Quick Clarity

In this episode of Quick Clarity, Angie and Jeff respond to crowded-sourced questions circling the minds of CEOs like…

• How do I take responsibility for a system that I, as a leader, have created? 

Jeff tackles these questions by sharing his reflections as a CEO, Hiring Manager, Coach, and Company Co-Founder. Angie outlines the three steps to ‘Start With Me’ and how each creates the opportunity to unlock human potential.

For those who prefer to read, a full transcript of this episode is available here. 

Quick Links

[1:49] - Jeff Reflection “We all build our own prisons and then go hide in them. We're all in these prisons of our own making.”

[7:18] -  Three Steps to ‘Start With Me’ 

• Step 1 - Notice feeling emotional about an outcome created by somebody else that runs counter to my wants/expectations.
• Step 2- Recognize that the subsequent natural response is to tell a story explaining why that outcome happens. Acknowledge that story probably comes from a place of protection that doesn’t represent your reality or the most effective way forward.
• Step 3 -Reflect; what would it look like to come from a place of personal responsibility? You don’t have to be able to see yourself from the third person or be a capable diagnoser of systems; you just need to ask yourself - what are you feeling in this moment of confusion, and what fears might be driving your behaviors that are creating unwanted incentives?

[12:10] - When it comes to turning emotional signals into constructive action. Everybody needs help, regardless of who you are. “I want to make a couple of things clear; I talked to my coach this morning. So everybody needs help.” Even Jeff talks to his coach!!!

[15:20] - How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barret

[16:56] - To build effective problem-solving habits, you must orient to the process, not the end goal. In the absence of self-awareness, attention is robbed by confusion, which reduces productivity dramatically.

[29:05] - Personal Responsibility of a Leader “A group of people that exists in a hierarchy where one member of the group can exclude or fire or demote or castigate or otherwise harm a member of that group. If that person doesn't start demonstrating self-awareness, self-skepticism, personal responsibility...Why would you ever expect that of anybody else? And if nobody else is doing it, then you're tying your problem-solving hand behind your back.”

[31:21] - Creating Psychological Safety = Greater Productivity. Psychological safety is a means, not an end! It’s the only way to actively harness the power of your whole team. “the end that's available when really pursuing creating an environment of psychological safety is much more well-informed, fast-moving problem-solving. Because people around a psychologically safe table are volunteering what's actually happening, not protecting themselves by putting forward what they think will look or sound best.”

“How do I know how much work my employees are doing?”
 
“Why doesn’t my manager care about my needs?”

Many organizations find themselves in conversations about returning to the office that are fraught or contentious. Some have already implemented a model following the disruptive period of the pandemic and are now dealing with the consequences of their choices. Others are still grappling with these decisions and contemplating how their policies should evolve.

These conversations often devolve into the physical location where employees should be working. However, there is a more productive and enlightening discussion to be had—one that focuses on productivity and shedding light on leaders’ blind spots and fears. All executives and managers should strive to create a policy that suits their organization’s needs, rather than prioritizing their own preferences.

In this episode of Quick Clarity, Angie D’Sa and Jeff Hunter dive into the topic of returning to the office and finding the right balance between working remotely or in person. Continue below for a full transcript of this episode, and join us as we explore: 

When to Start with You:

• Leaders must address their own fears with a coach or trusted partner to effectively navigate and understand the drivers behind their decisions.
• Conversations that focus on delivering value to customers and the community, while acknowledging personal confusion and blind spots, will lead to better decision-making.

Why the Right Goal Is Important:

• Prioritizing presence over productivity will hinder the achievement of your goals and ultimately create a fragile organization.
• Productivity is about delivering the most value to customers and the community. Shifting the focus from physical presence to discussing how and where people can do their best work will yield better outcomes toward your goals.

How to Increase Productivity:

• Design systems that incentivize and reward outcomes instead of measuring employee presence.
• Recognize that productivity is influenced by psychological factors, not skills.
• Learn to identify early indicators of employee confusion and proactively address them.
• Recognize that productivity is a manager's responsibility and invest in their development.

In this episode of Quick Clarity, Angie D'Sa and Jeff Hunter delve into the topic of the speed of change, which is the fundamental problem that most businesses face. Join us as we explore:

1. What Is The Speed of Change:

• Speed of change ultimately determines an organization’s success or failure and it’s ability to remain competitive.
• How quickly you can evolve alongside or ahead of the market and retain customers as you move fast.
• The practical speed limit of productive change is equal to the practical speed limit of productive learning. This is a psychological challenge, not an educational one.

2. Where Businesses Fail:

• Adapting to high-speed and unpredictable changes can be challenging for people, as we are all social creatures that crave acceptance, status, and safety.
• Speed of change and standards are two fundamental drivers of human confusion. If you don’t turn that confusion into clarity, they become the drivers of business failure.
• By prioritizing speed alone, you accumulate structural debts in your organization that will ultimately crush you or cost you later on.
• Leaders who do not approach their potential blindness with curiosity, or seek help to explore alternative approaches, will be trapped by the systems they’ve helped design.

3. How to Have Both - Standards and Speed:

• Mastery allows for fast and high-quality production, reducing the trade-off between speed and quality.
• Building mastery requires significant investment in management, discipline, leadership, focus, and execution.
• This is attainable through Talentism's Operating System and "build-run" approach, a methodology that emphasizes continuous learning and improvement.

4. Why Fun Is Great, but Meaning Is Better:

• Is feeling good the purpose of your life or the reason you show up to work? If not, you should actually be seeking meaning.
• The workplace environments that relied on cheap capital to create a false sense of meaning through pleasurable experiences no longer can exist in today’s environment. 
• Work should hold intrinsic meaning and contribute to self-discovery and purpose; it should be a place where you can learn and unleash your potential.
• Purpose, learning, and being enabled to unleash your potential at work are ultimately more competitive in the talent marketplace than fun.

In this episode of Quick Clarity, Angie and Jeff discuss a new job role CEOs are feeling increasing pressure to fill and leaving them asking…

“Do I have to be a therapist for my employees?”

“How do I motivate my team after experiencing a layoff?”

Jeff tackles this question by sharing his reflections as a CEO, Hiring Manager, Coach, and Company Co-Founder. Angie outlines what questions to reflect on when looking to action and solve the systems creating these issues.

For those who prefer to read, a full transcript of this episode is available after the Quick Links below.

Quick Links

“Am I a Therapist Now?”

The short answer? Of course not! However, a few things come to mind when we examine this question.

[2:45] - Generally, we don’t love generational analysis; however, a pattern seems to emerge here with older leaders we work with. Often when we delve deeper into the question, “Do I have to be a therapist for my employees” we find it is rooted in the past idea of work, the fear of being unable to meet the changing needs of the business world, and the confusion of how to solve the issues employees are raising. In the past, work was entirely used for economic security, often at the expense of autonomy, dreams, and potential. This created a system of suppression, which served as a form of submission to the whims of the current leadership. This is not a model employees want to continue operating under. 

[10:13] - When we hear people come to us with these questions, we refuse to believe that the entire employee base has suddenly become a group of weak creatures. We talk with so many leaders, and some are well-equipped for the current needs of modern businesses. Often inside the confusion these problems create emerges a BSL narrative of either attempting to blame yourself or others. We ask, is this a personal problem for you or a problem with a fundamental reality of human beings? This reality is not only actionable, but that understanding it becomes a massive advantage. Don’t get mad, don’t get even, get ahead.  When your employees and team members come to you with their issues, they give you the most sacred thing imaginable—their trust. Trust is foundational to a successful modern business. People will follow their emotions no matter how hard we try or how many specialized systems we create. When someone provides you with the opportunity to build that trust, you have to be open to it and communicative, or you risk not only forgoing a chance at meaningful growth but causing damage to the organization itself. Unfortunately, you do not determine when or how this will happen, let alone if it will happen. The actual choice you are faced with when trying to avoid these scenarios is either 

1. Hiring exclusively sociopaths limits your talent pool dramatically and makes the world a worse place.
2. Hiring people and then ignoring the opportunity to build trust with them inevitably hindering your growth or even the ability of your company to function, possibly catastrophically.

[20:07] - We have a lot of empathy for leadership struggling with the added load of these expectations. We are not claiming that it is not difficult, and we are not expecting these changes to happen overnight. However, we are asking you to accept the reality of the situation you have placed yourself in.

[22:33] - How do we investigate and solve the issues being brought to me?

1. Acknowledge. When people come to you with these issues, they need to feel acknowledged at that moment. You need to uphold that basic communication strategy and make them feel heard. If you can’t do that, you have to communicate your current ability and make time for them in the future.
2. Always seek to understand before you are understood. Take the time to do it right, don’t rush to problem-solve. Listen to them, let them express their issues, and acknowledge them. (for more methods on how to do this well, Jeff suggests checking out Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey) 
3. Be a guide. Often you are not the right person to solve this issue. Guide them to the person who can help! It does not make you insufficient as a leader if you cannot help them. Accept your inability to do so and delegate the case to those who can. 

[30:05] - How do I motivate my team after experiencing a layoff/RIF (Reduction In Force)?

People often ask how I get my team back to work after experiencing a traumatic event. To be clear, the failure of leadership had to happen before the RIF for that to happen, so if you were incompetent as a leader before the RIF, what makes you competent afterward? The reality of being a leader is that you will make mistakes. If you are not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough. However, when you make mistakes, they affect the people around you. Simple mistakes for you can become profound mistakes for others. When you make a mistake, people don’t want to think you won’t make them; they want to know you will learn from them and not make the same mistake again. Unfortunately, we often see large-scale issues and RIFs being treated by leaders as something that happened to them. Frankly, who would trust a leader who treats people’s livelihoods that way? It didn’t happen to you; you didn’t do your job well. You have to take personal responsibility for the mistakes, and you have to be able to share your learnings to make a brighter future. Simply saying “I’m sorry” is cheap; you must learn from your mistakes and give people hope for a future with the company. Narcissism is the easiest way to blow up your trust with people, and that trust is fundamental!!!

[36:00] It’s The New Saying Among Tech CEOs: I Apologize by M. Bobrowsky, Wall Street Journal.

[40:43] - You have to anchor to the meaning. People show up to work and have creativity, promise, and potential, which is what you’re paying hard capital for. When those people get confused, you must create a system and help them get back on their path. Not only because it makes the shareholders happy but more importantly because that’s when your team goes home from a day of work and feels pride. And that pride ripples throughout their life. So why does the work matter, and how can you help anchor your people to that meaning to get through the toughest times? Vision is universal, but the meaning is individual, and the first point of contact in large corporations is usually the managers. The leader paints a vision, but the purpose comes from the work. Management is responsible for creating an environment of people connecting to their meaning in the work. (check back for more on this, Jeff and Angie will be continuing their conversation on another episode)

In this episode of Quick Clarity Angie and Jeff explore how the talent market is evolving. Today employees’ expectations of their work experience and of their leaders are heightening. This creates inevitable, sometimes painful, confusion for leaders. Listen and read more below as we explore these great expectations, and how leaders can recognize their own confusion and adapt. 

What is Confusion? 

[02:10] Confusion is an endemic human experience, just like breathing, so assigning value in terms of “good” or “bad” is pointless. The mind only does what it is designed to do: predict outcomes. When those outcomes don’t match our reality, confusion ensues. Talentism sees confusion as an unconscious phenomenon that leads to feelings, not a conscious one that leads to thoughts, similar to the “fight, flight, or freeze” autonomic reactions. The modern world is more complex than ever before, and confusion permeates all things in adult life. Businesses must confront this confusing world and master it, especially high-speed growth/fast-change companies. 

The Expectations of Work

1. [16:04] - People want meaningful and purpose-driven work. It’s not an economic security feature or a place to punch a clock. Instead, people want the business to improve the world around them or solve problems they see as important, and they want the company to have a higher-order priority than survival.
2. [18:28] - People's expectations of management are going up, not down. Gallop polls show that over 85% of people feel dissatisfied with their managers. Talentism believes these numbers will persist as management teams fail to change fast enough to match the reality of the changing world.
3. [19:56] - People want to build mastery towards a calling. Two things are needed for some to find their calling.  1. People must find where they are compulsive  2. People need an environment to improve that compulsion. 
4. [21:54] - People want autonomy and to express their individual contributions. In the past, work was where you sacrificed independence in exchange for payment. In the modern world, people expect the ability to express their identities and contributions and have a role in defining the culture and my manager's power over me.
5. [24:07] - People want meaningful relationships in the workplace. Community is essential, and people want to have the ability to build one that reflects themselves and their values.  

The Expectations of Leaders

1. [28:25] - Leaders should be emotionally present and mature. The more people look to work for meaning and community, the more they bring themselves to the workplace and often look to leadership for guidance.
2. [31:10] - Leaders need to bring a unique and compelling vision. As people look to find more identity in the workplace, they are looking for their leaders to have the vision to propel their meaningful and purpose-driven work into the company culture.
3. [32:00] - Leaders need to be clear-minded, excellent communicators. There is an expectation that the leader has thought deeper, seen further, and thought more fundamentally about the things that matter to the business than anyone else there. Furthermore, leaders are expected to be able to communicate that more effectively than anyone else there, even in times of crisis.
4. [33:26] - Leaders need to be trusted. Even 60 years ago, this was an entirely foreign concept, but modern leaders must be trusted to be successful managers. 
5. [34:53] - People expect their leaders to take a stand on political and social issues and feel that aligning on those issues is very important in their choice of workplace. 

Referenced:

• Thompson, D. (2014, February 24). Workism is making Americans miserable. The Atlantic. Retrieved May 12, 2023, from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/religion-workism-making-americans-miserable/583441/. 
• Putnma, R. (2000). Bowling alone. Simon & Schuster. 

6 Key Principles Talentism Clarity Coaches use to unlock your company’s potential.

1. Start with Synthesizing [00:10:32]- Teams often lose the ability to act as an interdependent group of experts. They typically fall to the level of the system around them, starting with the blindspots and dysfunctions of the person who is at the top or leading the meeting. Every individual in a team is both responsible for their own point of view and for supporting the team to win. That means everyone has to synthesize: and form a productive perspective based on multiple sources of information and critical reasoning. No one person can surrender their right and responsibility to synthesize. But someone at the table needs to be responsible for the meta-synthesis – ensuring that everyone is synthesizing well.
2. Safety Leads to Productivity [00:17:42] – People who are confused or feel under threat will stay silent during critical times, adding to the operational burden of the organization. We have found that it is rare that an important operational problem wasn’t identified or at least suspected by at least one member of a team. We have also found that that person rarely speaks up. The second impact of people staying silent is that they can’t help things get better, which means they aren’t unleashing their potential. Someone on the team needs to synthesize the level of safety and determine what stands in the way of creating more safety.
3. Reorient to Productivity [00:27:08] – Most communications are unproductive at best or harmful at worst. A team that is poorly communicating cannot turn confusion into clarity and, therefore, cannot unleash the organization’s potential. Someone on the team needs to synthesize the quality of the communication and reorient to productivity when the communication is unproductive. Productive communication solves problems, fosters learning, builds trust, and ensures sync. Typically this starts with someone at the table synthesizing the quality of the conversation, sharing that observation, and reorienting to shared interests, goal-level thinking (shared commitments), design syncs, and prior agreements.
4. Ensure Perpetual Three-Level Sync [00:34:13] – Teams typically fail to get in sync at any level. They don’t share awareness, understanding, or alignment. Someone needs to synthesize this failure of sync, call it out, and guide people to testing for sufficiency at each level.
5. Design and Prioritize Leading Indicators [00:43:32] – teams typically become fixated on the past, not on the future. Humans prioritize small near-term risks over catastrophic longer-term risks. Typically teams jump on problems like a soccer game played by toddlers – everyone runs to the ball and kicks the hell out of it until somehow the problem moves somewhere else. Nothing is learned, and the team doesn’t win. Leading indicators require attention to the long-term issues that drive performance, like ECM clarity and trust. When teams spend all their attention on lagging financial indicators, they miss signals that the team at the top needs to prioritize.
6. Constantly Drive Learning Loops [00:50:51] – everyone is always learning. It is the most human thing to do. But without purposeful learning, based on quality syncs and shared hypotheses, learning will likely be unproductive. Someone needs to hold the responsibility to ensure that hypotheses are shared, syncs enabled, and learning is guided by data, not opinion, putting a point on what was learned and how it should show up in future designs and employment decisions. Someone needs to own the speed of learning of the team and use the levers of the broader leading system to ensure constant improvement.