By Liesel Mertes
5
5151 ratings
The podcast currently has 65 episodes available.
And so it's always been confusing to me why startups don't think about their culture from day one. And because we spend so much of our wake time at work, especially on our stage and the positive vibes or feelings you get out of helping others or contributing to the betterment of your community or society or making a difference for somebody else is such an important experience I think everybody should have,
INTRO
Why aren’t we focusing on culture from Day 1? Today, we look at building connection in the world of start-ups. My guests are Josh Driver and Zach Rodenbarger from Selfless.ly. They have a lot to say about how to build connection AND their technology platform is also a platform for companies to give back, so this is like a double-impact interview.
Zach and Josh’s origin story begins just before the pandemic, launching their platform with high hopes and ideals into a pretty brutal business environment.
They are talking about how they sustained connection, built their company, and expanded the scope of influence in the midst of the dual pressures of start-up life and a bruising global pandemic. As a bit of a teaser, you will hear about the importance of taking a walk, how “hangry” can get in the way of communication, and why Nerf guns could be a good idea for your office culture.
Zach and Josh are both tech guys who are from the same Indiana town of Valparaiso. The met in 2018, committed to the concept of building a platform where companies and individuals can give not just money but time and effort to support causes that matter. The website describes the platform memorably: “Selfless.ly is a unique company that was designed by selfless people to help the world become a better place.”
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I'd love to hear from both of you. Why do you think that that is even an important conversation to be having? And how would you define empathy work to me.
- Zach RodenbargerThere's a few tangible examples.
That is Zach Rodenbarger, the COO of Selfless.ly
- Zach Rodenbarger
Sometimes in our interactions, Josh will come in or I'll come in and we'll have something and go back and forth. And then one of us will say, do you need to go for a walk?
- Zach Rodenbarger
And I was like.
- Zach Rodenbarger
Yes, I need to go for a walk. I need a little fresh air, you. And maybe that's just because we've been at our computers for a couple of hours or longer and need to have take a pause and have a step back. And so we've had that over the year, especially when we're working hard and looking at new timelines and goals and things. And I know I've needed a walk or two here and there.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
We had other good practices. Sometimes it's a walk. I also find that sometimes it's a snack. I have you eaten recent links to a snack?
- Joshua Driver
Yes. We've encountered the snack situation as well. Yes. Hunger is a thing so much.
And this is Josh Driver, fellow-hangry sufferer and the Founder of Selfless.ly
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That was like one of my biggest learning curves early on in my marriage. I I used to think it was just Luke. It's totally both of us be like, Is this really a thing, or am I just really hungry right now? And you can't know until you're no longer hungry, like, you can't even find out.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I think that's a good follow up on empathy. It's probably easier to see in other people. And then when do we take that step back and look at ourselves and actually admit that? And I think that is really helpful to business partnership or even as we continue to onboard new employees, you know, thinking through, how am I coming across to others?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But also, do you put yourself in their shoes and how are they feeling and so kind of both well and hearing that it actually takes a foundation of some relationship and trust to be able to take someone suggestion to do something like, go for a walk. I can imagine that a less mature or self aware moments. Somebody being like, maybe even the way it could be delivered. Just go take a walk. Somebody being like, I don't need a walk. You need a walk? No, I'm just making a really good point.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But to be able to be at a place where I imagine it takes some work get to that point.
- Zach Rodenbarger
Absolutely.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
A lot of times I find with guests or people I get to work with those that really, like, are doing the work of promoting more human workplaces and more connection at work. There's an element that comes out of their own personal experience. So I would love to hear from both of you a time where meeting that connection and empathy at work was really important in your own personal story, so that could be giving it to someone or a time where you were like, I'm not. Okay. I need some support right now.
- Joshua Driver
Yeah. I think when I left the startup space and went into a corporate job, I came into a workplace environment and culture that might have been a little hostile and toxic. Like, there is a big disconnect between the leadership and the teams and the mentality of you're lucky to have a job versus we're lucky to have you as an employee. I wasn't exactly realized yet. And I had noticed when I join the company in my role that there was a lot of hostile communication. People had segregated themselves on one side or another and coming into that since I had been startups for so long and been on the ground for creating that culture.
- Joshua Driver
That was very new to me to be in the middle of this disconnect. And it taught me personally about how I want my next company to run and where I think we needed to head and be ego free and transparent and communicate in more of a we're all on the same level here. Like, don't view me as your boss. We're just jumping in together to fix an issue. And I think as far as feeling left out or where I really could have used some support was when my first full time job was as an EMT here, then wished hospital and going through some of the things for the first time and all the trauma there.
- Joshua Driver
There's no debrief or support. I think it's better now than it was, but you kind of had to process and cope individually with some of the things that you would see. And so that was really difficult for me to overcome at times when you have to process seeing the such negative things at times.
- Joshua Driver
Quite frankly, like volunteering someplace and getting the I feel like I'm making a positive difference outside of the trauma of emergency medicine was a big driving factor. A lot of my coworkers and stuff would turn to substance abuse and other things sometimes, but I was fortunate enough to have a good support system, whether it was my family or friend group to where if things were really getting rough, that somebody would jump in and say, hey, let's catch up or reconnect. And so I was lucky in that regard.
- Joshua Driver
But a lot of first responders, unfortunately, don't have that type of network to help them with that.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Thank you for sharing that. And I imagine even as you talk about the importance of volunteering, that there's a through line to some of what you're currently doing.
- Joshua Driver
Yeah.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Zach, how about for you?
- Zach Rodenbarger
So for me, with thinking through empathy in my past experiences, we can look to even just in the early days of self asleep and thinking about, hey, we both took this leap to start something new. And then about six months later, COVID hits. And so how do we work through this time where everything just radically changed, where we just launched the company? We launched the company in January and February of 2020. And then a month later, radically different thinking through. How is my co founder feeling right now?
- Zach Rodenbarger
How do I stay optimistic and pass that along to him and vice versa? We're both kind of feeling these challenges and seeing this real time, right that we had these ideas and projections and we're going to create group, volunteering outdoors, and we're going to invite people to these events and then that's not going to happen. And so how do we really think through and change that strategy? But also, how did I think through, you know, both of us leaving our corporate jobs to do this. And so losing that security and saying, okay, I understand that this is maybe something he's going through right now and the pressure he's going through.
- Zach Rodenbarger
So how do I stay optimistic to then pass that along and vice versa? And that was really helpful during those times?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Did you ever have days where you were both just like, really down in the dumps? It wasn't like one person could encourage the other. It was just both low, especially early on in that pandemic.
- Zach Rodenbarger
For me, I think for the most part, one or the other would see that and feel that and maybe because we're both high empaths. So if Josh was down, I was like, I can't be or vice versa. He may have a different perspective, but I remember thinking that. And so even though it was a really tough day, this is what it's all about. And so I'll stay positive or vice versa. And he would look at me be like, this is when he needs to step up.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah,
- Joshua Driver
I can't remember specifically when we had those times. But I remember even if we were going to be talking to a specific person turning in, saying, I don't have an inmate today to have this conversation. Do you mind just taking this on your own and doing that? I remember a few times where we had that discussion where if we're both feeling challenged, which is actual, we there. See, I think there were a few times where we might have just said, let's just call it a day early and go for a walk or go get a slice of pizza or something and and get out of the office for a little bit or go to the Lake each like, I think within reason we would step up on behalf of each other where we needed to.
- Joshua Driver
It was just not the perfect day. Just saying, alright, let's take a break in re energize and come back to it tomorrow.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That can be so good. And it sounds like really, of course, of course, that would be a good thing to do. But it's amazing how hard sometimes it can feel in the moment, especially with the entrepreneurial churn and pressures and one's own expectations. So I acknowledge how important that can be and how like sometimes it can feel harder to do than it seems is a good job cutting.
- Joshua Driver
I like to just get burn myself out trying to work on the issue at hand. Zach, does a really good job of cutting me off for like of a meter and saying, this is all the time we have for this. We need to move on. Otherwise, I'll sit down whatever whatever issue is at hand. So he does a good job of saving my own sanity.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I definitely like to break tasks up into the smallest parts and pieces and just get something done for that day or something like that. And Josh definitely wants to power through and accomplish it all in one day.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I am that trait, Josh. It makes me think there was a there was a friend that I had in College and we used to kind of like joke about his mindset. We would joke that Ben would break his whole day down into micro goals, and it always allowed him to feel good about himself because he would be like, I'm on even the little things. Like, I'm gonna walk through the quad more efficiently than ever before and talk to two people. And I used to think like, what a funny quirk about how Ben's mind works.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But now I look and I'm like, man, Ben was probably just 15 years ahead of all of us in self awareness of like, oh, that's maybe a key to living like a more bounded and contented existence than the rest of us had a handle on at 22.
- Joshua Driver
Yes, Zach is close to that, and I envy that very much because I don't have that level of organization and granularity that see and your friends have.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Building connection at work is important…and it can be hard to know where to start. What can you do to support the mental health of your people, to care for them and keep them engaged in the midst of all of the pressures and disruption? You don’t have to figure it out on your own; let Handle with Care Consulting help. With keynote options, certificate programs, and coaching sessions available, we have a solution to meet your needs and budget. Sign up for a free consultation at lieselmertes.com. Together, we can put empathy to work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I find in building connections with people, there are times where it feels really easy and natural and times where it's a lot more challenging. What are times in either of you or both of you can answer where building connection at work feels really easy for you. And why.
- Joshua Driver
Interesting. I would say that I'm
- Joshua Driver
I love to people watch, and I'm always interested in everybody's story. How did you get to where you are today? What experiences have you had? And so it's easy for me to get to know people because I'm just naturally just so curious about everyone's story.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I find I have to be maybe a little more intentional to provide that space to connect. And maybe that even goes to our overall topic of empathy to take a second and say, okay, if I was coming in on the first day or the second week, how would I want to be treated? Because I think it's easy for me. And as I mentioned earlier, probably Josh, it's easy for us to just kind of put our heads down and work. And so taking that time and being giving that space as well to make the connection, even if it's at lunch time only or something.
- Zach Rodenbarger
But at least you're very focused on allowing that space to chat and providing that because I know for me during the workplace, well, we'll chat later or something, but if you don't provide that space, then obviously it's harder to make that connection, especially in the first week, the first six months, and things like that and thinking, when would I want to have someone reach out to me whether they're a colleague, a boss, or even an intern can be anything.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. That reminds me of even a slide that I was showing yesterday and a talk that I was doing about imagination and empathy. I hear that a little bit of what you're saying, and although that doesn't always get you exactly to the right place, because you can't ever fully know what another person is wanting or experiencing, it oftentimes will move you closer. What would I want on my first day or first week? And then to be able to act out of that can really close what can sometimes seem like a big distance.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You both kind of offered some things in your answer, but I'll ask it explicitly as well. What are sometimes we're building connection at work feels difficult.
- Joshua Driver
I've started to embrace more of when I am feeling extroverted versus introverted and sometimes when I'm hyper focused on something in the distraction of having to communicate or interact can be frustrating because I need the focused time and especially with new employees coming on. You want to be available and transparent and present. And at our stage right now it's really difficult to be present with everything that we need to get done. And so making sure that I'm not coming off as disinterested is something that I always in the back of my mind.
- Joshua Driver
I want to make sure that I'm not conveying because it's not true. But there are some times where I just want to get something done and want to be sequestered for a little bit.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Do you have yourself in moments like that, like needing to actively engage in self talk, even about things. So I'll get my hand like I have to think about my body language and moments like that of being like, oh, I need to show attention and care right now. I'm going to do something different. Like do you do mental pivots like that? And what do they look like?
- Joshua Driver
Sometimes Zach and I have been together for so long now. I can tell with his expression where I've crossed the line of of being rational more. So there are certain triggers, I think too. And he'll say, yeah, you need to maybe just spend some time by yourself for a minute and go for a lock so I will replay a situation like that in my mind and try to think through. Alright, what did I say? Did I mean to come off this way or if I don't really came off a different way than I meant to trying to understand?
- Joshua Driver
Like how did this person infer that this was what I was trying to say. And so that has been helpful to rethink the experience so that I try not to replicate that. Moving forward. I.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I Imagine there's a line walk between replaying the experience and getting stuck in a never ending loop. How do you thread that needle?
- Joshua Driver
Not. Well. I like to solve everything and have closure. So if there's still a difference of opinion, I like to try to really put the pressure on myself to get it resolved. And in some cases I think I don't look at difference of opinion is like who's going to win this fight and get their way? I think it's more from their background and their perspective. Is there some truth to it and allow that was Zach especially? There are some things that he's very passionate about and has a perspective that he really feels strongly.
- Joshua Driver
And I'd like to think for the most part if he fully believes in something that I may not be so sure on and wants to go that I just trust him implicitly that it's the right thing and that he's very good at doing his research and looking at different aspects of things.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, and out of that foundation of relationship, you know what you can extend to them.
- Joshua Driver
Yeah. I think we're a lot of co founders that are state right now. We don't have time to be working on every project together, be on every call together and make decisions together. And so I think if you have a co founder that you don't feel that you feel like you have to micromanage or be a part of every decision, then that's going to be a really difficult culture to scale. It's going to make your company really difficult to grow. And so everybody that we've hired and when Zach joined Selflessly is very clear.
- Joshua Driver
I want the empowerment. I want to create the space for them to be empowered to make decisions that are best for a company and feel confident that they are able to execute on whatever task.
- Zach Rodenbarger
Is this where I say the complete opposite?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
This is a safe space.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I've been trying to obviously likewise empowering each other. And we did used to be on most of the calls and get to feel how each is thinking. And so it did help in the first month to six months to be on a lot of the calls together or as he mentioned, in the same room even. And so I can overhear his call, whether he wants me to or not and understand kind of what he's thinking, the action maybe he would take or his thinking on that his rationalization, right.
- Zach Rodenbarger
What would he be thinking in the same spot and so helpful to be able to, you know, have his perspective in in the back of my mind and probably vice versa from sharing that office for the first twelve months and everything. So that's been really good.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I hear a lot of respect and self inquiry in what you both have said. And yet I imagine there's still moments where like on an emotional on a practical on an interpersonal level, you guys have missed and or hurt one another in your journey. What has making meaningful repairs looked like.
- Zach Rodenbarger
Nerf guns. Yeah. I think for one of my birthday, Josh got a couple of Nerf guns for me, and so if we need, we can shoot each other, but also part of the startup mentality, right? We wanted to bring a little bit of fun into the office, but if you needed, you could shoot someone from across the room. That's been one way.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
At least I'm totally thinking of my two sons right now, and the moment where Magnus turns to Moses, and he's like, okay, you can just hit me five times in the chest. That's fine. Just don't tell mom.
- Joshua Driver
The biggest issue with that is that I'm a bad shot, so I'm not even like to get I like you. I can't make my points in the same way he can, because I tend to miss him completely, whereas he's really good at targeting me. So that was, in hindsight, not a great decision for a birthday gift start.
- Joshua Driver
She has to make a lot of lessons learned.
- Joshua Driver
Yeah, I would recommend that to other companies unless you're really good at aiming
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
either that or you want to devote part of your work day to target practice.
- Joshua Driver
Yes.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, maybe you guys would like to expand on the I hear like some fun, some levity, like not taking yourself too seriously. Are there other things that you do to make repairs when you guys have gotten a little bit off?
- Joshua Driver
I think that we find out if if we're having a conflict, that taking the time, like taking some space and cooling down is helpful, but also eventually, once we've had time to kind of process that situation. General, I think there was a time where I went and got a Blizzard or a box of dilly bars and dropped them off at the house. His house is like a don't let go of me. Ever don't leave me gift. I'm sorry. I was cantankerous and vice versa where I think we have a cool down moment and then we Zoom out and think about it there's.
- Joshua Driver
There's always an apology and then some type of affirmation about the other one.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I know I take a little more time sometimes to each person has their kind of respective way to do that and to cool down. And some people want to solve it. Same day some people take the night, take the weekend and so, you know, kind of learning the team, learning the other person and thinking through that, you know, how to talk through that and when and maybe even is more important if it's right away or give some space.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Have you guys ever had misses? Because I hear a little bit. You know, Josh, you said I'm gonna solve it now. Person. And Zach, I need a little bit more time. Did you guys have a learning curve initially and full disclosure. I have had to unlearn in my adult relationships that tendency and belief of like, if I can just say it to you four different times in four different ways, we can figure it out right now. Let's keep trying. And sometimes people are like, no, just shut up.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Hard lesson.
- Joshua Driver
I have had to learn that in general, my husband is similar. Where his cool down? He needs to think for a little bit and take a break. I think maybe in our early days I went back to like, don't walk away. Let's figure this out so we can move on. But then realizing that he needs a little bit more time and understanding to from his perspective, like, if he doesn't want to talk about it, it's not going to help for me trying to pull it out of them either.
- Joshua Driver
So I've learned to kind of let that go that we're not going to necessarily resolve it today. But I do continue to like to think that I prioritize that moving forward so that we can eventually get through whatever that wall is that hurdle.
- Zach Rodenbarger
I think my learning is definitely around witnessing people and then witnessing yourself. But it's very rare to convince someone of your perspective in an argument. And if you're both on one side, an argument is not going to convince the other person to jump on your side. And so where is that our email leading or can you take a step back and then provide the reason why you're thinking this way? The reason why that person is thinking that way. It's just interesting to see how arguments heat up and things, and there's no side switching.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
It's so true. Yeah. It makes me think of even a yet unresolved conversations argument that my husband and I are having and to be like, yeah, nobody ever switches sides in the middle like nobody is in the heat of it or very, very, very, very, very like the 1% does it happen and then usually with a fair degree of resentment.
- Joshua Driver
So.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yes, that rings true.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I'm struck that you are like building culture internally, but it selflessly is also like the product itself is something that is hopefully building culture and connection in the workplace. Tell me a little bit about how selflessly and volunteering and thinking outside of yourself is good for people in for workplaces.
- Joshua Driver
But I think as we see culture being a normal discussion and given that we're still in a pandemic and becomes such a volatile polarizing environment in the world everywhere.
- Joshua Driver
I always try to find, like silver linings or ways to maybe take take a moment to step away from the reality. And for me, my coping mechanism is to help others. And the reason why I've been able to spend that time to help others is because I've been very privileged and had the ability to do that where I understand that's not everybody's story coming out at our platform in understanding from not every company is a Lily or a Salesforce that has massive teams that work on these big the initiatives and have the resources.
- Joshua Driver
There are a lot of companies I mean humans are humans, whether you work at a Fortune 50 company or a small startup.
- Joshua Driver
And so it's always been confusing to me why startups don't think about their culture from day one. And because we spend so much of our wake time at work, especially on our stage and the positive vibes or feelings you get out of helping others or contributing to the betterment of your community or society or making a difference for somebody else is such an important experience.
- Joshua Driver
I think everybody should have, but unfortunately, we work all the time or we have kids or other responsibilities that limit that time. So we set out to build selflessly so that companies didn't have to try to scrape the bottom the barrel to be able to provide purpose or the positive opportunities or the community engagement. We wanted to be a partner, so every company can experience the positive effects of being a crime brand or socially responsible organization, and that for a long time has only been afforded to gigantic organizations.
- Joshua Driver
And so we wanted to be be the platform everyone can use. And so we have to be obviously an innovative with the pandemic and all these things that have changed the logistics on the nonprofit side. And unfortunately, a lot of this responsibility falls on nonprofits who are trying to keep their doors open and working on their mission. And so we took on the responsibility of of taking that work off of nonprofits and working on educating companies on how they can integrate philanthropy into normal business practices like employee engagement or team building or culture or heck, even the competitiveness of the sales Department.
- Joshua Driver
How do we leverage a philanthropic component while a bunch of type as I go tell each other or something? And I think if there's always even a component of that philanthropic, if there's just even a small piece that goes back or gives back, I think that that's a really great thing to hard wire into a company's culture.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Zach, anything you want to add?
- Zach Rodenbarger
Yeah, I think obviously what Josh said, one of my kind of tag lines, even as we reach out to teams and think about them is kind of selfless. Teams make the best teams. And when you're have employees that are thinking about each other and how to help each other and not always just focused on their task, that's obviously going to make a better team and environment and better teamwork. And so by thinking through, how do we make selfless employees that's really part of selflessly is to help those employees encourage those employees, not Joe's employees to find a volunteer opportunity or find a way to give back to support a cause they care about to have those matching donations from the company and actually use those.
- Zach Rodenbarger
And so all of these nudges that we want to help create selfless employees that are thinking about others and not just themselves. And so when you think about others that leads to that teamwork, really, everyone creating a better environment. And so putting all that together with what Josh said is exciting, that this is something we get to work on each day.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. Well, my brain can't help but go to some sociological context. You know, I think in generations before, what you are tapping into is this, like human desire to be a part of something bigger, to be giving back, and that there was a while in the US where that was filled by a Church that was asking for a time, and hopefully they were giving towards meaningful things in that way. But that has become less and less central in American communities. There's still this impulse, but not quite the same.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You know, there were good and bad things about that prior model, but there's not that same sort of, like regular outlet. And we're also more connected in theory, to the needs of the world. But through the lens of social media, which doesn't often lead to direct action. So, like emotional sensing, selves are out there like feeling all these things. But there's not this bridging, it towards action that feels like it builds up like a physical, real community that we're regularly a part of. And that selflessly kind of helps to bridge some of those, like sociological shifts with a meaningful offering.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah.
- Joshua Driver
I think without sounding like a sound bite, I feel philanthropy in the connection between a donor and a nonprofit or a company in its community or wherever this for profit and nonprofit connection is. For decades, we've given money to our Church, to the United Way, these intermediaries to trust that that's been utilized in the best way or is going towards the mission. And I think with technology improving and transparency, we've seen over time organizations that may not have made the best choices with the money that have come in and the the biggest concern is that this person had maybe a bad experience with this organization.
- Joshua Driver
Are they going to find another one to support, or are they just going to stop supporting? And that's a big concern. And so now there's this big push for having more control over where people can donate and not necessarily have to be relegated to the confines of somebody's of an organization, agencies or whatever. But what that means is more transparency needs to be done on the nonprofit side. And the nonprofits don't have the resources necessarily to be able to give up regular updates about a campaign or whatever.
- Joshua Driver
And so we've set up nonprofits to kind of fail from that regard. And then Conversely, I think we nonprofits. They're always fundraising. I've started my own nonprofit. We're always trying to raise more money so we can continue with our mission. And that leaves people out that may not have the liquidity or the resources to be able to participate financially, and we have to jump in. Or at least we take on some of the responsibility of how do we jump in and equate somebody skills and volunteer time to be worth just as much, if not more than them writing a check.
- Joshua Driver
And so I think it's a generational shift about what philanthropy is starting to look like when we launch selflessly as we continue to grow selflessly. There's always people from the charitable sector that have their own perspective. You need to trust. This organization has been around for a century that they're just going to be doing the right thing. But we tend to grow because people want to break out of what the mold of philanthropy has been and want to have more control and be able to make more direct impact by us connecting those two sides and really always innovating on how to keep those two sides connected.
- Joshua Driver
That means more resources go to the charitable sector. It just looks a little different. It's not an entry on a bank account. It might look like a donated product or a brainstorming session or some skilled services, but it can be helpful to breaking up some of the foundational infrastructure is a good thing, and I think we're along over you to really start shaking the tree and and changing what is no longer working. And that's a hard thing for people that have been in this space for a long time to necessarily want to accept.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, something that I heard both of you say as a mark of differentiation that you have cultivated and enjoy is a sense of whimsy, and maybe not taking ourselves too seriously. Tell me how that shows up in selflessly.
- Joshua Driver
Well, my office looks like a kid play room. I just have random stuff all over the place, and then we have a Bulldog in the office. But I think the way that we talk to people, the way that we put ourselves out there, we didn't win the virtual background thing when you made those for your background as your company logo and all the strategic stuff. We didn't do that. I put on a background of me standing at the podium on Jeopardy or just keeping it. I'm sure people for first impression at times like, who the hell is this guy?
- Joshua Driver
But I think that if we were always trying to display, everything is running great. We don't have any problems. We're constantly growing and just a few months away from being the Jeff Bezos to this is really nobody believes that. First of all, instead of constantly say everything is working. There isn't one company that everything's running smoothly, but I think we personality, my personality. We would probably suppress a lot of who we are individually if we always had to worry about being a highlight reel and being being always on and calculated and putting on this this front.
- Joshua Driver
And I think having more real conversations, joking around, making mistakes, owning them and moving on or being open about what we've messed up for, mistakes we've made, I think, is so much more valuable in creating a deeper connection with our staff, which our network, our investors and being open and also accepting of the feedback too.
Joshua Driver
We don't want to be a vendor or a tech provider. We want to be a partner. And I think that us being vulnerable and embracing that were not perfect, I think, is important to set that expectation for whom we're interacting with.
- Zach Rodenbarger
Absolutely. You want to be able to have fun with your team. You want your team to be able to have fun with customers and on those conversations. And you want people to look forward to having time together, whether it's on a Zoom call or in person, especially for your internal team. But then that customers start to feel that as well and enjoy the conversations with you. And maybe in the software, you start to see certain aspects and certain animations come across the screen or something like that.
- Zach Rodenbarger
You're starting to see a little bit of other software as well, but we want to be have that enjoyment, especially if we're looking at company culture and encouraging people to get out and have some enjoyment and purpose and things like that. We want to come through in our mission and our software and allow really customers internal external everyone to start to see that, feel that and really enjoy the software and enjoy working with selflessly and working for selflessly.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
If listeners are intrigued about the platform, the mission, you guys in your story, where can they go to find out more about selflessly and how it can be used to build and increase the sense of connection at work?
- Joshua Driver
Yeah.
- Joshua Driver
Our website is Selflessly. I and our social media Tags or give selflessly on the Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and our email address the general email for Zach, it is Hello at Selflessly IO.
- Joshua Driver
And.
- Joshua Driver
We get all kinds of requests companies that want to become B Corps or our favorite messages or hey, I want to. We're a small company and we don't think that we can really make an impact. Can you show us how to do it like those are the things we really enjoy spending time with. Also, I think hearing from people that may want to start their own company or want to brainstorm. Sometimes we make time to have a coffee with a potential entrepreneur or give some feedback, help others where we can.
- Joshua Driver
We'd love to hear from anybody who wants to reach out.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways to build connection and care in the workplace…
OUTRO
To find out more about the work of Selfless.ly, visit https://selflessly.io
One of the I think keys to genuine empathy is through consistent one on one and how you display empathy, like, structurally inside of an organization. So, for example, a one on one is that place where as a manager, you can create safety with your team and with your direct reports and create a vulnerable relationship where you really do know what's going on inside of their world in their life
INTRO
Sometimes, when you hear from leaders, you are inundated with their success stories: their key tips to making your life or company just as successful as theirs has been. And the whole thing can kind of seem a little unattainable and aspirational.
Which is one of the things that I love about today’s interview with Adam Weber, the Senior Vice President for 15Five. Adam is one of those highfliers whose work is marked by successes, whether that is leading HR professionals in HR Superstars or successfully growing and then selling Emplify as a co-founder.
But my conversation with Adam isn’t just a series of success stories. He is going to tell you about moments where he was NOT his best self, where as a young founder under tons of stress, he created distance instead of connection…and what he learned from it. Along with a lot of other great content.
Adam is a structure guy, so be ready for some really actionable suggestions. Adam is also the author of “Lead Like a Human”. Great title! He has a wife, two sons, and a dog named Poppy and he loves spending time in nature, camping, and bird-watching. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation as much as I did.
- Liesel Mindrebo MertesAdam, I'm so glad to have you as a guest today. Welcome.
- Adam Weber
It's good to be here. Liesel. Thank you so much.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yes. So a question that I oftentimes get in my work is defining what empathy looks like in the workplace. And I know that you're someone who has worked a lot professionally and written and thought about connection in the workplace. How would you define empathy at work? What does it look like?
- Adam Weber
I think it work. Empathy at work, I think, is seeing your employees as whole people as their whole sales and just in recognizing that they have things that are moving in their life that are outside of work, they have aspects of things that work that are impacting them that maybe you're unaware of. And so just taking that holistic perspective of each person and the unique experience that they're having and translating that and how you relate to them.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Thank you for that. I have found as I work with different companies as I meet with individuals that oftentimes when people like get it, when they feel really resonant with the importance of empathy and connection in the workplace, it comes out of a place of personal experience. They've had some touch points with either needing empathy and care or being in the position of giving it in a way that was really impactful. I'd love for you to share a story of when you've either really needed care in the workplace or when it's been really important for you to give it.
- Adam Weber
Yeah. I think I have two stories that come to mind. The first is maybe how early in my career I was able to practice empathy in a way that helped me see the value in it. I started in my career when I was 22 to 25. I was the pastor of a Church, and it's a story for a different day, but basically became the head pastor when I was 25, never given a sermon in my life. Wow. And was trying to support and was really the only staff person for two to 300 people and was trying to support them when in reality, like, I was just still really young myself.
- Adam Weber
And I think through that experience, a lot of people opened up to me about their lives. And you got to be a part of some of those high moments, like weddings, but also you're very much in the midst of really, really difficult situations. And so during that season, I think I learned a lot about just the value of sitting with people through hard things. It was during that time that one of my very best friends had ALS and he passed away and over an 18 month period.
- Adam Weber
But, you know, every Tuesday and Thursday, we sat together that entire time and have lunch together. And I think just being with him and watching him go through that experience was something that really built empathy with me. So that's may be on just like, the personal side of, like, really early. I got a little bit thrown into the fire of empathy and being just being with others.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. And I know that you have a second story, but I love it. Could I just interrupt you for a second? Because I'm struck with the dynamics of that story, something that I find myself facilitating a lot around is compassion, fatigue and talking. Or even Adam Grant use the term languishing recently. That sense of like, I don't know if I can give to anybody else because I feel so drained myself. You're young. You are responsible for the sole care of all of these people. I'm sure you have things going on in your own life.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You have this personal friend, so you're watching an emotional journey of watching him die. How were you finding equilibrium and places to be filled up for yourself so you could keep giving to others in a way that mattered?
- Adam Weber
That is a great question. I think what's interesting about being 25 is at that time. I don't think I did it with a lot of intention. I think when I reflect back on that time, there was a lot of kind of giving on empty without making sure that I was in a place of health myself. And one of the things maybe later in my career, I have realized the value for myself is making sure that I'm giving. One of the things I've noticed for me is that I need solitude.
- Adam Weber
I'm a person who naturally is drawn to other people and wants to be a part of their lives. And if I don't give myself space to restore and space to make sure I'm my whole complete self, I end up kind of crossing, twisting the wires of giving in a way that is healthy for myself. I wonder sometimes when I look back on that season, there's a natural part to that where I was just kind of being myself an inflow and giving in a way that's comfortable.
- Adam Weber
And I think there's probably another part of it that was just a little needy that really was really empty and didn't have great pathways to and to kind of restore myself, too. Which is probably why at the end of that year transitioned away from it. You know, I don't think I was acting in a way the problem is sustainable in my own life. Actually.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Thank you for that vulnerability. And even as I look back in to what my body and my person seemingly had the capacity to just absorb and keep churning. In my twenties, I'm like, oh, my gosh, that was a lot that probably wasn't healthy, but there's a certain hubris to that stage of life where you think I can just keep going.
- Adam Weber
Yeah, there's an infinite amount of energy and there's an altruism that's really beautiful, I think with, like, a willingness to, like, I can change the world, you know? And there is some truth to that. I think there's also some wisdom that maybe came a little later for me, too.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I interrupted your flow, though. You were telling the first personal story. I'd love to hear that second story that you had in your back pocket as well.
- Adam Weber
Well, the second one, really, like, set in motion. I had a windy career for the first ten years, kind of going from pastor to academic advisor, entry level job, entry level job, entry level sales job. And then I kind of stumbled into doing a start up about a decade ago and starting it with my business partner, Santiago, who was a week out of College at the time. So I'm ten years into my career. I've got two kids and we start this start up. I have no experience at all.
- Adam Weber
And immediately just the company just started to grow. And I went from kind of being a one person employee to having a team. And in the very beginning of that process, I felt so overwhelmed and I felt so stressed that I started to follow some of the negative patterns that I saw and managers that led me prior. And remember, there's a couple of specific moments, but where I just was not being myself and I was creating barriers between my employees, the people I was interviewing, I just wasn't leading in a way that was sustainable for me.
- Adam Weber
I was trying to act in a way that I thought managers and leaders were supposed to act. And I think during that time, I just hit a bit of a breaking point, like, because of how hard startups are in general, I was like, I'm not going to be able to sustain this if I try to do it. Like, I think everybody else is supposed to lead.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And what was that looking like? I just love for you to flesh that out a little bit more. You were like, this is the way it should be done.
- Adam Weber
And it looks like what I think it looked a little bit like the authoritarian, the kind of Industrial Revolution leader. The leading is a disconnected self where, like, I was one way at home. But then I'd show up to work. And just like, I wasn't that there would be, like, curtains or anger or there would be kind of, like, spouting off orders as opposed to, like, truly listening and collaborating like things like that. Or it would just be like, when you're interviewing someone instead of, like, coming up with your own way that you interview people that I was following, a guide, that when I would do it.
- Adam Weber
I was like, this just doesn't feel like me.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. You're moving into uncharted territories. And I find that in my life and in those I work with, it's easy to work off of a template instead of doing some of the work that it sounds like you are beginning to engage in. Like, is this representative of me and my best energy?
- Adam Weber
That's exactly right. I think the template phrase is a good summary of what that season felt like for me.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So what was the inflection point for you? I imagine you are not still operating out of that place of discontent.
- Adam Weber
You know, the inflection point. I was actually in the middle of an interview with someone who I still work with to this day. She's someone who I feel like I've had a really great relationship with and invested a lot into her life. But in the middle of her interview process, I was following a template, and I looked at her resume, and she took a gap year, which is super cool, by the way. Took a year to Europe right after College, and I followed this guide where you're supposed to do high pressure interviews and super awkward pause about her gap interview.
- Adam Weber
And it was really uncomfortable in the moment. I was like, Gosh, I just was like, I can't do this for this is not me. But then simultaneously, I actually damaged our relationship, even though we had never met at the time. And it took us a year, truly a year to get to the spot where she really trusted me and where she felt like she actually knew who I was because this initial impression was not actually the person that I was. And so I think that interview was really that moment was really a turning point for me.
- Adam Weber
That kind of set my entire trajectory and career around focusing on leaders, focusing on what good leadership looks like that I really think that moment and, you know, just full to take that story full circle. By the way, when we sold our business in April and she sent me a text, the same person sent me a text and said, There is not a person other than my mother who's impacted my life more than you and which I saved. And that was a hall of Fame. Probably one of the most powerful messages I've ever received, especially in the workplace.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah.
- Adam Weber
I think the reason it was so meaningful to is because of how much that moment was transformative in my leadership.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. Well, and I'm struck there's a certain level of intuition and engagement that is necessary to know that there has been damage done to a relationship, to be able to look back and be like, it took us a year. How are you seeing that disconnect expressed? And I'd love to delve into it specifically, because especially as leaders, there are, we don't know, necessarily when the impactful moment will be, which is really like an encouragement to be showing up as our healthiest best cells less. We do damage.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But over the course of that year, were you realizing in real time, like, oh, there's kind of something in between us.
- Adam Weber
Yeah. I think it's one thing. It's something sometimes you can sense, but you don't know because we don't really know each other. And this was one facet of who she was attaching a lot of significance to a situation that was not my best version of myself either.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right.
- Adam Weber
I think it was, you know, throughout the year as I started to really improve, like, one of the I think keys to genuine empathy is through consistent one on one and how you display empathy, like, structurally inside of an organization. So, for example, a one on one is that place where as a manager, you can create safety with your team and with your direct reports and create a vulnerable relationship where you really do know what's going on inside of their world in their life, like how they're doing.
- Adam Weber
And just in those moments, I think that it was kind of in those one on one. As I started to improve how I built relationships with people in the workplace and how I uncovered how they were doing and how I could help that just could sense kind of consistent, like, just like walls, walls. I think that were put up that we had to work through. And then I think also that her experience was different as other people started to come there like, that doesn't feel like a person doesn't feel like Adam.
- Adam Weber
That's not the Adam I know. And so I just think with time now, I mean, what's so cool about that is now we've worked together for eight and a half years. Right. So we're in a really different spot. But obviously we were then, which is really cool and pretty rare, by the way, to hire someone when they're right out of College. I got to work with them for that long. I think that's a pretty neat thing
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
To get to be able to see their growth trajectory. Well, I like something that you alluded to, which is the things that we can do structurally to build connection. And I know that that has actually been, like a big part of just the product and your professional movement in the world. So I'd love for you to tell me more about some of the best practices that you've seen. And you work with Amplify. And now with 15 five in what companies can be doing to think structurally about.
- Adam Weber
There's a handful of things that come to mind because I also think sometimes topics like this can feel overwhelming, but if you get really practical, you can start to see where these different containers are inside your organization to create trusted, empathetic relationships at the manager level, I think is really like where this is the most powerful because that's where the relationships are the most personal. And so if I think about a new manager, maybe think about my own story. Often times they were a top performing individual contributor.
- Adam Weber
They got promoted, they never got any training. They have super high goals. They're feeling overstressed. And then what they do innately is they start to carry and transition that stress over to their team. And they create kind of environments of chaos and confusion as opposed to clarity and team alignment. So one example of that was good.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I just want to recognize that's so accurate to the pain points that I observe again and again. Please continue. But what was well stated.
- Adam Weber
This is my world, though. These observations are pretty much what I spent all my time observing and helping companies with. And so I think for that manager, like, there's two really key containers for them. I think where they can show empathy. The first is what typically happens is on that manager is just kind of follow that path I just shared as they show up on Monday. They bring all the stress that is above them straight into that meeting on Monday morning. And it's like you can feel it in the atmosphere.
- Adam Weber
They bring in the stress, they bring in their own issues. They bring in whatever those things. And it really changes how it feels inside of just at that team level. And that type of environment really, like put walls up for people being like themselves. And so just a small switch, which is at the start of every week before we get to the stressors and the goals. And that all of those things before we do those things. What we first do is we just hear about what happened over the weekend just to create the rhythm and the habit to understand the phrase I use is there's always a story behind everyone's story.
- Adam Weber
And it's like, how do we make sure that we are just keeping those dialogues open to hear what's going on inside of your world, inside of your life, inside of what's happening outside of work. So that's one and that's in a group setting, and then the way you transition that forward, then it's end of that one on one setting as well. I mean, just a really small change to a one on one for a manager of just never starting the one on one, really checking your own energy and checking your own priorities at the door and showing up and being willing to listen first, be curious first and invest in their lives first.
- Adam Weber
And then it just unlocks so much as far as being able to understand their world, being able to support them and actually helping you achieve your own goals for your team, that sort of thing. So those are two at the manager level.
- Adam Weber
I think at the company level, how you can display empathy. One that I'm passionate about is we measure amplify measure engagement for companies. And while that is a neat thing, what's powerful about measuring is when the CEO says the thing out loud, that's hard about the company that everyone else knows. They just don't know that the leadership knows when a CEO says, you know what? Everyone thank you so much for your candid feedback. It is clear that our goals are currently not attainable, and it's really impacting how you're feeling and showing up at work today or how you're showing up at work in this season.
- Adam Weber
There is power in that at the company level, when you can show empathy at the macro scale, to the experience of the company.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
The acknowledgement of the pain point. I'm thinking, like burr under the saddle, sort of a reality.
- Adam Weber
Yeah, because it just it diffuses the tension. It's not even that we have it solved. It's just that we all understand that this is real, that we're all working through now. We're not a perfect organization. We're making progress. But I am aware of the same thing that you are aware of. And I think that that built a lot of trust and empathy as well. And then there's policies from an HR perspective, there's small things. One of the things I thought was so profound that 15 five are really it's huge for people going through it.
- Adam Weber
It's small in the realm of the impact to the benefits, bottom line or something. But our 15 five has a child bereavement policy like something that small. That when you come into the organization and it's it just shows a level of care and compassion for the whole person, for their world and for their experience or during COVID. We had family members who passed away. And so how as a company, not just as the manager, but how as a company, do we sit with and support people who are going through really, really challenging times?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. I have found in the conversations that I'm having policies never seem top of mind until they're suddenly top of mind. I'm like, oh, that's our policy. And whether that's our berievement leave policy says you have to have proof of death or it's only for immediate family members. We give people three days, and that doesn't take into account COVID related travel or all the sorts of things. And to pay attention to those things, it does feel impacted because especially as people are having so many more moments to touch on that.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I was just seeing someone's LinkedIn post about needing to bring, like, a bulletin from extended family members funeral to prove that they weren't just lying for time off and just how cheap that made it feel. But it was the policy, and nobody looked at the policy for a decade.
- Adam Weber
Yeah. And there's I don't even know what to say about.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, so sad about it.
- Adam Weber
I'm picturing that's just the Seinfield episode. I know George Castanza's trying to get his flight covered in your right. This is how it's supposed to be.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, you just think policy, the eternalist. Like how like your fourth grade teacher being like, did you really go to use the bathroom with your hall pass or you just cutting class? Yeah.
- Adam Weber
There is just I think underneath that there is such a lack of trust, right? There is like, we don't trust you, even with really hard aspects of your life like you're not trusted, I think, is at least the underlying message that an employee would receive through.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, like a meta level. If you're conveying yourself as a leadership team and a company that can't exercise trust, there's probably some trickle down questions that need to come up. What does that say about how we hire people? Or what does that say about how we manage people in an ongoing basis that we continue to have the perception of people that we can't trust? There's probably questions about other areas of your people operations if that really feels true or change your possible.
- Adam Weber
And I also think every employee asks themselves, Is this company worth my best?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah.
- Adam Weber
They have a level they're willing to give. And I think a small things like having to get a funeral bulletin. I think our create marks for people to go. This isn't worth my best. I might give time, but it's not going to be my best, right. And I'm not sure that I blame them. I don't I I'm not sure I wouldn't do the same.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Are you giving your people what they need to stay engaged in the midst of all of the disruptive life events that are coming at them? I deeply resonated with how Adam described the managerial journey: the stress that comes from suddenly having to manage and inspire and care for people. It is just hard, especially right now. And I hear, again and again from companies, that they want to be able to support the mental wellness of their people but they just don’t know how. Handle with Care Consulting can help. Empathy is a skill that can be learned and we can train you. We have targeted keyontes, tailored to your pain points and industry, Empathy at Work Certificate programs, and coaching options. Empathy doesn’t have to be difficult, reach out for a free consultation.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What is a time or a contributing factor that really it felt difficult to build connection with a given person or a team in your working career.
- Adam Weber
I think for me just myself, I think where I run into issues is when I get overstressed in general. And then I think I start to project at times on to other people, or I try to take that stress that I'm feeling and I push it to others, which is not a very empathetic posture. And so I think that has always been the thing I've had to be mindful of it. And startups, you really do have to be a venture backed funded startups are not for the faint of heart.
- Adam Weber
They are very stressful environments where you're growing quickly. So the business is changing every twelve to 16 weeks. It's like a whole different place, and there's a lot of pressure. And so I think finding balance in the midst of pressure in the midst of feeling overstressed. Like, I think those are the times for me, as opposed to like an individual, like one individual or things like that. It's when I get a little bit too inward focused to be thoughtful of other people.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, for some reason, what connects is even on a personal level. As a parent, I know when I am feeling like meta stress, whether that's work related or going back and forth with the roofing guys who are doing the hail damage and those sorts of things really can pull from my ability to be present, fostering joy, contributing to a shared sense of a espirit de corps with my children that feels very resonant on a personal level, as you were talking about that, especially in a startup culture. What did that look like for you?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And maybe there's like a day or a season that comes to mind, but whether it's coming out of a tough meeting about metrics or thinking about the steps towards Series A, what would that look like with your team when you were feeling preoccupied like that, how would you begin to interact with them?
- Adam Weber
Yeah, these aren't like my finest moments, but I think there were some memories or some thoughts I have that I go back to early where we're trying to take a thing that's nothing and turn it into something. And I was working as hard as I possibly could and overworking. I think during that season and sometimes during like, end of week metrics or views, it would be painful for me just to hear other people's metrics and feel like maybe they weren't working as hard as I was now with some perspective.
- Adam Weber
I'm like they also weren't owners in the business. I think I got to understand now, but at the time that was really painful for me and I had a really hard time just sitting and understanding. And I think when you lead with frustration, it makes it really challenging to understand what their actual blockers are. Then you're not really collaborating with them on the solution. You've just decided that you're frustrated at that in the interview story. Actually, those two scenarios were pretty much the foundation of what caused that kind of leadership change in my own life.
- Adam Weber
In that first year of the startup, there was a moment where I like walking out where people are sharing metrics, and I just left the meeting and I think that was another one where with some time I was like, alright, I need to really think about what it means to be a leader and how I sit with people and invest in people and even the other side of that. How do I set clear expectations or agreements where we're both mutually aligned? So I'm not just disappointed, but we have a shared clarity on what we're working towards.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right in just my last interview was with Max Yoder and he was talking about expectations versus agreements. And I thought, oh, yeah. That's so true. If it's just my expectation, then I either need to be able to release it because I didn't make it known to you, or we need to transition to an agreement where we're both on the same page. And I thought that that repeats itself in personal lives and work live hear that?
- Adam Weber
Yes. Exactly. Sounds like he nailed it, by the way. So I will just to build on that concept. This is why I think things like role clarity, things like clearly define goals, what those really give to our genuine agreements, not just expectations between employees and managers. And I actually think as tactical as those sound, that those create more empathetic workforces because it creates clarity inside the organization. It creates clarity of what is expected of me. So that's one part of what it does. So then we're all now collaborating on the same things instead of just like a manager who is constantly disappointed, constantly frustrated, who then puts up walls and isn't willing to collaborate, sit with the person, help them grow.
- Adam Weber
And the other thing it does is that when something challenging happens in that person's life, if there's role clarity and there's clear goals, there's ways for people to know how to step up.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So you are in a high pressure environment in startup culture where I imagine that I don't know, maybe even more regularly than quarterly. You were having to pivot and move, and maybe like, finesse where we're going and what we're doing.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
How did you find that you were able to maintain that sense of clarity in the midst of an ecosystem that was kind of changing around you pretty rapidly? Or maybe I'm not describing that ecosystem correctly.
- Adam Weber
I think you're describing it correctly. I think it depends on what season of the journey. So in the beginning, I think I did a relatively poor job of that. I think first time entrepreneurs, it's like the new idea always feels like the most important idea. And with time. And so there was rapid pivoting. But I'm not sure that it was always wise. And then with time, I think what we did was we really, really buttoned up, how we align as a company, on what's the most important thing and then but then also understand that things change and adjust and have good ways to what we call it triage, triage adjustments and pivot, as opposed to doing them kind of like the day, radically or inconsistently.
- Adam Weber
And I think that creates stability for the employees, too. When you kind of peel back the curtain on here's how we build strategy here's how we pivot strategy, so that for them, it doesn't just feel like constant whiplash within that triage.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You describe so many points of learning in your journey as a leader. A couple of years ago, you took the time to put this all down in book form and lead like a Human, which is a book that I have and have really enjoyed as a tool of insight and a reference point even in the work that I do, I'm wondering. It's it's your own, like baby bringing forth into the world now that it's had a couple of years to toddle around out there, what is the impact that you've seen?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And is there any part of the book that you just feel like is especially important right now?
- Adam Weber
Yeah. I think one of the things that I really appreciated about writing the book, obviously, I shared a lot about my early part of management, but I think once I turn the corner and really gave the time to figure out, like, it's hard work, I think to figure out how to become a leader that other people want to work for. It unlocked my own life. It unlocked the performance of my team. It unlocked a lot of their personal lives. And so it's a journey that's been really meaningful to me.
- Adam Weber
But I will say, when you do start ups, there's an interesting part of it, but the whole time, it feels really temporary. You kind of know it's going to end. And so I think one of the things with the book that I'm really thankful for is that it's a little bit more permanent. It was spot on time when I wrote it, but it lasts. And so it's a nice juxtaposition, I think with a start up and similar to I was a songwriter early kind of when I was right out of College and a lot of the songs I wrote I find really challenging today.
- Adam Weber
Like, I think about some of the things I was writing about.
- Adam Weber
I go, wow, it's interesting, like a spot in time, but it's got this permanence to it, and the book is like that I think for me and that there are aspects of it. I write. I go, wow, this is really challenging for me like that to actually live some of this stuff out myself, too, in a new season. The one the one that I think is the chapter that's been the most valuable for me is called centeredness.
- Adam Weber
And the reason why it actually goes all the way back to the very beginning of our conversation today is that I didn't have the tools early in my career to find my own grounding and to find my own wholeness and recognize that when I am in that place, then I can put all these other practices in place that allow me to lead in a more human way. And so it's without being too prescriptive because I really didn't want it to feel prescriptive. I want it to be each person's individual journey, but I do think there's an aspect of it that is just have I thoughtfully looked at my own life and what things are working in my life and what things are restorative to me and allow me to connect to, like my whole connect itself so that I can show up in a steady, consistent way in the workplace.
- Adam Weber
That's probably the one over time. I think that I think the most I reflect back on the most.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. And what guidance would you offer? Reflection is definitely the first step, but for individuals who are starting to take account and go, oh, that's not congruent or Gee, that's really crappy and painful. That's got to be different for me to be able to stay in this for the long term.
- Adam Weber
Yeah. I think there's some version for everyone of self reflection, like how do I take the time to analyze or think about how I'm showing up in the world and with my team? And I think that is both done. Personally, I do this myself. One of the things I do is I just actually Journal and cursive, and I just write what the feeling people still use cursive.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
The elementary school teachers would be so proud.
- Adam Weber
I might be the last one, but it's not active for me, I think, because it forces me to go slow. That's what I like about it, which is probably why it doesn't exist anymore, but really just try to write my emotions, right what I'm feeling and how I'm showing up. So one is like doing the self reflection yourself the other, especially if you're a leader, is just like to make sure you have someone outside of your scenario, but who knows you well enough? Who can tell you the truth of how you're showing up?
- Adam Weber
I think that part is really important because most leaders just get lied to constantly and they don't know it because of role power. And it's really important to have people that you trust, who will tell you the truth about who you are and how you're showing up so that you can make progress and work on it. And then I think for me, the gratitude practices that have worked for me in my life like I do these gratitude walks. It's because I have a busy mind, and when I walk, it's just a little easier to stay focused and things like that.
- Adam Weber
But I don't want to prescribe the actual activity. I think it's for you. What are those activities? What are the things? Is that exercise? Is that hiking? Is it once a week or once a month, you block out a day where you don't work, but you just take time to do something restorative for you.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That's good. I especially like the part about leaders being lied to and not knowing it. I think that is that's descriptively true for so many people.
- Adam Weber
I also think that's why I have a lot of empathy for CEOs and why I just have a heart for the CEO experience in the journey because I think it's really lonely for a CEO because I think one most of the time, everything you say people respond as if it's awesome and people are lying to you a lot, and they're not being because you hold their job in their hands and their family, security and all of these things. And if you show up every single day without having these, like, I think I have empathy for how lonely and isolating that feels for people.
- Adam Weber
And a lot of times they're unaware that that's happening to them, right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Building empathy and connection always has its challenges. There's this added layer right now of the particular challenges of the pandemic of social issues that feel really divisive of a continued uncertainty about how we're structuring workplace policies, not knowing what's going to happen with our kids in schooling and all of these challenges. What have you found really is helpful in continuing to move the needle on connection and care in the workplace, specifically within COVID-19.
- Adam Weber
I think one aspect is that just to take a little the pressure off yourself of trying to solve it. This is a big thing that's happening in the world, and it's happening to all of us. And so there's no perfect answer. There's no perfect policy, there's nothing perfect. You can say there's no burnout vacation thing that's going to immediately make things better. So maybe just like, releasing yourself with the pressure that this is, like, yours to fix in isolation. But the most impactful thing I think leaders can do right now is just have conversations and just be in on the conversations.
- Adam Weber
Burnout is a really good example, because it is like we're on, like, Wave five of burnout. I didn't even know what level of burnout it is, and it's impacting all of us in ways that we don't even know how to articulate ourselves to. There's this part of me, like, even with the Great Resignation to, like, not take it so personally to allow people just to be where they are. And some people now, there's a part right before the acquisition where some of our very first employees left, people are very, very close to.
- Adam Weber
And there's a part of that where you just have to recognize that, like, when you go through something that's significant in the world, sometimes you just need change. You just need change. It's not personal. It's not about the leader. It's not about the business. It's like, hey, there's a lot going on, and I just need something different.
- Adam Weber
I wish I could give you a perfect answer. I just think this is such a hard. I think it's such a hard topic because I just don't think any of us are immune to this. And I just think it's like, when you're in the middle of a story, you don't really know the answer to it. You just need to just kind of be in it and acknowledge that you're in it and maybe give space for your employees to also be like, it's okay that they're in it too.
- Adam Weber
I think I feel like the thing that isn't going to work, like, even with the great resignation, for example, is I think if you can be charitable with people as their departing, I just hate to feel really at the whole tenor around people leaving is so negative, and I find it exhausting. I don't understand why someone can't show up to a company, give their best hit a place where they go. My time here is like I'm ready to grow somewhere else and be celebrated. And it just to be like we honor that season for what it was and the impact it had on the business.
- Adam Weber
The business is about the business and the purpose of that business, not the individual who is running the business. So I celebrate that impact. And then and I think that that is a healthier way to process this, as opposed to making it taboo or sweeping it under the rug or acting like no one's leaving. People are leaving. People are leaving every company. You're not the only company where people are leaving. It's happening everywhere because people are looking for change. But if we normalize it and we celebrate people, it just feels like that is just like, a more appropriate way to handle honoring the time people gave instead of making every time someone leaves, it feel like a failure.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I like that. I think that's a good word. Adam, are there any other questions that you wish I would have asked you or insights that you have to offer?
- Adam Weber
I just I was like looking at my notes that I had earlier, and one of the most powerful things I feel like I did as a leader was when I knew that we had, like, a deep issue of conflict. I guess one of the things with empathy to me is that this component that happens inside of organizations, which is this conflict, and it's a natural thing that comes up when people are working hard towards a goal and maybe don't proactively solve an issue. But at some point, like conflict manifests itself.
- Adam Weber
And to me, one of the roles of someone who's, like an empathetic leader, is sitting in the midst of that conflict and being willing to truly listen and making sure that in that listening, that people feel heard and some of the most some of the work I looked back on over the last ten years of running a business I'm the most proud of was were the hardest conflicts where there were teams that were highly disengaged, and I Dove into the middle of it, and I sat with a full team and I said, what is going on?
- Adam Weber
Let's just talk. This is a safe space and just listened 90 minutes, just sat there and listened and wrote it all down and then summarized it and share it back with them. And I was just like before anything else happens first, like, do you feel hurt? Do you feel like this is what is happening for your experience?
And then once they're heard one that diffuses things, but then to then to go back and try to bring healing and restoration in those relationships and put the things on the table that have been living in quiet, in festering.
- Adam Weber
And there is to me that's a really practical thing. But to me, that is there's empathy in that because when conflict festers, it really at work. When conflict festers at work, it really impacts all aspects of a human being's life. And so to dive into that and to help create resolution in those situations, I think can really unlock workplaces. But it also creates better lives for all the parties that are involved in those scenarios.
– Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I agree to be able to wait into those deep waters and help diffuse it by radical attention. And just really hearing people is huge. Anything else? From your notes?
– Adam Weber
I think we did it. I feel pretty good.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
If you are interested in reading Adam’s book, Lead Like a Human, to get more great content, it is linked in the show notes.
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Adam…
OUTRO
You can find out more about “Lead Like a Human” here: https://www.amazon.com/Lead-Like-Human-Practical-Building-ebook/dp/B08DG14GG6
You can find out more about HR Superstars here: www.Community.15five.com
That divine middle is emotional liberation, where I can be compassionate and show compassion to an individual. But I do not need to carry whatever it is that they are feeling, right, not my responsibility to. And the thing about the thing that I think this is so important for me in my life is I think this was my biggest blocker, my biggest blocker to grow like something that I may have gone through my whole life and never addressed if it were not for something like Lessonly.
INTRO
When companies and individuals think about skilling-up in empathy and compassion, there are common questions that arise. How can I take on the feelings of others without being crushed by them? What do good boundaries look like? How am I ever going to keep my people accountable to their actual work if I start being all touchy-feely with the. My guest today touches on all of these questions and more. There are many reasons why you should take the time to listen to Max Yoder: he is erudite, well-read (see all of the books and authors he noted in the show notes), and he really cares about people. He is also the co-founder of the continually growing learning platform, Lessonly. Just last week, Lessonly made headlines in the tech world when they were acquired by Seismic. And the last few years has been a series of success stories for the company. Max is much more than an executive and a thinker, he is also a crafter of Lego art. - Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Is there anything that you found yourself giving time to in the pandemic, whether that's like a new pursuit or a hobby that you have particularly enjoyed?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. I've given myself a lot more time to make art, and I tend to make art with Legos. I really appreciate this man named Joseph Albers, who was a teacher at Black Mountain College, right. During World War two, post World War II. And he created this series of things called Homage to a Square. And he really like color theory. So he would put basically squares inside one another. And he did about two0 of these over a series of 20 years, I think from his 60s to his 80s, if I recall correctly, so hugely inspired by somebody doing 2001 thing from their 60 to their 80s.
- Max Yoder
And these squares, like I said, they're color theory. So he was trying different colors, and he said when I put a blue in the middle and I surround it with a red, that blue takes on a different cue, then it visually looks different than if I surround it with a lighter blue. Like what we put around to color changes the way we perceived that color.
- Max Yoder
So during COVID, I started doing all of these squares, and they were these really great free flow activity where I could get a 16 by 16 Lego square.
- Max Yoder
And I would create my own version of Joseph Albers Homage to a Square, all these different colors, and I have them all around my attic now. And it was just one of those things that I could do without thinking I sift through the Legos, I'd find the right color. I'd build these squares. It was not taxing, but it was rewarding.
- Max Yoder
And so I think in general, what I learned to do during COVID was play and not have a goal. And in one way of doing that with art and just really, truly understand what playing is, because I think I spent a lot of my adult life and I think a lot of my adolescent life achieving instead of playing, and I think you can do both at the same time.
- Max Yoder
But I don't think I was doing both. I think mostly achieving I love that.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, especially with the relentless pace of work in general, but especially accelerated as a result of the pandemic to actually have spaces of purposeful rest, whether that's like actual physical rest of sleeping or encompassing it with the mental release of play is something that I hear again and again as I work with different individuals, even as being really life giving. Yeah. I love that
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You also have welcomed, I think, a new little person into your home in the midst of the pandemic you find that that has having a child in the home has unleashed some different capacities in you as well?
- Max Yoder
Oh, yeah. So my daughter Marnie, she's eleven months old yesterday and eleven months.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Happy eleven months, Marnie.
- Max Yoder
Yeah, pretty special. Full name is Marina. When she was born, we didn't know she was gonna be a boy or a girl. She came out of my wife, and we had three names for girls, picked out three names for boys. Marina was the one that was clearly the winner. And then basically, as soon after that, we just started calling her money. So she came home and just changed our lives there's. Covid before Marnie and this COVID after Marnie and COVID after Marnie is excellent. You know, I think COVID before Marnie was really tough for a whole host of reasons, but when Marnie came, she brought this new life to our house, like literal new life.
- Max Yoder
Right. And then just this vitality to just and I of seeing the world differently and being a dad and watching my wife be a mom. And now being a husband to a mother, like all these things are life changing. And I'm 33 years old this year, and I just sent myself shifting from this achievement mentality to more kind of focusing on now, what do I care about? Why do I care about it? And am I doing the things that I care about? And my family is something that I care about?
- Max Yoder
Music is something that I care about reading or things that I care about. And the difference between that and achievement and Carl, you the psychiatrist, help me figure this all out is I'm not doing them to impress anybody or to get anybody's. Applause I'm doing them because I care about them. And if somebody doesn't care about them, that's okay by me. And somebody does care about them. That's okay by me. But I'm not doing it for anybody else. Right?
- Max Yoder
And being with my daughter is just something that is really important to me because she just wants me to be there with her.
- Max Yoder
She doesn't even need me to do anything. She just needs me to be watching her spending time with her. And it's just been really cool to over eleven months. Jess, who's a very calm woman, nurture Marni and love on Many. I think I call myself in a big way in front of Many. Many got her grandpa and her grandma, and then we have a woman named Gabs, who is a friend of ours and the caretaker of Mary three days a week. And all these people just are very calm personalities.
- Max Yoder
And Marni has just been wrapped around with so much love and kind of calmness. And what I imagine is going to come from that is what has come from that, which she's very adventurous, like, she's not scared. She's vibrant, and I just feel really lucky because it's not that parents don't want to give that to their kids, right? I think it's just sometimes we just don't have the resources, don't have the time, we're overstressed, and we're in a fortunate position where that's not the case. And it is highly rewarding to see my daughter be that's exploring, creative, laughing kid.
- Max Yoder
And I want that for everybody because it's a real gift. I.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Love that enjoyment of just her presence and watching her flourishing.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And something that you said kind of, like, particularly caught my attention, that I'm not thinking primarily of what I'm doing for her. I'm just being with her. I'm paying attention and the power of presence, which is its own segue into some of what we want to talk about today, which is empathy and connection in the workplace, because although it's not like a paternal relationship with those that you work with, I think there's this deeply human need to be seen and acknowledge, and I'd like to kick it off.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I know you're a leader that values cultivating this in your workplace. What is a personal story for you about why empathy and human connection really matter specifically in the workplace?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. I think empathy allows me to feel as somebody, so it allows me to kind of sit in their shoes and do my best approximation of what's stressing them or what's bringing them joy, like, empathizing with their situation. And I think that's incredibly important to a certain degree. I think the place where I get the most juice is being compassionate. And I think I've learned to recognize feeling sympathy for somebody, understanding that they are going through pain, but not carrying that pain as my owner running those same circuits myself.
- Max Yoder
This is something that Robert Sapolsky to a gentleman from Stanford has helped me understand. If I sit there and run the circuits all day long that somebody else is running and I get stressed with them, I wear myself out, but I can be compassionate and sympathetic to an individual. Like, if they're hurting, I can acknowledge that they're hurting, but I don't need to run the same circuits.
- Max Yoder
So I think it's really important to be empathetic because it gives me a chance to kind of sit in something and understand. Oh, yeah, that does not feel good. But I can't run that circuit too much because I'll wear myself out. But I can run the compassion circuit a lot longer where I can see if somebody's in pain, even if they're yelling at me or they're frustrated with something that, you know, life is tough there in a difficult situation that you might describe as suffering. I might describe a suffering.
- Max Yoder
And to be a calm presence in the face of that is a gift in and of itself. I might not have to do anything more than that. Then just be calm in front of them, not diminish or dilute. What they're saying also enhance what they're saying. Just be there as a calm presence that listen. And who does that take me? Has that taken me a long time to learn?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Can you give me an example? What has that looked like for you and your leadership over the last year and a half?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. I think we can. I go back longer than that because I think the Lessonly journey is nine years long to date, July 12 today. And I noticed that as we hired more and more people, we hit 17 people, and then we hit 25 people and then hit 50 people, that there was always more feelings coming into the business. Right. A woman named Jill Bolte Taylor, a friend and somebody who I love says we are feeling creatures who think, not thinking, creatures who feel feeling, creatures who think.
- Max Yoder
So we are a lot of feelings, right. We are very emotional. And for most of my life, I believe that was responsible for people's feelings. And I believed that I was responsible also for their judgments, which kind of two sides of the same coin. I just feeling responsible for two things that are not my responsibility. Right. Feelings and judgments of other folks. So I would try to carry those feelings as my own, and I would kind of assume those judgments as fact and they crushed me.
- Max Yoder
So I'm going to focus on the feelings part today, as opposed to the judgments or for this moment, on the feelings part.
- Max Yoder
There was a lot of feelings in the business, and every time we hired a new person, just more and more feelings, and we got to 50 people, and I couldn't take it anymore. I was probably a long pass being able to take it anymore. I was stressed, self medicating, trying to keep up with all the feelings. And it wasn't working because the frantic folks around me, if they were feeling frantic, I was becoming frantic myself, and that's just not what people need.
- Max Yoder
So I was fortunate enough. One of my teammates, who her name was Casey Combo. At the time, she's since married, she gave me a book called Non Violent Communication, not because she knew I was struggling with this, but because she knew I was looking for different methods for clear communication that was not aggressive, that was not argumentative, but was clear and compassionate. And in this book, Marshall Rosenberg writes about emotional slavery, which was exactly what I was. I was an emotional slave. I believe other people's feelings my responsibility.
- Max Yoder
And then he writes about emotional liberation. And he talks about these stages, the first stage, being emotional slavery of I assume your feelings as my own and my responsibility, and I carry them, and I get tired and you get tired. He says that a lot of times when people do that for so long, they might move into the next stage, which is basically disavowing other people's feelings. And right, about 50 people. That's really the only thing I knew how to do at that point. I was like, I can't carry all these feelings, so I'm just going to say no to all of them.
- Max Yoder
We hired Megan Jarvis at that point or head of the yeah, wonderful. Right. And I was like, hey, Megan, I'm so glad you're here. I need you to take the ceilings, like, I just need to go high. But, like, that was so not fun for me, because being with people is why I like my job, you know? So hiding from the feelings, man, I wasn't going to like my job, so it was just not going to work. So depending on my energy levels, I'd either carry people's feelings or I would hide.
- Max Yoder
And Marshall Rosenberg showed me that there's a third way. So those are two extremes right side of turning feelings all the way down to I don't care at all. So turning it down to 0% or turning it all the way up to a 100% care about everybody's feelings. And he makes it clear that there's this divine middle and that divine middle is emotional liberation, where I can be compassionate and show compassion to an individual. But I do not need to carry whatever it is that they are feeling, right, not my responsibility to.
- Max Yoder
And the thing about the thing that I think this is so important for me in my life is I think this was my biggest blocker, my biggest blocker to grow like something that I may have gone through my whole life and never addressed if it were not for something like Lessonly. Lessonly is this thing that's bigger than me, and it needed me. It was either going to crush me if I didn't figure this out, or I need to figure this out to keep my job. I wasn't going to be able to do my job if I didn't figure this out.
- Max Yoder
And so this bigger thing than me forced me to figure this out. And Marshall Rosenberg game is a blueprint of emotional liberation, and that's what I began to practice. And I don't know if I'm never going to be the same because of that.
- Max Yoder
In a really, really healthy way. I don't feel responsible for other people's feelings anymore. I feel responsible for my feelings and kind of making sure that I take care of myself. I are responsible for my intent behind my behavior. I'm responsible for my behavior.
- Max Yoder
I consider myself responsible for those things. Doesn't mean I consider you responsible for yours. I just telling you, I consider my response for those things. And so that's what I focus on.
- Max Yoder
And the reason I bring that up is in the journey of lesson. Like, there's been nothing more important to me than this.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I'm struck in finding that third way that you needed to develop a skill set of perhaps encountering the emotion. And I don't know if discharging is the right word, but even, like, energetically being able to release your feelings of responsibility, what what did that look like?
- Max Yoder
Thanks for asking that. I mean, very clumsy at first. Right. Like, understanding something intellectually does not mean that I can do it. Well, I have to practice it again and again and again, which is a whole other topic we should discuss of. Just like, intellectual understanding is not knowing. Knowing is doing. You cannot know something without having done it is otherwise it's intellectual understanding. So I had to practice a heck of a lot and remind myself that when somebody came to me and brought something, it was always coming through the lens of their own experiences.
- Max Yoder
And it was never simply about the thing that had happened. They were also bringing to me whatever else was going on in our life, because we can't separate that. We can't separate, like if we're having an emotionally charged home life and something happens at work, and it is like the straw that breaks the camel's back. What I hear from that person is just the work thing, right? What I don't see is all the stuff underneath the water that is happening. That is not my business, but it's always there, right?
- Max Yoder
And when I would make a decision network Edwin Friedman, who wrote this book called The Failure of Nerve, he really helped me with this. He helped me understand that I'm always in a relational triangle with each person. And this was a big breakthrough for me. This is like something that intellectually, really helped me break through in terms of my practice, which was when somebody comes to me, there's always a third thing in the room, and that is a prior issue that they might be bringing, or I might be bringing or another person that they might be bringing to the conversation where I might be bringing.
- Max Yoder
So to make it clear, like, Liesel, you and I are engaging right now, and we need shortcuts to kind of understand how to behave with one another. So we might filter through other people that we know that remind us of one another. And so when I meet people like Liesel, which this is just a brain by a shortcut, these things you'll come to mind. And in your case, I get a lot of warmth from you. But let's say I reminded you of somebody who really rub you the wrong way in the past.
- Max Yoder
You might engage with me through the lens of that person. It's not just about me and you directly. It's a third thing that everything goes through and that's happening all the time everywhere. We're not directly relating to one another, relating through our past experiences and the people that we've known in the past. That helped me a lot, because when somebody would come to me and be really fired up about something that I thought was disproportionate to what it just happened, it helped me understand why that might be.
- Max Yoder
There might have been a past issue, that this was emotional wound that was being poked at. It was not my responsibility, right? But I can sit there and be attached into the person. And maybe they don't understand that here, bringing that to the table. But I can have a sense like, this is not just about me and this person and this thing that's happening, they're filtering through their life. Right? And so when I realized that through Edwin Freeman, I realized it almost gave me permission to not carry things, because people are always bringing more to me than was between me and them.
- Max Yoder
And I'm always bringing more to people that is between me and them. So I don't want them to carry my stuff. And I don't want to carry theirs. Does that help, or does that make sense?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. That understanding. Did you find yourself needing? Some people engage in breathing exercises or they find themselves even to physically move as you are growing in this practice, there were things that you were like reading that were helping contextualize it. Were there other things that you like, embodied practices that were really helping.
- Max Yoder
Oh, yeah. Getting sleep sober, sleep hugely helpful. Like, I can show up and be calm in a conversation in a much richer way if I do not drink booze before bed. And I don't mean, like, I mean any amount of booze. And this is a rule that I break a lot for myself, which is like even a glass of wine at 05:00 p.m. Or 06:00 p.m.. It affects my sleep. So if I really want to be the best version of me, I say no, and I sleep better.
- Max Yoder
And it's just a fact of the matter. I am much less agitated. I am much calmer. So doing my pre work of getting exercise, eating well, sleeping well. And all those things are intertwined, what I eat and how I exercise to fix my sleep. So that matters to me a lot of just kind of taking care of myself and controlling the variables I can control. And then in that moment, if somebody's losing, they're cool in front of me or I'm losing my cool in front of them.
- Max Yoder
And my therapist, Terry Daniel, says it can help basically coach me. It can help to put your hand on your stomach, like, on your skin. And it can be a safer thing to do when we're not physically in the room together. Like, let's say I'm having a different conversation over the phone, like, happening a lot over COVID. And just that skin to skin connection with myself can be very helpful. Breathing. Breathing deeply when I'm with somebody can be very helpful. Breathing and showing them slow my breath down can even be coming to them.
- Max Yoder
So, yeah, there's physical things that I can do in that moment. And I hope it's very clear that I'm not suggesting that I nail this every time. Right. These are just tools that I have to do this a little bit better every day.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. I think that's helpful. As you were beginning, you talked about this inflection point at 50 employees where you started giving more attention to the particular presence that you were bringing. What did you start to notice? Did you notice the difference in people's receptivity to you and the sorts of things they were saying back to you as you grew in this practice?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. Here's one thing that comes to mind that I noticed is I noticed I didn't have to solve anybody's problems for them. And I used to think I had to, like, I used to think I had to come up with solutions. And more than anything, now, I can be with somebody ask them questions and ask them questions and do active listening. So, like, one of the things I learned through motivational interviewing is if somebody's telling me something instead of asking a question, saying something like, so maybe somebody comes to me and says they haven't responded to me three times.
- Max Yoder
You're frustrated might be the way I summarize where I think that person is at based on what they just told me. And then they had to go, Well, not really frustrated, just a little bit irritated. Or they go, yeah, I'm totally frustrated, and they keep talking. And when I'm getting them to do with this verbally process, and I'm only doing that because when they verbally process this stuff, they come up with answers a lot better. Right. But if I'm talking the whole time, it's tough for them to find answers.
- Max Yoder
So when I reflect what I'm hearing with a statement, it gives them a chance to keep talking so that they can kind of maybe all I have to do is just get it out. Right. Not keep it in, just say it to somebody. Some days that's all that happened, and two or three days go by and they call me and they say, I think I figured out what to do. Thanks for listening the other day, it just is it. And I'm somebody who wants to solve a problem.
- Max Yoder
Right. But in fact, sometimes I'm doing somebody a major disservice by even if I got the answer right on the off chance I get the answer right. With the limited information I have sometimes saying, hey, maybe here's what you should do is a complete disservice to that individual, because me giving it to them might make them more likely to actually not pick it up and do it. But if I were to just a little calmer and let them give you that conclusion themselves, it's so much more powerful if they thought of it.
- Max Yoder
Right. Like, you don't want to be told to do things. So sometimes even if it's the right call, we might do the opposite of what I've just been told because we got told to do it. But if somebody can figure it out themselves, that's the most powerful.
- Max Yoder
That's the most powerful recipe, even if it's exactly the same thing I would have said. Right. And most of the time, of course, I don't have the answer. But I guess my point is sometimes even giving somebody the answer unless they're asking me for it.
- Max Yoder
Right. Unless they're saying Max, I really want your feedback here, which is a whole different prompt. Right. But if they're not asking for it and give it a I can do a major disservice in that process.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. I think that's such a good word, because I think especially as people get, we oftentimes promote people on their capacity to solve problems. It's a really valuable skill set to organizational growth and leadership. In my work, I call it the predisposition to be in a Fix-It, Frank.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And what I heard and what you said is also a comfortability with a slightly extended time horizon. I think as I verbally process something that I see in the leaders that I work with, is there this imperative of like, well, we need to get it figured out now. We need to get it figured out in the moment. And I've got insights and I've got a history, and so I'll give it to you, and then you'll be happy. And how that short circuiting of the process, it can be a move of not believing that there's enough time to let somebody come to their own conclusion or not believing that they have the capacity of do so.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So I've just got to give it to you in this moment.
- Max Yoder
Right.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And the cost that can be associated with doing that, I think he spoke really eloquently to.
- Max Yoder
Well, thank you for hearing me out, because I think that's taking me a long time. Like, what I saw is the people who I would go to therapy with were very reluctant to give answers. So they were modeling for me, and I'd ask them why, and they teach me. And I don't consider myself a therapist. Right. But these people I do consider they are therapists. They're professinally, trained and in some cases, done it for 40 years. That's a long time. And there's a lot of mistakes being made in that process to their admittance, seeing them and seeing how helpful it was for me, but also knowing that there were times when I would go to that person to say I'd really like some advice.
- Max Yoder
And I've opened the door at that point to hear them. And many times the advice they give me, I don't take it up with open arms. It's when that advice feels pushed, then that's when it doesn't work, right. When it feels pushed or forced. But when it's invited, that's a whole different motion.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. So the acknowledgment of seeing a therapist of some of the things that they have helped you with. You recently did something for your company where you interviewed your therapist to talk about boundaries. I'd like to hear about why that felt important for you to do. And what were some of the key learnings that you felt like were really important for your people,
- Max Yoder
Yeah. So while I was important and what do people take away from it? I can only tell you what to away from because they haven't seen the interview yet. At the time of this conversation, we have not shown it to them yet. But I'll tell you what I hope to take away from it. But I'll start with, hey, here's why this is important. Many of my teammates asked me about boundaries just completely unprompted. They would come to me and say, hey, I'm going on a vacation. I know that you encourage us to turn all of our stuff off, to delete our email and our delete our slack from our phones, so we're not going to compulsively check them.
- Max Yoder
But I don't know if I'm comfortable doing that. And for whatever reason, they were not willing to accept themselves doing that they were concerned. And that's a boundaries challenge for me. I speak openly about having engaged with people that I love who have substance use challenges. And I speak openly about having to learn about boundaries in that process where I begin and they end in where they end, and I begin. It's a very important part of understanding how to be healthy in the midst of something that is really, really challenging, which is substance use disorder, which you might co alcoholism or any number of things.
- Max Yoder
Right. So I speak openly about these things. People come to me, and it's clear to me that this is not something that we get a lot of attention. And I would generally share. See, if somebody wanted something from me, I would generally share a talk by Gabor Monte called "When the body says no" was good.
- Max Yoder
He's a master, and he speaks about boundaries. Basically, caregivers tend to struggle taking care of themselves, and they'll just give care and give care and give care, and they will not care for themselves. They'll be asymmetrical in the way they give care. The way that they care for somebody else is one way. And the way that her from themselves is completely opposite. Basically, like, they don't deserve any care, but everybody else deserves all the care. And he basically talks about how this just Withers people away. So all of these things combined, I know boundaries are important in my life, and my teammates come to me and say they matter.
- Max Yoder
Gabor Mate gives this talk. And when I share with people, they tell me like, oh, my gosh, my brain just blew open in such an interesting way because he's so profound. So I'm thinking, hey, this is a chance for me, too. And so I asked my therapist about how does he view boundaries? And he gave this just excellent off the cuff answer. And I was like, Can I just interview you sometime about this? And so we can share this with my teammates, because exactly what you just said.
- Max Yoder
So he comes in and we talk about boundaries. And I thought it was important because I just it's just not talked about in our world. Right? We think Kind is doing things for other people, kind of at any expense to ourselves. Right. Like, well, they asked for it. So I got to give it because I don't want to be a jerk.
- Max Yoder
It's like that. It's not. We have to counterbalance kindness with boundaries, with assertiveness. And I just see people who do not have those tools to be assertive, and it's very stressful for them, and I ultimately think it's slowly killing them. So I think this is important. So here's what I hope people take from it. When they hear a assertiveness, I think they maybe hear aggressiveness. And Terry is very clear that you can be assertive without infringing on anybody else's energy or anybody else's motion. Like, it's not about aggression, right?
- Max Yoder
Those are two different things. Assertiveness is the ability to say yes or no based on you wanting to or not wanting to. And he says it ultimately comes from a place of self acceptance. If I enter a space and I accept myself, then I can assert my needs. And asserting my needs does not mean dominating your needs, right? It just means if I'm tired, somebody comes to me and says, hey, can we do this thing today? I might say if I'd like to do it tomorrow, I just don't have the energy today.
- Max Yoder
I like to do it tomorrow. And if that person is not willing to accept it, I say I understand, but I still have the energy. Can we do it tomorrow? And he's like, if you don't accept yourself, you won't even ask. You may not even ask the question of can we do it tomorrow? Because you may be coming from a place to say, I'm not good enough in order to feel good enough, I need to answer this request. But he's, like an accepting person, believes they're good enough.
- Max Yoder
They don't believe that they're going to be good enough by doing the request on the demanded time. Right. They're just good enough. And so he really clarified in a big way how self acceptance is key here. And what keeps us from exerting boundaries is a fear. And each person's fear might be different. But understanding what that fear is, it might be that you feel like you're not good enough for X, Y, or Z reason might be something different, but getting down to that fear and understanding it and and working through that is the way that we get to a place where we're comfortable enough to say no, thank you and stand by it and not be worried that that person, we're going to lose that person by doing so.
- Max Yoder
So there.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, and as I think of some of the responses and groups and surveys and the work that I do, I think there's an underlying fear for many people that if I assert this boundary, people aren't going to like me as much. They're going to think I'm lazy. And while you, as a leader, cannot, in a top down way, control people's responses to things like establishing boundaries or expressing vulnerability, that there is an element of culture creation that goes into this. How do we, as a group, you know, not always perfectly respond, but have more of a context where we, like, make the space for that.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
We make the space for it's okay to say no. We make the space for vulnerability. What are some of the ways that you have co created with some of the other leaders at Lessonly, a culture that says it's okay to do that? What are things that you have done that have moved the needle?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. So if the executive team at Lessonly is unable to assert ourselves, like, if we are not assertive in a situation, if we say yes to every new thing that comes our way, we are not modeling what we need the rest of our teammates to do. So it's incredibly important that a certain boundaries in my life that the executive team set boundaries and their lives, that when it's too much, we say it's too much. That is the fundamentally most important thing we can do to make it okay for anybody else to do it.
- Max Yoder
The opposite approach that does not work is the same as your boss saying, hey, I don't expect you to work on the weekends, but I'm gonna because, you know, I got a lot to do, but I don't expect you to, and that just doesn't work. You know what? People here, I better be working on the weekends, right? If your behavior is not aligned to your words, people are going to look at your behavior, right? Not your words. They're going to trust your behavior, not your words.
- Max Yoder
So what I want to do is align my words to my behavior, which is to say weekends are sacred, just like winter is the season that allows for spring. And winter is a season where it looks like there's not a lot happening, but there is a lot happening. Sleep at a time when it look like there's not a lot happening, but there is a lot happening. We need weekends or it looks like there's not a lot happening, but there is a lot happening, right? This resting and recharging is incredibly important.
- Max Yoder
And if I don't treat my weekends like I want to people to treat them. And then why would I believe they're going to do that? Right. I can't do anything more than that is just make the space to say like, I mean it when I say this, and I mean it because this is my behavior, and I need my executive teammates to mean it, too. And I need the managers to also mean it, too. And in some ways, that goes well in other ways. It doesn't.
- Max Yoder
Right. But it's ultimately out of my hands to some degree. Right. If people are going to pick that up, if we have a chronically, chronic challenge of the teammate, it's my responsibility to have a difficult conversation with them and let them know how important their modeling is, no doubt. But ultimately they're going to make the call if they want to change their behavior or not. And it's out of my hands if I'm doing it myself.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I'm struck right now that it's a tight labor market for many people. Lessonly is growing. You're wanting to bring more people on. Do you feel like you have seen a through line towards creating this kind of culture where rests and seasons and vulnerability is upheld and valued and the way you're able to attract and retain talent?
- Max Yoder
I think we understand part of the recipe, but we exist in a system, though, that is chronically overworked and systems win. Like individuals, we've created a system a lesson that I'm really proud of. But we're also in this broader work environment, in this cultural environment of overwork. And unfortunately, those systems, if we don't kind of remove ourselves from them and do a lot of extra work, they win. The bigger system wins. The culture wins. If they didn't win, we wouldn't probably have 25% to 50% of the population reporting depressive States.
- Max Yoder
Right.
- Max Yoder
The culture is winning. We've optimized for economic growth, we've optimized for consumerism, we've optimized for commercialism. We haven't optimized for well being. And look what we're getting, right. We're not getting a lot of well being because the system is not in support of of that. So it's discouraging. It just is. And so we can only do so much less only to turn the tide. But it's our job to at least try. And one of the things that I find complete myself to be completely powerless to change is that there is no winter in software.
- Max Yoder
There's no winter in the business world. There is no period of three months like there is for a pro athlete or for a farmer, where we work really hard and we plant and then we harvest. I'm not a farmer, so I'm not going to use all the right words, but we create a crop or mini crops. And then we have this period with winter where we take our time to rebuild. And pro athletes have their own seasoned in their off seasons. And this is wise. This is wise.
- Max Yoder
I have not figured out how to recreate that in the business world. And I don't know if I ever will. It just is the system at work, right? Our customers, even if we take that time off, if we were to say less, only going to B nine months out of twelve, we're going to lose deals because there's a lot of deals because people need us for those three months, they were going to be off, right? Because they're going to be on. So, you know, it's not an excuse.
- Max Yoder
It's just me saying, like, I don't know how to do it, right.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
The pressures of the prevailing system of capitalism that prioritizes growth and efficiency above all else.
- Max Yoder
You said it well.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We’ll return in just a moment for the final portion of my engaging interview with Max. But I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. In the midst of the unrelenting stressors the last year and a half, are you giving your people what they need to stay engaged? Empathy is key to building the sort of culture of connection that Max is talking about at Lessonly. And the good news is, it is a skill that can be learned! If you want help in skill-ing your people up in empathy and creating a place where people want to come to work, Handle with Care Consulting can help. With interactive keynotes, empathy at work certificate programs, and coaching options, we can help you show care when it matters most.
MUSICAL TRANSITON
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I would love to hear about times when building connection at your workplace have felt easy for you and why you think they felt easy. And then I'm going to have to underside. What are times when building connections felt really hard for you and why you think to start with when it felt easy?
- Max Yoder
Yeah. When it's all easy to build connections, when I am accepting on myself to go back to Terry Daniels lesson. I mean, it has everything to do with my my internal system being an equilibrium, you know, which is a delicate thing, right? One night of sleep and throw it off. But when I am in this place of peace with myself, I'm able to bring peace to my connections and not view myself as needing to be anything other than what I am. But when I'm not at peace with myself, I can go to a state of judgment and criticism.
- Max Yoder
And if I drop a ball or miss a mark and these are judgments that I would make of myself, you mess that up, you drop this ball, you miss that Mark. Those are all judgments in their evaluator language. It can be very harsh with myself and showing up to a situation. Putting intense pressure myself does not increase my connection to the person in front of me or the room in front of me. But when I show up and just say, like, you know, I accept myself, and acceptance does not equal agreement.
- Max Yoder
Like, acceptance does not mean I've got it all figured out. Therefore, I'm good. Acceptance just means I'm willing to look at my own behavior and accept it. Whether it's behavior that I can objectively say is life giving or soul sucking, I have to be able to look at it to accept myself. And once I can look at it, I might be able to make changes. But if I can't look at something, it's tough to change it. Right. So acceptance is not about saying I like everything that's going on in my life, just about saying I'm willing to look at everthing that going in my life with in an even handed way.
- Max Yoder
And when I accept myself, I can show up to a room with my new teammates or my old teammates or a mixture of the two and be peaceful in front of them and talk about mistakes without feeling ashamed and talk about things that I'm proud of without feeling ashamed and and share my humanity. And if I can do that, it maybe gives another person's permission to do the same. So I think it has everything to do with my personal system, being in a good spot here and then acknowledging that my personal system is often not in a good spot to folks so that they understand, like, hey, they're not dealing with somebody who's got this figured out, right?
- Max Yoder
Like day in and day out. I might have a different equilibrium, or I might have a different disequilibrium, right? It's not about coming at this from a place like I've got this oneness every day. I certainly do not do. Not at all. Right. But when I'm at peace, I can connect better. And I find that to be a really fun time in that journey towards self acceptance.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Something consistent theme that I hear from leaders is just the particular burden of other people's expectations about what it looks like to lead or manage change in a given season; as you are seeking that equilibrium and self acceptance, what about when you smack up against somebody else's? Like, judgment? I needed you to be different. I wanted you. You're not doing it the way that I would like for you to. How do you encounter those voices, real or perceived and still work to maintain well in the balance?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Because sometimes we do need to change. Sometimes it's like, oh, that was a blind spot. I need to change. And sometimes we need to be able to have the discernment to say, like, hey, that's your stuff, not mine. How do you navigate that process?
- Max Yoder
You nailed it, right? How much does this person love me? Is my first question. How well does this person know me? If it's my wife, I know she deeply loves me. And when she brings me something where she says, hey, what I got and what I needed were far apart, I'm listening. I'm not sitting there saying, hey, your expectations of me don't matter, right? I'm listening. It might not be that I agree with everything she says, right? But I'm definitely not shutting it all out either, right?
- Max Yoder
She is just like me going to come at this from an emotional triangle of past wounds, but doesn't mean that there's not real meat on the boat when she's frustrated. Right now, if somebody needs something from me and I don't know them very well, and I'm skeptical that they love me or know me really at all, it's not that challenging anymore for me to just kind of let that. There's a moment at first that I go back to my old self of getting defensive or being hurt.
- Max Yoder
And it's more than a moment sometimes, right? It could be an hour. It could be 2 hours. It could be 3 hours. It could be a good night sleep that needs me through it. But then I'm like, yeah, that's okay. Life is too short. So it depends on my relationship to this individual. And Brene Brown has the idea of the Square Squad, where, you know, the coal world can't be my critic, and I can't have nobody has my critic either, right? I need the people who love me, care about me.
- Max Yoder
And if the Square Squad is the one inch by one inch piece of paper where I can put the names of the people who I know love me, who will tell me the truth as they see the truth, right? They're version of the truth, and I know that they're not going to willingly hurt me for fun. And those are the folks who feedback. I am a lot more. I'm a lot more discerning with. Right? But if somebody's coming out with this condemnation or an unspoken expectation and they say you didn't meet my unspoken expectation, like, that is not my problem because it's an unbroken expectation.
- Max Yoder
There was no agreement there. I've got a chapter and Do Better Work, which is a book I got to write a couple of years ago that uses Steve Chandler wisdom of expectations versus agreement. Like, if we did not agree to that thing, then we have to get that agreement now and then begin to hold another accountable going forward. But if we didn't have an agreement and you're mad about not spoken expectation, like, I need you to look in the mirror and say, like, hey, we get an agreement because I don't remember the agreement now, and I can't read your mind, and we don't need to go back and litigate the path that you're frustrated about when we didn't have this agreement.
- Max Yoder
Just an unspoken expectation. But we can make an agreement now. And an agreement is not you dictating at me or me dictating you. It's us going back and forth and negotiating a course of action that we say, okay, this feels good collectively. You know, that is a relationship. When we do that, the other thing is just, you know, I can't live in a world where I just have to respond to everybody's unspoken expectations.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Something that I like and have appreciated. I think I've been getting your emails for, like, the last two years just because I enjoy reading them.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But you compiled them into a book that you just referenced. Do Better Work. You have a new book coming out. Tell us about that.
- Max Yoder
Yeah. So I took those notes and compiled it. So the first book do better work. I'd been writing notes, took some of those, turn them into chapters. This one is called To See It, be It. And I'll say that a little slower to see it. Be it. The idea is, if you want to see it, be it. And that's the best you can do. Right. I want to see more patience in this moment. Bring patience. If you want to see more creativity in the world, bring creativity.
- Max Yoder
And then let go of all the other stuff of what you want other people to be doing, because I think it's just very, very common and very easy to get wrapped around the axle of what other people are not doing. And I honestly think some people will die spending most of their time complaining about what somebody else is or is not doing instead of going, do I do what I value? Right? Do I live by what I value? And, of course, the answer is going to be no, because nobody does that perfectly.
- Max Yoder
And then the next question, if the answer is no, what it always is, how can I begin to spend more time doing what I value? And let go of worrying about what anybody else is doing? And, of course, there's a relationships with husbands and wives and kids were that's incredibly difficult, right. And there might have to be boundary set where I feel like I'm living my values over here and there's somebody else in my space consistently that I just don't feel like I can do my best self around.
- Max Yoder
That might require boundaries of separation. I just don't be together anymore. But what I'm getting at is, I think one of the greatest things we can do for ourselves to say what I want to see in the world, and how do I, at the time align to what I want to see in the world? And I think what happens when we do that is we either find that the things we want to see in the world has validity to them. We start to live them, and we start to see that they're very life giving.
- Max Yoder
Like, let's just use an example of getting good sleep. I want to see people well rested in the world. Well, I can't control how you sleep. I can control how I sleep. So if I take care of my rest, I want to see it, and I'm being it, right. And I can let go of all the other things. But at least I'm doing the thing that I want to see more people doing, and I'm letting go of whether they're doing it or.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, not.
- Max Yoder
And as I do that, I might say, hey, this feels pretty good. Like I had a hunch that sleep taking care of sleep was going to be helpful. And look how beautiful life is now that I've been able to take care of my sleep, which I understand is not an option for everybody. But I'm saying it's an option for me. So sometimes living my values strengthens those values. Other times, living things that I believe I value, like I intellectually value it, and then I start trying to live it.
- Max Yoder
I found out, oh, I don't really value that as much as I thought I would putting into practice. I see that there is that there are problems and there are always problems with any value is taken to an extreme. Like loyalty. I value loyalty. Taken to the extreme, it becomes blind loyalty. If I turn it all the way up to 100% loyalty, I become blindly loyal. If I turn all the way down to 0% loyalty, I don't have any loyalty at all. Right. I need to have that loyalty dialed into something somewhere in the middle counterbalanced with once again assertiveness and boundaries.
- Max Yoder
I'm loyal to somebody, but not at the expense of my own mental health and well being. It those two things counterbalance one another. So only by living that value do I learn those hard lessons, in my opinion. Right. I can't learn them intellectually. I have to live them and say, oh, wow, I do value this, but I value a different permutation of it than I thought. That makes sense.
- Max Yoder
So that's what the book that's the first chapter of the book is, or the first note in the book. And then there's 24 notes after that of other things that I just think are important, and I share them because they help me and they help somebody else. Great. I just know for a fact that all 25 of them help me. And my hope is that maybe one day somebody picks them up and they want to read the book. Right. They're choosing to read the book. And one of the notes, as as it helps me in the past, helps them in a similar way or a different way altogether.
- Max Yoder
That is healing as the whole point of the book.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. Well, and your writing is accessible. It's oftentimes encompassing story. It's nice digestible bits of wisdom that you could blaze through all at once, so you could flip through and take a little at a time. So I'm excited about this new offering.
- Max Yoder
Thank you for being open to it. It's a great joy for me to write. I got to dedicate it to my daughter, and I dedicated to her because I just want I could get hit by a bus one day. Liesel. My dad owns a funeral home, and my dad's dad started a funeral home. My dad and his brother ran the funeral home for last 30 years, 20, 30 years. And people just get they just leave, right? They don't choose to go a lot of the time. It's not old age that takes us all.
- Max Yoder
So I'm very highly aware that, like, is not my choice when I get to go and so writing for me is a chance to capture a bit of my spirit. And if I have to go for whatever reason, my daughter can pick up this book and do better work and and catch a little bit of her dad and deeply special to me to be able to capture a little bit of my spirit. And it really forced the genuineness out of it.
- Max Yoder
Right. Because I don't want it.
- Max Yoder
I don't want my I got to be genuine under that premise. Right. Like, I got to say what I believe, what I mean and what I stand by, because I don't want my daughter reading about somebody who didn't exist.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. Or reflecting in an individual that is not integrated with their best thoughts. Like, we're always seeking that integration, but you don't want a glaring gap between what you say and how you live, right.
- Max Yoder
And I want her to see that I hurt. I make mistakes. Right. She's not going to get a picture of a perfect human being because I've never been one of those and they don't exist. She's going to get a picture of somebody who struggled, and that's what I want her to have, because that's the model I want to be. Hey, life is a lot of struggle, and there's a lot of beauty in that, you know, a lot of beauty in that. I've been very fortunate in that struggle, right.
- Max Yoder
I always had a roof over my head. I always had food to eat. I don't pretend my struggles like anybody elses, but I can tell you struggle nonetheless. And I don't want her to think that life should just fall into place and be peachy. And that's what life is.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So as we draw near the end of our time for listeners who say I want to build more connection in my workplace, I want to be part of that change.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I know it's a broad question, but what words of insight would you offer to them as they think about how to go about doing that?
- Max Yoder
So I want people to ask themselves, what do I value? And how do I, 1% of the time seek to live that value and become symmetrical and congruent with what I value in my behavior? And then how do I learn in that process? Because that's the best I can do. And if I'm in a system like, let's say I'm in a work system where it does not align to my values, I have to ask myself, Am I willing to change into those systems value because the work system will change every person in it if they stay long enough, right?
- Max Yoder
It could even change them quickly. But if I'm in a system that is not congruent with my values, I'm going to be nervous because it's possible that that system actually has values that are very life giving. It stay long enough, I'll find out. But if I find out they're not life giving, I stick around. There is a casualty there. There is a loss there. So my ask to people is if you want to see it, be it and then pay attention to what the system cares about.
- Max Yoder
And if the system is so disproportionately, caring about things that are not what you care about is very important. If possible, you get out.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That's a good word, Max. Are there any questions that you wish I would have asked you that I didn't ask you?
- Max Yoder
Let's see. I mean, I've talked about values a lot, so real quickly, I think something that I love talking about is this idea of reciprocity. Liesel, yeah.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Tell me more.
- Max Yoder
Yeah. So reciprocity is idea of I give what I get. And so let's say I get kindness from somebody, so I give it back. But a lot of times reciprocity comes through in a relationship where people are not communicating very clearly, when maybe somebody is struggling and they take their aggression out at somebody else, reciprocity is oftentimes somebody yelled at me. So I yell at them. Somebody didn't respond to my message, so I don't respond to their message. So it becomes I give what I get. And reciprocal cultures, if we're having behaviors that are life giving really beautiful, right?
- Max Yoder
Because somebody gives me patience. Ideally, I respond to them with patience, right? Somebody gives me support. Ideally, I respond to them with support. Reciprocity is not necessarily something that is good or bad. It just is. And it resides about giving what we get. So what's the alternative to that? Well, it's living by values, which is, I think, supremely important to understand. If somebody comes to me, maybe somebody doesn't respond to my message that I sent them. And then later, they need something for me. So now they're asking me for my time.
- Max Yoder
If I'm reciprocal, I say, Well, they didn't respond to me when I needed them, so I'm not going to respond to them. But if I value driven, I say I value communication, right? I value support, and I would have value that person responding to me when I needed their help. So regardless of the fact that I didn't get it from them, I'm going to give it to them, not out of fight, not to show them the way. Right. Because I value it. It's really important that we get those two things.
- Max Yoder
It's not out of fight, right? It's not to prove anything to this person. It's because I value it. So if you're not having difficult conversations with me, it's not an excuse for me because I'm not living in reciprocal life. I believe in difficult conversations. I believe in having them. I'm going to have them with you. And that's the best I can do. You may not respond in the way that I hope that's out of my hands, right. I just value difficult conversations. I value patients. I value forgiveness whether I get them or not.
- Max Yoder
So I think reciprocating can be a race to the bottom. It can be this kind of slippery slope of just degrading cultures, degrading relationships, and values based living. If I do it because I value it, not because I get it in return is the answer, in my opinion.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I love it. I agree.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Max and I have to confess, there were definitely more than three valuable takeaways, but I have narrowed it down to these three…
MUSICAL TRANSITION
OUTRO
Max Yoder: Do Better Work
Robert Sapolsky: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert Zapolsky: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
Gabor Mate: When the Body Says No
Marshall Rosenberg: Non-Violent Communication
For anybody listening, you can learn empathy. It's not something that somebody should go. You know, I'm not an empathetic. So I'm just going to stay the way I am.
INTRO
Human skills ARE business skills. You cannot create lasting, high-performing teams without paying attention to and caring for the actual humans on your team.
This is something that my guest, Joe Staples, has seen again and again in his years of work. We are going to talk about tips and tactics to build connection (hint: nothing brings people together like food), how walking a mile, literally, in someone else’s role can build empathy, and why a group softball game was one of Joe’s biggest misses in team building. You will hear stories of high school bullies and reflections on the changing expectations of generations in the workplace. All in all, it is just one fine episode full of wisdom.
Let me begin with a little bit more about my guest, Joe Staples. Joe is a senior B2B marketing executive who advises companies around go-to-market strategy and activities. He has spent decades in the business and developed expertise in building a powerful, differentiated brand and generating demand. Joe is also the author or coauthor of numerous articles on leadership, customer experience, marketing, branding, employee engagement and work management. His work has been featured in all sorts of publications from Ad Age to Digital Marketing Magazine.
Joe lives out in Salt Lake City, where he gets to spend time not just working but enjoying the great outdoors.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What are some of your favorite things that you get to do out in Salt Lake City?
- Joe Staples
You know, we have we have a large family and so we're constantly going to parks going up in the mountains. We have we have a cabin that's kind of our getaway place. And, you know, we just we like the outdoors. The interesting one of the most interesting things about Utah is you can you can golf in the in the morning and ski in the afternoon if you hit the time of year just right. And we're 20 minutes from the closest ski resort.
- Joe Staples
So a lot to do.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You can you can just have a whole day of recreation at your fingertips.
- Joe Staples
Right. And when you when you think of small grandchildren, it doesn't take much to entertain them, give you like some rocks and potato bugs. And there's that
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That's that is true. I feel like in my own family, I have four. I was going to say young children, but the eldest is now 13, so they're getting less young with each passing year. But we know 13 down to seven. And as you mentioned, the cabin, we did well.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
We still do a fair amount of camping. And it's amazing when you strip away some of the electronics and iPads and all the interactive toys that are so dazzling. How really entertaining a good puzzle, a little bit of mud and a pile of sticks can really be.
- Joe Staples
That's exactly right. I agree completely. You know, the other thing for me, so getting to our cabin, you go through what's called the Heber Valley, which is this little old farming community, and then you go up into the mountains. And as I come down into that valley, I could physically feel the stress just kind of fall off of my shoulders. And I forget about everything that's good.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
There's a there's a particular power about familiar land, just that you revisit again and again. And I can think even this weekend we're going down to Bloomington, which was a meaningful place for me. I did graduate work down there. I gave birth to a young daughter who died shortly afterwards. But there was a lot of emotion that's tied up in that time. And there's a particular trail that I I ran and walked a lot during those years. And then I always make a point to come back to.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And there's something too I like I can feel it in my spirit, in my body of the familiar trees and bend in the path and the invitation that ushers me into to be tied to a story that's bigger than me to think like some of these trees, you know, they they came before me. They will outlast me. They're being sustained in much the same way that I am. And I I can hear that a little bit in your statement, like the the familiar land that evokes something in you as you're able to go to it.
- Joe Staples
Yeah. Those things I think they build us. They they. They. Help us become who we are.
- Joe Staples
We have pictures of my wife standing on the spot with nothing but trees and then a hole in the ground and then framing and then being all done. So, yeah, it's been it's been great. And then the other we do a family reunion there every year with all of our kids and grandkids. So those kind of memories just are important, as beautiful.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I would love for you to tell me a little bit about what your current role is in the work that you do.
- Joe Staples
Yeah. So it's changed pretty dramatically in the last year. So I was a CMO, a chief marketing officer for the last 20 plus years. My career was all in the tech sector and now I spend all of my time advising other companies on their go to market strategy. And those companies range from little startups that are trying to figure out how to get to market and what their product should look like and how to message and position it to companies that have multibillion dollar valuations that are trying to better understand their brand and what they do.
- Joe Staples
The thing that I like so much about it is that the work is super diverse. You know, I go from company to company and engage in these projects and to meet new people and see the struggles that they're going through and try and take the experiences that I've had and help them navigate where they're going well.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And what a two decade span to be in tech. There have been so many reinventions innovations and disruptive technologies within that space over the years that you've been working there. I'm sure that that has contributed to a really diverse toolkit of experiences at which to draw.
- Joe Staples
Yeah, technology has changed dramatically, as you mentioned, but marketing has changed dramatically over that time. The way you approach and engage with customers or prospects is just night and day. Different than what it was twenty or twenty five years ago, and so the need to adapt to those things is is critical but also fun because there's there's always new things to learn.
One thing I really like to ask guests is when we talk about empathy and connection at work, what is a personal story for you that emphasizes the importance of empathy and connection specifically in the workplace?
- Joe Staples
So I think, Liesel, I think as you think about all of this, it's important to recognize that the workplace isn't separate from our personal life, that those two are just intertwined and inseparable. And so, as I think about empathy, I think I learned that from my son, from one of our kids. We lived in Seattle for a number of years. And this particular son, I think, got picked on every single day that he went to junior high school.
- Joe Staples
And, you know, it was not super evident as he went through it. But I think it was it certainly was impactful. And then we moved to Utah and he flourished here, you know, just found the right friends and and all of those kinds of things. But while he was he was probably a senior in high school. My wife and I met a woman who her grandson went to the same school as our son and. The things she told us is she said that her grandson told her that she could go, that he could go three weeks at school without a single person ever saying hello to him, engaging with them, talking to him.
- Joe Staples
And she said, but the grandson told her that the one person that he always knew, if he passed in the hall or saw in a class that would say hello to him was our son. And, you know, I I thought about that and I thought, you know, what would our son have to have developed that that trait or understood that need if he wouldn't have gone through the challenges that he did earlier in junior high and and high school.
- Joe Staples
But I also thought, you know, I'd take that over him being the star of the basketball team any day if he would develop that kind of character. So it was a really important lesson for me of the need to kind of look out for the the team member or the person that that may be struggling. But then obviously empathy expands well beyond someone who's struggling and really is just do you take an interest in other people to make connections with other people or are you just looking out for yourself and what will benefit you?
- Joe Staples
And I think those distinctions are really, really important.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I love that story. Thank you for sharing that. If I could, I could feel a little bit of a catch in my throat, even as you said, because I one of my children, I have a son who is just on the precipice of middle school and has had a hard year with those dynamics of old school is rough. It is rough.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I feel when you said, like it's important to note that our work selves and our personal selves are there, not divisible. What I have observed is that that awareness signals a change in the workplace from when my parents probably were working or definitely my grandparents, where there is a sense of, you know, this is your home life, this is your work life, you really need to shut off that part of yourself in order to show up and get the job done.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Does that resonate with you? Do you feel like you have seen some of that movement in your lifetime of work in what is expected in a given office as to what you're allowed to bring to work?
- Joe Staples
Yeah, really good point. I think you're right on. I think that today's workplace, it it's you're able to talk about those things in in a much more profound way or more ready way than you were you rewind a couple of decades ago where it really was a bit more separate and distinct. But I also think a lot of it has to do with the individual. You know, my my dad worked in in the corporate world his whole life and based on his personality, he was just very engaging.
- Joe Staples
He still has those friendships that he had from, you know, 50 years ago that he developed at work. And I think a lot of that is how you approach your work. Do you see it as a task? You see it as a goal that needs to be accomplished, or do you see it as a collection of people who are engaged and connected together trying to accomplish something? And if you if you look at it through that people lens, I think I think everything changes.
- Joe Staples
All of a sudden you're just naturally interested in the life of that other person and what they're going through and both positive and negative.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I think that's a great point of. The individual and what they bring to the table into a given work environment, I mean, even as some of the cultural expectations around the accessibility of these conversations have changed, I still find in the consulting work I do in the coaching that the companies that are most able to successfully implement a strategy for cultivating empathy. What that stems from is usually the executive team or champions within the organization who really like this is in line with their heartbeat.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And they say this is the kind of person I am. This is the kind of company culture I want to cultivate.
- Joe Staples
Yeah, I think you're right. You know, the the culture needs to permeate throughout the company, but the tone gets set by that leadership team. They care about the people inside the business. Are they doing things to understand what those needs of those individuals are and then and then making changes to to help meet those needs? I'm reminded of a place that that one of our sons worked at a short time ago, and they had terrible health care benefits for for people who didn't live in the headquarters city.
- Joe Staples
And even though it was brought up a number of times, the company just didn't didn't recognize it or or didn't care. So if if the message gets sent that what you care about isn't what I care about, then, you know, that's a that's a culture that will quickly understand that and good people will move on.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. The lack of receptivity and feeling hurt. Well, and I mean, especially with what we're recording July 2021, the current labor market dynamics really. I mean, there's always a cost to people leaving in recruitment, rehiring, reputational loss, but especially as people are clawing back to full staffing and being able to keep and retain people, it takes on an extra measure of urgency, like, are you keeping your people because they have choices and they can leave if the culture is not life giving.
- Joe Staples
Agree? Yep, definitely agree. You know, just one other point on on empathy. I think sometimes it can be misunderstood. You know, our goal isn't to avoid disagreement in the workplace. The goal is we're going to disagree. How are we are we in a place? Do we have the kind of culture and connections and trust and empathy that allow us to go through those disagreements in good, healthy ways versus the counterproductive and toxic ways? And so I think that's where this culture of of empathy comes into play and really shows its worth
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. I, I, I talk with companies. They say you already have a de facto way of dealing with disruptive life events, of dealing with disagreements and in many places because because we don't actually train for this in our management programs, it's not a core of how we promote or analyze managers that, you know, people just have their bad habits or their personality, like default positions and ways of dealing with things that you know, that the way they work themselves out in practice as it becomes kind of.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Your your operating principles, do we shut down any disagreement? Do I shame someone for having a problem? You know, it's just getting in the way of productivity. And I found that a big, you know, part of getting to growth is being aware of those habits.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What is a time for you when building connection has felt really easy.
- Joe Staples
You know, I I think it's I think, you know, it probably goes to. And this I hope this doesn't sound wrong, but kind of when you're when you're in the battle together, it's when the connections have happened. You know, a lot of companies today promote cooperation with with other companies. I'm a competitive person. So I I never had a problem picking a competitor and saying we're going to go take market share from from that company. We're going to build marketing plans and branding plans.
- Joe Staples
And they're the they're the company that we think we can go succeed against and we can win against. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that kind of a competitive spirit. And so I've I've used that to our advantage. But I think that when your team then feels that, then all of a sudden they're not looking internally and saying, hey, that you're the enemy. They're looking externally and saying, we've got this other company that we're competing with and we're going to we're going to win against them.
- Joe Staples
Sometimes I think businesses can confuse some of these softer skills with being overall soft, and I think they can coexist. I think that you can use trust and empathy and connection internally, but externally use competitive juices to your advantage.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I read a turn of phrase that rang true recently. It was saying instead of calling them soft skills, we should call them human skills because that's much more representative of what they are and how they serve us in the very, very good.
- Joe Staples
You know, one other thing that that's interesting to me is how much time people invest in their their trade skills. So I'm a marketer and, you know, I'm just surrounded by marketing people who are trying to learn account based marketing and new digital marketing skills and search engine optimization skills. And then you look at how much time are you investing in? Let's call them human skills, leadership skills. And they look at you like. None, right? And those two don't they just don't match up because as I look at my own career and I think really the career of most executives, it's it's much more based on leadership skills than it is on how good of a marketer I am.
- Joe Staples
There's lots of people that are way better marketers than I am that I didn't didn't ever get to a C level position. So how they think they would get there without investing time into those skills doesn't make any sense.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I was just interviewing a CEO of a growing tech company and he was talking about his how his education framed him for some of what he's doing. And he studied both psychology and finance as an undergrad. And he said, you know, people people are always thinking that I lean into my finance skills a lot in the role that I have. And he said psychology always wins. You know, it's it's the people skills. It's knowing how to get the most out of a team and knowing who to promote and when.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
It's knowing who needs a break and who needs like a rousing, encouraging speech at that moment. And I like that just turn of phrase. Psychology always wins.
- Joe Staples
Yeah, and I, I don't think it gets taught certainly doesn't get taught at a university. And even when people start into their positions, nobody's really you know, the CMO isn't taking the junior marketer and saying, you know, let's let's talk about your leadership skills and in your human skills. Instead, they're taking them and saying, OK, you know, do you understand how to do this part of of your job? And it's much more of those technical skills.
- Joe Staples
Right. And that's I think that's one of the problems that people have when they continue to try and have their career progress. They hit a ceiling. And it really is not because they're not good marketers or finance people or salespeople. It's because they haven't developed the leadership skills. And that's that's the value that they're going to bring.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So it it doesn't happen in a formal way the way it could or should this equipping and human skills. How did you find throughout the course of your career that you continued to skill up in these important capacities?
- Joe Staples
Yeah, for me, it was because I was so interested in it. You know, if I if I had if I had the choice to read a book on the latest marketing skill or read a book on the leadership perspectives, I would always pick the latter. So it just came really natural for me just because of interest. So I in January of this year, I went back to school. I'm going to get a graduate degree in organizational leadership from Arizona State University.
Joe Staples
Most people look at me and go, no, what not? How come you're doing this? Because it's a commitment and takes time and costs money and all those kinds of things. But it is fascinating to me. And, you know, so I look at it and and say the the more I can understand leadership and and how to motivate people and how to engage with people, the the better I'm going to be at mentoring others and teaching those skills.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Absolutely. Well, in that posture of lifelong learning, it serves us in our homes and our relationships as we are members of a community and as we're members of a workplace.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We will return to the interview with Joe in just a moment, but I want to take a second to thank our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. As we said at the top of the episode, human skills are essential to business. Especially during the tumult and labor shortage of 2021, building connections of care is a competitive advantage. If you want to skill-up in empathy, Handle with Care Consulting has an offering to fit your needs. From keynote sessions to certificate programs to executive coaching, let us help you engage you people and show care when it matters most.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What are some times for you we're building connection has felt really hard. And then as a follow up, how you still pressed into the messiness and importance of building connection anyway.
- Joe Staples
Yeah, I, I think when it's hard is when it's forced, when it feels forced and. You know a lot, just about every company that that I engage with, they do some form of. Team building, and I'm not a big fan of it, I you know, I and I think the the reality of this set in for me, what would it be? Probably 15 years ago, I decided that this will be great. We will have for my team.
- Joe Staples
We're going to do a pretty large team. We'll do a team softball game, and then we'll have a barbecue after. And again, I love softball. So error number one was I took what I wanted to do and now projected that on 30 other people and said, here's here's what we're going to do. And we played this game and it was evident that there were some people there that had never. Played softball in their life, but with the three week notice that I gave them, my guess is they actually practiced to try and not look terrible, terrible, terrible, but they would rather have gone to the dentist and play this softball game.
- Joe Staples
I mean, it was just painful to them. And I can remember being at this game and looking and thinking, what have I done? Look what I just put these people through in an attempt to build team dynamics and help them feel more a part of the team. I have just done the exact opposite of that. And so from from that point on, I've really tried to shy away from from these team building activities where it's a force fit and you got to come.
- Joe Staples
The one team building event that I still love and that I still think works is so simple and it is eating together. Everybody has to eat and you go to any restaurant and you can find something that you love. And what it does is now all of a sudden you're actually getting to know each other. A softball game analogy. You know, the person on third base doesn't get to talk to the person in right field. You're not developing any connection that way.
- Joe Staples
But sit next to somebody at a dinner that you didn't know or a lunch that you didn't know before. And all of a sudden you found out that you went to the same school as you did, or he has the same number of kids that you do that are the same ages. And or even better, he's going he or she is going through some of the same problems you're going through now. You can create some connections.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, well, the again, the shared experience of eating and providing the space for conversation that isn't just about tasks to be accomplished. I like that. How what what are like some micro practices that you either formally instituted for yourself or just started doing regularly within the office as a leader to make sure that you stayed connected to your team and especially team members, that maybe you naturally didn't have as many affinity points with.
- Joe Staples
Yeah, so the team members that work directly for me, I always found that was quite a bit easier. The the challenge was, you know, if I had an organization of one hundred people and I was trying to to lead this entire organization, there may be three or four levels between me and that other person. How do I develop some of some of those connections? So I again, going back to my meal, they didn't think that I, I eat a lot.
- Joe Staples
That's not the point. Right. I would set up monthly lunches with newer team members. So it may be your. First day or it may be your third week, but you're you're a newer team member and we usually have eight or nine people in in the lunch and it accomplished two things. One is I got to know them, but they got to know each other because, you know, they may be working on on different teams. And so I always I always felt that that was useful when the other one that we did, I worked for a company called Novell in kind of the heyday of of the tech scene for them anyway.
- Joe Staples
And we did something that was where we took executives and had them work on Frontalot in front line jobs, customer service jobs for a day. Yeah, it wasn't really long, but I, I still have a picture of of the the general counsel for for the company, very senior leader on the phone, taken from our service complaint calls. And you think about empathy, they came away from that, recognizing that this these jobs aren't that easy. Right.
- Joe Staples
And number two, I certainly couldn't couldn't do it. And now all of a sudden, they thought about what those jobs were a bit differently.
- Joe Staples
One of the other practices that I did for a number of years is once a year I would go work a really small trade show where we had a little bitty booth by 10 booth, because for the event staff, that was the worst. An event that you go to where you have a big, you know, 30 by 30 booth and you have speaking engagements.
- Joe Staples
That's fun and exciting in the back corner of the of the trade show floor in this little booth. And you're trying to get people to talk to you. So once a year, I would sign up and I would go work those booths just to remind myself what the people on that event staff did and how hard it was. It was it kept me kept me aware
– Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
If you had like a magic wand that you could wave to give them an awareness about empathy or a new sort of perspective, what what capacity would you give them or what words of wisdom would you want to impart for them to take away?
- Joe Staples
My experience is people love to be challenged. They may not say that. They may think, no, I'd rather just kind of sit here and do my job and go home every day and and do the other things that I love to do. But people love to have somebody show confidence enough in them to come to them and say, hey, we have this brand new project. Even if you say, I don't I don't think you even know much about it, but I want you to learn and I want you to lead it.
- Joe Staples
And I think that just causes people to rise to the occasion,
– Joe Staples
I think it works when you have a star performer and when you have a a poor performer, because I think even with a poor performer, you can come to them and say, you know what, I can see that you're struggling in this area. I believe you can do this. So let's talk about what that means. And, you know, why are you struggling and what can I do to help you?
- Joe Staples
Those are the kinds of connections that cause people to go, wow, like you really you really do care about me and want me to succeed. And then together, you figure that out if if the person because most of the time the employee knows they're struggling. You're not telling them anything they don't know. But if they feel that you want to help them not struggle, that's so different. Then I'm struggling and you don't really care. The only thing you care is that the work isn't getting done or our results are not where they should be.
- Joe Staples
You only care about the results. You don't care about me. You just sent a very different message. Wouldn't you sit down with that person and say, look, let's talk about why you're having a tough time with this, because I really think you can do this. This is right. This is you're capable of this.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. Simon Sinek talks about, you know, he had like a little micro training video module, but he talked about the importance of both empathy and curiosity of a manager at that moment. And it's a different way of phrasing some of what you said to to sit down. And it's you know, it is in one part about the numbers or the metrics or the performance, but it's also that measure of curiosity, of saying there's probably more of a story that's going on right now.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And, you know, can we can we engage at that level that can really signal something powerful.
- Joe Staples
Right. And if you don't have that conversation, you may never know that. Yeah, I'm just distracted because, you know, two months ago, my dad was diagnosed with with cancer, just struggling to keep my. Wits about me, right? You never know that if you don't engage and have those conversations.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, it can make you draw all of those sideways conclusions. Is this person just lazy or unmotivated or are they looking at job somewhere else and function off of those unvalidated assumptions? They can really lead us away when it could be exactly what you said. You know, I'm I'm really distracted because my dad's been in the hospital for the last three months, and that's hard.
- Joe Staples
Yeah. You know, the other thing I'd love to hear your perspective. The the connection between empathy and trust, I think is is pretty fascinating.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I it's interesting because as I as I train companies, as I coach different teams, there's some people that they they love this movement towards empathy and connection in the workplace. And, you know, it's it's close to their heart beat. They want more of it. And then, you know, I definitely interact with people that it feels like just one more demand, like somebody need me to be their counselor. And do you know all of these, like, large assumptions about what it's going to take from them to have to get into more of the human side of interacting with their people?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And one thing that I talk about is, you know, those those moments where you're getting more of the story, where someone is sharing both, you know, a really good thing that's happened, you know, a new baby, those a new marriage, the celebrations and also some of the hard stuff, you know, my my child is really sick and we don't know what the test results are going to be, that those moments, even moments a little bit like what you said, moments of that can feel like confrontation.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
“You know, you're you're not cultivating a place where it is safe for me to express who I am as a Black woman.” You know, those those moments that can feel hard. They're actually depending on how you navigate them. They are invitations to much deeper connection, you know, that like vulnerability as we can move into those places with better habits, better ways of connecting. It's a tremendous moment for trust. And trust is the foundation. Google did this widespread study of what is the defining characteristic of high performing teams and what they came away.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
You know, they're they're finding was the number one characteristic was psychological safety people where they felt like they could bring their humanness there. And whether you term it psychological safety or trust, you know, that's the place where you can have true like creativity and innovation and people who say, you know what, through the ups and downs, I want to stay with this company because they see me. And so that connection between empathy and trust and what can flourish out of that, I really encourage people to see see these moments as opportunities to really cultivate some beautiful things within your organization.
- Joe Staples
Wow. Whoa. Really well said. I think you make a number of great points there. And, you know, the the more sincere somebody can be in that caring and concern and understanding, the better it is. Absolutely. The employees definitely recognize when it's when it's forced. You know, when I come and I say, how are you? I know you and you tell me you're terrible. And I go, Yeah, that's too bad. You know, that goes OK.
- Joe Staples
So results of the and you kind of jump over there they go. You don't really care about me, right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I am. I view people as on a continuum of this skill set because it is a skill set and everybody can get better. There's some people who are naturally much better at it. But occasionally I use the illustration of bowling like I in my training. I'm going to give you a tip like you don't want to end up in the gutter. And there are some things that we instinctually do. Well, just it's it's always darkest before the you know, these tired cliches are just telling people to buck up and that are really going to be off-putting.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So let's make sure you don't do those things. And then, you know, even even if it feels like a little bit of going through the motions at first, you know, hopefully as you as you build and you see that connection and you get better and you get more comfortable within the skill set, just like anything, you know, whether it's training in a new capacity with technological platform or training for a new skill in our bodies. You know, when I start shooting layups, I'm not super good at it when I start learning.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
But the more I do it, the better I can get. And empathy is like that. What we're moving towards is like sincere, wholehearted engagement. But even if we just start with you not saying the same stupid stuff that you used to say and asking how they're doing and then pausing because, you know, you're supposed to pause and nodding because, you know, you're supposed to not like that.
- Joe Staples
Still not having softball team building activity.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. You know, we're all learning along the way
- Joe Staples
But but the summary point to what you're saying here is for anybody listening, you can learn empathy. It's not something that somebody should go. You know, I'm not an empathetic. So I'm just going to stay the way I am.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
That's not true. You can learn the skill of being empathetic.
- Joe Staples
These are skills worth working on. These are things that every middle manager, executive and team member should invest in. Is these human skills, these leadership skills. Yes. You've got trade skills that you need to keep current with.
- Joe Staples
But to to have a fulfilling career, to have a career that you enjoy is really about can you have an impact on other people? I mean, this isn't about us as much. It is as it is about. Can I be the person that, you know, 15 years from now, somebody looks back and says, and I hope I loved it at that company because I worked with so-and-so or because I was managed by so-and-so. And I those people interactions are they're just so important.
- Joe Staples
And if they're that important, we should invest in learning how to be the best that we can at them.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Couldn't agree more. Thank you, Joe.
- Joe Staples
Thank you, this was a lot of fun.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Joe…
OUTRO
There's an awakening happening in corporations and people are now choosing their jobs based on values. And that will force organizations who aren't already inclined to that thinking to really start rethinking their approach to caring for their people and the beautiful thing.
NEW INTRO
Today, we talk about the awakening that is happening in the workforce as a result of COVID, change, and choice. How workers are choosing jobs based on values and what top leaders are doing to welcome and nurture the whole person at work.
And I am excited to have both a colleague and a friend on the show as a guest: Tegan Trovato is the Founder of Bright Arrow, a premiere Executive and Team Coaching firm supporting clients nationally.
Tegan is an HR industry veteran specializing in Talent Acquisition, Talent Development, and Organizational Learning. She has served as an executive or leadership team member for companies like Levi Strauss, Zynga, Xerox and Cielo.
At Bright Arrow, she and her team offer executive coaching, leadership team coaching, and group workshops. All of Bright Arrow’s coaches value authenticity, confidence, courage, growth, and leadership and make these values a priority in every interaction.
Tegan is also the is wife to Brian (a fellow entrepreneur), mommy to Athena (who is really, really bute), and mom to her two fur babies - senior kitties Pascal and Dedier (pronounced D.D.A).
She loves nature and we began our conversation hearing about her recent break from work here in the Indiana summer.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I would love to hear some of your favorite things that you've gotten a chance to do on your staycation so far.
- Tegan Trovato
Oh, you know, just being outside and my husband and Athena and I all being together as a family is everything, because with the pandemic, we still don't have child care yet. We do have someone starting soon. But we've just been like ships passing in the night, just handing Athena off for for one of us, one entrepreneur to have a meeting and the other one goes and takes care of her and then we switch off again throughout the day.
- Tegan Trovato
So just being together has been and I don't even know what the word is, heart filling.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Have you have you gotten a chance to eat some good food? Are you finding your being outside a lot? It's been raining and muggy that you know,
- Tegan Trovato
That doesn't stop us. I'm from the South, from the real South where it is always rainy and muggy and we just go do your thing anyway. So, no, that hasn't stopped us. And there's been enough breaks in the rain and we've spent a ton of time. Yeah. Walking on the trail and jogging and setting up the little kiddie pool outside for her.
- Tegan Trovato
So, yeah, that's been that's part of what nourishes me is being outside and and yes. Eating healthy food. So we always eat relatively healthy, but we've been doing a little more of the salads because we've had time and all that good stuff so.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, and who wants to be slaving over their oven or stovetop too much in the high heat of summer? The salad is a great option.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
One of the things I would love to talk with you about is how you've seen the need for empathy grow and change specifically over the last year and a half within your coaching practice. Give us a little bit of a 10000 foot view of what your typical client looks like.
- Tegan Trovato
Hmm. Thank you for asking that. It does help set the stage a little bit for who is seeing what inside of the businesses and from where they're seeing this all unfold. Right. So the clients that we typically work with at Right Arrow are executives. So VPs and above inside the organization, they tend to be very driven, pretty holistic leaders, meaning they do want for their employees to feel good and be healthy and often at their own peril. Right.
- Tegan Trovato
So they're not often not taking care of themselves and trying to pour out for others. The organizations they work for tend to be in either hypergrowth or undergoing major change.
- Tegan Trovato
And that's often why we're brought in is to act as a support mechanism. And sometimes when it's a hypergrowth situation to help the leaders stay on track with the organization's growth so that as the leaders that got the company to where it is, they may also be the leaders that get them to the next growth level.
- Tegan Trovato
Right. Everyone has to grow in tandem with the organization itself. So so we tend to be working with leaders that have been working really hard already. And now with the pandemic, it just folded in multiple other layers.
- Tegan Trovato
On top of that,
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What is the biggest change that you experienced in in the presenting needs of your average client as a result of COVID? And granted, like every one story is not every story, but is there a common thread that runs through?
- Tegan Trovato
There is a common thread. There's a few common threads that run through. And I have a lot of thoughts on this. So don't make me wonder too, too far afield. But there's a few things that come to mind when you ask that question. I think, one, the first thing we're seeing is that everything that existed before the pandemic was magnified. Right. So anything that was already a little out of balance was certainly out of balance during the pandemic.
- Tegan Trovato
And so that's a major change we saw in some of those things are not having great boundaries when working at home. You know, we worked with a lot of leadership teams that were already distributed across the U.S. and working from home.
- Tegan Trovato
So that became magnified, not having great access or balance when it comes to time with family because they're feeling overstretched at work. That became magnified.
- Tegan Trovato
What is newer is the need for attentiveness to the humanness of the employee population, so great leaders already had some sense of wanting to care for their people.
- Tegan Trovato
And I would say that characterizes the leaders we work with. What changed, though, is that we we entered into this collective suffering together during the pandemic.
- Tegan Trovato
So we went from as leaders needing to care for people in pockets of intensity, right, so an employee's parent may pass away or their child, you know, an employee's child might be struggling with something at home and a leader could offer up a little extra care in those times. What changed during the pandemic is that the leaders themselves were suffering in tandem with their employee population and suffering, meaning we're not sure how to balance everything.
- Tegan Trovato
We're not sure if it's safe to go out in public, to go to work, to vaccinate our children, to not vaccinate don't vaccinate ourselves, to not vaccinate ourselves. Right. I mean, you name it, that list is so extensive.
- Tegan Trovato
And in the meantime, also trying to a lot of employees and leaders trying to manage their children's schooling while also working and selling and managing new product launches. I mean, it was just exponentially difficult. And so that led to suffering.
- Tegan Trovato
It's leading to exhaustion. And so I think that it's while it's tough that everyone was sort of suffering together, it has also created this really amazing opportunity to feel more connected than ever before because we share that suffering.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I appreciate the emphasis on the opportunity for connection that is possible, because I think sometimes when we talk about providing support for the humanness of the workplace for a certain type of leader or manager, that feels like one more ask. Like, I can't believe that you're asking me to have to do that to, you know, to be somebody is like there's all sorts of ways that derisive sentiment can be expressed, like to be somebody's counselor or their nursemaid or their mom.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
It can be couched very much in the negative. What is this going to take from me or for me, instead of seeing it as really such a deep potential for connection and trust and the, you know, trust, vulnerability, connection, that's the foundation for creativity, for innovation, for thriving cultures that people don't want to leave.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And if we're only experiencing that moment as a pain point, it's going to cause us to want to, like, hold back, you know, not fully engage instead of be like, no, this is these are the deep waters that lead to all that good stuff that we want to write about in our Harvard business reviews.
- Tegan Trovato
That's right. Well, you know, a colleague of mine, Sarah Martin of Welcoa, that's their organization, helps to create workplace wellness. So they work with companies of all sizes to create wellness programming, essentially, and whole employees. She and I were talking the other day and she said, you know, what is about to happen? And most of their clients know this. What's about to happen is that the future workforce over the next year plus is going to ask during their interview process, what did you do during the pandemic to take care of your employees?
- Tegan Trovato
Mm hmm. It's now going to be a screening question, right. For, you know, do I even want to work here?
- Tegan Trovato
So to your point, there used to be an option. I think it used to feel much more optional for leaders to say, OK, that's too far. I don't want to have to do that much caring or that being that concerned with someone's personal well-being. I think that it became less of an option through the pandemic.
- Tegan Trovato
And now the question is how optional do we want to make it again when we go back to sort of business as usual air quotes. Right, right. So we're in a really interesting time when it comes to that and. You know, and I do want to say I think only other leaders will ever understand how hard it is to lead. And to lead well, and I get why a lot of not a lot, but a good percentage of leaders will say, no, that's not my job, making sure someone feels good at work.
- Tegan Trovato
It's not my job that's up to them. And some of that is totally true. It really is up to us also as employees to want to feel good and to experience the goodness around us. It's a mindset thing, right? But that's only a part of it. So I get why leaders feel taxed in that, but it's really no longer optional. So I think the future leader profile looks very different going forward than we're used to.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I would love to hear some of the things that you found when you are confronted in your coaching practice with some of that that resistance is is this my job? Is this what I need to do? What have you found has been most effective in guiding those conversations and those people to their own journey of meaningful growth in these leadership capacities?
- Tegan Trovato
What a great question. It's a resistance was a key word in your question. And, you know, I always like to say and it's a common, common knowledge, maybe more for coaches than in the rest of the world. But impatient resistance, rather, is either fear, impatience or ego.
- Tegan Trovato
Those are the three causes of resistance. So when I feel someone resisting the call of their employee population for support, whatever that may look like is a big bucket right now.
- Tegan Trovato
We'll explore which one of those things it might be. And most often it is a little bit of impatience. I can't do it that fast or that much. It's very seldom ego right now, it's truly very seldom ego. It is most often fear based. When we really get down to the core of it, executives, leaders really of every level are afraid they're not going to get it right.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Hmm.
- Tegan Trovato
And if we really peel this all the way back, Liesel, most of us could say we aren't perfect at this at home. I would say that I am you know, I'm still always growing and how I emotionally show up in my household. And so if we don't feel like we've nailed it at home and most of us wouldn't dare say that, right. I'm 100 percent awesome at my emotional management and and taking emotional cues and tending to the people around me.
- Tegan Trovato
I'm awesome. So we can't say that at home then. We certainly wouldn't probably venture to say we're nailing that at work and leaders strive to be great. It's part of why they're in their seat. They want to be good at what they do. And so I think when it comes down to empathy at work, tending to that human factor at work, it's a big, messy piece of work. And leaders, most of us kind of are humble in that we know we're not maybe one hundred percent at that yet and we'll never be you.
- Tegan Trovato
And I know that right will never be 100 percent. But I think it's fear that keeps writers from feeling super inclined to saying, yes, yes, yes, on the front of just taking care of the human needs of employees.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. Well, and I hear within that also the dimensions of, you know, when we talk about our home lives or just our personal spheres of how we support people or receive support so many times, that's so informed by our own personally contextualized experience. You know, what were the expectations of my household of origin and how, you know, emotion was expressed or not was I told all the time that big boys don't cry or to stop whining or the context that sometimes I hear within the coaching I do of, you know, people who were vulnerable when they were 19 years old and their first relationship.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And they felt so burned and exposed and they made this this agreement like, I'm never going to go there again.
- Tegan Trovato
Yes.
- Tegan Trovato
And I love that you brought up this personalization of that employee experience as a leader. That's so important. And we talk about this now when we are, you know, kind of behind the scenes discussing diversity, equity, inclusion, like my coaches and I just had a whole, like, focus session on this to try to think about what tools we need, what education materials, what we just want to be ready to provide clients who are venturing into that, you know, trying to be more inclusive leaders.
- Tegan Trovato
And one of the things we kept landing on was for a leader to be ready to fully show up for their employee population. They had to they have to have personalized the experiences their employees are having. And what I mean by that is, you know, you and I may not be able to identify with the exact same stories, but if we can identify with the human feeling we may be having at work and personalize that, somehow we feel much more inclined to support.
- Tegan Trovato
So, for example, just to characterize this, there was a study done that demonstrated that CEOs who have diversity, equity, inclusion on their agenda as executives, a high percentage of them have daughters. Hmm. So they they're able to personalize the need for inclusive at work because they can imagine their own daughter at work, not not getting equal pay, not getting the promotion, not being heard in a meeting, you name it. And that is true across all of our initiatives at work when it comes to this human engagement.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I resonate with that deeply. I would love to hear what is it time that you have found yourself needing to engage with that sort of capacity for imagination and personalization in an encounter where you're like, I, I need to extend myself to to connect here?
- Tegan Trovato
Mm hmm. I'll give you a really current one. You know, I will say we have several coaches that are in community right now. And what I mean by that is, you know, we have. You know, about a dozen or so coaches who will work with our clients, at Bright Arrow, and I've been really deliberate about making sure that our coach population is very diverse and that our clients then get to meet with a diverse slate of coaches, which will bring different perspectives from their own.
- Tegan Trovato
I mean, there's just a ton of rich reasons why this is important, and I just scratch the surface of those tons of reasons. But in a meeting we had my coaches and I get together once a month for some community and continuing education. One of our coaches was talking about an inclusive party training that he had created, and he is a Black coach who felt very impassioned by this. And he built this gorgeous program and then has not launched it.
- Tegan Trovato
And when I sit in my chair, I'm going, I build a program, you sure as hell believe I'm going to launch it, right? I put all that time into it, all that hard, all the intellectual energy, and it's going to launch. But where his path was different is that he's also dealing with all the traumas he's experienced as a Black leader in corporate America. He's inspired by having to carry extra weight. That's not his as a black man in a white world.
- Tegan Trovato
So when it came time for him to launch this program, he had already wrung out his soul and had to relive all of his own personal in preparation to then facilitate rooms full of white people and help them understand their role in creating inclusive leadership. And I don't even as I'm telling the story, I recognize I don't even have all the right language to intimate what this man is feeling. And so it was my it has been and continues to be my job to be aware of that lack of full understanding, but try really hard to understand even better and to do what I can to support him as he launches that.
- Tegan Trovato
Now, all of the coaches are already decided we are all coming together. We're going to help him get what he needs in terms of support so we can lift this program because it's gorgeous. It's an amazing program. But I think that's a very recent example for me of. Really having to stretch my own understanding, right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, and if you had not engaged in that process, if you had only been looking through, you know, wow, what would keep me from launching a program? You know, I I'm not lazy. I would launch this program, you know, did he just run out of there all kinds of ways that you could backfill the answer with assumptions about him or reasons why that wouldn't be true and that would really like distract you. And so that important pause to not and, you know, we're so often making those like intuitive leaps to backfill and how empathy ask for a little bit more of a pause and some humility of saying, oh, yeah, my my life experience is different.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
My answer might not be congruent with what's really going on here.
- Tegan Trovato
Yes. And a key to that. And you just prompted this. Ah, thank you. I didn't assume any of that back story I had. I asked. Right. So he shared that it was reliving trauma. He shared the exhaustion he was feeling. Wow. The assumptions I could have made and filled story in. They're right because and this is exemplified by well, if I built a program, I would just launch the thing. Right. That would be such an asinine place from which to fill in the details for this man.
- Tegan Trovato
So the key was we were in community. We were curious. We had zero judgment. We worked hard to take his perspective and understand his lived experience. And with that comes a whole lot of needing to be humble. Right, and not making those assumptions. So thanks for prompting that very important detail about how we arrived at his story together.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I would love to hear I'm struck that in your role as a coach. It's it's different than being a manager. It's both like coming alongside sometimes, you know, leading a little ahead. But what have been some of the most important skills of connection and empathy that you have felt you needed to grow in in the last year and a half for myself?
- Tegan Trovato
Yes. Mm hmm. Actually, you know, empathy was one of them. And I took your training because of that,
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Which you were such a pleasant participant. Why, thank you. Thank you for trying to do my part. Yes.
- Tegan Trovato
But, you know, it's funny because I would say as a coach, if we're worth our weight in salt, we probably have rather advanced empathy skills from the from the average person. Right. Because we have to be in our empathy with clients and compassion in order to make the space they need to figure out their story.
- Tegan Trovato
Right. So we have to take their perspective, practice, non-judgment, recognize when they're experiencing emotion
- Liesel Mindrebo MertesAnd a judgy coach is a jerk.
- Tegan Trovato
Oh, you should fire them ASAP, but also not just recognizing their own emotion, but helping them learn to communicate it if they need that help and vice versa, communicating what comes up for us as we experience their story.
- Tegan Trovato
However, what I knew was going into this pandemic, what we were in the middle of it, I think when I took your training, I was curious if my concerns myself concept of empathy was really right or not right. So I had never taken a class on empathy.
- Tegan Trovato
I've read about the core emotion of it. So I think that that was a place I went. I think empathy and compassion were to places where I went deeper. So empathy is that recognizing emotion and trying to take other's perspective. This is for listeners. I know you know this, but compassion.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
No, I like it. Keep going.
- Tegan Trovato
Compassion is also empathy sort of can be a foundation of that. Compassion is then taking action to try to alleviate the suffering of others. And I think that my my practice over this past year and ongoing is recognizing when to exercise one over the other and how to do it. Well.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And tell me more.
- Tegan Trovato
I think what I learned, I'll just share a little about what I learned in your course, which I thought was really helpful, is first just being very careful with the empathy space not to bring our own story in when someone's suffering, which is a really tempting right. For instance. I lost both of my parents have passed, and I'm pretty young for that to have happened. And both of them died rather tragically. And when I experienced someone else going through that, do you know how tempting it is?
- Tegan Trovato
I know what you're going through. I lost my parents, too. And and then once you start down that path, details want to start spilling out. Right. That is not helpful when someone really needs empathy. And I think that that is certainly not something I would ever do in my coaching practice, but in my personal life, that could easily I could easily say that would be a tendency I would have had. And so going deeper on that level of practicing empathy and really making it a hundred percent about the other person.
- Tegan Trovato
Was a tune up for me, like that was a level up the compassion piece, the reason there's growth there for me and maybe for others is that we can feel compassion and wish for their suffering to end.
- Tegan Trovato
But it cannot be our responsibility that we're always taking action for everyone. Right. That leads to compassion fatigue and the beauty of me being on that journey, as I can then see that going on for the leaders I'm in community with or coaching, because that that was very much what was happening through the pandemic as executives and leaders were just they were just running around with buckets of water, trying to put out all the fires.
- Tegan Trovato
And meanwhile, they had their own stuff they needed to attend to as humans through this rather traumatic time everyone's in. And so there it was easier for me because I'm in the middle of that work to have conversations with them about, like, OK. Which pieces can you have compassion for and wish for the ending of suffering, but know that it may not be your job to take action, right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah. I appreciate you sharing in that journey of discovery. And, you know, it's ongoing and the very real pressures of compassion, fatigue of where do I need to take action? Where do I need to actually claim my rest in this space? Because there's a little bit of a lie that gets perpetuated in in leadership, in dimensions of capitalism, the sense of like we have to be always active and always producing and always caring.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And, and another phrase that I've I've been using lately that has found traction is change fatigue, especially as we are, you know, stop start, two steps forward, one step back out of the pandemic is there's a lot of organizational change that's going on that people are suddenly having to absorb, pivot within, decide if they're going with it or making a stand against it.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
And that's that's its own additional layer on top of what can make it difficult to show up in ways that really manifest our values.
- Tegan Trovato
Absolutely. And that's a good example of something that's been happening in organizations before the pandemic that's been magnified. Right, right.
- Tegan Trovato
Change fatigue is very much I mean, it could just be the tagline for corporate America. We're always the only thing that's the same as everything changes. I mean, there's all kinds of one liners about this. And yes, it is on steroids right now. It absolutely is.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Sometimes I get a question that I'd love to have your thoughts on, because I imagine that you're equipping your clients with guidance in this, which is OK. I am not the top leader at my organization, but I really do want to see more empathy, more of a culture of care. How do I move that conversation along? How do I, within the constraints of my position, like become an advocate for the change I want to see?
- Tegan Trovato
Oh, I love this question so much. What immediately came up for me is the first opportunity for leaders at any level is to embody empathy within your own leadership station first. So work hard to sort of become the poster child of an empathetic leader and and through that, it's not from a place of ego, it's from a place of practice, because empathy is a practice. It's an emotion, but it's also a practice. And so I think when leaders can just kind of get their own backyard straightened out first, it creates the credibility that's helpful to lead that further, that language or that narrative further in the organization.
- Tegan Trovato
Now, you don't like let's not wait for perfect because perfect doesn't exist. Right. So be measured in what you think you need to do before you have that conversation. But I think that's the first piece.
- Tegan Trovato
I think the second piece that's important is there is a lot of research out there now which if you follow Liesel, you will see a lot of this in her work that demonstrates the business impact of empathy at work. And, and it is, as leaders, always important that we can say, look, this will save us time or money or help us work better or produce faster, that's the truth.
- Tegan Trovato
We need some of that included in our narrative that doesn't need to be the predominant part of our narrative, but it doesn't hurt if we want to grease the wheels to get our get the attention that that initiative would need to be able to also tie it to business outcomes.
- Tegan Trovato
But also, I think the third thought that comes up for me here is that this is a great time to bring that up.
- Tegan Trovato
We are on the heels of having lived something that proved the need for empathy and care at work. And employees are going to be asking in that interview question in the future, OK, what did your company do? Why should I work here? You take care of me if something happens in the world again, can I trust you?
- Tegan Trovato
So I think even bringing up that question and helping your organization focus on what's coming, that also would help grease the wheels a little bit, right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I love the beginning point of embodying the change you want to see.
- Tegan Trovato
I feel for the leaders who are trying to figure this out, because it is it can feel like a really big lift, but I am humbled, as I'm sure many of these leaders are, by the fact that we are in the midst of something really wonderful happening, I think. I really do.
- Tegan Trovato
There's an awakening happening in corporations and people are now choosing their jobs based on values. And that will force organizations who aren't already inclined to that thinking to really start rethinking their approach to caring for their people and the beautiful thing.
- Tegan Trovato
So that's part of why I say it's time. Now is a great time for you to get brave and and just start asking, you know, the questions that are empowering to your organization. Like, what can it look like if we did better at X or Y, we could do better at X? Or could I take the lead on putting putting together a focus group on the topic of caring for employees with H.R. right now is a great time to to put your hand up for that stuff.
- Tegan Trovato
So.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Right. Well, and again, I love coming back to the focus on the the positive accrual that can come out of this.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Do you have a story or two that you can share in some of the clients you've worked with who have been on their own growth journey where they've come back and been like, wow, you know, this is this is how my team has changed. This is how I've grown that I feel like success and progress stories as a result of growing in these capacities?
- Tegan Trovato
This awesome leader who is he's a super people developer. I've been working with him for years and just kind of watched him rise through the ranks of his executive space. And he, like many people, transitioned out of his individual contributor role where he was a rock star at his job.
- Tegan Trovato
And then all of a sudden, like most of us, got dropped into a leadership role with 20 people. All of a sudden he was managing and no education in between. This is most leaders story, right? You're great at your job. And then you're going to manage a bunch of people, you know, good luck. Yeah. So his struggle was, why don't people just see what I see? Like, why won't they just do what I say?
- Tegan Trovato
And there was this new learning.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Sounds like the parental struggle as well. Why would I stay the course?
- Tegan Trovato
And it is actually very much a parallel. But there is this level of again, it's trust building. It's just giving people the tools they need to do their best work. And when he was able to pivot from telling to asking. The right questions, everything started to flow for him, and that's part of the human element, too, right, of just caring about the fact that people are getting stuck because, again, they're either afraid or there's not enough trust.
- Tegan Trovato
And that comes back to relationship. And just OK, intellectually, if you believe in your team and they're not moving, there's something underneath that and that's usually relationship oriented.
- Tegan Trovato
And there were definitely times earlier in that work where I was not at all thinking about relationship because for me the work was rewarding. So of course, everyone else would just be rewarded by getting in there, doing the work right. No, that's not how it works. These are where humans, right, and so I, of course, wasn't tending to my own human needs in that process and by proxy wasn't tending to the needs of others.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, my company, Handle with Care Consulting. Cultivating care, building empathy, valuing the whole person at work is essential work that has never been more important. Let Handle with Care Consulting help you skill up in empathy. With keynotes, empathy in leadership certificate programs, and coaching options, we have what it takes for you to grow in care. Come and journey with us to building up empathy at work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
If you could wave a magic wand and for all the leaders you work with, get them to like and at a deep, like, bone, soulish level, understand or like have an understanding or change behavior, whatever connects.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
What would you say is just essential across the board. Hmm.
- Tegan Trovato
I'll lead with the headline and then I'll unpack it a little bit, what came to mind for me was if we could just start caring for each other at work the way we care for family. We would be on a completely different track really fast. And. The reason I think that's becoming possible and necessary is we spent, I don't know, the last 15 years talking about work life balance and then it became work life integration and then it became, I don't want to talk about it.
- Tegan Trovato
Right. People, people, people's reactions to that idea are so triggering because it is so hard to tell where the boundaries and lines are now. Work has just permeated our personal lives and vice versa. We're having to fit our personal lives in around work, doctors appointments, soccer games, weekend stuff. I mean, you name it. I think the truth is that there is very little separation now, but intellectually, we're still trying to tell ourselves that it must be separate.
- Tegan Trovato
So I think that we're still working on getting clear on the fact that this is what it is now like work and life out of fabric, they're so interwoven and so behaving with our co-workers, like their health, well-being, emotional existence isn't part of our job is amiss. Right?
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, or like its just an inconvenience that gets in the way of work.
- Tegan Trovato
Yeah. Or just thinking we still have an excuse to be like, no, it's work. Well, yeah, no, that's outmoded. That's actually not true anymore. Yeah.
- Tegan Trovato
So I think that there is a really beautiful opportunity right now for us to just, you know, stop being so worried about overstepping and in learning to offer care and making it an option for people to take advantage. I wouldn't want to force ourselves on people, for goodness sakes.
- Tegan Trovato
But, you know, when someone's struggling or you or you can tell they're having an emotional reaction, developing the skills we need to be a container is it's very much what's on the horizon.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Yeah, I love that. Is there any question that you wish I would have asked you that I didn't ask you?
- Tegan Trovato
You know, I think there's a question around my personal experience with empathy and why. Why, what I've experienced that makes it matter to me yet, because let me let me ask you, I know that this as a personal connection for you and empathy and why it matters.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Tell me a little bit more.
- Tegan Trovato
Years ago, before I started my practice, I went through my own personal trauma is the word I would use to describe it. So sparing all the details, I will say that I went from having a super career high moving across the country to accept this really exciting job, getting married. And the week of my marriage, my mother died tragically and unexpectedly and I had to go back to work within a couple of weeks, like all good corporate citizens have to do.
- Tegan Trovato
And I was a mess. Well, you know, I thought I had it together and I was pouring myself into work as a coping mechanism, which was a habit of mine. But I wasn't doing OK, you know, and I was new in my job. I had just moved to another state halfway across the country. I didn't know anyone. So I had almost I have really had no support systems other than my poor husband, new husband, new marriage.
- Tegan Trovato
So I think my experience of that was I found work to be such a cold place through that experience. And, you know, I was because of that, able to look back and question my own leadership over the years of how kind of leader was I before I struggled myself, when it came to caring for others who were going through really tough personal life circumstances. So. I you know, it's easy for me to look back and criticize the people I was working with and for and, you know, that lack of care, but really I found more empathy for them as I reflect.
- Tegan Trovato
But that's because I've had to do my own thinking around. OK, what does it look like for leaders to do a better job then? And what do I need to develop in myself so that I'm living and demonstrating, embodying that for the clients I work with, for the people I lead, so that I'm modeling that. But it started from a place of not having it myself, you know. So I think the workplace is really naturally the way it's built is devoid of empathy and humanness, it is our job as the humans who comprise the company to bring that into the culture.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
I love that. Thank you for sharing that a hard season that really, you know, allows you to identify with the clients that you help and be a part of creating something that is more human and more life affirming. And that's not to put like some easy, pretty bow over a hard experience. But if there is a way to use something which is just crappy and how hard in your first week of marriage and a brand new job, but to be able to use that to be of service to others is a beautiful thing.
- Tegan Trovato
There is purpose in everything. Sometimes it just takes a little while for us to get clear on what that purpose is right after a hard time. So I totally agree sometimes.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Sometimes it takes some dark night of the soul before we can come to that moment.
- Tegan Trovato
Look, it gives us grit as leaders. It really does. And credibility and connection to others when we get to those things.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
So if if the last year and a half has been anything, it is a great leveler of some common experience.
- Tegan Trovato
Indeed. Indeed.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, thank you, my friend. Anything else you'd like to add before I stop?
- Tegan Trovato
No, I mean, this has just been a real pleasure and I'm just excited to hear what listeners might take away from this. And I just am really proud and humbled to work with leaders who are keen to do more of this and to create a more human workplace. And I would say there a majority. Yeah, people I've come into contact with. So I'm excited about what's what's ahead for all of us.
- Liesel Mindrebo Mertes
Well, and if some of those leaders are listening and they think, wow, Bright Arrow sounds awesome, I'd like to find out more what is the best way for them to do that?
- Tegan Trovato
Check out our website. And there's a contact form there, which is www.brightarrowcoaching.com and it's really easy to find me on LinkedIn as well.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Tegan…
OUTRO
Learn more about Tegan Trovato and her coaching work here: https://www.brightarrowcoaching.com/
But at the end of it, you know, you can't be listening to the reality. It can't be you can't be talking about how fantastic things are when things don't feel fantastic because then you lose all credibility and that's what people want. I think in leadership these days.
I can get really snarky when technology is not working well for me…just ask my family. Chromecast under functioning, the link refusing to load. All of it can seem like a lot. But the biggest frustrations come when the technology that I need for work isn’t WORKING. So, when I call the support desk, I am bringing a lot to that interaction.
My guest today is Nick Smarelli, he is the CEO of GadellNet Consulting and a big part of what his team does is troubleshoot those complex, frustrating tech calls. Nick is talking today about how he keeps his staff engaged, supporting their well-being in the midst of a pandemic, giving them what they need so they can give the customers what they need.
Nick is open, insightful, and has great tips for anyone who is leading through a time of crisis and I anticipate that you will get as much out of the interaction as I did!
First, a little bit more about Nick. Nick joined GadellNet in 2010 after working with Ingersoll Rand. He studied psychology and finance as an undergrad and, I love this line from his bio, “Nick views all business decisions from the lens of blending both humanity and fiscal responsibility to achieve incredible outcomes.” And I think you will hear that impulse in his interview.
GadellNet grew over his 10 tenure, from 4 employees to 150 across three states. GadellNet has also earned honors as an Inc. “Best Places to Work”.
Nick is an ultramarathon runner, a father of three, a spouse of over 12 years, and an avid supporter of the community. Nick has a podcast, “Zero Excuses”, where I had the pleasure of being a recent guest, where he speaks to guests on the power of the human potential – and how to live a self-accountable life. He is currently pursuing his Masters Degree in Industrial Organizational Psychology from Harvard University.
We began our conversation talking about early morning workouts. Nick is often up in the wee hours of the morning to exercise or to get work done, which feel slike a necessity at this stage of life as he is also a parent and a husband.
Liesel Mertes
I was I was a rower in college. I was on the crew team. So I'm no stranger to like the four. Forty five am waiting approval.
- Nick Smarrelli
I'm getting up in the morning.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. Were you always a morning person or did you come to that with your like athletic pursuits.
- Nick Smarrelli
I would say I am never been a morning person. I, I don't know if I am right now. Frankly it is not, it is not my default by any stretch. But I think by virtue of athletic pursuits, work commitments, usually speaking, there's just a lot of work to process and I find mornings to be really solid for that. It's again, after having kids, that is my lone moments of reasonably energized solitude. You know, certainly the kids go to bed, but by the time bedtime happens, I'm spent.
- Nick Smarrelli
I'm not enjoying that moment. So carving out that morning space has given me a little bit of of time to have and be, I would say, selfish. That's my selfish time. That's my how. Take care of my body. Take care of my mind. Take care of a little bit of work so that when the kids wake up and my wife wakes up, I'm in a place and they're going to get the best of forty five minutes of me before the cycle starts again with, with kind of a normal workday.
- Nick Smarrelli
So that's, that's really where I use that selfish time because I feel like the rest of the day is kind of committed to your pursuits outside of just myself.
- Liesel Mertes
Totally. Well and I like that turn of phrase and the differentiation between energized versus depleted solitude, because I deeply resonate with that as a parent at this stage of life. Like by the time I'm finally alone and everybody is mostly in bed, although they're never completely in bed, there's always like that bouncy nap. Right. You know, they've had an epiphany or, you know, they want me to look at some bumpe. It's it's not the same as a morning solitude.
- Liesel Mertes
I am. I saw something on your website that I would like to ask about, and it specifically leads into. Caring for people at work, creating culture of care.
- Liesel Mertes
All right, that's helpful for me. I didn't want to do with it on my first attempt at.
- Liesel Mertes
I saw on the GadellNet Consulting website, you talk about your 98 percent happiness score with clients, tell me a little bit more about that and then I want to dig deeper into that number.
- Nick Smarrelli
Yes, well, I yeah, certainly, let's talk about that and a big part of our culture, at GadellNet, that is a lot of, I would say, bilateral feedback. So it's we we adore seeking and identifying feedback. So we always I always feel like every time we bring on a new employee, they're overwhelmed by the number of channels by which we get feedback from our clients, from our teams, from our from our leaders. You know, we love feedback.
- Nick Smarrelli
I think it gives and informs us quite a bit in terms of our strategic decision making. But one of the big things that we implemented was just kind of a casual survey at the end of every single engagement that we have with a client of ours. So we are a 50 percent of the business is a 24/7 help desk. So at the end of the day, what we are supporting is somebody who walks in the door, expects things to work.
- Nick Smarrelli
Things are not working that day. Oftentimes they are, let's say, a controller. They've got a big meeting with the CFO excels networking. So now you've got a lot of emotion that comes into it and they're calling in and they're seeking our help. So we talk all the time, endlessly, frankly, that our jobs are kind of half therapists have IT professionals. So we really kind of try to frame out this idea of kind of client satisfaction, client happiness, because we we really try to kind of throw an emotion at it, because at the end of the day, really what we're doing is dealing with angry people who are frustrated by the system.
- Nick Smarrelli
And as a business leader, it is hard to keep people motivated to do that day in and day out. I sympathize with our front line team sometimes with kind of where their responsibilities are because everybody is frustrated. So the we really try to kind of put a focus on that experience that at the end of the day, in a 20 minute engagement that you have with that person there, just a little bit a little bit better, we kind of do it akin to there's a rock in your shoe, we take the rock out.
- Nick Smarrelli
So we really kind of focus on metrics that tie back to an emotion because we believe that that's the end of the day. We're keeping systems running. But we're we're we've got to acknowledge that that person comes with a whole load of baggage and emotions to that phone call as well.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, I love that awareness of the whole person that you're interacting with. And it makes me wonder, just in an informal sense, I mean, I picture the last year has been hard, complicated. There's quarantine, there's people schooling at home, there's relatives getting sick and the tolerance level for anything going wrong on the system side, I imagine being even lower than is already low bar. Have you have you people felt that on the other side of calls or chat interactions like just a higher intensity of anger or despair or all of the emotions of the people they serve?
- Nick Smarrelli
You're this question is so incredibly relevant. It's painful. So I'll take two steps back and I promise I'll answer your question. But sure. You know, March 2020, obviously, everyone's going in lockdown. You know, the team is getting to X, the number of phone calls, everybody. They're dealing with their own personal crisis. And now they're also dealing with every fifteen thousand clients that are moving back to their homes or to their homes to work indefinitely.
- Nick Smarrelli
Our job at that point is can be tied back to in some capacity saving lives. At the time, you didn't know how contagious this was. We didn't know what it was. But at the end of the day, we are creating space for people to continue to operate, to continue to keep their jobs and to keep themselves safe. Fast forward March 2021 and now really, but it really kind of came back really March 2021 and people are starting to come back.
- Nick Smarrelli
We're in this kind of weird purgatory zone. Some people are being forced back to the office when most of them don't want to go back to the office. Most businesses have stopped hiring in that 12 month period and now the economy is ramping up. So their workload is higher than it's ever been. Couple that now with you know, if you go on LinkedIn, go on Inc.com, you'll see kind of this this mass turnover that's happening seemingly across the board.
- Nick Smarrelli
So people are stressed, they're anxious. They are. This is the last, I would say four weeks have been the most eye opening in terms of kind of our responsibility emotionally to honor the people calling in, because it is it is a different just a vibe now. And it's been it's been interesting as a leader, it's been interesting to receive the feedback, but I don't know what it was where we were fully locked down, that everyone is still feeling this like solidarity of we can do it.
- Nick Smarrelli
And now I just feel like people are just completely spent and burnt out and have just have nothing left to give to the cause. And they're in some sort of like adrenal fatigue at this point. And it's it's manifesting itself every single day to our team.
- Liesel Mertes
And I and they're they're looking to discharge that stress on or to someone or something. And that that can be a big load to carry for the person at GadellNet Consulting, answering the phone. Is there anything that you have found has been really effective in how you train and equip your support staff to really meet that emotional moment? And let me backfill it with an observation of my own, which is I am a USAA insurance client. They do auto insurance, home insurance.
- Liesel Mertes
And I remember being in my MBA program, we did a case study about USAA and just how they encountered that moment because, you know, a little bit like what you do. They're fielding calls of somebody who has just been in a car accident or their home has been robbed and that sense of their presence on the phone as being a business and a valued differentiator in the minds of clients. It strikes me that you're hoping to do something similar. How do you equip people in their training and then in the way that you support them in an ongoing manner so they can keep consistently delivering that to your clients?
- Nick Smarrelli
That is a great question, and we have been seeking avenues with which to provide, I would say at this point we've named it, so that's our first step is acknowledged that fundamentally, I think people people the reason why we hire people that come to our company is they take everything very emotionally. They took a high degree of pride in their their jobs. And because of that, they feel when their clients that are upset, whether it's at us or just at the situation in general, they take it very personally.
- Nick Smarrelli
So for us, we've kind of identified it as this is a this is a pervasive issue across the United States, across all businesses. We support three hundred businesses. We are a business ourselves. So much like last March where you were feeling it, the business itself is feeling it. Plus, we're also now bearing the responsibility across our client base as well. So that was really our first step. There is a series of books that our technicians are offered up.
- Nick Smarrelli
Most of them have read, I would say probably about 80 percent have read it. The talk about kind of being that kind of empathetic engineer and and our team has kind of advocated for it's a light book. It's nice and easy for reading it. And then our last step is our training developing manager is out searching and for finding kind of how do we how do we provide that type of training. So our goal is in the next two weeks, we can have lunch and learn to talk about, you know, when people are feeling this or you're feeling it, kind of how do you how do you how do you how do you deal with it?
- Nick Smarrelli
How do you not bring it home with you after five p.m.? How do you be empathetic to the emotion but then not have it add? I mean, again, these individuals are having eight to 12 phone calls a day to not be burdened with kind of a Lego stack of everyone's problems that are now building up, that you're bringing that home to your family. So we haven't done anything great yet, but I feel like I know somebody that may be able to help us.
- Nick Smarrelli
That's you, by the way, to kind of help. How do we how do we have those conversations?
- Liesel Mertes
And thank you for thinking. Well, it reminds me of some training that I've done throughout the course of the year with the Indiana Primary Health Care Association, because these are all of these frontline people and it's exactly what you're talking about. It's compassion fatigue, this emotional residue of exposure to other people's grief and trauma. And how do we not carry that into all of these other areas of life? Because, yeah, it's really real. And especially when your job is a frontline person.
- Liesel Mertes
What have you done that has really worked over the last year to care for your people in a way that keeps them sustained?
- Nick Smarrelli
So for us, we've hopefully we've done we've done a number of items, one of the key items is kind of start taking a step back. We we we use a tool called Tiny Balls. We're actually in the process of moving now to amplify. But it is a it is a tool that has allowed us to remain connected. If there's one thing that especially as somebody who has my personality, I like to be able to see people's faces and kind of read that feeling of exhaustion or exasperation.
- Nick Smarrelli
And when you don't, you have a hundred and fifty employees in one hundred and fifty different places. That was impossible for us. We really ramped up our efforts around 20 plus questions that really tackled a lot of the key. Emotions during the last 12 months allowing for people to be expressive either directly or anonymously in terms of where that can shore up support, more than that, we've really kind of opened up avenues of communication. I, I if I look at my calendar pre March in terms of my engagement directly with employees that don't report to me or indirectly slightly report to me, I would say that was five percent of my day.
- Nick Smarrelli
If you look at my weeks now, I'd say 30 to 40 percent of my days is talking to individuals across all layers of the organization and kind of hearing their stories and understanding their concerns. It's a big reason why, frankly, we're not pushing people to go back to the office just yet. As much as I would love to see their faces back in the office. The stories that I hear from them are saying we're where we want to go back, but we're just not ready yet.
- Nick Smarrelli
And so for us, we've really tried to take that feedback, share the feedback directly to folks, and then really kind of take action on what we heard. Some of the tools that we've also used that I think are impactful. We created for the last six months I presented our state of the company is a scale we talked about the scale of kind of 10, which is operating on pure overload, pure, pure adrenaline, and then zero is just not getting anything done.
- Nick Smarrelli
And for us, that March, April, May timeframe when everyone is moving remote, we all had to operate at an eight to a 10 and we wanted to make sure that we were operating at a at a zone that was capable for us. We kind of created this whole numbering system that people would use to check in with their managers, because sometimes you just can't name the word or name the feeling. But numbers seem to help. So this numbering system really kind of helped.
- Nick Smarrelli
I would say open up dialogue to people to say I'm feeling like a two right now and saying that they're fine. Me as CEO, there's days I come in and I feel like a two and and that's OK. So really opening up the discussion around it, we've we've had lunch and learns around mental health. We've done training around it. We've we've really we've opened up employees being able to get access directly to therapy that has has I think I forgot the number.
- Nick Smarrelli
We're three to four x the use of that service in the last 12 months now. So we're making sure we're putting money in the places that we're finding to be important. So, you know, I would say, were we the best at it? I would I would I would likely say no. But we really did make sure that the conversation was always open. I spoke frequently to how I was feeling, and it never was with my usual rub of optimism.
- Nick Smarrelli
It was a lot of just kind of really open dialogue around the cell, I feel. And I'm running this company and it's OK that I'm not feeling bullish and optimistic today. That's that's an OK feeling. So. I just think it opened up dialogue and I think it was appreciated by the team.
- Liesel Mertes
I love that it's so important and just for listeners, as I work with companies, I find again and again a mark of differentiation between companies that really can move forward in creating a culture of care or that are stuck in old patterns is members of the leadership team and top level managers being able to give the space for these conversations to be available and not like a one off an aberration, but important and sharing out of their own vulnerability. And I really like what you said, even if the awareness of putting aside what might be like your preferred way of operating with optimism and vision and leadership, when we so celebrate that, especially at top levels and and it is great, it really can help excel and drive a company to growth.
- Liesel Mertes
And yet especially in moments of profound disruption, if that's just where a leader stays, like, I've just got to only, you know, it's like just keep pounding the optimism, Peg. It can really be discordant for people. So I hear that the growth in awareness that, you know, probably was necessary. Was that hard for you the first time that you were like, OK, I'm going to let them know where I'm really at?
- Nick Smarrelli
So I would say without question, I am not. If you look at where I see a therapist and I talk through things as I do, I am I am a classic case of imposter syndrome. I mean, I'm a classic case of often feeling that if I am not acting perfectly and seen perfectly that in some capacity I'm failing. I take into account to too much what people think of me. So exposing that the CEO, which we have been taught since we were kids, are, you know, at the helm.
- Nick Smarrelli
You're you're you're leading the way. My emotions trickle down to everybody else's emotions. If you're optimistic, people will follow you. And the reality was it was so dissonant to how I was feeling and how other people were feeling. We call it emotional intelligence. Call it something else. It felt fake to try to go out there and say everything is perfect, everything is great. Let's continue to move this way. And so, yeah, it was uncomfortable.
- Nick Smarrelli
And it's frankly still is. I don't I don't like talking about where I'm falling short. I think an example is this week I was flying to Colorado. I was landing. I landed at forty five or nine o'clock at night. I was supposed to stay at a state, a colleague's house. And I texted him like, I just don't have the mental capacity with which to not be alone right now. And that was odd. That was odd for me.
- Nick Smarrelli
And he was he was obviously very accepting of it. But to me that was me saying I, I just can't and I can't do it all. I can't come into a house and be in a good mood after being in a good mood all day. That was that was taxing on me. And so I think the last year has really opened up a chance for me to show. I think I learned throughout my career it's OK to not be the smartest person in the room, but it was never OK to show that much emotion.
- Nick Smarrelli
And I think the last 12 months is really kind of allowed me to to show a bit more and to walk away from things. Just say like this is too much for me right now. And being OK with that and frankly, everybody really rising to the challenge when I wanted to do that.
- Liesel Mertes
Thank you for sharing that, what has been one of the most unexpected things that has come out of your vulnerability, whether that is something it has elicited at other people or how you felt afterwards, like has there been anything that you would say, I didn't really want to do this, but this has been good on the other side.
- Nick Smarrelli
So I would say merely exposing if you look at kind of the different aspects of yourself that you tend to not show to others, I think, you know, social media is always gets blamed for this idea of building a personal brand. And certainly my personal brand is zero excuses. I I'm doing these ridiculously long races and look at me. I'm a great dad and that's my personal brand. And the days where I'm not crushing it is quite the opposite of that personal brand.
- Nick Smarrelli
And for me, I think. I've set aside this necessity to always be and I'll use the word perfect, but maybe I'll call it on brand that. It's OK to showcase those those feelings and at the end of the day. That position has not changed. People still don't respect what I'm doing and frankly speaking, have have really stepped up and. Kind of allowed me to do that, and that has, I would say, kind of absolved a lot of the stress of the job because I haven't had to fake my way through it on the days where I couldn't.
- Nick Smarrelli
So like I said, I think it just it just, frankly speaking, just allowed me to have a bit more grace than I ever have of not being this perfect person all the time and. I don't I think it's better and I'll give a story quick, we had an individual who I would say in September, October time frame, came to us and said, I'm all I was off for two weeks. And at one point during those two weeks, I considered taking my own life and we had sent him both my director of HR and myself had sent him a note in the middle of the week.
- Nick Smarrelli
And I said, hey, this is how I'm feeling today. And I was feeling down and our director of H.R. said, hey, take the time, we support you. And that one two punch to him, he thinks saved his life. And he again, I don't mind sharing the story because he shared it with the whole team. He held a lunch and learn on mental health later that month. But he really kind of talked to what the impact of of those programs are on him.
- Nick Smarrelli
So, again, I had the selfish motives of in the sense that it made me feel more comfortable as a leader being true to myself. And then I think for others, it allowed them to do the same thing to.
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm. The powerful effect of those meaningful gestures, I feel like sometimes as we in the face of disruptive life events, they can seem so big, whether that's pandemic or a death or sickness. And we can kind of negate the power of sending out an email or sharing how we're feeling or just sending that text of encouragement and the impact that those gestures can have and do have. Because when somebody's feeling. Suicidal when they're feeling underwater, they're really looking for something to to lay hold of, and if we can offer those things and be, you know, even even just the small gestures, I think that story really shows the power and the impact of those times of reaching out.
- Nick Smarrelli
It's crazy to me, I had a great conversation with my father in law talking about just cuz listen to the podcast then and anything I'm on, he's he's a he's he's my number one fan. So any, anybody has on the podcast, you're guaranteed at least one more guest because of because of my father in law. But he talks about how incredibly different businesses today it is 20 years ago and how know companies like that, but also so many other great companies talk through these things.
- Nick Smarrelli
But you couldn't even imagine having those conversations back then. And to me, I just feel like it's it's really is a huge shift. And I think more and more and more a bigger shift. And I'm hoping people take notice of those companies doing some great things that this is this is the new reality is people if you expect people to bring their whole self to work, there are some parts of that aren't as pretty. And we've got to we've got to honor that, too.
- Nick Smarrelli
And that stuff that starts with leadership and saying if you want people to bring their whole self to them, to things, talk about your family, talk about your emotions, talk about your great talk about your bet. And again, to your point, I can't be a source of doom and gloom. If there are there are times where I have to shine and show and and push through those bad days with a smile on my face.
- Nick Smarrelli
But at the end of it, you know, you can't be listening to the reality. It can't be you can't be talking about how fantastic things are when things don't feel fantastic because then you lose all credibility and that's what people want. I think in leadership these days.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, and in my work as well, I oftentimes and party to that sort of generational divide of this is a different paradigm of doing work and I would definitely say a healthier, more inclusive, less even even if you just want to look at the the dollar cost. I mean, the cost of stress that was absorbed in people's bodies, in their health and their rate of burnout in that prior way of doing things was really high. And it's it is an important, necessary and competitive shift that we're engaging in.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. And it's it's what people want. It's the way the world is moving. And I think the pandemic has really highlighted that if we could have played nicely and pretended that everything was OK, all of the pretension of that performance was stripped away in the month after month of covid and everybody coping with that.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
I want to take a moment to adknowledge our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. In today’s episode, you heard about the mental stressors and the toll of compassion fatigue on workers. And maybe you thought, that is going on for me and on my team as well. If so, let Handle with Care Consulting help. With trainings on coping with compassion fatigue, how to have hard conversations, and how to build empathy in the workplace, we have an offering to fit your needs and help you skill up in empathy. Contact Handle with Care Consulting for a free consultation today and start to put empathy to work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
– Liesel Mertes
You are a psychology undergrad and currently doing master's work in industrial organizational psychology at and a little local school called Harvard. How does your knowledge of psychology affect how you lead as a CEO?
- Nick Smarrelli
I think people always ask because I have a psychology and a finance degree, so it's almost you've got these you know, you've got the angel on one end and the devil on the other side and it often flips. I'm implying one is one or the other. But for me. You know, it's so funny where people always ask kind of where what do I use the most as finance or the psychology? And I would say finance. I use two percent of my job psychology.
- Nick Smarrelli
I use the other ninety-eight and not the learnings necessarily from university, but more so the study of human potential, the study of. And at the end of the day, most business owners are managing people, we don't I don't run a factory where I've got precision in robotics, where I don't have to kind of honor brain and home and a lifetime of experiences as they bring that to work. So for me, psychology is required. It is it is the you know, you wouldn't have you wouldn't have a manufacturing facility with a bunch of equipment and not an engineer who could fix that equipment or understand how that equipment works.
- Nick Smarrelli
And yet we seem to be OK to have and teach specifically at business schools. I have a very big contention with the curriculum of the business schools. It's so much practical curriculum and not. The people that execute on said curriculum, and I think that for me is a huge mess. So to me, I think leadership is ultimately, you know, you're an engineer of how things work and how if you put two things together, what happens if you put seven people together?
- Nick Smarrelli
What happens? And so understanding team dynamics, understanding. You know, if you bring in this personality, how does that shift things? How do you how do you identify the right talent? I mean, that is all psychology. And I don't care how great your knowledge is of finance at the end of it, it's it's a people game and it's it's such a big part of the job recently. So for me, psychology,
- Nick Smarrelli
Psychology always wins. And I love the study of it, which is why instead of pursuing an MBA, I opted to pursue a master's in industrial organizational psychology is how do I bring that psychological theory back to the business base?
- Liesel Mertes
Well, I like that so much. And even the the framing like an engineer, because all too often it's turfed to H.R. like, well, get a person or a department for that. But how much that misses in the day to day of managing, deploying, you know, optimizing and engaging with people. I you shared a little bit earlier that sense of, OK, I want to lead with vulnerability, but I don't want to be doom and gloom.
- Liesel Mertes
It reminds me of an article I came across. I reposted it and it was like the response was huge of people resonating with it. It was talking about four leaders being able to share without being leaky was the term this author used finding that sweet spot of encouraging vulnerability without just dumping on the people underneath you. It makes me think that oftentimes being at the top is a lonely. What have you found has been important to support your mental health. Where have you found a community that you can, you know, be leaky with that has allowed you to be able to be present for the people you lead?
- Liesel Mertes
Especially over the last year or so?
- Nick Smarrelli
I have been fortunate enough. I have been part of, let's say seven years ago, decided to join Vistage, which is a kind of a CEO group that has been hugely impactful into both business and then kind of just general mental health or kind of finding people that are going through the same problems. And then recently moved from Vistage to YPO, which is the Young Presidents organization here locally in Indianapolis. And also I'm part of the St. Louis chapter as well.
- Nick Smarrelli
For me, it's hard to explain the stress and pressure of being the leader. Everything is big and I often say I get too much credit for the good stuff and I get too much credit for the bad stuff. At the end of the day, everything's my fault. It is a system or a person that I allowed to fail that created whatever problem we're experiencing. And that's that's a hard. Part of the job and then couple that with covid, where you've got two hundred and fifty people that are looking at you whose spouses are sick or spouses are not working anymore and looking at you to make sure that every decision you make is going to ensure that two weeks from now they're going to still get their paycheck.
- Nick Smarrelli
It's it's it's it is lonely. And I think that is a great way to describe it. And my wife is just one of the most supportive people in the world. But it's hard to describe that feeling. It's hard to describe kind of that burden that sits on you. Even on Saturday afternoon when you're not sitting in front of a computer, you're still working, you're still processing, it's still there. There's still a little smelly in my subconscious that's processing all the forty seven things that we're trying to trying to improve on at any point.
- Nick Smarrelli
So for me, finding people that are very much aligned with my values and then finding people, frankly speaking, that are so definitive, my values, that I would say in some capacity force me to either reevaluate or. Double down on the way that I think as a leader, but for me, creating space for me to talk about how hard it is sometimes and how I yearn sometimes to work at Starbucks. And when I leave, you know, there's no emails coming in afterwards or any of those type of things.
- Liesel Mertes
And the biggest mistake you can make is misspelling somebody's name on the correct, which I would never say doing wrong milk.
- Nick Smarrelli
Yeah, it my my ability to learn people's names, they would say, what's your name? And I would, of course, immediately forget it because that is that is my my go to. But but yes that is that's exactly. Nobody loses their job or their house or puts them in a crate in a strange place or I'm not pushing people to complete burnout or all the other stuff that kind of comes along with how do you push people to reach their highest potential but not push them over the ledge.
- Nick Smarrelli
And this is such a fine line. So either way, long, rambling story here, to me, it's it's finding like minded people that you can truly be open with and and truly share the inner workings of how you're feeling, but how the business is doing and and people who just kind of understand what that burden is like. I can't articulate more as a leader is having what that group has meant to me in terms of getting through, especially the last year, but getting through the last 11 years of of of running a definite.
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm. Thank you for sharing, this has been a great conversation. Are there any questions I haven't asked you that would be helpful for me to ask you? Oh, man, we want to share.
- Nick Smarrelli
No, I can't I'm sure I think if there's anything else, that's. That's out there. You know, nothing nothing comes to mind. I'm sure will later.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key take-aways from my conversation with Nick…
MUSICAL TRANSITION
OUTRO
And sometimes we forget that at work. We forget that in other scenarios. And at the end of the day, work is important and matters. But but it's work. And we are we're humans and we're people. And we were feelings and we're joy. We're sadness first. And that ends up having a huge influence and work at the end of the day and not recognizing that it's a little bit naive and dismissive of it makes us better workers if we actually are a little more self-aware about how we're feeling, our emotions in general.
NEW INTRO
Today’s conversation is wide-ranging. We explore the importance of engaging with your own emotions, the absence of one-size-fits-all solutions to emotional and social health, and the particular challenges of empathetically managing multi-national teams. I learned so much and I know that you will too.
My guest today is Jorge Alejandro Vargas. He works at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that supports our favorite research tool, Wikipedia. There, Jorge leads Regional Partnerships, engaging with teams across the planet to leverage both private and public sector partnerships.
Jorge calls San Francisco home. He moved here seven and a half years ago from Bogota, Colombia where he was born, educated, and worked as a lawyer specializing in Intellectual Property and Copyrights.
He recently moved to the Lower Height neighborhood from the Mission.
- Jorge Vargas
I love walking around the city, a good friend and colleague said the San Francisco is a collection of neighborhoods rather than a single city, and each neighborhood has its own vibe and its own thing. And walking around is really nice. I also enjoy tennis a lot, so I try to fit a game of tennis at least once a week. Not that I'm very good at it, but I am trying my best to get that time out in the tennis court.
And as we ease into our conversation, perhaps there are some listeners that will remember the evolution of Wikipedia with me. I remember when Wikipedia was looked down upon. I was DEFINITELY never, ever allowed to use it as a source in high school or college. But somehow, over the years, we have all come to rely upon the shared knowledge that the platform represents.
- Liesel Mertes
Even the turn of phrase, it's almost like like Kleenex, like you Wikipedia something, because that's where you would go for trusted information. And even as my children use it, how much of a go to resource, which as it relates to your work, I feel like, you know, just in the span of my adulthood, I've seen readership grow, you know, participation, access. And it sounds like that sort of movement of building acceptance, you know, getting stakeholders together is what you're doing in these regional partnerships in a way to continue like moving there.
- Liesel Mertes
The influence and the participation of Wikimedia and Wikipedia is that is that like an accurate enough summation of some of the things that you're doing? I realize there's probably way more to it than that.
- Jorge Vargas
One hundred percent. And I think that it's been very interesting that so this year we're celebrating our 20th anniversary, actually.
- Liesel Mertes
Happy 20th.
- Jorge Vargas
Thank you very much. And it's been 20 years human and we call that. And that's kind like the the tag that we've been using for this big milestone of a birthday, because we really acknowledge the fact that Wikipedia is built by humans. It's because of hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world that we have what we work with. They are volunteers. And the movement as a whole, as we call it, is the fuel and the magic that actually keeps Wikipedia alive with a foundation.
- Jorge Vargas
What I do and the partnerships team as a whole tries to do is support that mission that is highly built by all those volunteers in the world and work with those partners that want to help us in many different ways further that mission and pretty much reach that vision that we have as a movement of imagining a world in which every single human being has access to the sum of all knowledge, which is an ambitious statement. It's a very bold move, but at the same time, that's what we want to do.
- Jorge Vargas
But to do that, the only way is to work with others, and that is the whole spirit and DNA of the partnership's team and the work that we do.
- Liesel Mertes
And what I hear in that is at its best, you know, Wikipedia is democratizing the the spread of knowledge, you know, with the with its kind of participatory platform. And yet still fact checking that people are able to do and getting voices from different sectors and different cultures and languages is so important in that continued growth of that mission.
- Jorge Vargas
That is absolutely right. I think that what Wikipedia has done in the last ten years has disrupted the parroting. That knowledge should sit with with a few group, with a group of few folks. I would say I remember growing up with the concept that knowledge and information was trapped in this few books that we held with pride in the living room as the encyclopedia that we should look at as the source of trust. The knowledge and Wikipedia, although sounds on paper, is a crazy idea.
- Jorge Vargas
Twenty years later, as finding ways to show that knowledge can be shared and can be produced by many people and really democratizing the notion that we all can be experts as long as we follow certain editorial guidelines that the encyclopedia relies on, as long as we are doing the homework. I would say in actually producing information in a way that is accurate, verifiable, neutral, and where consensus can be reached to make that part of the encyclopedia. So it's fascinating.
- Liesel Mertes
You talked about managing teams across countries and I want to hear more about that, especially with what's gone on over the last year.
- Liesel Mertes
One of the things that we really love to talk about on this podcast is how to build empathy and connection at work. And oftentimes that is something that is seen as not really having space in the workplace.
- Liesel Mertes
What comes to mind when you think of within your personal experience, a story of a time when you really experienced the impact of either experiencing empathy at work or experiencing a lack of it in a way that made an impression on you.
- Jorge Vargas
Thank you so much for that question. Does it bring some triggers, a lot of the positivity and like the things that I love about the work and specifically about my team. So the partnerships team and specifically the regional partnerships team is focused on, as I mentioned earlier, expanding and bringing ways to create more awareness and increase readership in particular parts of the world. And in order to do that, we needed to hire folks that are living in those parts of the world.
- Jorge Vargas
So we have a regional manager for Latin America who in Colombia, someone who is in Indonesia, someone who's in India, someone is in Ghana, someone who was in Jordan recently relocated to to the U.S. So that brought me for I want to say the first time. The feeling of having to work on the same topic, on the same thing with five or six completely different people that came from completely different backgrounds, contexts, languages, time zones. And one of the big things where I realize that empathy was needed was the fact that we were just sitting in completely different parts of the world.
- Jorge Vargas
And that meant that maybe someone was going to be having lunch or dinner while the other person was trying to feed them and have a conversation with them. Or maybe someone was in the middle of child care when the other person was actually in the middle of what they thought was an important meeting. So definitely trying to break that construct that we continue to see and that maybe the pandemic has a silver lining left or is leaving of not centralizing everything of where the place of work is physically located, the headquarters of the Wikimedia Foundation or in San Francisco.
- Liesel Mertes
Can you unpack that a little bit more? Because I think it's a very interesting point. What does so paint a picture for us? What does it look like for you to be checking in with yourself in a way that makes you a better manager as you think about what you're about to ask of, you know, a partner or a teammate?
- Jorge Vargas
I think that for me, the first thing to I check in with myself is trying to think where the other person is. And by that I mean not just geographically or the times in which they are, but like try to understand maybe where that person is in their life. At that moment, particularly the last year and a half, has shown us that. Work and life, for better or for worse, or the day to day life are completely together, like it's very hard to separate, particularly when we're working from home.
- Jorge Vargas
We know that we may have kids in the background. We may have like the mail come in. We may have someone that is needing something from somebody else and requires attention. And for me before this and when I used to work back in Columbia or when I started working for the foundation, I never thought of that. I was just like, well, working like it's just work, which like think of this thing that we need to do, period, no matter what.
- Jorge Vargas
Now, I think that being more self aware. Sorry, more self aware about. Where the person is, is it late for them this morning for them. What happens if I sent them right now a ping that I need to talk to someone? And I make the assumption that even though it's late for them, they're probably awake or maybe they are awake, but they shouldn't be responding, but they're under the pressure to do so. So it's really checking in and being like, OK, where is the other person?
- Liesel Mertes
Right, that's so good and being part of teams that span the globe, I imagine, really necessary. Do you feel like you're, you're learning curve has really had to, like, accelerate over the last year and all of those things?
- Jorge Vargas
Absolutely. I think that for better or for worse, the fact that the partnership's team of the foundation is so remote from its inception allowed us to have a leg up before the pandemic because we were already building in the routines of what being on camera all the time would look like. Having this multiple time zones would look like at the same time, I think that this last year and a half through COVID has trained, has reinforced even more the idea of trying to understand and recognize where the other person is mentally and physically and trying to really be self aware of this is a good time for us to speak, not necessarily timers in the time zone, but.
- Jorge Vargas
Maybe this person is going through something right now. Maybe they are going through a lot of stress because they haven't been able to deal with child care at the moment. Maybe there's been health complications with them or for their loved ones. And I think that before the pandemic, I wouldn't have thought about that. I would be like, oh, yeah, I know the Times Zone works or let's let's talk at 7:00 p.m. just so it's easier or whatever.
- Jorge Vargas
But now it's more of a check in and think through first, like, oh, OK, but I remember that they said that this was happening mean I should think this through before sending this or asking for that. So it's been a it's been an interesting learning curve, I would say.
- Liesel Mertes
So those sorts of things in my work, I call them disruptive life events, which 2020 and 2021 have been full of across the world, whether that is in people's immediate sphere of family and influence or, you know, a little bit more to the periphery. There have been there have been hospitalizations. There have been funerals. I find that even in even in like a singularly within one country, even in, let's say, just a strictly U.S. experience, there can be like people respond differently based on region conditioning personality.
- Liesel Mertes
I imagine that that becomes even more complex in how people experience grief and disruption when you expand it to global teams. Are you how have you found yourself navigating, you know, within different cultural norms of expectations as to whether it's OK to speak about these things at work or OK to cry or OK to show weakness? What are some stories or wisdom that you've gleaned in navigating those dynamics?
- Jorge Vargas
That is a very interesting point and one that I can speak for me on a personal note. I grew up in Colombia. I shared earlier, and that came with me building myself from a work culture that was very conservative, very strict, where we wouldn't be open about things we wouldn't share or overshare or where feelings were not necessarily part of it, particularly in a law firm. And I remember moving to the U.S. and started working with the foundation and feeling that there was some sort of culture shock on how folks were maybe a little bit more open to do things and how I felt I was not necessarily in a position to be open or share or bring something to the table.
- Jorge Vargas
And it took me a little while to understand how the culture would work at the workplace and how different it was to take that years later. I think for me it's now trying to understand the opposite side and now seeing how folks in parts of the world were. Maybe there is a little bit more of a restriction or of an apprehension to be open about things or share grief, share feelings or emotion where power dynamics, especially when it is an interaction between you and your manager, immediately puts you in a situation where you don't necessarily feel comfortable opening up or saying one thing or the other.
- Jorge Vargas
So I think that it continues to be a learning curve for me. I think that it will always be a learning curve for me, but. Having to be exposed to so many different cultures, so many different ways to see life, to see disruption, to see grief, sadness or joy or positivity has showed me that there's no one size fits all solution for any way that we want to communicate among humans, particularly in a global context, that we keep working and evolving towards in this and many other places of work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We will return to the conversation with Jorge in just a moment. I’d like to take a second to recognize our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. If you’ve been listening this long into the podcast, you probably agree that empathy and connection at work are essential for keeping your people engaged. But how can your grow your empathy skillset? Let Handle with Care consulting help. With keynotes, certificate progams, and leadership coaching, we have a solution to meet your need. These sessions are engaging, combining stories with data, merging science with really actionable tips you can put into practice right away to build up a culture of care at work.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mertes
I imagine to be able to do your job well, there is a necessary measure of curiosity and adaptability, you know, to continue, as you said, to find those things fascinating and rewarding. Would you say that that has would you say that that's a part of you and has always been a part of you, or is that something that you've had to cultivate as you have, you know, moved into different cultures and continue to expand your cultural competency?
- Jorge Vargas
I have to say that it's more of the latter. I never thought that. I mean, I do consider myself a curious person and someone who wants to learn more from others from a personality basis. I'm always. Very chatty, very open, very sociable, and to meet people, learn from them, and at the same time, I never embedded the cultural element or the understanding of where others come from as part of that. Being exposed to that now through work has put me in a place where I now are more sensitive or more sensible is the word to that and have my eyes more open and my ears more open to that, the receptiveness that we need in order to make sure that we're taking that into account.
- Jorge Vargas
I also think that being the U.S. were, for better or for worse, there's a mix of personalities, approaches in life, cultural context, whereas in Colombia it was way more. One note, a lot of people that would think similarly or act similarly. That also just the fact of me being in the U.S. and being exposed to other different things allowed me to fine tune a little bit more. That element that you're describing as being more perceptive and more curious to understand that cultural part of what just being human and having a human interaction.
- Liesel Mertes
What has it been like to build connection across these international teams, because like those truly human elements of connecting, feeling like that person has my back, we celebrate wins together, we support each other during losses that can feel like a complex task even when everyone is coming from the same cultural context. What have you done that has really helped build those elements of connections in the teams you manage?
- Jorge Vargas
I definitely think that there's been a lot of conscious or unconscious effort and just being very open and honest about myself with others and just putting myself in a situation where I try to be as human and as real as I can, which that definitely has been a work in progress and hard in the sense of. Being very close and very reserved before being here, much more in a in a space of work, but showing that openness and that willingness to just be human with others, I think that no matter if the cultural context could be different or there's like some translation to be done allows me or has allowed me to build those connections, those personal connections that ease down a little bit of the tension that exists on not just the cultural friction and challenges and differences that we may have, but the dynamics that would exist between you and your manager or you and somebody else that maybe has way more experience within the organization or whatnot.
- Jorge Vargas
So. I think that at the end of the day, one of the things that I've noticed myself doing more and more is. Finding ways to come across as approachable as I can and as real as I can and honest about my feelings as I can, and that has required a lot of work on my own self-awareness and realizing that it's important for me to check in how I am feeling at the moment, like maybe I'm not happy for something. And coming up to a conversation with someone in a different part of the world or in the U.S. or whatnot.
- Jorge Vargas
Without me realizing, like, no, first I need to know, like, OK, I'm not thrilled right now because of X or Y, is this the right time to talk about this? Is the right time for me to have a conversation about this or that topic that for me, I think has also helped open myself more to others and recognize that, OK, maybe this is a great time for me to say, you know what, I'm not having a great day, but we need to talk about this.
- Jorge Vargas
And this is something that we should just do. And that openness has and that being real about things has allowed us as a team at large to just really is way more into each other and see each other more as human, particularly when there's not an element of physical interaction, which is also one of the bigger challenges that we have in in this work and in general with remote work and in the past year and a half with covid. I've worked with people that I've never met in my life in person, and it's been two or three years like I've met my team, which is great pre covid, but usually would have like one or two opportunities a year to do so.
- Jorge Vargas
So having to build that rapport and that connection behind a camera and a microphone is very, very different. And I just can, like, wrap up with a nice, I think, example in practice that me and my colleague Yael has instituted in the team. We have a weekly team meeting where we don't start the meeting until we all go on around and just share what's going on in our lives and sometimes is very sad and sometimes has us sharing grief or loss or challenges with each other.
- Jorge Vargas
Sometimes it's time to celebrate and share funny memories and happy things and just recognizing that we're all human before being just robots. That work has been critical to being able to build that empathy and that connection with my team and with folks across the organization.
- Liesel Mertes
That's so good. And I see that again and again in in high functioning versus, you know, like low functioning teams is this element. Of vulnerability from the top and granting permission in some ways, because so oftentimes there's this power dynamic that exists where especially if leadership like if they never appear vulnerable or human, certainly the people underneath them don't think that it would be appropriate to accept it, OK, for them to share something hard. So, yeah, I think that is incredibly powerful.
- Liesel Mertes
And you touched on the, the important thing and the challenge of being able to express your feelings, which is knowing actually how you're feeling, which especially, you know, I know for me and for many people who succeed in in the typical ways of succeeding like, that, you know, their high efficiency, they're going one thing to the next. And it really does take purposeful work and pausing to interrogate yourself and be like, I think I'm actually feeling things right now.
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm. What, what could they be? So, yeah, I resonate with the importance of doing that.
- Jorge Vargas
And I think that it's a work in progress, I think that I I mean, I hear myself say that and I realize that that hasn't been or that has never been the constant in my life. Right. Like just having that level of self-awareness is taken a while and is definitely taking a lot of therapy and a huge fan of therapy. I encourage everyone to go to therapy. It's just recognizing that were that were people that were human, that were flesh and bones.
- Jorge Vargas
And sometimes we forget that at work. We forget that in other scenarios. And at the end of the day, work is important and matters. But but it's work. And we are we're humans and we're people. And we were feelings and we're joy. We're sadness first. And that ends up having a huge influence and work at the end of the day and not recognizing that it's a little bit naive and dismissive of it makes us better workers if we actually are a little more self-aware about how we're feeling, our emotions in general.
- Liesel Mertes
Yes. Well, and if we have punishing internal voices that never allow us to feel our own feelings, certainly we are transmitting that sort of energy to the people that we manage, you know, like that's not acceptable here. And agreed. Huge fan and participant in therapy over the years and that work in progress. You know, we I have a there are six people living in my household that span the age range. And so there's lots of emotions and lots of volume all the time.
- Liesel Mertes
And but but just because you're expressing them doesn't really mean you're fully aware of them. We put up a poster on the wall that was this like concentric circles of feelings to even be able to look at. And it's helpful for me. You know, I put a sticker on my water bottle. My daughter was asking me even today, someone what you seem a little preoccupied with, what are you what are you feeling? And we went through, you know, the the little circle.
- Liesel Mertes
And I it was helpful to get me to what I was actually feeling, not just preoccupied, but something deeper than that. All right, what are times for you as a manager that building connection has felt easy across your teams? And why do you think it felt easy?
- Jorge Vargas
I think that the times we're doing that empathy building or that human connection has been easier has been the times where I've managed to be with my teammates and my colleagues in person. I think that being in person definitely makes things makes things easier to just open up, be a little bit more human, be a little bit more approachable. And I have to say that it's been very hard not being able to do that in the last two years, year and a half, because that, I guess, like to to the question like it's hard to like be able to build empathy and understand where others are when we don't really have a proper read on where someone stands.
- Jorge Vargas
I think that the physicality of how we act and the faces that we make and the body language that we show to other folks helps a lot when it comes to building that empathy and that understanding of the other. And doing that behind a screen on a little box that shows up in your screen is hard. It's tricky. And sometimes it's very hard to read where others are, right? Yep. I think that being in person has definitely. Or when we are in person, building the empathy and building more of that report, it's definitely easier, right?
- Liesel Mertes
And well and especially working cross culturally. I spent a year living in Nairobi and even in person because of some of the cultural differences, the body language differences. You know, I was just always progressively learning like, oh, I'm I am misreading what is going on right here. And I'm in the room, let alone when you know that interaction is reduced to a two inch by two inch screen. What what has helped, as you have done all of the the ZOOMIN or the Microsoft teams or whatever platform you prefer, have you adopted any best practices for effective communication mediated by technology?
- Jorge Vargas
Definitely. One of the points that I've been trying to enforce more and more to myself. Is just learning to listen, like just listening more and making myself sure that even if it's behind a screen or even if it's in person, I allow myself to get as much information as possible that allows me to break some assumptions or where someone is emotionally or where someone is presently or not. And that listening or. Has been very, very important, but I also think that someone or something I would say sorry that has helped or that helps a lot, is just allowing myself to be wrong and be OK with that and letting others know that.
- Jorge Vargas
I can also be wrong sometimes, and assuming that someone is OK or the opposite and not deluding myself, but by thinking that I have to know it all and that I have to be the super, highly, emotionally, emotionally intelligent person that knows where and how, like just for giving myself a little bit more and allowing others to. Feel OK that they can be wrong about how I'm feeling about X or Y or Z, that has helped both in person but also behind the screen, you know, so often.
- Liesel Mertes
The story that we tell our stories of our victories and successes and times that we've done things well, if there's a story that you can share, I would love to hear a story where you realized that you were wrong and went about making repairs and the impact that that had.
- Jorge Vargas
I think that sometimes we make assumptions about people that puts us in a situation that makes us defensive or makes us biased towards trying to find ourselves right in an argument and win over something. And specifically, I see that in the past there's been situations where I've allowed myself to join a conversation or start a discussion with a colleague or with a teammate with a lot of assumptions in my mind. And probably that makes me. Weaker to begin with and makes me fail and just takes me to being wrong at the end of the day, and I realize that sometimes that would even take me to a situation where I would have to.
- Jorge Vargas
Even think of like, OK, maybe I should actually apologize, because I was I came into this conversation thinking that they were going to do A, B, C or C ABC, and even though they didn't, I took the conversation or two the discussion to that route. And I also, because of the assumptions, I came to that discussion with a lot of emotions, with a lot of anger, a lot of resentment towards was what was going to happen.
- Jorge Vargas
And and that made me fail. And that made me be a bad manager at the moment or that made me be a bad colleague or about teammate at the moment and those situations where I failed. For me, it has made it even worse, more complicated to understand is the fact that sometimes. We don't even know that we failed until we really went deeper on that, failing until we really hurt someone or until someone actually calls you out. Sometimes you're not even called out or sometimes it just.
- Jorge Vargas
This hurt or damage that you did and you're not even aware of it
- Liesel Mertes
And you mentioned that that feeling like, should I apologize? Do I need to circle back? Do you find yourself in the aftermath of some of those situations going and making repairs that way?
- Jorge Vargas
Definitely. And I think that I mean, that applies a lot, not just on the the professional level, but like on the personal level. I tend to be someone who and definitely something that I keep working on day and day that could say things and afterwards be like, oh, crap. Like what did I just say? Or like, was this what I really wanted to say? Or was this like my frustration speaking for me and then coming back to being like, OK, what did I actually say?
- Jorge Vargas
I wish that I could have like a recorder playback of what I said and how I set it to make sure that what taste left in my mouth after I was in an interaction with someone, actually. Was right or wrong, but usually there's like an aftermath where you're like. Oops, I think that maybe this was not what I had to or maybe I came across completely wrong in this or that, usually if there's that gut feeling, it's because something was wrong, I think.
- Jorge Vargas
Yeah, the good thing for me at least, has been just being able to recognise that and be open about it and go back to a person and say. You know what, I may have been wrong, did I say something, did I do this or did I do that instead of just staying with the assumption that maybe it wasn't?
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. That I that I'm just going to double down on this or hope that it goes away or all of these coping mechanisms that can feel easier than just, you know, being straightforward and owning our stuff. And I think so often, you know what what I have experienced and what I consistently observe is that can be hard for leaders actually to want to do. They feel like I'm the I'm the leader. Other people apologize to me. I don't apologize to them instead of really embracing them, the transformative power that there is in owning your stuff.
- Jorge Vargas
Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that I mean, there's a lot of ego attached to positions of management that sometimes they bring really great things, but sometimes they don't. And oftentimes it's just realizing that no matter if we are in a different power dynamic, we are all human, we're all the same people. We all have feelings. We only have approached something the wrong way or the right way and. I think it's better at times to go back to someone and say, I think that I may have said something and be wrong about it and be told, no, you were fine, don't worry.
- Jorge Vargas
Even, even if it's not really true, even if that person is just letting it pass. But it's better to do that and then be like, OK, at least I did it then just staying with a weird afterthought and knowing anything about it.
- Liesel Mertes
Right. Just trying to push it to the side. Yep. What words of insight would you offer to listeners who are sitting here and they think, you know, I, I there's some work that I can do, I want to be cultivating more connection and humanity at my workplace. Where should where should they start? What are some things that have been helpful for you?
- Jorge Vargas
I think that a good way for me to kind of like start that conversation or like give those specific tips here. And there is maybe broadly saying that recognizing that we are all people that bring our own baggage to the office and recognizing that that is OK. Like, I think that for me personally. My culture and my context. Was very pushy about the idea that you left your baggage at home and came to work, acted, worked and developed whatever you needed to do and then came back to that, and that is not really true.
- Jorge Vargas
And I think understanding and acknowledging that we are human and come to work and engage in work relationships and conversations with the baggage that we have with waking up grumpy, not having a good night's sleep, having issues with our child care, having a fight with your spouse or maybe the opposite, coming in very happy because you had like a phenomenal night the day before or you've been having really good things happening. At least recognizing that that is there and not feeling guilty about feeling those feelings is a good way to start.
- Jorge Vargas
And I'm speaking for myself. I used to feel very guilty about feeling feelings at work. And it sounds kind of dumb now that I think about it. But that's pretty much like how a lot of the work culture has been shaped and the idea that we have to separate completely our feelings and our work and our humanity with the day to day office. But then in addition to that, I would say that trying to stay as open and as transparent and as approachable to folks is really is really important.
- Jorge Vargas
And that usually starts with just trying to share a little bit more about who you are, about where you are at the moment. I think that you put it very eloquently by saying giving permission to others to recognize that you are human, that you're not this wall and a manager that is just this person that is looking at your work and giving you a qualification that at the end of the day will give you a yes or no pass grade, but actually just a fellow human that needs to recognize that sometimes they have good things going on, sometimes they don't, and allowing yourself to give that permission to others.
- Jorge Vargas
And I think that also applies even outside of work.
- Liesel Mertes
Mm hmm. It's so good. What is a person or a book, and if a few come to mind, you can feel free to say, that have really positively affected your development as a leader?
- Jorge Vargas
I'm going to cheat and not say a book or a person, but I'm going to go to a podcast, although that or very poorly paid work. And Shankar Vedantam has this phenomenal podcast that I think of my favorite podcast called Hidden Brain on NPR. And it's really about understanding all of this things that we as humans have in our brain, in our personality and our humanity, and how that impacts the day to day life, how that impacts work, how that impacts conscious or unconsciously the patterns in human behavior that are part of everything.
- Jorge Vargas
And it's a fascinating podcast. It goes on a weekly basis. And I strongly encourage folks to go through it because it also touches to a lot of things that sometimes speak to me personally. Sometimes it speaks to me about work. Sometimes it speaks to me about something specific that's going on in the world. And all in all, I think it has really shaped me, or at least has awakened a lot of curiosity about more of the things that we have hidden in our brains as the name of the podcast stands for.
- Liesel Mertes
Are there any questions that it would be helpful for me to ask you that I haven't asked you yet?
- Jorge Vargas
I think that I would love to understand or maybe hear based on your experience in the conversations that you've had with many folks about this topic, how much of the cultural context and cultural background that we'll bring that we've discussed in the last hour or so, how much data that comes up? How much do people actually recognize that? That is something that we all need to identify in the context of empathy and empathy at the workplace?
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm. Well, that's that's a good question. Let me give you kind of an impressionistic take on the question, which I I was a political science major. My favorite area of study in my undergraduate work was post-colonial theory, you know, different different cultures, speaking back to power structures. So I've I've taken some of that curiosity. Even in my MBA program. I was I was studying supply chain and global management. So it it caught my interest consistently.
- Liesel Mertes
Like, how are the assumptions that we're making about how business functions? How do they hold water? How do they not how do we need to be pivoting in a more global context? And the reality is whether it's whether it's global writ large or even within, like, you know, I consult with companies who everybody is living in central Indiana. You know, it's way more homogenous. Some of the companies that I work with on a smaller scale.
- Liesel Mertes
But still there are these these differences. I, I introduce people to empathy avatars in my training. These are these go to like postures of our personality that we take on when we encounter someone else who's going through a hard time. So you could manifest as like a Buck up Bobby, which is someone who is that mentality we were talking about, which is, you know, work is for work. We're all about productivity. It's a stiff upper lip.
- Liesel Mertes
You know, you just have to keep on keeping on or at. Cheer-Up Cheryl. You know, someone who is always wanting to look on the bright side, forcing someone else to look on the bright side or a Fix-It frank, someone who is all about like, let's let's just what's the solution? Like, how can I get you not to feel poorly? And there's there's seven or eight of those. And they're there like ways of being that people have adopted out of their own personal experience, out of the norms of their cultural context, out of what helped them survive formative pain in their own lives.
- Liesel Mertes
And it's continually fascinating to me.
- Liesel Mertes
So that's a roundabout way of saying I'm a student. I've seen how these things express themselves when I you know, when I talk about even to talk about like. You know, places like like Japan or China, like those are huge, complex, diverse cultures, but, you know, those are when people are doing work, you know, with their counterparts in those countries, those people identify a lot more with like, again, that the Buck-Bobby or the Fix it Frank.
- Liesel Mertes
Like, it's it tends to be that the normative cultural experience is we don't talk about those things and like that. We are not showing vulnerability in those ways. Like you, you have to find somebody else in your life to deal with that stuff is not going to be here. So I'm continually learning. Does that answer your question about some of the things that I've seen?
- Jorge Vargas
Absolutely. And it's fascinating that you mentioned something that probably we we didn't look more deeply into, but it's the fact that the power dynamics and the differences in cultures and contexts also speak a lot to just the historical dynamics that have put some cultures, quote unquote, above others and might oppression that has existed in the hundreds of years that we have as like people interacting with people. And that also comes to play a lot when it comes to the workplace and finding ways to build empathy and try to break some things that unconsciously have been ingrained into our system culturally.
- Jorge Vargas
It's hard and sometimes it's even hard to recognize, I think that for me, speaking for myself, although I was very. Happy and lucky and privileged to grow up in Colombia, still in an international setting and going to an international school, there was always the sense that. You as a Colombian were less than someone in the U.S. or someone in Europe simply for the fact of where you are, where you were coming from, and that plays a big role as well in understanding that cultural context and that cultural baggage that we bring to human interactions and to human interactions in the workplace.
- Jorge Vargas
So I appreciate that you bring that point because it's definitely very relevant and still something that we see now in understanding how history, how race, how political systems keep just influencing the ways in which we bring ourselves to work and bring ourselves to interacting with others. And it's not just that different cultures are different. It's also the fact that some cultures have been historically oppressed by others and. Denying that or not, acknowledging that that is also part of how we interact in the workplace in a global context is this is harsh justice complex and we just have to remind ourselves of that.
- Jorge Vargas
So thank you for making that point.
- Liesel Mertes
And that's that's part of why one of the foundational tenets I talk about is it's something that that you touched upon is just the importance of paying radical attention to the person in front of you to free yourself a lot of the times from feeling the responsibility of, like, I need to fix this or I need to get out of this situation because I feel personally uncomfortable and triggered.
- Liesel Mertes
But to be able to do the work and just coach yourself to like I'm going to be radically attentive here and I'm going to I'm going to have in my mind, you know, almost like a decision tree, different ways that I can pivot and respond based on what this person is indicating that they need.
- Jorge Vargas
That is so true and like so, so powerful. And I love this. Time of radical attentiveness, I think that it's really, really great that I'm definitely taking that coined term that you shared with me, because I love that it actually describes a lot of what we were talking about.
- Liesel Mertes
So, yeah, well, and it's I mean, we feel it right. Especially with so many devices and demands that take our attention, like whether it's whether it's a partner or a friend when somebody I mean, even if you're not going through a hard time, when somebody just like zeroes in on your story and they're really there with you, you know, I feel like we realize how rare it is just because, you know, we so seldom give that to people or even experience it.
- Liesel Mertes
And it's just one of the most powerful gifts that we can give.
- Jorge Vargas
That is absolutely true.
- Liesel Mertes
All right, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much you I really I am better as a result of the conversation and it is expanding my perspective and my available toolkit. So thank you for sharing.
- Jorge Vargas
Thank you so much, Liesel, for doing this work and for inviting me to chat about this, and this was a fascinating conversation.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Jorge…
OUTRO
My guest today is Scott Shute. Scott is the Head of Mindfulness and Compassion at LinkedIn, which is this great role that sits at the intersection of ancient wisdom traditions and a technology company. He is also an avid photographer, a musician, and, most recently, a published author. His book, “The Full Body Yes” launched in the middle of May. His mission is to change work from the inside out by “mainstreaming mindfulness” and “operationalizing compassion.”
This was a deeply enriching conversation about how to build up mindfulness…and in a year of so many distractions, don’t we all need a little more attention and mindfulness? And how to operationalize compassion, which is right up my alley.
We began talking about his book. I got to read an advance copy and enjoyed a passage so much that I called my 13 year old daughter into the room one morning to read it aloud to her. It was that spot-on.
Scott ShuteI was saying what you just said about response is what has been typical, like what I'm not getting is I send the book to my friends and they're like, oh, hey, cool. Got your book. Thanks. Not getting that. What I'm getting is like, oh, my God, Chapter eight, like, we got to talk about this because blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And and there is at least one story in there for everyone that's been super meaningful and has moved the needle on their life just a little bit or something that resonated with just a little bit or a lot.
Scott Shute
And so that's been super gratifying.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. Well, and as someone who prizes the craft of storytelling, I enjoy just all the places that the full body. Yes. Took me from Japan to Kansas to dealing with bullying in your adolescent years and back again. So I enjoyed both the wisdom but also the delivery of it. And I I have some questions to ask about certain sections of the book. I can't wait to jump in.
Liesel Mertes
What is your personal connection to why empathy matters and why it specifically matters in the workplace?
Scott Shute
And thank you for that question and thanks for having me. It matters because we don't work in isolation. We work with others, we live with others. And so to me, empathy, I talk a lot about compassion and I'll separate the two a bit. So I define compassion, is having an awareness of others, a mindset of wishing the best for them, and then the courage to take action. And some people say that compassion is empathy plus action.
Scott Shute
And so if you're talking about these first two pieces, it's first being aware of others and then having a mindset of wishing the best for them or a mindset of kindness. And why that's important in the workplace is, yeah, we don't work by ourselves. We work in teams. And what we've discovered, what science has shown us Project Aristotle at Google has shown us is the number one factor in creating a high performance team is, well, it's not their IQ, it's not what school they went to.
Scott Shute
It's not even the level of diversity in technology or overall diversity. It's psychological safety. This ability to say, hey, can I can I be myself in front of you guys, can I can I fail in front of you and know that you have my back, but actually even harder? Can I succeed? Can I win in front of you and know that you have my back? So if we're on a sales team and I just made two hundred twenty percent a quarter with two weeks to go and my friends at eighty five percent of quarter, are they really going to help me out.
Scott Shute
Are they going to look at me the same way. Am I going to look at them the same way. So this idea of empathy, this idea of being aware of others and having a mindset of wishing the best for them, really putting ourselves in their shoes builds powerful work environments where we end up being more creative. We end up with better solutions. We end up delivering something much better for our customers.
Liesel Mertes
I love that. Just touching on the data points, some of the business case that's there, I'd like to dig a little deeper. Would you tell me about a time in your work experience where you think, man, I was not OK? I was really going through a hard time and this person's care, attention, what they did or said really made a difference and paint that picture for us.
Scott Shute
Sure. Great question, I think for me, I'm trying to find a specific one, but for me it's that feeling of connection. I, I felt the sting of isolation in high school. You know, I had a really great junior high. Some people hate junior high. I loved junior high. But my first two years of high school were really painful or really hard. And they were, upon reflection, upon a lot of years of reflection.
Scott Shute
I realize this because I felt isolated, that I felt loneliness, that I felt, you know, other than and I eventually ended up changing schools. And what was so great about finding a new school, as I found people that I connected with, people who enjoyed me for who I was. And this is the antidote to loneliness, this is the antidote to isolation and this being connection, and when we feel like we're connected to others. And so I've what I appreciate about your work is that, you know, a lot of stuff when we're going through it, it's about that isolation.
Scott Shute
Sometimes it's about the isolation we feel about ourselves, like we don't feel good about ourselves. That inner critic, that obnoxious roommate in our mind is going crazy and we just feel gross. Sometimes it's feeling a disconnection from others. Sometimes that can be about performance, right? If I'm if things aren't going well, then it it comes back to feeling disconnected, feeling like, oh, well, are they going to throw me out of here? Am I going to lose my job?
Scott Shute
And so anything that builds that connection, whether it's a manager's kind words or a cross-functional partners kind words or just having a friend at work that you can go take a walk around the block with or, you know, now assume call and and say everything you want to to. That is such a meaningful thing because it's like, oh, here, here it is. I can remember again what's really important and what's really important are these relationships. What's really important is feeling connected to myself, but also connected everything else
Liesel Mertes
That that reminds me of a passage from your book, The Full Body Yes.
Liesel Mertes
Would you mind if I would it be OK if I read aloud to you just as a section you're talking about this process of discovering what your dream job would be. And you're write, "If companies were more conscious, they would treat their customers better. There would be more integrity and trust in the world. If companies and their leaders were more conscious, they would treat their employees better. There would be less trauma and stress. There would be more healing, more creativity.
Liesel Mertes
People could be whole. We wouldn't need to think of our work life as bad and the rest of our lives as good. We can bring compassion into everything we do at work, not just because it makes others feel better, but also because it's a better strategy for success. The research bears this out. We just haven't quite caught up to it in practice yet."
Liesel Mertes
I feel like that echoes what you just said, and I would love to hear in your position and scope of influence.
Liesel Mertes
Tell us a little bit about your role at LinkedIn and how you've gone about being part of actualizing some of those beautiful sentiments. And I love for you to also include some of the pain points along the way from concept to reality. There's oftentimes some stretching that goes.
Scott Shute
Sure, sure. I've been at LinkedIn for nine years and the first six of those, I was the VP of Global Customer Operations, which was essentially customer service and a lot of other functions that are customer facing outside of sales. And part of me is I've I was able to bring my mindfulness or my contemplative practice to work, starting about two years in as a volunteer for my for my other job. And I've been in this this role now for three years as a full time role, Head of Mindfulness and Compassion.
Scott Shute
But what does it mean? So there's two parts of my role, mainstream mindfulness and operationalise compassion and in mainstream mindfulness, we're just trying to make mindfulness as meditation really and overall mindfulness like self awareness, just as normal as physical exercise. So you can think of it like mental exercise and physical exercise, because our employees, they're almost all knowledge workers. Right. We don't need to run six minute miles or lift heavy things, but we do need to stay mentally focused and emotionally balanced and all those sorts of things.
Scott Shute
So this is why it's important. And what it means is we offer things like meditation sessions. We have, well, pre pandemic. We had 40 to 60 a week across the globe. LinkedIn is about a fifteen or sixteen thousand person company. We offer an app called Why Is It Work, which we really like from our partners at Wisdom Labs. And every year we do a 30 day challenge involving that app, usually in October, where we get people to use it and the challenges, you know, meditate or, you know, use the app 20 times within the month of October and we'll give you a T-shirt of this year.
Scott Shute
We give Hoodie's said, never, never underestimate the power of a free hoodie on behavior.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. I'd do much more for a hoodie than I would for a t shirt. That was right.
Scott Shute
Right. It was pretty good. We do things like mini retreats if people want to go further. Speaker series, again, just trying to make these mental exercises and these this idea around self awareness just as commonplace as physical exercise. Now, for that part, and it's been super successful, you know, every year we have more and more and more people, but also as a percentage of our population taking part in these things.
Scott Shute
And during especially during COVID time, during quarantine time, you know, there's been an uptick because, one, people can come to it. When now when I lead a meditation session, I'm getting people from all over the world instead of just, you know, the people from my building on fourth floor on Thursday at four thirty in the afternoon. And the second reason they come is because they need it like we're we're all having challenges in our own ways.
Scott Shute
And so that those challenges are forcing people to go inside.
Liesel Mertes
I also want to hear about that part that you said operationalising. Yeah, and it is because it makes me think of another quote you have in your book that we don't rise to the level of our expectation would fall to the level of our systems, which is something that I do. Yes. And my training and consulting all the time to move from good intentions and thoughts and prayers to actually how do we have replicable systems of care and training that make us good instead of poor in these issues.
[Liesel Mertes
So I'd love to hear more about that.
Scott Shute
Let's talk about that. So I first talked about all the things we're doing with mindfulness. The second part of my job is operationalizing compassion. And look, I think mindfulness is interesting and it's all about self development and it's really powerful. And that's going to happen with or without me. There's a huge move towards mindfulness, but compassion, compassion, I think, is where the juices, because this is how we work. It's how we work together.
Scott Shute
It's how we work with our customers. So if you think back to my definition, three parts, you're building capacity to be aware of. Others have a mindset of wishing the best for them and then the courage to take action. Now, put that in the context of a business context. So as an example, this and what I would say is I'm not the one making LinkedIn a compassionate place. It was already like that. It evolved that way.
Scott Shute
This is why I have this job. The more my role is to codify it, to say, how did we get here? You know, if the executive team was going to leave LinkedIn and go to any other place, like what would the top three or five or 20 things that we would do, like how would we bring the magic somewhere else? And so this is what I mean. And I'll share some examples. So as an example, our head of sales will stand in front of whatever five thousand salespeople at sales kickoff and say something like, look, hey, our job as salespeople is to provide long term value.
Scott Shute
So don't sell something our customers don't need just so you can hit your quota. Hmm. Right. And that's I was a salesperson too at 25. That's not how I was taught. Or in product development, you know, every week we have four or five or eight product reviews, and this is kind of like Shark Tank without the attitude, you know, a product manager will come to the product executive team and say, all right, well, here's the next revision of my product and what we expect to happen.
Scott Shute
And something like, OK, Will, if we do X, Y and Z, we're going to result in 13 percent more engagement. In other words, 13 percent more clicks on the site. And the first question, if the person doesn't answer it themselves, the first question is always, all right, well, how is the member experience and the customer experience? And if the answer is, oh, well, hey, did I mention it was 13 percent more clicks than the meeting just stops and then it becomes an object lesson on our first principle, our number one value, which is members first.
Scott Shute
And so these types of things are built into our culture. But it goes back to this to I have the capacity to be aware of others and wish the best for them and then the courage to take action, meaning sometimes, you know, we deeply understand our customers. We deeply are trying to solve their problems. And sometimes I need to do something for them. That's not great for me either. The company in the short term. But I know that over the long term, it's going to be better for both of us.
Scott Shute
We're going to provide long term value and in the long haul will be more successful financially and as a company in general. Right.
Liesel Mertes
You know, the question that that prompts in thinking about operationalising and also potential pain points, I find sometimes in company cultures there can be a focus on the customer, the member, whatever the title is, and that sometimes that happens at the cost of the employee experience. You know, where we're driving, for results, you know, whatever whatever metric is held up there. How are you taking some of that same degree of intentionality, especially in a year that has been so full of disruptive life events, death, job loss, relationship transition and operationalising internal compassion in those shows?
Liesel Mertes
And and I assume that, like everybody else, it's kind of been a finding your way in the midst of that.
Scott Shute
Yeah, there's I think business is best-run not by writing in a thousand places, a thousand sorry, a thousand page playbook, but by these high level things. And then each situation is different. So compassion goes back to it's a balance for all of the stakeholders, not just the shareholders, meaning a company who takes care of their customers, as we described, but also takes care of their employees as described, you know, have an awareness, a mindset of wishing the best and courage to take action and the shareholders.
Scott Shute
So you have to stay in business in order to meet your vision. Right. In addition to the broader environment, you know, the community that you work in, the broader global environment you live in. So when we're creating this, when we're moving from me to we thinking, I think that has compassion at the roots of it. And each situation brings up a different set of solutions.
Scott Shute
There are sometimes where we need to do absolutely the right thing for the shareholders, you know, and there's sometimes we need to do absolutely the right thing for the employees or the customers or our neighbors and next to the buildings where we work, whatever it is.
Scott Shute
But if I'm trying to do something that for the long term is best for the whole, that's when we win. So what does that mean on the ground? Well, let's say that we have a call center in India and in the city where they're in. They can't even get to the office or they can't. They're worried about their health. There might be a time when we just need to close our customer service center for a day or several days knowing that it's not great for our customers, but our employees need to take care of themselves.
Scott Shute
And sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes employees need to work extra hard to take care of our customers, but it's finding the balance over the long haul that is important.
Liesel Mertes
What are you taking away as valuable lessons from a leadership level of what, supporting people well, during disruption, looks like?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, it for sure starts at the top at the language that people are using. So there's a couple of things that have happened. One is, you know, when we do company meetings in the old days, like every other company, C levels are standing on stage. Everybody else is kind of watching and there's a separation between us. Well, now we do the company meeting and the same sea levels are at home. You know, we're on Zoome or whatever the technology is.
Scott Shute
We see their dogs walking by or their kids or, you know, we have technical failures. They have technical failures, just like we all have rain. And it has humanized it has equalized us in terms of that. We're all people like we're all humans first and workers somewhere second or down the line. And so as a leader, if I can be conscious about this, it's it's being more vulnerable. It's talking about my own challenges, but it's also a recognition of everybody else's challenges.
Scott Shute
And, you know, early on, our leaders were very clear and saying, hey, look, you and your family, your health, your physical, your mental health are the most important things to us. So please do what you need to do. The work will be here when you get back, you know, and that was the that was the messaging. But then it was also in our policies and everything that we did that supported that messaging.
Scott Shute
So I think this is it as a leader, be vulnerable and then be aware and treat people as people, treat them like you want to be treated like if your grandma or the person you treasured most in life worked at this company, how would you treat her?
Liesel Mertes
Yeah, there's a good grounding question. What is
Liesel Mertes
So pulling back a little bit in your book, The Full Body. Yes. And in your work and mission in general, building compassion in our lives and our workplaces, I imagine that there could be some pushback that you receive from other people who have risen to executive positions within their companies. What is some of the most common pushback that you hear when you talk about building compassion at work?
Scott Shute
Right. I think usually it's a misunderstanding of what compassion means. People often think that it sounds soft or it's just about loving each other or some like they put you know, they even make that. They even make that voice. It's soft. It's about loving, you know, airy fairy. And they have their hands in the air while they're doing them. And this is not what compassion is all about. Right? It takes real courage. Like, I think it's much harder to be a compassionate manager than to be a command and control jerk manager.
Scott Shute
It's super easy to stand up on your pedestal and say, just look, I told you what to do. Just do it. Come on, why haven't you done it? And then scream at people when they don't do. Exactly. You know, it's managing out of fear. That's super easy. That takes no skill, but to be compassionate means you deeply understand other people means you have to take the time to listen. And sometimes compassion requires a strength that you really have to work up to.
Scott Shute
Right that strength to have the hard conversation. You know, if somebody's struggling, the strength to really find out why and to in some cases either coach them up or eliminate their role or move them on to another role, these are things that require a strength of our own character and conviction and values. And it's not easy at all. So usually it's a misconception of what it means. And then when you get down to it and we say things like like I was talking about the salesperson or the product person, they're like, oh, yeah, well, of course you put customers first.
Scott Shute
But then when we really dig into the conversations, like, do you have the courage to put the customer first when it's hard? Yeah, it takes real courage. Do you have the courage to put your employees first when needed to? You know, so it's a lot harder than it sounds. It's easy to understand, but it's hard to put into practice.
Liesel Mertes
Right. I'm a I'm reminded when you you talked about that somewhat easy default behavior that can happen. That's an avatar that in my training's I'll introduce people to one of these default behaviors that we go to in the face of other people's pain, because it's how we've had to survive some of our own psychological, emotional, spiritual pain. And that my character I term the the Buck-Up Bobby, the just have to keep going. And whether it's, you know, a Commiserating Candace or a Cheer-Up Cheryl, these these postures that we take on to avoid some of the the skill of going deep, of being present.
Liesel Mertes
You know, you you mentioned in your book and I deeply resonated with it, that our deepest need is to be seen, heard and acknowledged and both in our successes on our average days and especially on the days where, you know, everything feels like it has gone sideways.
Liesel Mertes
In your capacity as a worker, as a leader, how did you personally skill up? Because your book is, you know, sprinkled throughout are anecdotes of having meaningful conversations with, you know, someone who worked under you, who is deciding, you know, to start a new relationship or to pursue graduate education.
Liesel Mertes
Do you remember feeling out of your depth and like you needed to skill up? How did that process go for you as you acquired the skills necessary to get where you are?
Scott Shute
Sure. So part of it I always wanted to be a manager. Like I. I was always interested in psychology and the way our minds work. And I tended to be when I was an individual contributor as a salesperson, I tended to be somebody that people would come to ask for advice. And so it took me a while, but I figured out how to start being a manager. I had to change industries, you know, to be a manager.
Scott Shute
And I remember that job was the most stressful job I ever had. And I was 29 and leading a team of, I don't even know, eight people or 10 people. And that I was that was a job I was freaking out the most in not leading a thousand people organization, but leading eight for the first time because you have to figure out like oh whoa, this is totally different. Like this person's career is dependent on me. There a lot as dependent on me.
Scott Shute
And I felt that weight and it didn't happen all at once. But, um, but in every conversation, you know, you get that feeling in your stomach like, oh, that went really well. Or I know that could have gotten better. Yeah. And so over time I scaled up by you know, I got coaching certified. I took extra trainings on how to be a manager, how to be a better listener. And I was just also reliant on my I've always had a deep kind of personal development bent.
Scott Shute
So reading books and, you know, going to classes and just continually trying to learn to to be better at it. So it seemed like most things it comes with a failure. And I don't mean that in the big way, but like doing something and walking away from it, going that could have been better. Yeah.
Liesel Mertes
Yeah. At its at its worst it can be the, the unrelenting voice that is always desiring improvement that you have both give space to you as a potential for good, but also reign in in those moments. That's right. Leave me alone.
Scott Shute
That's right.
Liesel Mertes
It was good enough.
Scott Shute
Well this is this is one of the hardest challenges in development in, you know, how do we be a hard charger, whatever you want to think about that, how do we be super successful and how do we have a mindfulness practice or be a good person or continuing developing, you know, on these softer skills?
Scott Shute
And I struggled with that for a really long time because
Scott Shute
I have been at other companies where I'd look up at the roster of the C suite and think to myself, oh, my God.
Scott Shute
Like, do you have to be a jerk to be a VP here? I'm like, is this that's I don't want to do it. And and then I had have now had the luxury of working at other companies and especially LinkedIn, where in fact jerks are not allowed. I could look at the entire C suite and go, I'd be proud to be any one of those people or to work for any one of those people. And realizing that some companies and some leaders and some organizations have figured this out, like there is a way for each of us to be successful and to be a good person.
Scott Shute
They are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I do think they go together at the highest levels.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and what what I have found also as I have worked with companies domestically. Internationally, in a small, medium, large, especially over the last year, is that. There's there's still an element almost of permission that is needed to be able to see people in top levels of influence and scope being able to have these moments of weakness, you know, not not failure, but to but to say like this actually is really hard. Like we we have our kids schooling at home.
Liesel Mertes
And I feel like it's just kind of overwhelming or I just want to bury someone within the last week. And I'm not fully OK for this meeting because there's only things that people are in the hard driving cultures where leadership hasn't purposefully wanted to be more connected and more human. There's a tremendous amount of just having to absorb stuff, defer those messy, both bodily feelings and also emotional ones, which just wreaks havoc. Yeah. In the long run,
Scott Shute
These, I'm going to reframe the weakness to vulnerability.
Liesel Mertes
Yes.
Scott Shute
When we express our vulnerabilities, it's actually a real, real strength as a leader when you know, when done appropriately. Because people want to identify with the people that lead them, right? And if someone is they see as perfect or, you know, then it's like, oh, I'm not like them. I can't ever become like them. But if they see leaders as, oh, wow, I really see myself in them and I aspire to be someone like that today, I aspire to be more like them today.
Scott Shute
That's really, really powerful. And it is accelerated by these leaders ability to be vulnerable, to be real. It's actually counterintuitive, but but showing some vulnerability now and then is a real strength.
Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I like I like that pivot towards vulnerability. Tell me you introduced the concept near the end of the Book of microcompassions in the workplace. I really liked that term. Tell me more about some of the power that you're seeing of microcompassions in the workplace.
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, we're probably familiar with micro aggressions, right. So I was trying to figure out what the balance of that is. Not that it solves every microaggression, but a micro compassion is just this idea that compassion doesn't have to be complicated. It's just the simplest, simplest things like smiling at someone or saying, hi, you know, so you're in the grocery line. And instead of just being lost in our phones or we're waiting to check out, like, why not say hi to somebody and ask them a question that gets them started?
Scott Shute
Because going back to what is one of our deepest needs, our deepest need is to feel connected, to be seen, to be acknowledged, to be heard, ultimately, to be loved. And we don't have to go all the way to love right there in the grocery store. But how about seen and acknowledged and heard to feel connected? And so we can do this at work by saying hi, by smiling, by remember someone's hobbies, you know, it's like, oh, hey, Colin, did you have you been surfing lately or, you know, have you been fishing lately or whatever?
Scott Shute
Knitting, you know, what's the what's the latest project you're working on? Or ask about their daughter or their son or something they're excited about. It just shows that you remember and you are seeing them as a person. And let's see what's another or you know, sometimes we have these meetings either by Zoom or we're in person and somebody hasn't said something for a long time. It's just bringing them in like, oh, Katie, we haven't heard from you for a while.
Scott Shute
I'd really love to hear what you have to say about this topic. Anything that we can do to create more of the we and less of the me moves us forward and helps people feel connected.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and creating these cultures of care. Yeah, I talk about how. It's a competitive advantage for you, it comes out in employee attraction and retention and how people are able to survive, stabilize and return to thriving when things go sideways. I imagine at Linked In, as it is so much about connection at work, you actually know that the numbers behind the LinkedIn matrix are seeing what are being reported in jobs reports, which is that companies, especially right now, as we are in May of twenty twenty one, they are looking to hire.
Liesel Mertes
You know, we're ramping back up. It is difficult to find people talk a little bit about. I'd love to hear. Yeah. Just compassion and a culture of it as the competitive advantage and how you succeed and how you pull in the right people to accomplish what people classically talk about. As you know, the the more business-y ends of your your profit and loss.
Scott Shute
Sure. I will get there. But first, I'm going to digress into the history of work for just a real quick second.
Liesel Mertes
Yes. I love a good digression.
Scott Shute
So we started start, I don't know, at some point there were kings and slaves, like when we were building the pyramids 5000 years ago and workers were not highly regarded. And we had the agrarian age for a long time where you had landowners and slaves or non land owners and workers were not highly regarded. And then in the industrial age, you know, you imagine a factory where with a thousand seamstresses or people on an assembly line all making the same thing again, workers not highly regarded.
Scott Shute
Well, now you fast forward to today and a company like LinkedIn and not everybody has gotten are not everybody's in this position. But at LinkedIn, we don't have any hard assets. Right? We're not selling cars or copper or commodities. All we have is information. And so that means that the number one asset we have are the employees. And so we want our employees to have we want them to be at their best, i.e. the mindfulness programs.
Scott Shute
And then we want to create an environment where they can do their best work, where they where they feel wanted. Now, as a worker now in Silicon Valley, the power is in the workers hands. Right. So an engineer in Silicon Valley can write their own ticket. They can work wherever they want because they're in such such high demand. This is the opposite of where we were 5000 years ago. And so people want to work in places where they are valued.
Scott Shute
They want to work in places where their company is doing good things in the world, you know, where they are trying to make a difference, where there's a purpose driven. They want to work for good leaders, people who care about them, people who are honest and have the same set of values that they do. So this whole idea of creating and we don't even have to use the word compassion, but a culture where people are valued, where it's about the we instead of the few me, where it's about the we of the world instead of just the me of the company.
Scott Shute
People want to work in those environments and over time they'll vote with their feet. You know, people don't leave jobs. They leave managers. Right. But they also will be disenfranchised by companies who are, you know, not that honest or they're doing bad things or create an environment where the bad seeds get bigger stages. So it is it's a competitive advantage over time in the talent that you attract. But it's also a competitive advantage in terms of the quality of products and services you end up offering your customers.
Liesel Mertes
Absolutely. I appreciate the added coloring of the history of work, and I like that I like that to thank you for that digression.
Liesel Mertes
You've written this book. You've launched it in the midst of pandemic time. Still tell our listeners a little bit about The Full Body yes. And what made you write it when you did?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, I've been thinking about writing a book for 35 years since I was a 15 year old in my ninth grade English class. I always knew I'd write a book. And every time I sat down or virtually sat down to write it, it wasn't there.
Liesel Mertes
Can I ask, did it as like, did you know what kind of book was it? Fiction or poetry? It was just going to be a book.
Scott Shute
I just knew I would write a book. Like, I just I just had that knowing and and I figured it would be something about my life journey. But, you know, when you're 15, you don't have much of a life journey to write a book about. So I got to go live first. And then in December of 2019, I'm coming home with an from an event with a friend and my friend is driving and I'm in the passenger seat and gets this funny look and he goes.
Scott Shute
The universe has told me to tell you it's time to write your book. Yeah, and I kind of checked in. It's like, wait, does it feel right? It's like, oh, yeah, it does. It does feel right. And the timing was just, of course, just, you know, it all lined up. I found an editor. She helped me create an outline because I never wrote a written a book before to turn my hundred stories into 35 or 40 stories and put them in order.
Scott Shute
And then I just started writing. And then exactly at the time it was time to start writing is when the quarantine happened. And so I traded commuting time for essentially meditating and writing time. And the book came in 10 or 11 weeks, which, according to my publisher, is extraordinarily fast. But it was time. And then, you know, now it's a year later. This is the wild part about the publishing industry. It takes a while to get it out there.
Scott Shute
And so releasing of, you know, kind of hopefully towards the end of the pandemic when they can actually. Yeah. You know, the people can actually get out. And but but I think that what I'm talking about, these things that I'm talking about are universal. It's talking about really finding our true selves right. When we when and when you are deeply aware of our own selves, our own values, what's really important to us. And then we make decisions based on what's important.
Scott Shute
This is, I think, what we're all going through. I mean, in the last year, how many people do you know have moved or they've gotten divorced or ended their relationships or started relationships or changed jobs? To me, it seems like those big life events are on turbo. And, you know, part of it. Yeah, it's the challenge, the crucible of what we've gone through. But part of it is people are getting they're like, no, I know who I am.
Scott Shute
And I I need to be something different than who this is right here. I'm making a change. And that's what this book is about.
Liesel Mertes
Well, and even in that story of some of the, you know, writing with a colleague who who spoke that it was time, there's a thread that goes through of a paying attention to to the concrete, to the mystical, to the range in between of what is going on within our life story. So even the story of that, the final nudge from a pandemic and from a friend that are in line with some of the themes.
Scott Shute
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, you know, in my own life, I believe that, you know, science from the universe, whatever you want to call that thing, the divine, whatever are all around us. You know, I see signs in billboards and fortune cookies and license plates in front of me not all the time, but they'll glow. I call it the golden tongue wisdom. Like, they'll just light up and the message will just match, like something I've needed to hear.
Scott Shute
And because I believe it and because I then act on some of those insights, like more of it happens. And so I believe that life happens this way. But or and if someone believes that life doesn't happen that way and there are no science and it's just the way it is, then, you know, that's how their life happens. I believe that's true to me.
Liesel Mertes
I deeply resonate with that. The the receptivity and the expectation leads to a very different level of attentiveness and receiving. That's true.
Scott Shute
Yeah, receiving and then action, I think, you know, so if we get a message and then we're like, I'm going to do anything, well, then I think it's less likely that we'll be, you know, that the science will show up the next time. Yeah.
Liesel Mertes
Well, thank you for for sharing in The Full Body, yes, as listeners, if their interest has been piqued as they are paying attention to their life and even to this moment as they're listening and think maybe this is for me, where's the best place for them to go to get a copy?
Scott Shute
Sure. Well, you can get a copy wherever books are found, Amazon and Barnes and Noble and everywhere else. I learned something new in the process, like if you have an independent bookstore that you love, you can actually buy online at bookshop.Org. And if and if you designate your local bookstore, they will get the profits from that book from online. I think that's really, really cool. I did not know that coming. If you want to know more about me or the book, you can check out my website at Scottshute.com or the fullbodyyes.com either way, or follow me on LinkedIn for kind of daily updates.
Scott Shute
And where else? Oh, if you're into meditation, I'm on INSIGHT. Timer And about every two weeks I do a live event on Insight Timer where you can do a I often am talking about compassion and compassion practices, but that's another place to find me.
Liesel Mertes
And Scott, as you are paying attention to your life, do you have a sense of the what next? I realized that you took a year ago and that is now out in the world. And we might think that this is your current work, which I know it's a part of your current story, but we're particularly excited about right now.
Scott Shute
It's in this moment I'm first I'm giving this book some time and time and attention to breathe. I'm taking and taking a couple of months away from LinkedIn just to focus on the book release and then I'll go back. But I'd love to spend the next part of my career really diving into the operationalising of compassion, because there's there's I think that's my unique place in the world. Like I've spent time as an executive, but I've also spent time in a really deep way as a seeker and as a, you know, a cleric.
Scott Shute
I'm a member of the clergy and there's not that many of us. And so I'd love to find a way in really simple and secular terms of how to bring. These divine concepts, really, of compassion and love into the workplace in a way that everybody just goes, oh yeah, like, yeah, why aren't we doing it that way?
MUSICAL TRANSITION
If you are interested in getting The Full Body Yes, finding out more about Scott and his mindfulness offerings, or even seeing some of his beautiful photos, those links are in the show notes.
Here are three key takeaways from our conversation
OUTRO
Links:
To find out more about Scott and The Full Body Yes: https://www.scottshute.com/
Resources to Operationalize Mindfulness:
I mean, it's just so private and so painful and so isolating at so many levels. And that's why I said grief isn't tame, because part of the viciousness of it is its unpredictability. Yeah, something can remind you, something can be a trigger. And it's just it's it's not controllable. It's not tameable. And I think understanding that is actually really helpful
INTRO
Grief can rob you of language. The feelings are so totalizing, so big and unwieldy. You don’t know when or if the pain will end and the people around you seem to have little more to offer than trite platitudes like “It’s always darkest before the dawn.”
If you have been that grieving person, feeling so very alone with no one to listen or respond to your cry of pain, or if you have been that awkward friend or colleague, fumbling around for the right words and finding none, than this episode is for you. Because this episode is all about lament.
Lament is a language of pain, of giving voice to the sorrow. And my guest today is no stranger to lament. In fact, Mark Vroegop has written a book on the topic called Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.
The book is borne out of his life experience and the death of a daughter. But I will let him tell you more about that in the course of our interview.
Mark Vroegop is the Lead Pastor at College Park Church, a church on the northside of Indianapolis. And, on a personal level, Mark has powerfully intersected with my own journey of pain and grief. He was the one who stood graveside when our daughter, Mercy’s, body was lowered into the ground. Sharing our pain and giving voice to our grief. His honest reckoning with his own struggle and, ultimately, hope has ripple effects into my work as a Workplace Empathy Consultant. So I am glad to welcome him to the show today.
And, just to note, Mark’s story is deeply intertwined with his Christian faith. For those of you who do not share his faith, there might be language or concepts that are foreign to you, I welcome you to listen, as we listen to all of our guests, with a welcoming curiosity, embracing the concepts and wisdom that finds resonance with your spirit and letting anything else pass along.
And for those of you that are rooted in the Christian tradition, I believe that Mark’s writing and story could deepen your understanding of how the language of lament allows you to hold both grief and sorrow without having to just plaster a happy, religious platitude over your pain.
A little bit more about Mark: he has taken up roasting his own coffee beans in the midst of the pandemic. He loves the outdoors, although his is quick to clarify that he and his family no longer sleep in tents.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, we love the outdoors, love anything exercise related outside of a big park nearby. Here you go. Creeks, my favorite place to go, kind of my happy place. And we are big campers. So when I say camper, think glampers.
- Mark Vroegop
So we have a travel trailer that we now have that we've upgraded from a pop up. And we love just taking that thing out on a Friday, Saturday and enjoying the outdoors and some quiet. And we're looking forward to more opportunities to do that here soon.
Mark is the father to four living children.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, so we have four children. We have three boys who are adults, twin boys. Our number one number two are out of college and one is married and two others are getting married soon.
Mark Vroegop
We have a daughter who's in high school and mother in law that lives with us and a dog named Stella.
- Mark Vroegop
So we have a really full and vibrant home with people coming in and out all the time and just love the opportunity to be in their lives and are thankful that they live in close proximity here to Indianapolis. So we can see them quite often.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, what a robust household and what a number of transitions you guys are collectively standing on, on the brink of.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we are in the middle of all kinds of transitions, that's for sure.
Yeah. Tell me a little bit.
- Liesel Mertes
We're going to be talking about disruptive life events, the comforters that come alongside as poorly and the moment.
- Liesel Mertes
And I know that your journey into that, both as a writer, pastor, speaker began from a really personal place. Would you set the scene of that story for us?
- Mark Vroegop
Sure. So our first children were twins, so pregnancy wasn't a problem for us. In fact, the problem was we were too pregnant and my wife carried our twins to thirty nine and a half weeks. So she was a college athlete and twins were born six pounds, seven ounces, six pounds, 11 ounces. Kendall came on three days later. Just beautiful, fairly easy pregnancy apart from enormous discomfort. Third sons born, no complications whatsoever.
- Mark Vroegop
Healthy baby boy and then 2003 we were pregnant with our daughter that we learned she was a daughter, Sylvia. And throughout the pregnancy, my wife just had this this fear that something wasn't right and she can be more fearful than what she would like.
- Mark Vroegop
And so we just were praying through all of that. And at the very end of the pregnancy and their ninth month. Thirty nine weeks, actually, just a few days before delivery and Sunday night, she said something doesn't feel right.
- Mark Vroegop
And I thought, wow, she's just nervous and fearful, like pregnancy is coming here to an end. And I get that. And we went to the doctor's office just to be sure, because she hadn't felt any movement. In a while and in the doctor's office, we found out the tragic news that are in utero daughter at thirty nine and a half weeks, just like I said a few days before delivery had mysteriously died and then she had to give birth to a deceased baby.
- Mark Vroegop
We named her Sylvia.
- Mark Vroegop
And yeah, that was not just a shock, but a trauma that really deeply affected us, because prior we had, you know, had all kinds of difficulties. Life wasn't easy, but nothing of this sort of caliber. Persay. So, yeah. And from there, we just then tried to begin moving on and healing and in that process had multiple miscarriages, had what was is called a blighted ovum. So we thought we were pregnant, dared to hope that we were pregnant, got excited, went for an ultrasound, only to find out that there's no baby there.
- Mark Vroegop
And we had actually caught a miscarriage before we knew it. And so it just it was this. Year, two year journey of just immense, gut wrenching, everyday kind of grief that sometimes came in a tsunami and other times came like the tide that would come in and go out.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, it was quite a journey to try and navigate through. So that's the hard providence that the Lord graced us with as a huge lesson in a way that we've also been able to help speaking to other people's pain as well.
- Liesel Mertes
Thank you for sharing that. For sharing a little bit about Sylvia, I. I have your book in front of me. Dark clouds, deep mercy. And you write in there, My grief was not tame. It was vicious. Could you could you open up? You know, there's there's the overview. But I imagine in that first year or two, what did what did a particularly vicious moment that comes to mind for you look like?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, it was one in particular is laying next to my wife and used a few days after we had buried Sylvia and she's just crying in a way that I never heard her cry before.
- Mark Vroegop
And there was just this bone chilling fear of what if my wife is never happy again?
- Mark Vroegop
What if our marriage is going to be in trouble? Because, you know, so many couples, when they lose a child, it creates an unusual level of stress.
- Mark Vroegop
You know, how how do I help my kids move on and process grief when. You know, I don't even know how to process my own grief and and then just to the real pressure of, you know, in pastoral ministry and every week there's hospital visits and babies that are born and messages that need to be preached.
- Mark Vroegop
And so, you know, and then when it's a miscarriage or we're trying to get pregnant and we're struggling, you know, it's not as though I can share a prayer request with the church. Hey, my wife got her period this week. Pray for us.
- Mark Vroegop
I mean, it's just so private and so painful and so isolating at so many levels. And that's why I said grief isn't tame, because part of the viciousness of it is its unpredictability. Yeah, something can remind you, something can be a trigger. And it's just it's it's not controllable.
- Mark Vroegop
It's not tameable. And I think understanding that is actually really helpful because it tends to normalize what at times you feel like is a sort of a crazed perspective on I've never felt this way and I don't know that it's sustainable.
- Mark Vroegop
And by God's grace, it we made our way through it as the Lord helped us. But I felt like in the book and in helping people with their grief, to be honest, that no grief is not tame and it is vicious.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We will return to Mark and his story soon. I want to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. The rate of change and disruption in 2021 is unrelenting. As employers adjust to new rhythms and regulations, so you know if you are giving your people what they need to stay engaged and thrive? Empathy training is an essential element of building a culture of care that supports mental health and values the whole person. With keynote options, certificate programs, and coaching options, let Handle with Care Consulting help you confidently, consistently offer meaningful support when it matters most
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mertes
As you're carrying that grief, who who did you find, especially in that, you know, immediate two year people? That we're really your people, that we're more in the know and actively supporting you.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, for sure. Family was super helpful, you know, extended family member walking out of the delivery room prior to Sylvia being born.
- Mark Vroegop
And I grabbed my brother in law who's a dear friend, and I said, I need you to do something for me. And he said, What's that? And I said, Here's a camera. I need you to come in to this delivery room and I need you to take pictures, because this is all that we got. Yeah. And I mean, what a huge gift. Had two pastors who literally when I walked into the birthing room. I saw a little signia, picture on the door, which I knew was a symbol that a stillbirth was going to happen in this room from my chaplaincy orientation at the hospital when I saw it, it just my knees literally gave out and they literally carried me across the threshold into the room.
- Mark Vroegop
It was a powerful kind of metaphor of their help.
- Mark Vroegop
And then there were just other people we didn't locate our counsel or our support. And one particular person for some folks, that might be helpful.
- Mark Vroegop
In our case, we had sort of a team of folks who didn't even know they were part of a team, quite frankly, former seminary professors, other people who had walked through seasons of difficulty, who at different times we were able to, you know, to talk with.
- Mark Vroegop
And I think more than anything, besides just talking to the Lord, my wife and I, by God's grace, were able to process our grief and pain together.
- Mark Vroegop
And so in that respect, my wife was my greatest advocate in the midst of grief and I hers, although that kind of bounced back and forth depending upon how each of us were doing throughout the course of a week.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I, I, I hear and resonate with. Some of the ways that especially, as you know, partners and spouses in the death of a child, you know, for for Luke and I as as Mercy died, you would want to think if anyone else understood what I was going through, it should be this person.
- Liesel Mertes
You know, they've also lost this child.
- Liesel Mertes
And there we found that there were ways that, yes, we really could be of help to each other, come alongside each other. But then the ways in which you miss the other person can just feel so painful.
- Liesel Mertes
Like if you can't see me in this or if you're wanting, you know, if I'm feeling like I need to be with people and you want to be alone in those those aspects of distance could just in our story feel so wounded.
Liesel Mertes
And yeah, I hear I hear dynamics of the complication that it can be to both support and miss each other in shared grief.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, very much so.
- Liesel Mertes
Is it OK with you if I read you a short section from the introduction to your book? OK, you were talking about the comfort that was given to you at that time and you said, "When occasionally I candidly shared a few of the struggles of my soul. Some people reacted with visible discomfort. Others quickly moved to a desperate desire to, quote, find the bright side, a quick change of the subject in awkward silence or even physically excusing themselves to escape the tension.
- Liesel Mertes
When people stayed in the conversation, they often responded in unhelpful ways. In moments of attempted comfort, people said things like, I'm sure the Lord will give you another baby or maybe more people will come to the faith because of the death of your daughter. Or the Lord must know he can trust you with this. Every person meant well. I appreciated their attempts to address our pain, but it became clear that most people did not know how to join us in our grief."
- Liesel Mertes
That is in deep alignment with what I hear again and again in my work with businesses. But I would love for you to just expand a little bit on that sentiment. What was it like to absorb those misses from well-meaning people?
- Mark Vroegop
Well, it was it was hard, but I don't blame them. I mean, grief is scary. It's we. Look at loss, and we want people to not be sad because there's something about loss and death and sorrow that just penetrates our sort of self-sufficient mindset as human beings.
- Mark VroegopSo grief is just terribly uncomfortable. And if you don't understand it or don't have a language to engage with it. My experience was, is that people and even I did this in pastoral ministry, we tend to revert to sort of these default positions that we think are helpful but end up not being helpful at all and then not having the skill set or the competency to walk with somebody in pain by having the courage and the competency to know it's OK for me not to say anything right now
- Mark Vroegop
Because our bias towards fixing or explaining or wrapping it up in a nice little bow is often, in my experience, not designed to really comfort the griever. It's designed to relieve the tension that the person observing the grief feels. And so, you know, that's where I think lament is helpful, doesn't solve all the problems. But I think that gives us a language that we can sort of plumb the depths of deep sorrow with a little bit of a framework or some guardrails, if you will, to help us know what to do and maybe what not to do.
- Liesel Mertes
Let me jump in there, because I know for some listeners, this might be one of the first times apart from, like studying a vocabulary list in high school or for the jury that they have encountered the word lament.
- Liesel Mertes
Could you unpack that term? Tell us more about how lament has been helpful.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah. So lament, broadly defined, could just be thought of as, you know, deep sorrow.
- Mark Vroegop
But from a Christian perspective, when I talk as a pastor and when I think about biblical lament, I define lament in my book as a prayer in pain that leads to trust. Each one of those words is really important. It's a prayer. So it's what people do. They talk to God. It's a prayer in pain. So something difficult has created this this unique kind of prayer. That's a prayer in pain that leads. It's designed to be process oriented.
- Mark Vroegop
So it moves us from where we are to where we need to be. And it leads to trust. So in the Bible meant always has a resolution, even though the pain is it resolved. The prayer has a resolution where the person works through. I'm going to turn to God, I'm going to lay out what's wrong. I'm going to claim the promises of the Bible and I'm going to choose to trust and then I to do that over and over and over and over.
- Mark Vroegop
And what's fascinating is the Bible is filled with this language, the book of Psalms, the song Book of God's community. One out of every three songs is a lament. And that lament speaks to all kinds of different experiences, whether it's personal lament, corporate lament, repentance, lament or something. It's also called an precatory lament, like when injustice happens, what people say lament can be that language. So it's not just at a personal level, but even at a corporate level.
- Mark Vroegop
Lament is the language of people who are in pain.
- Mark Vroegop
And as they talk to God,
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, this this deep soul-ish movement into not hiding from the sorrow, but naming it and embracing that process.
- Liesel Mertes
As you said, you you mentioned within that, you know, we read a little from the book Ways in which people missed you in your pain, some of these well-meaning turns of phrase that are much more to escape the discomfort of the moment.
- Liesel Mertes
What were some of the best things that people did as they came alongside you and your family in those immediate stages of grief?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, presence mattered, like the ability to just be with us and to be quiet and to sit in our pain, the ability to just say I'm sorry and be OK with the tension of that grief, folks who simply tried to meet a need, brought meals, just tried to love us as human beings, not just as grievers, people who loved on our kids and helped them to know that they were special and important as mom and dad were in a hard and difficult place.
- Mark Vroegop
And all the things the church did was they sent us to Florida for a period of time, maybe five to six days. And it's just a silly thing, you'd think. But they actually paid for us to go to to Disney World. And, you know, you lose a baby and then go to Disney World. But I'll just never forget walking through the streets of of Disney World there with the castle in front of me and my kids literally kissing on my wife's arm.
- Mark Vroegop
And it was just really good for them to be happy for just a moment, even though we were deeply grieving.
- Mark Vroegop
And I remember standing in line and my wife still showed the signs of pregnancy. And a woman, well-meaning, asked her, "how far along are you?" And I forget when my wife answered, but she mentioned something really graciously, just not giving her the whole story. But what do you say? I don't have a baby with me, but I look pregnant and, you know, so it was just and so here we are really grieving.
- Mark Vroegop
But our kids were able to experience some level of of happiness and joy, which was our joy, too.
- Liesel Mertes
I'm a I'm glad as a podcast host that you told that story because I I think of that community of people who.
- Liesel Mertes
We just felt, you know, felt the goodness and the movement to send you that way, because as Luke and I walked our own journey with mercy, I think I think it was out of that story. I think we had heard you say that, that we we thought we we have to get out of you know, I really felt I have to get out of Indianapolis. We have to have a change of scenery. And it gave us the freedom.
- Liesel Mertes
And I actually reached out to a business school professor and mentor at the time who I knew had an extra house in Arizona and said, can we can we just stay there?
- Liesel Mertes
You know, my my daughter has just died and she so graciously let us stay. And it was such an important and a good time. And I had the same thing happen standing in line at the airport, some really well-meaning family who was just elated to think I was pregnant. So I connect deeply with that. And I it just makes me think of the ways in which we extend ourselves to bless people that are hurting, like the ripple effect of that goodness, you know, came down to my family, however, many years later through a colleague at a business school, you know, to to bless us and that kind of way.
- Liesel Mertes
So I love the the legacy of blessing that comes out of that sort of attuned encouragement in the moment for sure.
- Liesel Mertes
It also causes me to tuck away, I so seldom ever comment on a woman who looks pregnant after those sorts of experiences.
- Liesel Mertes
I think you have no idea what is going on.
- Liesel Mertes
And there are so many other ways to make small talk. If they want to tell you about their baby, they will.
- Liesel Mertes
I have found in as I have worked with couples who have walked through miscarriage or even within, you know, Luke's own story, miscarriage is hard to bear. If it is acknowledged at all, it's often couched within the woman's experience, I remember a mutual friend of ours telling Luke, Gosh, I think this is probably sad for you.
- Liesel Mertes
It can't be as hard as it is for Liesel. But, you know, and just kind of passing over.
- Liesel Mertes
Did you find within your own experience that some of that misalignment or or failing to grasp how miscarriage could impact the life of a male partner was present?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, that wasn't a huge issue for us. And I can understand why it would be for others. I would say that I did find that where I was processing and where Sarah was processing, that we were, in fact in different places as relates to miscarriages.
- Mark Vroegop
So she felt that more deeply than than what I did. And that took us some time to be able to kind of work through or just, you know, I was sort of the one who was optimistic, like. Look, it's OK, we got time, you know, let's let's just keep trying, keep praying, and she it was deeper for her.
- Mark Vroegop
It was. And it took me a while to realize that. And so, yeah, thankfully, nobody mentioned sort of that as a, you know, statement.
- Mark Vroegop
I did find that I had to get my head around how to process my wife's grief differently than mine, so we were both were grieving but grieving in different ways and for different reasons. And sometimes that manifested itself in some pretty challenging ways.
- Liesel Mertes
Tell me more about that. What was important, as you learned and navigated that journey of sometimes misaligned grief?
Mark Vroegop
Well, one was just trying to be sure that we were understanding where each other were, because, you know, the challenge with grief is it can make you really selfish.
- Mark Vroegop
You've got every right in the world to only think of yourself. And grief tends to give you tunnel vision.
- Mark Vroegop
I remember one time one of our biggest conflict moments came when I came home and Sylvia's room had been all set up for her.
- Mark Vroegop
You know, we were expecting her to come home. So the crib was set up, all the clothes were out. And I came home and my wife was packing all of that up. She was taking the crib apart. And I was like, what do you what are you doing? And she's like, we're not going to get pregnant. And I want to take this down. And that crib and that stuff in that room was like a symbol of hope for me.
- Mark Vroegop
And it was a vicious teaser to her or an accuser that this was never going to happen. So here we walk into the same room and I see it as a place of comfort and future. She sees it as a place of mocking.
- Mark Vroegop
And yeah, that so that's just like one example of how we're coming at the same thing from two very different angles.
- Mark Vroegop
I think it is important for folks to realize that their processing of grief can't be projected on other people. No two people grieve the same. And our tendency is to think that the way that I've grieved is the way that everybody should grieve because of how intense it is. Hard to imagine that anybody could grieve any other way in which I do because of how hard it is.
- Mark Vroegop
So that would just be an example of how there were moments when we missed things and we just need to give each other a lot more space to grieve. Well, but also realizing to realize, but also to realize that we're not the only one grieving here just to be more sensitive to each other and by God's grace, that happen, but not without without some bumps along the way.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. There's David Kessler is a writer and psychologist and is he was talking about some of the numbers that are put to the number of marriages that fall apart in the aftermath of a child's death.
- Liesel Mertes
One of the things that he has found in his counseling, study and research, he would say a huge contributor to that is just judgment of another person's grief process.
- Liesel Mertes
And that really struck me. I was like, that rings true experientially of how that can underlie a lot of aspects of dysfunction as the volume is just so high, everybody is feeling what they feel pretty intensely.
- Liesel Mertes
Sylvia died, there is the immediate grief journey, what has been how many years has it been now since her death?
- Mark Vroegop
Well, I'm a terrible mental math guy, but she died in 2004. So 17 years, 17.
- Liesel Mertes
You did it
- Mark Vroegop
I did it
- Liesel Mertes
Mental math, right there.
- Liesel Mertes
What has been important in intermediate and long term grief as people have continued to support you?
- Mark Vroegop
You know, I've got a pastor at my previous church that every birthday. That Sylvia would have had he sends me a text and just says, hey, just thinking of you today and praying for you means the world like it's just it's crazy how kind and helpful it is, because, you know, one of the deep pains, particularly with stillbirth or the loss of a child, is the loss of the future.
- Mark Vroegop
And when somebody says, you know, how many kids do you have? Well, for the first year or so, we felt like we needed to say, you know, four because Sylvia counted. And then over time, after our other daughter, Savannah, was born, you know, we stopped adding. All of that into the equation and. So just the fact that folks remember and that she counts because she counts for us, she counts deeply.
- Mark Vroegop
So those sort of moments, Christmases and and birthdays are extraordinarily, you know, important.
- Mark Vroegop
And then also just folks who who saw the redemptive nature of what kind of God was doing in us through all of this that was meaningful as they would indicate or share how they saw God's grace shining through us in the midst of our brokenness and how helpful and instructive it was.
- Mark Vroegop
So, so not forgetting and also helping in some measure to see over the long term the fruit that God was reaping was helpful, doesn't bring Sylvia back, but it does serve to help us to see how that.
Mark Vroegop
Pain isn't pointless.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, those those questions, like the number of children in your household can can feel very tricky. I, I connect with that. I have I've had times where, you know, we have had five children and I've people have just asked me socially and I said, well, we have four and I will have a child with me say, no, we have we have five made conversation stream.
- Liesel Mertes
And just to reflect on a. Yeah, how particular can be for those remaining children at various moments to want to hear that acknowledgement, even if I've gauged socially, like maybe maybe I won't say it now, maybe it's just not worth going into. And, yeah, those little reminders along the way.
- Liesel Mertes
Your book, which I would love to hear more about, but it is full of ways in which you have taken some of your personal experience and it affects your practice with other people. I want to hear more about your book, but I want to start with that place.
- Liesel Mertes
How how is your posture different now as a result of Sylvia in the way that you come alongside people in their grief and sorrow?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, it's sort of like I speak a different dialect or even different language, so that when they're saying something, I sort of have a translator to know. I think I know what they're saying. Other people maybe have an experience. Deep levels of grief may not understand what the grieving person is trying to communicate. It certainly made me more aware of the nature of grief and lots of other spaces.
- Mark Vroegop
And it. It made my first step to be one of deep sympathy and empathy with folks who are grieving and gave me a little bit of a resolve or a balanced conviction that it's OK for me not to have to fix this mess and just
- Liesel Mertes
Can I pause for for just one second?
- Liesel Mertes
I I'd love to dig a little bit deeper that you talked about that first inclination of empathy and being with what what does that look or sound like for you in different situations?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, it looks like being present. It looks like personal touch.
- Mark Vroegop
It looks like saying I'm sorry. And in many cases it means being there silent with a grieving person.
- Mark Vroegop
It's being OK saying I have no idea what to say right now and realizing that that's some of the most comforting things that you can say
- Mark Vroegop
More, I think it just helps just to know maybe what not to say and to kind of resist the urge or inclination to to solve, to fix, to and to silence, to contain grief is a wave that just needs to be ridden with somebody as opposed to some problem that we need to solve.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I, I talk about that in my work, we have some some avatars we'll talk about. Are you manifesting as a Buck-Up, Bobby right now? Or a Cheer-Up Cheryl or a Fix-It Frank, amongst others, these postures that we take...Well, as you said, out of our own personal discomfort, the ways it triggers us, the way we feel inadequate or just.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, the desire to to make it better for someone and the release that can come in realizing there's there's not actually something to be said that magically makes all the pain of this better. And I can release myself from having to find that in this moment.
- Mark Vroegop
Right, exactly.
- Liesel Mertes
Tell us about your book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, Discovering the Grace of Lament.
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, throughout the years following Sylvia's death, I started just exploring kind of the contours of grief as I would read things in the Psalms.
- Mark Vroegop
And started doing some teaching and kind of the darker Psalms, and when I would teach on them, people would kind of come out of the woodwork and like say things like, you just described what my last couple of years have been like. And then I did some teaching on the Book of Lamentations on Lamentations is the longest lament in the Bible. And it just became apparent that this language of lament was a gap that so many of us, including myself, just needed to think about.
- Mark Vroegop
And, you know, most people don't set out to study lament. Usually lament finds them.
- Mark Vroegop
Hmm. And as I began to investigate the subject more fully, began to realize that people need this language and it could be helpful, therapeutic, empowering in terms of helping and serving other people who are in the middle of their grief. And folks just started asking me, like, do you have anything else on this? And I was like, no, I don't. And have you written anything? Like, No, I haven't. And. Do you know anything that's out there that's, you know, theologically robust and, you know, compassionate?
- Mark Vroegop
I'm like, there's just not much many books on this. And so I thought, well. Seems like maybe I should try to do something to meet that need, and so 2014 and 15 developed the idea and. Just wanted to try and do something that would help people, and quite frankly, I, I didn't didn't know if the book would be well received. When I first pitched it to some people in the publishing world, they were like, aren't we talking about.
- Mark Vroegop
And I was like, I know, I get it. But let me explain this to you. And so, by God's grace, got the opportunity to publish the book. And it's it's proven to be way more helpful than what I thought. I knew people needed this language, but my experiencing in publishing the book is just really even proving it a 100 fold. Mm hmm.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, and something that I love about the book is.
- Liesel Mertes
It's it's full of your heart as someone who has grieved, as someone who has come alongside people in grief, it is both spiritual and conceptual, but even the last chapters that are eminently practical, how do we take this idea of, yes, I buy-in, lament is important and begin to integrate it into our practices and personal lives?
- Liesel Mertes
You know, even even the movement that funerals are all celebrations of life. What does that, how does that constrain instead of release us in some of those ways?
- Liesel Mertes
So it just comes through richly in your work
- Mark Vroegop
Thank you.
What is one of the ways, you know?
- Liesel Mertes
Publishing something like a book is is releasing its I imagine it could be like releasing a child into the world, like go forth and grow. What has been one of the most surprising and pleasing ways to you that your book has been used or made connections out in the world?
- Mark Vroegop
Yeah, you know, the book released in 2019. And by. May of 2020, it had gotten into spaces and had been put in the hands of people that I would have never imagined would be reading it. And so it. And there's a book award called the ECPA Book Award, and and so that it won the Book of the Year award in Christian Publishing, and it just was stunning to me that in the midst of our sorrow and loss here, now we enter into a global pandemic where people are lamenting everything.
- Mark Vroegop
And the way that lament serves not only for personal grief, like I thought that it would, but lament now has an expansion from a cultural standpoint at so many levels and then that. Led to another book that connects lament and racial reconciliation and how does lament play a role in that? And so what's been remarkable is just to see the way the language of lament is really helpful at so many levels and in ways and in places that I hadn't thought that it would be.
- Mark Vroegop
And so I I didn't anticipate the book being very well received by God's grace. It has been. And I just think it. It's an example of how much grief and pain there is in the world and how much we need a language that can help us.
- Liesel Mertes
Mark, are there any questions that it would be helpful for me to ask you that I have not yet asked you?
- Mark Vroegop
Sometimes people wonder how exactly do I lament the back of the book? I even have some worksheets. And, you know, it's it's a helpful framework for processing through grief and for prayer, because laments involve kind of a movement of turn, complain, ask and trust. And so I, I use that as a regular prayer for him. Not every day, but each of those steps are super helpful. In fact, I've often recommended that somebody study, lament, psalm and look for those four key movements, turn, complain, ask and trust, see how the Bible expresses each of those four movements and then kind of on the other side of the page to write out your own prayer in light of what you see.
- Mark Vroegop
The Psalmist praying. So, for example, Psalm 13. How long, oh, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? And I find it really helpful to see that the Bible talks that way so that then I could write my own prayer and finish the sentence. How long will the Lord will?
- Mark Vroegop
And, you know, every so many days I kind of need that prayer because my life got lots of grief in it. And so lament by using these varying forms or elements can can really be a helpful way to navigate difficult times by regularly turning, complaining, asking and trusting and doing that over and over and over and over.
- Liesel Mertes
Hmm. That's good. Thank you. Anything else that you would like to add?
- Mark Vroegop
I just think it's wonderful that you're engaging in this space, because I think. People need to know how to help other people grieve, and it's one of the most important, one of the most transformative and one of the most complicated seasons of a person's life.
- Mark Vroegop
So, you know, I've heard senior executives say you should always be reading a book on leadership.
- Mark Vroegop
I think it's true. But it would also seem that every person ought to have some sort of competency in how to navigate grief, because either we're going to be grieving at some point in time or we're going to be in proximity to someone else who is grieving and in that. Opportunity, you can do a lot of really good stuff and be really helpful. I think it's presented a great opportunity for Grace to be extended to hurting people. And that's what people who are grieving the they need a lot of help.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't I couldn't agree more. As I say, I look back on my own training in, you know, master's degree in management studies.
- Liesel Mertes
I thought, how is this such a complete oversight in the curriculum? Because if you manage any number of people for any amount of time, you will be managing someone and leading and being in relationship with someone who is grieving. And a non-acknowledgement or a misstep is its own form of mismanagement. And, you know, we can grow in this.
- Liesel Mertes
And it's so good to have tools like your book to help people along the way.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Mark…
OUTRO
You can find out more about Mark’s book, Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy, here: https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Clouds-Deep-Mercy-Discovering/dp/1433561484/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534035599&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+clouds+deep+mercy
We are we have been dealing with a crisis with with the disease of addiction. And again, I think that we can see that because we're talking about it more than we've ever talked about it. And that's because we're seeing so many people affected by it. But it is a it's a huge health crisis that we're living in right now. It's just gigantic. And I don't think, quite honestly, we've seen the worst of it at this point.
INTRO
Hi everybody. Today we are talking about the disease of addiction. There is so much important ground we are going to cover, including why it matters that we call addiction a disease. Because this wasn’t the language that was used when I was a kid growing up in the “Just Say No” to drugs era.And my guest today has a ton to share. That is because this is Wendy Noe’s work. She is the executie director of the Dove Recovery House in Indianapolis, which is a recognized residential program for women with substance abuse disorders.
But Wendy doesn’t just talk with us as a professional who works with women dealing with substance addictions, she talks to us as a woman who has been directly impacted by addiction. She walked with her brother as he spiraled deeper into addiction. She helped check him into and watched him leave treatment programs and she has really, really good words to offer if you are just feeling at the end of your rope as you try to help someone you love who is grappling with their addiction.
As we dive in, a little bit more about Wendy. She is from central Indiana, lived here her whole life, although she has a love for Michigan, particularly South Haven.
- Wendy Noe
I just love the area. I love the peace of it all. I love the little bitty towns up there. I love the winetasting. I just feel like, you know, to be able to drive two hours, two 1/2 hours north and it's just such a peaceful getaway for me. Quiet's I love the nature. You know, her house is just a perfect space for me to retreat and just calm down from life. I just love it up there.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I love that. Well, in the Great Lakes are their own national treasure. I mean, they are these sweeping landscapes that really when people talk about the Third Coast, my my in-laws are from northern Minnesota. So when we encounter the Great Lakes, it's usually from the western side driving through Wisconsin and into Minnesota. But my sister has recently moved to Michigan and it's beautiful. We hadn't really done Michigan in the same way because we'd always been on the other side.
- Liesel Mertes
But it's charming. And you can drive in Michigan forever like we we did a day coming through that Upper Peninsula and then all the way down to Ann Arbor.
- Liesel Mertes
And I was like, it's been like, you know, eleven hours all in Michigan. I was stunned at how large it is.
- Wendy Noe
It is. It's huge. And my husband and I always talk about retiring. And I mean, we're too young yet. But
- Wendy Noe
He loves snow. He loves the winter. So he's always said he wants to move to Montana and snow and all cold things. And even though Michigan has a winter, I'm like, we could move to Michigan when we retire. You could have, you know, the cold and the snow. And yet I still get beach time in summertime.
- Wendy Noe
Yes. So I don't know, maybe one day we'll find our way into Michigan as residents
- Liesel Mertes
Michigan, Montana, those states.
Not that to the north.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, it's it's a certain thing if you've grown up with snow and ice, like I grew up in the Midwest and it's you know, I similarly, I think about like it's like eight months of winter up in northern Minnesota. There's just a lot of winter. I mean, summers are great, but there's a lot of winter soon. So you have to have a hearty constitution.
- Wendy Noe
Yeah, definitely.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, which is probably why whether it was, you know, people of Dutch descent, you know, colonizing Michigan or the Scandinavians in northern Minnesota have been like, oh, yes, it was like this in the old country. You weren't shocked to come and find these brutal winters.
- Wendy Noe
That's true. That's all you know.
- Liesel Mertes
So you are married. You also have some teenagers in your home, is that right?
- Wendy Noe
Yes, I have two daughters.
- Liesel Mertes
OK, are they getting ready to graduate? Lower high school that have have
- Wendy Noe
I have a freshman and a senior. Oh yeah. Yeah. So they're both June babies, so I have one getting ready to turn fifteen and one getting ready to turn eighteen.
- Wendy Noe
So my life is. It's weird right now my baby is leaving me for college, and she's, you know, she I we have been very fortunate to not have senioritis and she's not been an unenjoyable teen. She's just this really impressive, amazing young lady. And I really enjoy being around her. And she's a huge help.
- Wendy Noe
You know, my 15 year old or soon to be 15 year old, my freshman. She's like, I'll do it later. I'll do it later. You know, I'm certainly going to have the teen angst, I think, with her. And she's enjoyable and incredible in her own way. And I just love I'm blessed to have two amazing daughters.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, well, in I'm a couple of years behind, my eldest is thirteen. But I've been saying to people, I mean, we are we're having a recalibrating of our relationship to suit her age.
- Liesel Mertes
And I think especially with your oldest, as they encounter these different life stages, we can be aware as parents of their need to skill up like, oh, they need additional skills and these are growth moments as they're entering. And but I I think there's a corollary that I experience in myself of being like, I've got a skill up as a parent for this new stage as well.
- Liesel Mertes
You know, it requires different aspects of my, you know, my training and engaging as I engage with this new stage. And it sounds like you're on the brink of doing some of that as you have a child leaving the home,
- Wendy Noe
You know, so that is one hundred percent spot on
- Liesel Mertes
You talked about. Working throughout their growing up years and the different professional roles and capacities you've been in.
- Liesel Mertes
You are in a leadership role at the Dove House. Would you tell me a little bit about your role there and about the Dove house and their mission writ large?
- Wendy Noe
I would love to. I'm the executive director at Dove Recovery House for Women. I supervise a staff of 16 and Dove Recovery House provides a residential treatment for women with substance use disorder. We're the largest in Indianapolis. And and really, our program model is is really the only type of its kind in the state of Indiana.
- Wendy Noe
We house 40 women every night. And, you know, we we serve the most vulnerable women in our community, women that have experienced homelessness and near homelessness, sex trafficking, prostitution, trauma, women without the ability to pay, women without health insurance who really need treatment but can't always afford or usually can't afford to go to those other places.
- Wendy Noe
We've been around since 2000 and we've been recognized by the Department of Mental Health and Addiction and the Governor's next level recovery office as the best practice model for the state of Indiana that they would like to replicate. So I'm I'm really proud of that and how hard we've worked for it.
- Liesel Mertes
And how many years have you been at the Dove house?
- Wendy Noe
I've been here just over six years.
- Liesel Mertes
OK, yeah. I have so many questions to come out in the course of our conversation about good ways to encounter people who are dealing with addiction issues, ways in which we compound the problem by our responses. I have a number of questions
- Liesel Mertes
I would like to tie, also, a little bit, also to some of your own experience. I remember you telling me when you began on this learning curve at the Dove House, it helped you in kind of looking back at some of the experiences that you had with your brother within your personal life.
Liesel Mertes
How how were those two like a, awarenesses coming together as you began at the Dove House?
- Wendy Noe
It's really been a fascinating journey for me. And I've learned so much in my time here at Dove House. So a little background. I've always
- Wendy Noe
I've spent my entire career in the nonprofit industry and working primarily in women's issues. And so I was ready for a new role, a new chapter and executive director position. And this one opened up here at Dove House. And I didn't really know a lot about addiction and substance use disorder, and I certainly hadn't ever heard of Dove House.
- Wendy Noe
And but again, just passionate about women's issues and met the board of directors and was offered the job. And I really took it upon myself to educate and become knowledgeable about substance use disorder and the issues of the women that we treat face.
- Wendy Noe
And it wasn't, you know, until I started working at Dove House and really educating and becoming educated by my women and by my staff about substance use disorder, that my eyes really opened up to the disease.
- Wendy Noe
And I have a younger brother who had really kind of gone off the rails. He was in and out of jail. He had several arrests.
- Wendy Noe
You know, it was the common theme that if we hadn't pain pills our house, make sure you hide them before he comes over knowing that he always had what he said was back pain, always had back problems and always needed some medicine.
- Wendy Noe
And I had chronic ear issues. And so, you know, it wasn't unusual for me to have pain medicine in my house due to those those chronic ear issues, you know, and then so was the running theme in my family that lock these things up or he's going to ask for money here. He always wants money and never taking any ownership of the fact that he could never keep a job. You know, he was always good about getting a job, but never keeping a job.
- Wendy Noe
He'd over sleep or it what was someone else's fault.
- Wendy Noe
And so I saw some of those same things with the women that we were working with. And again, he was in and out of jail for for theft or possession of marijuana. And then he got arrested again. And I honestly can't recall what what what the charges were for. But it was then that I started getting clued in to some of the flags that were being raised.
- Wendy Noe
So I remember having a conversation with my mom and I said I think he might have some addiction problems and sort of having some of those questions and conversations with not only him, but also with with my family members, with my my twin sister and my mom. So
- Liesel Mertes
Wendy, could I could I jump in and ask you a question?
- Wendy Noe
Yeah. That so.
- Liesel Mertes
I imagine that there's there's this family unit dynamics as your brother is struggling along the way. You you mentioned kind of this this emerging awareness.
- Liesel Mertes
Is this addiction prior to that? What what were the family like, feelings and conversations? Were you feeling like he's just so irresponsible, he's totalizing the family's attention, why can't he get his act together? Like what were some of the things that were being absorbed within the the wider family structure?
- Wendy Noe
It is such a good question. I so I'm very much a look. You want something, you work hard for it, you get it. And it irritated me. I had no patience for him.
- Wendy Noe
I had no patience for the fact that he would not take ownership over his own behaviors. I was sick and tired of him hurting my family, our family. My mom was a single parent. My mom did not have a lot of income and yet she felt like she needed to take care of him.
- Wendy Noe
He had always been the baby of the family. And she, you know, I couldn't understand why she would give him money or she would bail him out or she would help him.
- Wendy Noe
And then my sister was the mediator. You know, she was always his caretaker. My mom had to work. And so she was always the one that would help him with his homework and make sure he was eating and that very nurturing older sister. And I was the hard ass one, you know, in a job, which I need to do.
- Wendy Noe
I'm tired of taking care of you. So we had a very interesting family dynamic, you know, and my mom and my sister would get very frustrated with him, but they always seem to rescue him. Yeah, and I didn't. And so we had a very fractured relationship. We did not talk. We did not talk with each other. I didn't want anything to do with him. He made me mad. And so I really I really kind of cut him out of my life with him.
- Wendy Noe
I didn't I didn't know him. I didn't understand him. And I certainly didn't respect him.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for for giving that background because it's a struggle. It's a struggle for so many people to think, is there a right way of encountering someone with these issues? And, you know, is it right? Is it wrong? Is it just what you do to survive, to get through and be able to live a life beyond that? So that's I appreciate you giving voice to some of those struggles.
- Wendy Noe
Yeah, of course. I mean, I think, you know, he would be the first to recognize the challenging relationship that we had.
- Wendy Noe
And yeah. And he was very good at keeping things away from us. You know, he presented what he wanted us to see. He was trying to get a job, but he couldn't get a job. There was no one hiring. And I didn't live in the same town as him. My mom did. So I think maybe she was more abreast of things, but and as a mom protecting us. But we had a very, very fractured relationship.
- Wendy Noe
And he only let me see what I what he wanted me to see.
- Wendy Noe
And so I remember him calling me from jail and needing my help. And I asked him, are you addicted? And he said, yes, I have a problem.
- Wendy Noe
And I said, OK, let me help you, but here are my conditions. I will only help you or I will only do this if you go into treatment. And he's like, fine, OK.
- Wendy Noe
And at this point, I think he was kind of looking at some homelessness and didn't have anywhere to live. And so I remember picking him up from a friend's house after he had been released from jail and he was living in a camper on their land.
- Wendy Noe
So no running water, no electricity. So he was you know, it was pretty rough for him. I think he was willing to do whatever it took at that point to have a house.
- Wendy Noe
So I remember taking him to the grocery store and hooking him up with everything that he needed and took him to a recovery house because I at this point, I'm working in recovery. I know it works. I know what it takes. I called people I knew and got them into a program and he lasted 30 days.
- Wendy Noe
He met a girl on an online dating site. And he's a charmer. I mean, he has a heart of gold. He he always said he loves well, he loves while he didn't have the rest of it together, but he loves. Well, yeah. And and he left the. Program, and it went right back to to his and my relationship.
- Wendy Noe
I was frustrated I couldn't keep it together. So, again, you know, fast forward wheels fell off. He they were doing good for a while. My sister, who is you know, she and I were talking this morning, she's she's like that that that old town neighborhood mom that knows everything and is in everyone's business and knew that things were falling apart.
- Wendy Noe
And my sister, if she doesn't know you. She'll figure out who you are and start a relationship with you.
- Wendy Noe
And she uses social media, Facebook as a way to communicate with people that I know of people and found out through a friend of of my brother's girlfriend that they were no running water.
- Wendy Noe
They had kids in the house, no running water, no electricity. They were filling up water jugs at a local gas station. And and the house was trashed. And then that we found that they were both addicted and they got arrested. For theft, and which was some of my brother's charges before, and she was released because she had no priors, my brother went back to jail and I had her come to Dove House and tell me what had happened.
- Wendy Noe
And I still feel bad about that because I have to imagine that, you know, here I hold this responsibility in this role of this this large organization. But yet I'm also her boyfriend, sister. And she needed my help and had to have community service and needed resources. And so she's sitting in my office and telling me everything. And it was then that I learned that my brother was addicted to heroin. He ended up getting out of jail.
- Wendy Noe
I got him into another program. That program didn't work out for him, which I don't blame him. I blame the program.
- Wendy Noe
And quite honestly, they failed my brother, but he gave it to me that
- Liesel Mertes
Could I have you pause just for a second?
- Wendy Noe
Yeah. Sorry, I go on and on.
- Liesel Mertes
No, no, no. Well, I'm just struck. You said they failed my brother. From your experience with your brother and also within your area of competence, what makes for a more or less effective program more helpful?
- Liesel Mertes
Whatever whatever term applies best?
- Wendy Noe
I think so, for for in this instance, this program allowed clients to have medication in their room. And my brother's drug of choice was with pain pills and graduated to heroin because pain pills became much more difficult to obtain. That program failed him because they had pain pills in the room and my brother used one of the pain pills. And so they looked at that as a discharge and that discharged him because they looked at that as a relapse and discharged him due to that relapse.
- Wendy Noe
So I think that and there's a lot of programs out there Liesel that that discharge individuals when they have a relapse. And, you know, people have relapses all the time. When you look at diseases, you know, whether it's an asthma relapse or cancer comes back or diabetes flare up, you know, who knows? And, you know, you treat that. You treat that disease. Something's not working. Let's figure it out. But to just charge a person from a program because they relapse does not help them.
- Wendy Noe
They're not going to be able to maintain sobriety. They're not going to be able to figure out what caused that relapse. And that's what Dove House does differently, is that we don't discharge due to a relapse. We we look at what happened, how can we help them? Because ultimately they're going to come back. They're going to need our help. And if we discharge them, then the chances of them dying or getting our services in the future are significant.
- Wendy Noe
But in that instance with my brother, you know, they failed him in two ways. They they discharged him due to his relapse. But they set that relapse in front of his face by having a medication that could was easily abused. Yeah. Newly into recovery. He could not he couldn't resist it.
- Liesel Mertes
Well, and that that movement a little bit, what you were saying of giving it another chance that the language of disease as it relates to addiction, I feel like has been a movement among practitioners and social services in science, in the medical field to talk about addiction more as a disease than as a matter of willpower. Why why is it important to make that move in the language and our conceptualizing of what addiction is?
- Wendy Noe
Addiction always been looked at as a character flaw, and it's personal choice that you're making. You're choosing to use drugs. You're choosing to use alcohol. And and the reality is, is that at first choice you are you know, you may choose to drink alcohol or you may choose to to do something to put something in your body that perhaps you should be putting in there. But then something changes. And there is evidence that supports that when you use drugs or alcohol, there is a chemical.
- Wendy Noe
A chemical imbalance that occurs in a person's brain and for some I can have one my brother cannot. And so it's a very interesting study and research that's come out that shows that this is a disease, that it is an imbalance in a person's brain.
- Wendy Noe
The other part of this is that if you look at what the root cause of addiction is, something came before that. And what I say is trauma is the gateway drug. Those individuals experience some form of traumatic experience and they're using those external influences like drugs or alcohol to self medicate.
- Wendy Noe
So, for example, my clients here at Dove House, and this really is across the board for women in and of itself, the average age for drug use is 13. And evidence shows that the age you start using drugs and alcohol on a regular basis is the age your brain stops maturing. So the average age of drug use for my clientele is 13. That means they're stunted. Their brain is stunted at the age of 13 or 14. Ninety five percent of my clients and again, this is this is evidence in general.
- Wendy Noe
So while I see it in my client population, if you look at nationwide evidence and research for women. Ninety five percent of them experienced some form of trauma with 90 percent of them experiencing childhood sexual abuse. And again, this is across the board.
- Wendy Noe
So if and then if you remove this notion that's a character flaw, you're bringing the disease and the the judgment out of the closet. People are using in secret, in secrecy. They're not reaching out for help because it's so stigmatizing.
- Wendy Noe
So if we can remove the stigma from it, people are more likely to reach out for help at an earlier age and early onset of point because they know they're not going to be judge.
- Wendy Noe
You don't judge people if they have cancer. We don't judge people if they have diabetes or asthma, we look at them as getting help. And so you're right that the narrative or this conversation around substance use disorder and addiction has really started to shift.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
We will return to Wendy’s story in just a moment. I want to take a second to thank our sponsor, Handle with Care Consulting. As the economy starts to recover, are you doing all that you can to help your employees return to a place of thriving? From death to disappointment to addiction issues, your people are facing a host of challenges and empathy is more important than ever. Let Handle with Care Consulting equip your team to practice empathy when it matters most. With keynote sessions, certificate programs, and coaching options, there is a solution that fits for your team.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, and you were in the midst of the flow of your story. You were talking about helping your brother in and out of these different treatment centers, which I imagine in the midst of being a parent of two children, a partner, a professional, is taking a lot of your emotional and social bandwidth at the time.
- Liesel Mertes
What what sort of a strain was that like for you trying to navigate these moving pieces on your brother's behalf?
- Wendy Noe
The hardest thing for me was the two roles that I was playing. And, you know, I educate people and I see the women that come through the doors of Dove House and I love on them. And I educate people in substance use disorder. And I see these women as the women that they are, these incredible human beings that experienced severe things in their lives. And we are giving them the opportunity to become their best versions, the women they're designed and meant to be. And I've always felt that that my life's purpose is to provide a voice for women who have yet to find theirs.
And then I'm I'm dealing with my brother who hurt my family and hurt my mom is an active addiction and I'm judging him for it and I'm mad at him for it. And it was really hard for me to shift and think, why is it OK for me to treat him that way when I don't treat these women that way? And I'm telling other people not to treat people with substance use disorder, with negativity and with isolation.
- Wendy Noe
And yet here I am doing it. And so I really had to train myself and evolve as a human being and as his sister, that my brother suffers from the disease of addiction. And this is not a choice he is making and I need to help him.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, well. And I imagine. It's always it's always hard when we feel personally triggered or like this isn't just an abstract question, like your choices are affecting me, they're affecting people I love.
- Liesel Mertes
And it can be hard sometimes to do those pivots in real time. Like when you're in the midst of a conversation, what kinds of things were important for you to be doing, like prior to interactions with him afterwards? Like what supports were you getting that what allowed you to evolve in the way that you're describing?
- Wendy Noe
I asked a lot of questions and I leaned on team members who had family experience with addiction. I ask questions of women that came through our programs.
- Wendy Noe
I really wanted to know and I I wanted to be vulnerable. I wanted to share why my own issues, my own insecurities, why I was acting the way that I was, and really helping to gain more of a personal understanding, getting inside the mind of someone that suffers from this disease. That really helped me to ask those questions to to not only know it from a literature standpoint, but to know it from a personal standpoint, to know it from a very intimate perspective.
- Wendy Noe
How does it make you feel when when a when a family member disowns you or when a family member says these things to you? How did that make you feel? And so it really it it it opened my eyes in a way that they hadn't been opened and. It allowed me to help my brother in a way that I never had been able to help him patient with him, I was more understanding. I was compassionate. I ask the right questions and I listened.
- Wendy Noe
And it honestly helps our relationship when I could tell him from a factual educational standpoint, like you are making this decision right now and this is an impulse decision and and having a very forward conversation with him, you know, instead of saying to him, you are leaving this program and moving in with your girlfriend, why do you think that's a bad idea? This is why I think it's a bad idea. And pushing him away, if I said it to him that way, instead of saying you're making an impulse decision, why do you think that is?
- Wendy Noe
And what has happened to you in the past when you've made an impulse decision? And can you slow down? And instead of leaving today, can you think through while you're angry right now because you're in this program and somebody made you mad and so you're just going to go move in with your girlfriend? Can you slow down and think through this? If I make this decision based on emotion and impulse, how is that going to benefit me tomorrow? Right.
- Wendy Noe
So really helping him understand and slow down and make have those conversations, because that's how we do here at Dove House.
- Liesel Mertes
What I hear in some of those questions and tell me if I'm characterizing this correctly, inviting him into more of his own reflective process beyond just like judging or offering advice on what could seem to you, like really bad decisions.
- Liesel Mertes
Like, let me just tell you what I think, instead of kind of pressing deeper and inviting him into his own deeper reflection, is that a good characterization of some of the things you were doing and asking the right questions?
- Wendy Noe
100 percent. Because if you if you make all the questions, make all the decisions, and when things go wrong, guess whose fault it is? Your fault. It's my fault. Yeah. Really helping him slow down. And what we say here at Dove House, play that tape all the way through. He has to learn and lean on his own understanding. And if I know that today I make a decision to eat unhealthy and I'm trying to lose weight, well, guess what?
- Wendy Noe
If I eat unhealthy, I'm going to gain weight. If someone tells me, Wendy, don't eat that, one, it's condescending because I'm a grown adult. I don't need you to tell me what to do. But if I do it, it's because then I'm not owning that decision. Someone own that decision for me. And so it really, you know, he he's a grown man. And the women that we serve, they're grown women. I am not their parent.
- Wendy Noe
I can help them lead them to a place of understanding and help them think for themselves. And that's what we do, is teaching them, helping their brain to mature. It's it's very similar to raising my daughters. You're going to make decisions when I'm not around. What you have to do is think about the consequences with those decisions, whether they're positive or negative. How do you want to live your life? Are you going to go to a party and drink alcohol?
- Wendy Noe
Would you do that in front of me? And if you make a choice to do so, how will that benefit you? I will help you in the long run. Ultimately, you're going to have to make those decisions. So it's really providing them with the tools that they need to make healthy lifestyle choices for them.
- Liesel Mertes
Right. Something that I hear sometimes from support people who are walking with people with addiction is that sense of social taboo, of personal failing. It affects both the addicted individual, but also their support systems. Because what I've heard from some support people, as they said, you know, it's it's something I don't feel like I can ask for help with or talk because I'm also judge, you know, what did I do wrong that my child or my partner is dealing with substance abuse, that there's this extension of the shame narrative that goes even to the support people who are seeking help.
- Liesel Mertes
Did you find that to be true within your own story, or is that something that you also hear for support people?
- Wendy Noe
I guess it's not it wasn't really part of my story because, you know, I. I think. I don't know, I think I've been very careful about who I invite into my world, and I think because I had people around me that understood substance use disorder that I was in a place unlike what a lot of other people experience. I had I had a built in support system through my job. Right. They got it. They knew it.
- Wendy Noe
They didn't judge me. If anything, maybe it allowed me some street cred because, you know, they call you ignore me because you've never experienced a recovery yourself. And yet when I tell share with my clients that, like, this is the walk I've walked and this is the world in which I live and my get it, you know, it allows some different level of credibility.
- Wendy Noe
But I do think and it's the same with people that that suffer from the disease, is that fear of judgment? It's the same with those family members is again, we've looked at this as a personal failure. And so people don't talk about it because. Yeah, how how will people look at me? They're shocked or they're surprised and they don't share their story. I mean, I have people that are donors that don't share that or that are volunteers that have a personal history with addiction or a family member, and yet they won't share that knowledge publicly.
- Wendy Noe
But they feel a calling to help, hmm. And so I think as we continue to break down the walls and stigma around substance use disorder, we can we can really shape the outcomes of how we help those individuals suffer from it.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, I'm struck that you have sat in the room with many people who are walking their stories. You mentioned some earlier in the podcast. You know, their parents disowned them. The what are as this is
- Liesel Mertes
One aim of this podcast is to help people be able to avoid some of the minefields that are response patterns. What would you say are some of the worst things, like whatever you do, just avoid saying this kind of stuff to someone who is in the midst of an addiction struggle?
- Wendy Noe
You know, it's a fine line because you don't want it, you don't want to enable bad behaviors. You know, I think.
- Wendy Noe
I think I think the worst thing we can do is isolate a person from love and isolate them. So if you use again, I will never speak to you again or you are not welcome in my home. I mean, you certainly have to put boundaries up and put boundaries in place. I think when we attack their character, it's the worst thing we can do because, again, it's it's it's a disease. They're not making this personal choice. I mean, we always say that this the addiction is a monster in your brain.
- Wendy Noe
And if you open the door to that monster, he's going to be in that door all the way open. And it's really hard to get him out of the room once you've invited him in. So I think that, too, to dis. To disconnect a person from their family, they won't reach out for help when they need it because they've been booted from it before, so they're not going to go back.
- Wendy Noe
I mean, if you are kicked when you're down, are you going to reach your hand back out to that same person who you know you're not because you don't want to be reinjured.
- Wendy Noe
I think that would be probably my greatest advice now with the understanding that we we can't give them money, you know, we can't give them the financial support or inviting them into our home. We certainly have to lay boundaries and put things in place, but. I think we still need to be present and available.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah, but the flip side of that question, what are some of the best or most helpful general principles in helping someone who is struggling with addiction?
- Wendy Noe
Well, obviously, I think the person that needs I think a person struggling with addiction needs to understand and be educated about the resources that are out there. We can't do it on our own. And I think they need treatment. And I'm not a big fan of just, you know, detoxing and then they can come home that such that such treatment is getting the the chemicals out of their body. But it's a treatment. They need long term.
- Wendy Noe
They need long term treatment. But the big thing is that it has to be that individual's choice. So I can I can force you into treatment. But if you don't go there willingly, you're not going to stay. So we really have to say I'll help you with this, but ultimately has to be your choice. I'm willing to to to call I'm willing to pay for two weeks. But this is all this is all I'm willing to do.
- Wendy Noe
It has to be up to you. And that's what I learned even with my brother. He I told him that he had to go to the first treatment program and then he left. But then he I kept the door open to him and he came back and said, OK, Wendy, I'm ready to try this again. Can you help me? And that time it stuck. And today he's three years sober from heroin. But it was a it was a personal choice.
- Wendy Noe
I don't absolve him from bad behaviors. I don't enable bad behaviors. When I feel like that side of him is creeping up. I don't, I don't entertain it. I don't entertain oh, woe is me behaviors. And he knows that about me. But he made choices and we can have conversations. But ultimately it was his choice to get sober and to do the hard work.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. Was that, was that movement into treatment or the decision to go. We talked about some of the family unit dynamics. Did that get messy or were you did you feel fairly aligned with your mom and your sister?
- Wendy Noe
Very much aligned. My mom trusted me to make the I mean, I think at that point she really said, you do what you need to do. I trust you to help save his life. And she really backed off when I told her, don't give him money. Don't do this. If you want to buy a pack of cigarettes, then buy him a pack of cigarettes. But but stop doing this. She did. And that helped a lot because she trusted me and really walked alongside me and my sister as well.
- Wendy Noe
I mean, my sister and I are exceptionally close and, you know, is even educating her on on how to help him. And I think the fact that he was a united front, he couldn't play my mom. He couldn't weasel his way into things. You know, it helped him because he knew he couldn't he he he couldn't do the things that he'd done in the past.
- Liesel Mertes
Right. Speaking of best practices and ways to be helpful, what were some of the ways that your support system was most helpful to you as you were going through the ups and downs of your brother being in treatment?
- Wendy Noe
For me, you know, the people that I didn't work with that didn't understand addiction, never passed judgment, and they always were just there for me to listen because, you know, you have to put on a certain front around your family when you're figuring this out.
- Wendy Noe
But, you know, I could let my guard down with my people and knew that I was loved and listened and understood and maybe they didn't have the advice and that was OK because I wasn't looking for advice. I just needed to vent and have a support system that when I needed it, they held me up.
- Liesel Mertes
Yeah. For people listening right now, some people might be thinking, I don't know anyone who is dealing with addiction issues, I'm sure that I don't that my life doesn't touch anyone who's been affected. I think oftentimes were unaware of the scope of the problem.
- Liesel Mertes
Do you have any, like, numbers or ways of conveying? I also imagine that covid potentially has kicked up a number of addiction issues as people are dealing with a lot more depression. They're stuck at home. They're looking to numb or dull all kinds of pains. What does it look like in Indiana or nationwide as to numbers of people who are dealing with addiction issues?
- Wendy Noe
Addiction is a huge issue. It's a lot more prevalent than people would realize. And I think the chances are that everyone would know someone that is dealing with a disease of substance use disorder. I can't tell you what the number is at the moment because, again, that's a self reported number. We think it's much more prevalent than even what the data would say.
- Wendy Noe
What we do know that in the world of covid right now, that overdoses are up by 80 some percent compared to this time last year and overdose deaths are up by 40 percent compared to this time last year.
- Wendy Noe
So we are we have been dealing with a crisis with with the disease of addiction. And again, I think that we can see that because we're talking about it more than we've ever talked about it. And that's because we're seeing so many people affected by it. But it is a it's a huge health crisis that we're living in right now. It's just gigantic. And I don't think, quite honestly, we've seen the worst of it at this point.
- Liesel Mertes
Tell me more about that.
- Wendy Noe
I think that we are we're seeing the overdose rates and we're seeing the death rate or the overdose and the death rates skyrocketing. But right now, people are getting stimulus checks, they're getting unemployment, and so they're financially managing. I think that when the money runs out, we're going to see a lot more homelessness. We're going to see a lot more need than we've ever seen. I know our numbers are going up just in terms of of requests.
- Wendy Noe
Right now, we have 88 women on our waitlist level, which is the most I can remember we ever having.
- Liesel Mertes
Wow, yeah, those are huge numbers if people are listening and they think I want to learn more about the Dove House, perhaps I know someone who should go or I want to support the work you guys are doing. Where is the best place for them to go to get more information?
- Wendy Noe
The best place to go would be our website doverecoveryhouse.org . We have great information about where our who we are, what we do here, some really great videos and testimonials from clients that have been served through our program. We're also on all social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. We even have a YouTube page and our videos are up there. I do every other week or so. I do just a two minute kind of log called once Wednesdays with Wendy and just highlighting kind of what's been happening at our house.
- Wendy Noe
So if you go to our Web Web page, you'll find all the links for our social media channels.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
You can find links to the Dove House and their available resources in the show notes or on the web posting. That way you can learn more and support the good work that Wendy and her team are doing in Indianapolis.
Here are three key takeaways from my conversation with Wendy…
OUTRO
Find out more about the Dove Recovery House at https://doverecoveryhouse.org
The podcast currently has 65 episodes available.