m inviting the person that I want to be influential with to be in the mind space where they’re open to hearing something in a new way. Jenn DeWall:  Yes, and then you’re also just like you learn, learn, learn, which only then gives you more “intel” if you will, to be influential or to at least connect the dots for them. Merit Kahn:  Exactly. Now I hope that your audience will use their new powers for good and not evil. Jenn DeWall:  It’s very powerful. You can see the manipulation or like the consequences. We’re going to assume that everyone that listens to this is very, they have a lot of integrity, so they are going to use it for all good. Merit Kahn:  Perfect. What is Your Leadership Habit for Success? Jenn DeWall:  Merit, we wrap up every single podcast episode with, first of all, I’ve loved our conversation, just thinking about how we truly can be more influential and how it’s just by mindset. Thinking about how we can unlock the mindset and mentality of the people that we’re influencing to get them into that space to be able to work with us so we can gain influence. And also talking about, you know, the mechanics and just, there was so much good content in this episode. I’m not even gonna rehash it because I hope everyone has listened to it. So thank you. But we do conclude every single Leadership Habit Podcast Episode by asking our final question, which is what is your leadership habit for success? Merit Kahn:  Well, I think what I’ve learned recently through comedy, through really studying comedy, is to really keep things light. So what I know about my own ways of being is that I’m a writer, I like to journal, and I used to just journal and just kind of get it out of my head and onto, you know, into a journal just to kind of rehash the day or process a question or something on my mind when I didn’t always do, was a review that journal. And when I started studying comedy, I also did a lot of writing. You know, you write about your observations, and then you write about why what’s interesting about the fact that you observed that. So it’s kind of like the, there’s the observation but then there’s observing the observation, and so there’s a lot more reviewing what you’ve written that I didn’t always do. And what has happened in my business as an entrepreneur and somebody who leads lots of people in training sessions and you know, keynotes and things is I’ve started observing the lessons that have been right in front of me that I, I didn’t allow myself the time or space to process. So I guess all of that is to say I would recommend that leaders do a journal. It doesn’t have to be like this is what I have for breakfast, but a few things like a big issue, how you’re observing what you’re thinking about it and what that informs you as a leader. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. Be an observer of your observations. Merit Kahn:  Yeah. Yeah. You said it perfectly. Jenn DeWall:  I mean, that’s something that gets out of your own head because you might be missing something. There might be that next solution or aha moment when you take that step back. And journaling is the way that allows yourself to do that. That’s what I think I hear you say, which sounds powerful. Merit Kahn:  The only other thing I would add to that is I think you know, leaders, we have a lot on our plates. You know, I’m a business owner. I’m a single parent of a teenager. Like there’s a lot going on, but the moment I take comedy or my writing or our exercise, the things that lift me up, the moment I take those things off of my schedule because I’m so busy is the moment that stress takes over. And when I’m stressed, I am closed-minded. I can’t see the possibilities. So it may feel like a luxurious thing to sit down and write in a journal or go catch an open mic night or, you know, perform standup comedy. But it is absolutely essential to my being open-minded to see new possibilities for my audiences. For my clients and for my own business. Jenn DeWall:  I love that. It’s like slowing down to speed up. Merit Kahn:  Exactly. Exactly. Jenn DeWall:  Merit, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was such a pleasure to have you. This was so fun. Thank you. Jenn DeWall:  Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Merit Kahn. If you want to find out more about her two-day sales intensive event or book her as a speaker, find her at meritbasedbusiness.com or look at the show notes. If you feel that today’s podcast made an impact with you, please share it with your friends, and don’t forget to write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. The post Episode 24: Grow Your Sales and Influence with Entrepreneur, Educator and Entertainer, Merit Kahn appeared first on Crestcom International.

Learning from Failure at Work with Tamara Ghandour In this episode of The Leadership Habit Podcast, we’re continuing our work fail series because we know that if we’re working, we’re likely making mistakes, and it’s important not to live there but to learn from failure along the way. Jenn DeWall interviews Tamara Ghandour, the author, speaker, founder and president of Launch Street. Tamara is an innovation expert, and she is going to share with us her early work fails, what she learned, and how you can learn from her missteps. Jenn DeWall:      Hi everyone. So we are back with our minisode work fails, and we are talking to innovation thought leader and the creator of the IQE assessment and the president and founder of Launch Street tomorrow Ghandour, and she’s going to share with us her work fails because let’s be honest, we all have them. Tamara Ghandour:           And some of us have a lot of them. Jenn DeWall:      I mean, I know, I’m sure everyone can talk, but no, obviously we all do, and that’s why we wanted to open this up and give people the opportunity to hear from individuals that are extremely successful but know that we have all found success as a result. I’m building on our failures, not living in them, building from them. Learning from Failure Tamara Ghandour:           So I’ll start with the business one, and then I’ve got some more personal leadership ones as well. So I’ll start with the business one. So a couple of years back, I was hired by J&J to reinvent baby care, and it was, it really exciting. They wanted kind of, you know, new to the world ideas. I wanted to really shake up baby care. This was before there had been a lot of innovation in baby care. So I think maybe 2007, 2006 and I assembled an amazing team. We, you know, played with baby toys. We checked out formula; we talked to dads, I’ve been into all this great stuff. And for six months, we had our heads down working on this incredible project, and we pushed boundaries, and we came up with new ideas, and we shuffled into the CEO’s conference room to present after six months of doing all this work. And I’ll never forget this room, Jenn because it had this massive wood table and these kind of Pestello used chairs at Crete when people sat in them, and the walls had oil paintings of CEOs past, and none of them were smiling at us at all and quite intimidated. I was so intimidating and my team at our standing up at the podium with our beautiful PowerPoint behind us and my clients to my right and his boss and the VP of this department and the head of that department, I mean all the mucky-mucks were there. And my team starts presenting these ideas that we had, quote-unquote, perfected over time. And I’m beaming with pride. I’m like a mama bear. I’m so happy. But as they’re talking, I start to notice this whispering to my right, and I look over, and it’s my client’s boss and he with, every idea keeps leaning into my client, and he’s saying things like, didn’t we try that before? Didn’t Joan with R and D look into that? And we squashed it. Didn’t a competitor look into that niche, fail? Didn’t another consultant give us that, and we shelved it? He squashed the life out of every idea. And here’s the thing about him, I don’t remember his name and if you’re listening, call me cause I have a lot to thank you for. But I do remember that he had a mustache so big that it moved before he spoke. So this whole experience, I could see it happening cause his mustache would move every time and you’re just waiting. I was waiting for that mustache to move, and he just killed the day, and that was the longest angriest plane ride home. We’d failed. We went to that meeting, we presented these ideas, and the entire thing just got shelved right in front of me. And I’m sure you’ve been in those meetings. We’ve all had those experiences where we get up there, and we are so excited. We’re so sure that what we’re presenting is so right and so good and that people on the other side of the table just shut us down. And he did that to us. And on that plane ride home, I’ll never forget, I went through the 12 steps of anger. I just started with seven. I started to feel, I was so mad. So I started with mustache man. I was like, how dare he, he should not be doing anything with innovation. When I got this plan, I’m going to call him and tell him he should be fired. And then I moved on to my client. I was like, well, how dare he, he shouldn’t, he can’t get buy-in from his team. He shouldn’t be the one leading innovation. And then I went onto my team was like, Oh, they were not, they’re not a good team. They snowed one over on me. I’m gonna fire all of them before we get to baggage claim. Fortunately for everybody, it was a long plane ride home. By the time we landed, I realized that the real mistake, the real failure came from me. My team and I had been thinking about this work for six months, and then I shuffled into a room of people that were cold. They weren’t thinking about this stuff. They just came to the meeting. They weren’t in work with us. They haven’t been pushing boundaries with us. And here I was at the front of the room, pushing my brilliance on a group of people who had their own stuff to deal with and their own to-do list. And I thought that my brilliance, my beautiful PowerPoints with my cool videos, was going to win them all over. And it did the exact opposite, and it was an epic failure. The work never went anywhere. All those ideas were shelved. Nothing ever got to market because I walked in with this ego that said, our work is good enough that you should get it. And it didn’t. And I walked in with this assumption that because we had done the work, everybody should see what we see, and they didn’t see any of it. So I’ve had that experience more than once. But that was the one that really stuck with me because it really made me realize like, wow, I need to, I need to really rethink about how I communicate and how I try to get buy-in for things. Because that was a lot of money and a lot of time wasted for all of us. And it was, I own the mistake a hundred percent it wasn’t my team. That was my job to realize, Hey, wait a minute. I’m going to be talking to people who are not part of the day to day process. How do I get them to think differently? How do I them to open up to our ideas? I didn’t. I walked in with this big, big ego because we got paid the big bucks and failure, When Your Ego is in Control Jenn DeWall:      Right? You’re the smart one. So, of course, I’m going to create here and solve all their issues, and they’re going to love it. Love it. You know? And I think that comes down. I think you see that a lot in any organization where you’ve found a lot of success, and you know that you’re good at what you do. So it’s so easy to become shortsighted and not, you know, and forget that there are other things that we’re blind to as we get more and more successful. So then yeah, you go into that meeting, then the unexpected happens, and it feels terrible, terrible, awful. Tamara Ghandour:           And it was off-script. I had no script to go to when they weren’t like applauding and cheering. My little vision in my head on the plane ride over was them standing up and applauding because, my God, they’d never seen work this good in their life. Right. That’s what we’re all told to, to vision, like all the positive stuff. Right? The outcome we want. But I didn’t strategize the other outcomes at all, which is probably the second part of the failure really is I should have thought about what happens if they don’t get it? What happens if they have these questions? And instead, I just failed. I got nothing more to say about it. Jenn DeWall:      If I had to summarize your takeaways. Like one of those is kind of try to find, or I guess there’s a few of them there is you know, thinking about who your audience is, thinking about what’s important to them. Maybe what would, how would you describe your takeaways? Tamara Ghandour:           So I totally appreciate what you just said. And for me it’s about, the thing that we forget is what’s in it for them, not why should they love my idea or my thinking or my perspective, but truly what’s in it for the person on the other side of the table? So if I’d really thought about that, you know, my client’s boss, what’s in it for him is something that he could do effortlessly because he’s been there for 30 years and he doesn’t want to rock the boat. So how could I have presented my ideas for him in a way that would’ve gotten him to go, oh, that’s not the hard work that I’m worried about? Or have I thought about, Hey, what they’re thinking is, Oh my gosh, we’ve seen these ideas a million times before. So what I need to think about is not the idea, but why is it relevant today? And I missed the mark on that because they were, and they had seen some of those ideas before. That happens time and time again in innovation, but the difference was the time in the marketplace and the environment. But I didn’t think about that. So when I tried to tell people a lot is think back up and think about what’s in it for them, what is in it for the people across the table. If you can think from that perspective, you can communicate to them in a way that they can be open to receiving instead of what I did was, is what’s in it for me, which is look how glorious me and my ideas are. Jenn DeWall:      All right. All right. If you do that, I mean, I think that’s natural. Again, we get the Excel at our careers, we know that we’re good and we’re confident in who we are, and there’s, you know, there’s that point where competence is a beautiful thing and then sometimes there’s that point where confidence gives us, they just blind us, blinds us from seeing some of that outside perspective. Learning to Listen Tamara Ghandour:           They blinded me completely. And it was an incredible lesson. And of course, I’m glad I had it cause it, you know, did the work that I have today. But when I think about the failures, I think about that one, all the, because it was a pivotal moment where I realized, Hey, I got to get out of my own way, and I got to start thinking about the other people and how they’re viewing things and how they see things in their experiences. And I think as leaders, that is hard for us sometimes to get out, get out of our own way and think from another perspective. I’ll share another failure with you that came to mind, which I actually made me laugh as I was driving down thinking about it because it has been a while on this one too. But so I was recruited to head up the strategic arm of this urban marketing firm in New York City, and I was 27. I was the youngest person at the table, and my boss was an incredible gentleman named Mike Hall, and he was in Chicago, at our parent company. And as I was building this department, my job was to go to Chicago and to present to him as if he was the client so that I could so that we could build this department and I could, you know, present all this great, these great service offers, offerings that we had for people. So I labored and labored and built like once again the beautiful presentation. Clearly, I have a pattern here, but I went to Chicago, and I met with him, and he tore apart my presentation, tore it apart in a way that I’ve never experienced. And I thought I had a thick skin until that moment. I did not. At that moment, I was on the edge of tears, and I do not cry. And, and he, he just, he kept after me, kept after me, kept after me, and I was so angry with him. And that meeting was a total failure because I took away from that meeting that he doesn’t like my work. He doesn’t think I’m good enough. He’s trying to knock me down. But what I should have taken away from the meeting is he’s trying to strengthen what I’m doing. And he’s trying to make it better. And unfortunately, I actually had drinks with him later that day. While I was in Chicago. And we had that whole conversation about that. He said, Tamara, he said, I brought you in here, not because of your experience, not because you know, you’re trying to be a perfectionist because you don’t have the experience. You’re 27. He said I brought you in here because where I think you could take us in the growth that you provide us and what you’re capable of. So stop worrying about being perfect in front of everybody and having all the answers. Cause at that point, I thought I had to have all the answers all the time. So stop worrying about that and just be yourself and do it and take the feedback when you get it. And I love that he said that. But that meeting itself for me was a failure because I took away the wrong thing. I needed him to tell me to realize what the real takeaway from that meeting was. I walked away thinking, Oh my gosh, I’m the worst. Why did they hire me? He’s like, what are you doing tomorrow? Like you’re not here because like everything you say has to be right. Because I kept trying to be right in the meeting, and I had just not a good idea. So I mean it, I guess it was, you could call it a failure, you could call it a lesson. But to me, it’s one of those things that rise up of wow, I was trying so hard to be right and smart and perfect and not seeing the situation for what it was. And the environment for what it was. And had I done that, it would’ve been a wonderful, successful hugging meeting. But instead, I walked out practically in tears because I thought, Oh my gosh, my, my identity is being chipped at. You know, everything about me as being kind of knocked down. And that’s not what he was trying to do at all. I failed in how I saw that meeting. Jenn DeWall:      That is such a great story because it is to receive feedback. It’s hard when it’s not the feedback that’s telling us we’re great. It’s, it’s so natural for anyone to go inside and say, Oh my gosh, they don’t believe in me. Oh my gosh, I’m not worth it. What an idiot I am. And to go down that, you know, just that thought pattern of believing that we’re not worth it. And then what does it cost? Well, it costs you your happiness, but it costs the company your ideas. And sometimes it’s just a really, really bad assumption or projection that we’re making. Right? In that case of just assuming he was saying all these things, whereas what you found later, there was actually something else. So remember that there’s more there to feedback and it’s not, you know, go assume positive intent. Assume that feedback is there and that people want you to succeed. Right. Assume that. Handling Negative Feedback Tamara Ghandour:           I think that’s super important to take away from that. And for me to kind of, to add to that, because I think that’s where it gets hard to get feedback is I walked in with this need to be smart and perfect, and that’s where it was a failure for me. Had I not had that mindset going into it, I would’ve had a very successful meeting. Regardless of if you liked my ideas or not, I would’ve learned I would’ve grown, we would’ve gotten to a better place. But because I was so wrapped up in what I’m presenting or what I’m thinking needs to be perfect, and I need to know it all. That’s where the roadblock happened. That’s where the failure happened. And I think we do that to ourselves a lot in the workplace and in life because we’re so busy trying to be right, trying to be perfect. And it’s some of the greatest leaders I’ve ever seen. The best phrases that come out of their mouth is, I don’t know. Let me figure that out. Not sure. What do you think? Those are what make great leaders, Jenn DeWall:      Right? You don’t have to tie yourself to. I want to be the one that looks good here. Right? I mean, there’s just so much. I just love that example because I really, that one speaks to me. I mean, there’s a lot of examples that I have of receiving feedback poorly, where in hindsight I’m like, Oh, they were just trying to help me in. Yeah. They actually had some great things that I now am really happy they said, but at the moment, it was just my own ego, my own lack of confidence to see that lack of experience, to see that that took, and it really deprived me of my ability to connect with my team, to engage because I was living in that feeling of pain, right? Like, Oh my gosh, I guess I really did fail. Tamara Ghandour:           It creates this invisible wall between you and everybody else because you’re trying so hard to be that person, to look smart, to have all the answers, to know your stuff, that you’re never really, truly connecting with other people because that’s the layer you’re always putting on it. And it sounds very soft, but the reality is that also is then hindering collaboration. It’s hindering your teamwork. It’s hindering innovation. And so that ultimately is going to hinder the bottom line because you’re walking around and trying to be right and it’s human nature. It’s not that anyone’s doing it maliciously, but it’s hindering everything. Jenn DeWall:      Tamara, thank you so much for sharing your fails. You know, we, the goal of bringing these minisodes to light, is to show people that failure is okay. There are lessons in failure, Tamara Ghandour:           So many good ones! Jenn DeWall:      So many good ones and we need to stop persecuting ourselves for making mistakes, and we need to start growing with our mistakes and growing from them. Tamara Ghandour:          One of my favorite things to do now is when I have what we would call a failure, right? The call didn’t go well. I- something happened on my keynote, and it just, something was off as my lizard brains. Like, you’re horrible. How dare you, what are you doing? Go hide. I have to shut it up. And then I like to ask myself, what did I learn here? And if I can take a moment to breathe and ask myself that I can get past my little lizard brain that’s trying to sabotage everything and get to the place of the lessons from the failure and I think all too often we have these great, they’re really great failures, but we don’t take a second to go, well, hold on. Awesome. What did I learn here? And if we can just pause and do that, we can get so much out of it and hopefully not repeat it, Jenn DeWall:      Oh my gosh, yes, ask yourself! That’s how I’ll close. I remember that. If you’re putting yourself out there, if you’ve made a mistake, just ask yourself, what did you learn, or what can you learn? Tamara, thank you so much. I really appreciate your sharing this and being vulnerable and open because I know that so many people will learn from your mistakes and then your learnings! Tamara Ghandour:           Well, thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to share it all. I’m an open book, but more importantly, I think we all learned from each other. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. To find out more about Tamara, you can find her at gotolaunchstreet.com, or you can find it the link in our show notes. If you like today’s episode, don’t forget to share it with your friends and write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service.   The post Minisode 7: Work Fails with Founder of Launch Street, Tamara Ghandour appeared first on Crestcom International.