the artisan podcast

Dr Lola Gershfeld is the founder of EmC Leaders, a training and consulting company focused on working with managers to master the art of relationships. She's also the author of The Emotional Connection, The EmC Strategy, as well as The Connected Culture, How the Art of Relationships Leads to Positive Results.

Check out Dr. Lola's Youtube,  Blog as well as Podcast for additional info

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Lola:

I started in the business world very young. My husband and I built three electronic manufacturing companies and so I always took the role of a leader.

I served as an HR manager, and a CFO, and then,  because I was building teams and I was, really feeling confident about myself.  Then I was asked to serve on this private company board, and, I couldn't believe what I was actually experiencing.

And, I remember, I think the moment for me was like sitting and watching these board members attacking each other.  And, you know, the CEO was sitting next to me and I turned to him and I said, why do they do this at every board meeting?

And, he said, quietly, I think it's because they care about each other. And, and I thought to myself, what? That, that doesn't make sense. That's so silly to express care about each other like that.  But, what I really found is that they got really stuck in this pattern, the dance that they would do every board meeting.

And it was really awful because, one person would shut down, the other person would attack, and then we would just go circles and circles. We would have eight-hour board meetings with no progress and imagine how exhausting that is. The funny thing is all of these people who were on the board were very smart and very intelligent and had scientific degrees and they could solve technical problems.

And that was really fascinating for me how is it possible they could solve such difficult problems, but they could not talk to each other.   So, as you can imagine, I started to really look for a solution because I didn't enjoy this experience.  And, I went to the bookstore, I got these books, you know, Good to Great, Primal Leadership, Speed of Trust, all of these books were on my desk.  I was diving into them and studying them, trying to figure it out. And every time I would come to the board meeting, I would teach maybe communication skills or set some rules or boundaries, but nothing actually worked. And so I decided to go back to school and find the answer because it was really fascinating to me.

And I not only saw these disruptions in the boardroom, but I saw it as an HR manager, you know, people would come to me and sit in the office and I would empathize and I would try to understand them. And guess what? A few weeks later, the same pattern comes back again.

So I really wanted to understand what was happening and how is it possible. So I went back to school. I got my master's, my doctorate, but the aha moment came when my husband invited me to this workshop, couple's workshop called Hold Me Tight. It was created by Dr. Sue Johnson, and she's the developer of the emotionally focused therapy.

Okay. I'm, I'm sitting there in this couple's workshop and I'm watching this instructor talk about attachment signs and about patterns, how these couples get into and get lost in this pattern and takes over their relationship and they just become stuck in this conflict over and over again.

And I'm thinking to myself, wait a second, we have exactly the same pattern in the boardroom. Workplace conflicts are all about attachment. Workplace relationships are all about emotional disconnection.  And I cannot tell you, Katty, I, I was on fire at that time. I flew to New York. I took, you know, the externship with Susan Johnson.

And from then on, I was just immersing myself in all of the science, all of the knowledge about attachment. And I was actually bringing it to the boardroom to work with boards and teams. And miraculously, things started to change. The transformation was happening right in front of my eyes.

And so I decided to create tools because as I was doing the techniques, people didn't even have the language, didn't know how to express themselves. So I created tools, I created the training and then I created the certification program, which I taught at Chapman and I taught at Pepperdine University.

I see that every time people use the EMC process, which is emotional connection, stands for emotional connection, I see people are happy at work, they have the tools, how to get back to connection. They're a lot more engaged and I feel like there's hope.

I want people to know there's hope because I felt very helpless and hopeless in those moments. So I want people to know that there is a roadmap. There's a way to get out of conflict and you don't have to be stuck.

Katty:  It's amazing because you could have easily walked away from that board. And not just made it easy on yourself, but then instead you actually leaned into that and decided, okay, there's a solution here. I don't know what it is, but I'm going to find it. And not only did you find it, but you built it from there. So pretty amazing because workplace conflict, it is such an opportunity for everyone to be able to find the tools and the language to be able to work through that, you know.

We work with creatives all the time and sometimes just the disagreement on what the font should be or what the color should be. Because we're each bringing our own idea of art, of creativity to the table, just that simple thing, can blow teams apart.  To be able to have that opportunity to turn away from it and not personalize it so much is so, so important.

You talked about emotional connection. Let's talk about that because, on your board, you had people who are very high on the IQ side of it, but maybe it's not so much on the EQ side of it from what you said. So what does emotional connection mean? How can we create that at work in our business?

Lola: Well,  I think the first thing is obviously to recognize that when we work together, we impact each other. I mean, you just mentioned, “ it would be nice when people don't take it personally”.  It cannot be! People do take it personally because relationships are personal. And especially when we depend on each other and my survival depends on you as a manager to continue to help me to grow and develop and, and be in this world as me.  But if I don't have a connection with you, I am now a threat, right?

My brain, my, my, my amygdala, the mammalian brain that we have is going to be constantly vigilant for threats because the connection, the emotional connection that I have with you is part of my survival code.  It is wired in survival.

So when I don't feel connected, that's, that's so incredibly important for people to get that when we work together, all of our senses become very, very attuned to each other, to the facial expression, to the words we say, to the tone of voice. Everything is so magnified. When I have a secure connection with people, with my manager, my colleagues, and my coworkers, I feel safe. I feel safe to express my ideas. I can go out in the world and take risks. I can be open to share my mistakes. That security of our relationship gives me that safety that you're not going to abandon me. You're not going to reject me if I screw up and make a mistake. I won't be alone in that experience.

You know, one of the biggest fears we have is isolation, is being alone. So our emotional brain is very attuned to that cue, to that emotional signal that we send to each other.  And when we don't have an opportunity to clarify that message, that's when we get stuck.  For example, you might be coming to work and stressed from something that happened at home.  And then, you might be walking to your desk without saying hello to everybody, or to your coworker. And then they interpret that, “Oh my gosh, Katty is upset at me. Something is wrong with me or something is wrong. She's mad. Maybe it's the thing I sent her yesterday”.  Right? So the emotional music of fear .... I see Katty is upset and that starts to perpetuate that negative thought, which starts to perpetuate the protection, which starts “When I come to the meeting, I'm going to be on guard”.  And then you are gonna say why are you not engaged?  Why are you not saying anything?

Well, oh my gosh,  because we don't know how to talk about these conversations.  When we do have, that's why I think the process is so effective because it gives you a structure.  It gives you a process. It gives you a language where you can say, Hey, Katty, I got scared. You know, I'm not attacking you, but I can, I just want to clarify because I got scared.  You didn't say hello, and I was wondering, you know, is everything okay now? You don't say, Oh, you know, why are you making such a big deal? You don't respond that way.

You know, they're saying, Oh, thank you for sharing that. That must be difficult for you. Of course. No, I appreciate you sharing your, your experience is valid, right?

So. The first thing is when we understand how we impact each other and that it's okay for us to share that vulnerability from the impact point of view. And we know how to respond to that in emotional connection, creating safety. When we are continually creating a bond, we are creating that safe space.

Saying like, “I'm still here for you.  You are important to me. I care about you”.  That continuous feedback loop gives me the confidence to come back to you again and gives me the safety next time Katty may come in and not into herself. I'm already going to have that experience saying, no, no, it's okay. Katty is just maybe having a bad day. It's not because I did something.

 That is how people become more secure in their relationships. So the emotional connection process is really based on that attachment theory of John Bowlby, Carl Rogers, Salvador Minuchin that really looks at the relationship and says …For us to thrive, for us to feel calm, we have to have a secure relationship. We have to have a way to create a conversation where we can gain our emotional balance back. And the fastest way to gain that emotional balance is to reach for each other.

I used to go around the block all the time when I was stressed, you know, as an HR manager, like, Oh my gosh, you know, you cry, you go out, you walk around and then you calm down, but you never have that conversation to repair the connection.  So you just kind of like shove your emotions down.  And then what happens? You think that it's okay, but guess what? It accumulates and it becomes your raw spots.  And the next time somebody says something, you blow up like a blast. Exactly. You say to yourself, what happened to me?  Yeah. Why, why am I like that?

So these bonding conversations that we teach people in the process, they actually not only just heal the connection, they heal relationships where people can actually get rebalanced and heal themselves from being outside in the world and being in danger of being criticized.

Katty:

I think we sometimes forget in the workplace, at home, with friends, we all bring our histories to the table. So a particular outburst or a particular reaction has so much more depth underneath it than that first interaction or altercation. So I think you're right. We automatically go into protect mode and we automatically go into just the stories that we start telling ourselves about why that outburst happened. 

And then I get a sense that it's very easy for resentment to start building if we don't have that conversation right from the beginning. You talked about impact, that every relationship has an impact. And I know that you talk about impact and feedback and the correlation between the two of them.

I wanted to get into that with you because obviously in the creative space when whenever our talent does a pitch or presents an idea, art can be very subjective. How would you suggest giving feedback, getting feedback, and just kind of what to do with that feedback,  so that its impact is a positive impact, even if the client doesn't like the direction, that it's not taken personally. It's just really about the piece of art versus, you!

Lola: That's a really good question because that there's an art in itself, right? You have to kind of like maneuver those conversations and Katty, I have to again, go back to the relationships. When you are paying attention to the connection and constantly, address the attachment significance of that relationship, it will be much easier for people to process the feedback.

So, in attachment terms, we know that the brain asks this key question in attachment relationships. And the question is, are you there for me,  A R E, are you there for me? So, the acronym A R E is actually expressed with, are you accessible to me emotionally?  R, are you responsive to me? E, are you engaged with me?

Basically, what this means is, can I reach you? Will you be there when I need you? Will you give me your attention? So, and it comes in through in vulnerable moments.

So that ARE question, when it is answered with a resounding yes, you have a secure relationship.  When the answer is a no or a maybe you have an insecure relationship.

So if you answer the question, no or maybe in your relationship with a client or with a your coworker, with your employee,  and if it's no, and maybe you have to know that there is insecurity in the relationship. Number one, you have to know that. So you have to learn how to balance yourself, which means you have to learn about your triggers and your raw spots and emotions.

So when you go through the process, you learn all of these tools and all of becoming more self-aware, what is happening for you? So you come into that conversation more balanced. And when you share the feedback or impact, I like to say share impact, don't share feedback. What does it mean to you? How does this work impact you? 

Because that comes from a vulnerable place, that comes from a place where they didn't do anything wrong, right? It removes the judgment, it removes the disappointment, it removes the shame effect. It gives them the impact, saying, look, this is how it impacts me.  It's nothing that you did anything wrong because you have to constantly reassure them that there is a connection, that you care about them, that they're important to you, and that their feelings are valid.

I'll give you an example. My daughter called me yesterday, and she's 40. Okay, she's 40 years old. She calls me, and she says, Mom!  I was sharing with you the day before something that I did, and you said something. You said, Oh, you need to be consistent in this.  And when you said you need to be consistent in this, that really hurt me.

And what I did is I grabbed my form, you know, the EMC reconnection form, and I'm, because my emotions start to escalate. So I'm losing my balance. I'm grabbing my form so I can just follow it and be in emotionally responsive to her.  I want to be able to sit with her space and hold her space. And the form helps me to do that.

So I'm saying, okay, so the raw spot that hit for you in that moment is like you being judged. Yes, mom, that's it. Now she knows the process, she knows the language, so it's easier. And so it made you feel like you were hurt. Yes, I was very hurt and I felt defeated, she said, and I felt very surprised and ashamed when you said. Oh, and what is that image?  Oh, it felt like you were stabbing me in my heart.  All right. And look at the impact it's having on her, right?

And like, wow, my gosh. And where do you feel it in your body? Is it in your heart? No, it's in my stomach. Oh, stomach. Wow. That tells me that there's a shame piece happening because we know the bodily sensation and the emotion behind that.  And then what's the worst fear for you? Oh, I will never be good enough.  No matter what I do, I'll be never good enough.  Oh my gosh. And what's the fear about me as your mom, or you will never be proud of me?  Wow, that makes sense. Wow. You're so strong and courageous.

Now I'm going through the form and I'm telling you the answer and the questions are there.  And so what do you do? What are your thoughts? Oh, I'm thinking I'm going to have to prove to her that I am good enough. I'm not going to eat. I'm not going to sleep. I'm just going to work and work and work to show her.  Oh, that makes sense. Wow. That, that, that's so hard. Your feelings are valid. And what do you need?

I need to know mom that I am good enough just the way I am.  You are good enough. You're good enough just the way you are.

it took us about 15 minutes to have this conversation and it healed her, it connected back, it gave that reassurance that I love her. I care about her. She was enough courageous. She felt safe enough to share those vulnerabilities with me. And now we move on. 

Katty: So how do you do that at work where maybe in someone's mind there is an imbalance?  Because somebody is somebody's boss or a client is paying your invoices. And it's not necessarily a friendship, or a, you know, or a personal relationship, but you're trying to stay in a professional relationship. But you're still trying to minimize that imbalance. How would you go about that?  Because I could see in scenarios where maybe a marketing campaign was rejected by a client.  And the talent would take it personally. How would they even be able to come back to someone who's their client or their boss and be able to mend those fences or at least take away the personal hurt from it.

Lola: Well, we, we have to process the emotions in order for you to heal that hurt. In order for people to speak that language of emotional connection. They have to know what are the steps. It's like dancing right in dancing tango. For example, I love Argentine tango.

And so when I started to learn, you just learned the steps first. So, you learn the steps, but then you learn the music. For example, with my coworkers, every time I bring a new coworker, I give them training.

You know, we're going to learn this, but this is a process where we share emotions. So when you have a client that is, for example, rejected your work and you feel out of balance in that way, you come to each other. You come to each other and say, hey, this was so hard for me. This was really rejecting and here's my raw spot that hit for me.

And here's some emotions that, that was, was I felt, and here's my body sensation, here's my image, and here's my fear, and this is what I start to think, and this is what I start to do when I have those emotions. And this is what I need.

Now, when we come together, imagine team members and managers and can come together to each other, how it changes their relationship, how much stronger they become as a team.  And it's slowly, slowly, they feel much more comfortable. They can trust each other more.

 I cannot tell you the number of companies that have called me and said, we are so happy we learned this process before COVID.  During COVID we were able to still stay away from each other, but be emotionally connected because we have the tools.

We could speak a language of emotions, we can identify emotions.  Emotions are the most important thing in conflict or in any disconnection.  Lisa Feldman Barrett, she said that the more granular you can make emotion, the less overwhelmed you are.  So as you organize, this is what the process is. You organize your experience, and emotional experience gives you that structure.

 So the more there's surface emotion and softer emotions and primary emotions and the image and fears and body senses, all of that gives you relaxation. All of that gives you a sense of I'm not alone in that experience.  And when I'm not alone in that experience, my prefrontal cortex opens up because my amygdala relaxes.

Now I can see options. I can see that the client didn't reject me. So all of that cognition starts to be more accessible to us when our emotional brain is at rest.  But we cannot, we cannot tell ourselves, Oh, don't worry about it. Just relax.

No, because you have to address the emotions and you have to talk about it. And you have to know that the other person is not going to turn away from you when you open up and say, I was so hurt.  I was so hurt.

It's okay. It's okay that you're hurt. Thank you for sharing that you're hurt. You're so strong and courageous. We're here with you. You're not alone in this.  These are powerful, powerful words. I can't wait to hear that.

Katty: Well, it's really creating the space where people can step into it and have a, and feel confident and safe enough to have that conversation. 

Lola: Oh my gosh. And Katty, people blossom.  They blossom once they know that they're not alone. They, they, they have all this motivation. You know, companies create benefits and perks to motivate people, but I think they're missing the mark. You don't need to spend thousands and millions of dollars to give free lunches and free, you know, whatever cleaner service and massage service fitness, no, you have to be emotionally connected, you know.  Teach that, learn that and you're going to be great.  Your people are going to be flying and thriving in the workplace. 

Katty: Yeah. It's very interesting. I think to go back and take a look at where every member of the team falls on that emotional intelligence or emotional connection spectrum, some are probably easier to lean into it and for some, it's really something that has to be taught and practiced over and over and over again, because it doesn't naturally, or, or maybe just previous hurts is going to put up a protection for them.  But to be, to be able to really pull that team together to kind of use your own words, bringing, you know, pulling the team together versus pulling them apart. Some of these tools to be able to utilize that is, is powerful.

You take us through, some specific language in terms of what it is, and how we approach a conversation. You've shared some of that already. What if it doesn't land, at what point is our responsibility? Let's say I come to you and I share with you a hurt or that something happened.  And if there's no responsiveness on your part, what is then my responsibility there?  Where do I go back to you or what do I do at that point?  I stepped forth to resolve the conflict and to make sure that the relationship could be repaired. But if it's not reciprocal, what do we do? 

Lola: It's hard, right? It's, it's very hard. The thing is we still have to work with that person. So, it's very important for us to first of all, maybe find somebody else who can process emotions with you and can be there for you. So you can come back to the person.

You definitely need to come back, and you need to come back in a safe way. I mean, obviously, when the person doesn't respond to you, not because they don't want to connect with you, because they feel overwhelmed. So, it's hard for us to empathize with that, when we are out of balance.  So that's why I say that if the person is not available, you do the process with somebody else, get your balance, get you feeling heard. And so you don't feel alone.

So you can come back and say, look, our relationship is important to us. This is what we call bonding conversations, right? You create additional safety, you know, in your mind, you know, cognitively that when people work together, they want to be connected because of the dependency. Because our brain turns on these bonding needs and we want to be, we long for that connection. So we start to give space to the other person and say, I know it's uncomfortable for you, but you are important to me. You're important to this team. You're important to our success.

Now, my tone of voice is calm.  Right? My facial expression is calm. That's because I'm not activated. When I'm triggered and I'm activated, my facial expression is, expression is stressed. My tone of voice is like pointy and it's very difficult for the other person to hear that congruency that I really care about you.

I'm attacking you and you really care about me? No way. So we need to first of all, I recognize that we get into these patterns, what we call a negative cycle. And that's one of the very important things, people learn in the process is to recognize when is that cycle starts. 

Like for example, the most common cycle is what we call pursue, withdraw, you know, when, when one person, for example, starts losing that connection and doesn't know how to talk about it.  So what they do, is they start to come across as critical.  So they push for connection, right? But it's actually that protesting the disconnection.

So what we do is “Why are you not talking to me? Why are you not responding to me? It's like, right, what's going on? What, what's happening?” And so the other person then tries to defend themselves and then they shut down.

So you have a pursuer who's pursuing and then you have a shutdown person who is withdrawing and avoiding, and so that's the cycle. So when you start to recognize that you can come back and say, look, we got stuck in the cycle.  You know, it's not your fault, it's not my fault, it's the cycle's fault.  And then you start to create safety for that conversation. Look, I want to know what happened to you. I can tell you what happened to me.  And then we can be there for each other.

That's the fastest way is when we reach for each other and we can get out of that negative cycle.  So that's A R E, are you there for me? is we are practicing how to be accessible, responsive and engaged emotionally. All emotional variables.

Katty: Being emotionally connected versus being defensive.  So, so how do you go about if in a situation where you may have a large team,  and there are some people on the team that you connect with right away and you're friends and you go after work and you go for drinks and you go for dinner, and then there are other people on the team that you just don't have that friendship, you're coworkers, you're not friends. And there are some relationships that, that cross from just being coworkers to actually having friendships develop as well. How do you navigate then not letting, not, isolating someone because you're not inviting them to your after work gatherings? Where's the fine line of being co-workers and then suddenly becoming friends? 

Lola: Yes. Katty, that's a very tough question. Make that as a habit for your team to talk about emotions. To talk about the raw spots because when you have that opportunity on a regular basis, you know, let's talk about the triggers.  Who got triggered last week and what are the triggers? What are some of the raw spots? What are the emotions? You start to actually learn about people.  You start to open up like people have never heard of you.

I remember doing this, session, with the CFO and a manager and the manager got very stressed because the CFO would attack her in meetings and shows the manager stopped talking to her completely.  And so the more she stopped talking to her, the more the CFO got anxious and upset. So she became really, really like very aggressive towards her. So the manager went around, went to the HR department, and filed the complaint.

Well, the CFO was so, she was so devastated. She couldn't sleep at night, she was just terrified that she was going to lose a job and she was going to have this on her record.  Well, the company called me and I did the reconnection session for them.  And during the session, the manager did not want to share her emotions first in front of the CFO.

She was like protection and I said, I get it. It makes sense of course you would not be able to share. It's not safe for you. Can you just say that? 

“I'm scared to share. I don't feel safe to share my emotions”.  This is a first step to just acknowledge what is happening with you right now. “I can't trust you”. Right? That's, that's a good place to start.

When the CFO shared what happened to her when the manager filed a complaint, how she couldn't sleep, how she couldn't eat, she could, she was devastated.  The manager opened up. The manager said, I had no idea it had an impact like that. You were so aggressive towards me, I thought you like you have no human emotion. 

So as you have these practices of conversations where people have this language and when they share, they need to know, they need to respond. And I, we teach that how to respond, you know, to keep saying, thank you for sharing. You're so courageous and strong because in the workplace, it's not customary to share vulnerability and emotions.

We say, you know, be vulnerable, be vulnerable.  No, if I'm going to share my vulnerability, people are going to look at me and just walk away. No, we have to learn how to say thank you for sharing. That must be so difficult for you.  You're so courageous and strong.  And then when they share, they feel accepted.  They feel connected. They learn about each other. They start to feel like, wow, my manager has actual emotions. I had no idea.

You become human, right? Yeah, we become human. And now we have a whole new way of looking at each other. I mean, I can literally show you in the process. of where each person starts to see each other differently and where the cycle starts and how it ends.

When I do sessions, like I'm, I have a hundred percent confidence in me that I know exactly how to get people back to connection because I use an attachment framework roadmap. It never let me down ever.  So I feel like managers need to learn this, this structure, that attachment significance, because then it will only make them a lot more effective..   

But we have to catch those moments. We have to pay attention to those moments. And we have to feel confident. We know what we're doing in those moments. 

Katty: Those are powerful words. You're so strong. You're so courageous. Yeah.  So how do we catch ourselves when we're being triggered?

Lola: Oh, it's so hard, Katty, because the emotion is so fast,  boom, boom, boom, and you are in the cycle.

Katty: Yeah. I was saying something you mentioned was like our, with our teams. They can see our expressions. They know, like, our, you know, our face maybe says a thousand words.  How do we, as managers, how are we, how do we become, without having gone through the training, how can we become more cognizant of what our body language is portraying? Maybe I'm using the right words, but you know, my face is just negative, you know, giving,  giving feedback with this. How, how do we catch ourselves, from those triggers?

Obviously, like without, without going through the training, for the person listening here and they're like, gosh, these words really are impacting me. I need to be mindful of when I fly off the handle,  how do I calm myself down? Because you said you go, you used to go around the block as an HR manager, where you went for a walk and you'd come back.

Lola: Yeah, but that was not effective. It was, it only worked for a day, Katty.  No, what's effective is to learn how to have these conversations.  In order for people to understand how they impact each other, they have to hear it from other people.

They have to have these bonding conversations to know that this is what happens. This is what, what you do that impacts me, and this is what I do that impacts you. That's, we all do that, but we get stuck in that the more we don't know how to talk about our emotions, how to reach for each other, how to talk about our fears and needs. We have, that's a responsibility, I feel this is a biggest responsibility for us is to learn about our emotional experience.  To learn how to recognize and articulate that fear and how to  know what is it that we need.  We have to learn how to ask for that need.

And sometimes people will not be there to give us that need. And it's okay. I mean, I remember having a conversation with my husband, you know, and I said, I need to know that it's not my fault. I didn't do anything wrong and he would say,  I cannot tell you that, but I can tell you I love you.  I said, no, I need to know that it's not my fault. And he said, I can't tell you, but it took him time, right? And now he can say, it's not your fault. He recognizes it's the cycle's fault. We both got off. Okay? It's the cycle's fault. It's the cycle's fault. It's the cycle's fault.

Katty: I think a great place for people to start is to pick up a copy of your book.  Because I think in here,  you have some really good tips about not saying it this way. Instead, reframing it and rephrasing it and saying it that way. And just giving some tools to people. Where else can people go to find you, Lola? And just learn a little bit more about ARE and conflict and the tools that you bring to the table.

Lola: Yeah, they can go to emcleaders. com And we have a master class that actually live sessions the master class live sessions.  So that's a that's a great way tolearn we have online courses. We have a book We have a youtube. I have a youtube channel on emc leaders podcast, obviously.

It takes time for people to understand this process, to learn this process, but once you have the tools, it's like you have a new world in front of you. It's like,  Have you done zipline, Katty? Mm, yeah. You know, on a zipline, when somebody straps you in, you feel secure and you can go through the chasm and say, like, whoo,  you know, you can see the world, you can pay attention, right, to the whole beautiful thing.

Well, that's the same thing with secure relationships. When, when our buckle is not secure, we are very scared. We can't grow, and that's what I see, especially with When people become more connected with each other, when they have this opportunity, you don't have to do these bonding conversations all the time.

Once you kind of heal your raw spots that happened in that relationship, you start to become more and more secure in that relationship.

We are in relationships. We grow in relationships. If we take one person out of that relationship and say, well, this person is behaving themselves badly. Well, of course, they are, you just took them out of the relationship. You have to always look at the relationship. Relationships are key for us.

And if there's anything wrong, performance, motivation, productivity,  you know, whatever, absenteeism, turnover…Relationship, always start with a relationship because that is the key.  So I welcome people to reach out and to explore. We have tons of resources and we're here for you to learn and discover yourself and others.

Katty: Beautiful. It's really like learning a new language. Yes. Once you've learned it, then you can actually communicate it.   

Lola: Yes, exactly Katty. And then your life becomes fulfilled because connection is what we want.

Links: EMC Leaders,  The Emotional Connection,  The Connected Culture, 

Check out Dr. Lola's Youtube,  Blog as well as Podcast for additional info

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 The artisan podcast is brought to you by the good people at artisan creative, a digital creative and marketing recruitment firm with over 25 years of experience, placing freelance and full time talent across multiple verticals. We look forward to meeting you learn more at artisancreative. com.

Will Greenblatt shares key public speaking techniques to transform your interview, pitch, or presentation.   

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I'm so excited to welcome Will Greenblatt to this call today. He is the co-founder of the Outloud Speaker School, an agency of actors who teach public speaking and communication skills to entrepreneurs, executives, and to candidates. He has repeatedly spoken at Google, Wayfair, and Boston Dynamics, to just name a few, and has provided coaching to over 4, 500 individuals virtually worldwide.

 His clients have won numerous pitch competitions and raised capital by honing in and raising their skills in publc speaking and pitching. He's here to talk to us about how we can do that in an interview process, how we can do that when we're pitching new clients or pitching new projects.  And brings all of that with the experience that he has gained as an actor.

He started acting when was seven years old. He speaks five languages including Mandarin Chinese and learning Urdu in the process. So with that, so excited to introduce Will and take our conversation to the next level.

Katty: I met Will a number of years ago. I'm part of an organization called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and Will came in to teach us all facilitators how to be better public speakers, how to facilitate meetings better, and how to really hone our presentation skills.

Will: Yeah, it's really nice and I love what you've been doing all the stuff I get on Linkedin you know following you because we haven't actually spoken in so long, but the power of the personal branding, the telling your story, getting your message out there makes me feel like I've kept up with you in a way.

Katty:. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes. The power of social media and how we show up and how we represent ourselves on it is powerful.  Let's just jump in and talk about it. I know you speak with executives, with corporate teams and talk about how to represent themselves, how to present themselves, how to, be a strong public speaker as well as for pitch competitions and how to promote themselves that way.

So obviously the audience that we're speaking to here today are the creatives and the talent that we work with who on a regular basis have to pitch. They have to pitch their portfolio, they have to really pitch their creative thinking when they're presenting clients with ideas and where they're presenting options.

So I really wanted to jump into that. I know your acting background has been a huge force in kind of what you've developed, but why don't we start from the beginning and bring us to where we are currently today from your career trajectory? 

Will: Yeah, the good thing is I just told this story on a stage as part of a public speaking competition two nights ago or three nights ago.

So I have a handy, short, and condensed version. One of the biggest tips I always have with people is to tell your story with less, fewer words, right? So many people want to throw everything about what they're thinking, whether for it's a pitch or a presentation or just telling a story, they give too much detail.

So I'm going to try to do, take my own advice and give the shortened version.  When I was seven years old, I started acting in film and TV.  My family were actors, so I fell into the business kind of through them. And I acted all the way through my childhood, through teenage years, through high school, and I thought, okay, I'm going to go to theatre school.

I went to National Theatre School of Canada. I thought I'm going to get my conservatory training, and I'm just going to go to Hollywood, and that's going to be my life.  And my brother passed away when I was 17, and it threw my life off course, I was like really grief-stricken and I didn't know what to do with myself.

And so when I went to theater school after that happened, I just wasn't in a good place mentally and I realized I didn't want to be an actor. So I ran away from home searching for something like what I was going to do with my life. And I discovered teaching in Spain. I taught English for a year and a half.

And then my first startup was in China. I knew some other English teachers, we started an English education company in Hangzhou, China. So then I discovered entrepreneurship and the long story short is that I came back to Canada and was like, okay, I've got acting, teaching, entrepreneurship. And then I realized, okay, if I use the acting & teaching background, I can teach entrepreneurs and other creatives and business people to tell their story with the kind of skills that I've been honing my whole life, really, since I was seven.

So that's the abridged version of the whole story. So it's an acting and teaching background, and then a focus on entrepreneurship, which is about how do you talk about problems, solutions and prizes. And all public speakers can benefit from that entrepreneurial mindset of somebody has a problem, you've got the solution, and then you have to sell the story of the vision, the prize.

We'll get into that later in the storytelling frameworks. I think for your audience, the creatives, it's really important that they don't just think of themselves as a certain type of person. Still, they embrace the role of a storyteller, a salesperson, an entrepreneur, or an intrapreneur, if they're working at a company. This idea that they've got to get people to buy in with the way they talk with their words, with the power of their speaking voice and their story and their personal story.

Katty: Yeah. So let's talk about that. Because as you're telling your abridged version of your story, just from a visual perspective, as I'm looking at you, you're taking over the whole screen, like you are animated, your energy is coming through, your enthusiasm about what's coming through, what you talk about is coming through. So let's just talk about that. Because so much of our communication in our world now is through digital media and Zoom and Teams and so forth. How can we use this space as our stage to really present ourselves best? 

Will: The easy answer is you can actually look at the little box where you're showing up and see what that looks like. And so I have an extra light here. I don't know if it'll show on camera, but you can probably see it moving around on my face. So I made sure to set that up beforehand just to give me a bit more light. I've sat in front of windows.

I'm making sure that I'm in the center and that my head is barely touching the top so you can see my shoulders You know too many people look like this on the screen. And if you can't see me if you're listening to this I've slouched down. You know that some basic framing things some lighting things, some audio things.  I'm speaking into a decent mic for this as well, which is really important.

Those technical things are important. And then, it's the same concept as speaking in any situation, really, but it's how committed you are to your topic, and can we see, hear, and feel that with the way you're talking?

So one thing I know is that I care about my message enough to not worry if people think I'm cool and laid back. I don't do that because I'm so much more interested in my message getting out there than I am in what people think of me as a person.  I know that if I put effort into being clear, and excited, and enthusiastic and showcase my passion, I have a better chance of people receiving my message and receiving it positively and remembering it.

So you know, in this space, you can work on the technical side of things, but just remember why you're passionate about what you're doing and then let people see that.  It's not as easy as that, but that's the idea. That's what you want to commit to and not try to hide and be humble, be too quiet, be too laid back.

But you have to find a way to show that you are passionate. And if people don't feel your passion, they don't feel your commitment, they don't feel your energy, they will write you off very quickly. And it's such a shame because these are brilliant, talented people who have a lot to offer. And then they open their mouths and people go, eh,  it's a shame. 

Katty: Yeah. You have to be able to sell yourself and sell your creativity, sell your ideas, sell your strategic thinking, whatever the job is that it that's being required.

But it's interesting what you're saying. One of our core values at Artisan is enthusiasm in life and work. So your whole body language exemplifies that body language speaks volumes. So if you are not enthusiastic, not just with the words that you're using, but how your body presents then that's going to come through, passion. You use the word passion. I'm using enthusiasm, but they're really like the love of what you do and how you're going to get it out there.

Will: So what I try to teach is just being aware of that and starting to like intentionally choose how you want to be. And it's not about being fake, but it's about reminding yourself, giving yourself permission, allowing yourself to show your passion rather than squishing it down, which we too often do.

Katty: Yeah. Actually, what comes to mind as we're talking is when we're receiving feedback about our work. The pitch is happening, your presentations is happening and maybe the client says, "oh, I don't like that color or oh, that's not what I was thinking" …how to keep ourselves from retracting and still be able to present a counter in a positive way to be able to win them over versus just totally losing it.

Will: Yeah, or being defensive which I saw on stage at a tech festival in Toronto a couple of days ago. A founder was asked a question and he just got really defensive. It was a very reasonable question and his answer was reasonable, but he thought he was being attacked even though I didn't feel that way from the question. The investor said something like, how are you going to make money? And he went, "It's very common to take a 20 percent fee. And we're going to take that 20 percent fee!"  But he didn't need to be that defensive. He could have just said, 

"That's a great question. We take a 20 percent fee."  Done.

Katty: How do we control our emotions when we're triggered like that? What are some techniques? 

Will: The best one is breathing into your belly. I get a really bad stage fright. So when I've been an actor, this was the way I allowed myself to go on stage without having panic attacks before opening night. And when you're nervous, you stop breathing deeply into your belly and you start breathing, hyperventilating shallowly into your chest, and then of course that makes it work worse because you're getting less oxygen your brain thinks you're fighting and it's a whole vicious downward spiral.

 So if you just stop that at the source, and intentionally breathe deeply into your belly  (Breathe In) and then out (Breathe Out), even just doing that once my voice is slowing down now and getting deeper because it just has an instant calming effect. And if you keep remembering to do that throughout and just training yourself to start to look for those and be aware of those moments when you feel Triggered or as my therapist would say Activated which I think is a great.

It's not always bad being activated. It can be useful, but in general, we don't speak our best when we're activated, and definitely not when we're triggered. When our emotions get the better of us, we're reacting instinctively, we’re not thinking through how we want to speak. And then yeah, we're probably more likely to show anger, defensiveness, fear.  So yeah, breathing into the belly is really important, and you can do it without showing people you're taking deep breaths.

People are always like, oh, how do I?  But then won't it look like I'm nervous if I'm breathing deeply? It's you just listen. And somebody asks you a question, you just go "Yeah, that's a really good question", and you breathe as you're thinking and answering it, and you have a lot of time to do that, you don't have to jump right in with an answer, but just, “Yeah, that's a great question”, and you can stall with a phrase like that to give yourself time and then go into it.

Katty: I can see that being so powerful in an interview. We have a candidate who is getting ready to meet with a hiring manager. And sometimes I think there's a pressure, especially if you have a half hour for that interview, there's a pressure to get in as much as you can during that time. So patience with, and just slowing down our conversation is sometimes not top of mind, but what you're saying is actually forcing the conversation to just, sit.

Will:  Yeah, a question I like to ask a lot for this specific example is, how would I talk to this person if I didn't want anything from them? Because so often when we're in these high-pressure situations, we're trying to get a sale, we're trying to have somebody approve of something, of a request or a work. We want something from our audience members. There's a power imbalance, but it also tends to make us a bit needy, and a bit on edge, and we want something so badly from the person.

But it makes us change the way we really talk, and it makes us change our energy.  And, the power of this question is you go, what would I say? So Katty, we're talking right now. Neither of us is trying to sell anything to each other. We're just having a conversation because we're both interested in the same topic.

And so you and I, there's no power imbalance. There's no problem. There's no fighting or jostling for position. We're just enjoying the conversation but we know we have an audience. So we're still trying to be clear and interesting to listen to and interesting to watch, which is, I call this thing Authentic Stage Presence.

It's this term I like to use a lot. It's like, how can you be interesting to watch and listen to, but also as real and natural as possible, like you're hanging out with your friends at a bar or in a cafe or in a living room.  And so you want to think about that when you're in an interview or in a pitch or presentation.

It's like you want something from this person. But if you didn't, what would your voice sound like?  How fast would you talk? How loud would you talk? Would you smile? Would you make a joke in this moment? Do that.  If you do that, it puts you at ease. It puts them at ease. And it feels much less like a transactional conversation.

And those transactional conversations, when they're, when they don't feel that way normally go so much better because the person just feels like it's a real human conversation.  And yeah, any pitch, anything where you're trying to convince another person and you inherently want something from them, try to just pretend you don't and think about how you would communicate in that situation.

Katty: Pretend that you don't, but still infuse the passion and the energy in that conversation. So they know that you want it, but you're not nervous about it.

Will: Exactly. It's about showcasing your passion because that's what you do all the time. So I'm a big proponent also of you want to try to be consistent with the way you talk. So many of us have a different voice with our friends, with our family members, with our work colleagues, with our we have all these different personalities.

It's like a collage of different magazines that I'm just pasting together and I don't feel like a real person.  So I was just like, okay, what is my voice and I started really trying to work on that and make it as, as consistent as possible, obviously, it's going to be a bit different.

I'm not going to talk to my best friend the way I'm talking on a podcast. But the difference for me now is a lot less because I've really worked hard on finding my voice. That's my advice too, is find something you're passionate about it and whenever you talk about it, whether it's to your best friend, your mom, your partner, or the CEO of the biggest company on the biggest moment of your life.  Speak the same way. 

All this stuff is normal. We're human beings who have evolved to communicate with each other in different ways. And so everything we're doing is just human.

But it's just becoming aware of those things that we're doing and saying what of those are going to be, are going to serve me really well in my career, and my ways of communication? What is not making me feel so good about myself or getting me what I want? So it's choosing a bit more intentional ways to be both real but also showcasing your intelligence and your passion.

Katty: Love it. Thank you I remember when we had met some years back you, you had a framework or a methodology, but maybe that's the, maybe that is the right word for it, that you really talked to the audience about  your tone, your pitch, your volume, like all of those things going to make, can make or break whatever it is that you're trying to communicate. Do you mind to talk to us a little bit to take us through that? 

Will: 100%. I call that the Speech Settings.

There's five vocal speech settings that I like to look at, and two physical body language ones. The five vocal ones are volume, pitch, pace, clarity, and inflection.  And just to make sure everybody knows these terms, volume is how loud or how soft you are.  Pitch is the high or the low of your voice. The pace is how quickly you're talking or how slow. The clarity is the how clearly you're enunciating or how much you're mumbling. And the inflection is like the pitch, but it's how much it moves. So how much does your voice go up and down or how much does it just stay the same?

And so all of these have a zero, which is like the lowest they can be and a 10, which is the highest they can be. So, what I always show to people is I show this image and it looks like a DJ's mixing board, with those little sliders that go up and down. And I just say just like a DJ or an audio engineer, you can adjust any single component of the sound or the image, in the case of the physical ones at any time. 

And it makes a big difference. So often when I'm working with people, especially in a group setting, I'll say, give me your pitch and they'll give me their pitch or their presentation. I said, that was great. Now, everybody, where do you think their volume was at?

And the person maybe is a really quiet talker.  And they'll be, people will be like, three, four, and I'll be like, yeah it's a little low. So I'll say, okay, what I want you to do is try it at an eight or a nine. And the person always goes, no, I couldn't do that possibly, because they've lived a whole life,  being quiet.  Just try. And then eventually they get there and they declare their pitch in this loud volume and they are a completely different person.  And the whole crowd goes, Whoa, because it's crazy to watch this one little thing.

And just to add the two body language ones, those are physical expression, which is your arms and your body, and then facial expression. And then the last one sometimes I don't always talk about, especially when we're on Zoom, is groundedness, and that's how well you stay, that's how well your feet are connected to the floor versus like shuffling around and pacing nervously and stuff. And the point is to become aware of these things and not get stuck in any of them and think, Oh, I should speak at a seven for volume.

People say, what's a good volume that I should speak at? There's no such thing.   What do you want to do with your words? Do you want to scare someone?  Yell at them. Scream at the top of your lungs.

Or do you want to stop your dog before they run onto the road and chase the ball? Use a high volume.  Do you want to comfort your child because they're really scared and they've had a nightmare? Don't shout at them.  Use a low volume. You know what I mean? We know this stuff instinctively in other areas of our lives. When we're talking about family or friends, we do this stuff naturally.

What I'm advocating for is that, you take that wisdom that we all have as human beings. Some of us are better at it than others.  But we just be more intentional about it, especially when we're on stage, and say, Okay, I want to get this audience excited, I can be a bit louder.

Okay, I want to warn this audience about something, I can slow down and get a bit serious on my face. Whatever that intention is of what we want to do with our words, we just we are able to adjust the speech settings to achieve those objectives. And that takes a while, but it's amazing how much can be done just by starting to play with those.

Katty: How would you make that adjustment in an interview setting? I guess where you're sitting your room, the space that you're at. Like you have to really be paying attention to the physical environment, and your proximity to the interviewer, if it's an in-person one.  That physicality probably has to play into that.

Will: When I was in China doing my first startup, one of my co-founders and I did a double pitch like we were pitching our thing to a potential customer. It was like the biggest pitch we'd had so far. And we were in this boardroom. The thing is when we had practiced it, we had practiced it in our apartment, which was actually bigger than the boardroom we were in randomly.

And my co-founder had practiced it as a sort of theatrical kind of presentation, but then at the last second, they put us into the small boardroom and we were just sitting across the table from these potential customers.  And I think because of my acting background, I was able to adjust without even thinking about it.

And so we had our laptop, we didn't even have the projector, we were just showing them our presentation on a laptop instead of on the projector. So it was much more intimate. And I was like, yeah, so this is what we're doing. And then it was my co-founder's turn, and I think because he was nervous, he was like yelling.  And I didn't know how to stop him and I didn't know what to do. It was fine. It was, a bit awkward, but he was really speaking way too loudly. And I think because he had practiced it in a certain way, he wasn't ready for the curve ball and it just, it wasn't the right volume.

He didn't adjust his volume for the, as exactly as you said, the physicality, the proximity, the environment. And so paying attention to that is, is really important. And then also switching up in the middle of your presentation or your talk let's say, you want to tell a quick story in an interview, you mentioned an interview, right?

You want to tell a quick story, they always ask you this question, what's the time you overcame a difficulty?  So a good way to do that is to say here was the problem, here was the difficulty, and then I found the solution. So the first half of that story is bad.  It was a problem. It was scary.  It was hard. You want to show that kind of the difficulty of it.

 You don't want to be like, yeah, it was really tough. You want to show how tough that situation was. So you might have a different inflection to your voice when you're talking about a problem where you're saying it was really bad.

We had lost $10, 000 worth of inventory. I was on the hook for all of it. My coworker was freaking out. I didn't know what to do. And then you've discovered the solution. And your voice can change.  And we figured out what we wanted to do. And then you can smile, and your voice can drop down or can go up and get excited.

However you want to do it, there's no right way.  But you shouldn't tell the whole story in the same tone of voice, volume, pace, pitch, facial expression. Because it's not appropriate for the message being conveyed.   So  you want to not only pay attention to the environment, but also what am I actually saying?

Exactly. We need variety. We know we need to listen to variety if we're listening to a speaker or if we're talking to somebody, if it's the same tone, we just get bored and nod off. No matter how interesting the tone is, if you hear the same thing over and over again you're done.

Katty: I'm flipping the script here, not as the interviewee, but as the interviewer. The recognition that the interviewee may be nervous or scared or overwhelmed or in awe of you and the company and like all of that. I could see that even from an interviewer's perspective, how changing your tone can help somebody just be put somebody at ease or calm them down versus these are the facts of the job. This is what you need to do. And that could totally freak somebody out. So the kind of the back and forth between two people, like that's, I'm seeing, I'm hearing the power of the voice in this thing, right?

Let's talk about body language real quick. I think the piece that people miss a lot in body language, they, we've listened to words, but maybe not necessarily to what somebody is saying non-verbally.

And we're communicating oftentimes on a WhatsApp, on the Slack channel, on email, we're not even seeing each other or on social media, How do we take what you've talked about so beautifully and translate that into when we're not having the body language component?

Will: If I understand your question, are you saying how do we communicate better in our writing with each other when we don't have access to body language?

Katty: Yeah. When we're not seeing each other, for example, we're on the Zoom, but the camera's off. 

Will: So I would make a distinction between those two forms of communication, audio and writing.  With audio, yes, it's very important that your tone of voice does some heavy lifting that where your face and your body language can't. If you're on the phone, if you're cold calling people if you are catching up with somebody over the phone, or if you're on Zoom and your camera's off you want to be a bit, you want to be even more expressive.

But again, I want to bring it back to this idea that the way you talk about yourself and your work, it's by default, you are slow, clear, excited, not slow, but, slow enough to be understood and you pause after important information.

You develop this way of talking about yourself and your business, where no matter who it is, no matter what it is, you can access that kind of passion and clarity at a moment's notice, because it's just you've trained it into yourself and it's real, it's, you care about what you do.

But also I would say for audio, we'll stick with the audio first. Okay, imagine that people can see you.  So if I turn my video off right now, you can't see me anymore, right?  But I'm still using my hands to gesture while I'm talking to you, in the way that I would. Like I'm still gesticulating the same way that I would when I'm on video.  Because I know that's going to help my voice.

And I know if I'm sitting up nicely and in the way I would want to be seen, that's also going to help my voice. And then of course, if I turn my video off, but I'm slouching down like this, it's way harder to access that excited voice, it doesn't match our body.

Okay. I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but please indulge me. You mentioned the 55 percent of our rule that comes from something called the Mehrabian model, which Albert Mehrabian, who is from Iran, he came to Canada, I believe, or the U. S. I can't remember, he was a psychologist who specialized in communication, and he's the one who people take that number from, that 55 percent of communication is body language, 37 is tone of voice, or 35 is tone of voice, 38 something, and then 7 is words.

But I think he himself has spent his entire career trying to say that's not right, don't believe that because it was a really specific experiment that doesn't translate to real life and he said that very clearly.

But a concept that he should be famous for.  And I wrote about this in my book because I think it's such a shame.  He came up with this term called Congruence. The key to trusting a speaker is when they speak in congruence. Congruence means your words, your tone of voice, and your body language and facial expressions all match.  When your voice is telling that you're excited, and your words are saying you're excited, and your facial expression and your body language are all telling the same story, people go, oh, I believe you. And then when you say something like, I'm really excited to be here,  people go, I don't believe you. I don't trust you.

And whether or not they think that consciously, it just, it erodes trust. But then it builds it, if we're matching. One of the most important things you can do is just if you're saying something, look and sound like you mean it.

And if you're talking about something horrible, like your company solves a problem that is killing millions of people each year, don't say that with a big smile on your face, because it looks weird. You have to think about the reality and the emotions of what you're saying, so it's got to match.

So that's why I wanted to bring that up, is this concept of congruence, your voice, your body, your facial expression, and your words all telling the same story, is super important for people trusting you. And as we know in business, trust is everything. 

Katty: I love that concept of congruence. I will have to check it out and check out your book as well.

Will: Yeah I've dedicated I think chapter four, the first part of chapter four to that little story and that idea. And it's what I call being in alignment. Step four of my sort of methodology that I take students through when I coach them is  After we work on body language storytelling, which we should probably get into as well and then doing some practical tips to start recording yourself and watching it back and, getting recordings of you in your natural environment.

We go a bit deeper into your personal life and your history, and we go where do you come from in your childhood. What happened to you growing up that made you do the work that you do, and is there any part of you that you're maybe ashamed of, or you don't want to show to the world, or you wish were different?

And we start having those conversations, because the reason that we do that kind of work,  Is if you can align all of those things just psychologically for yourself if okay This was my childhood. It made me this way and maybe i'm a little ashamed of that But i'm owning it and all of that brought me to where I am today And that's why I do what I do and i'm honest and transparent and real about that.

That's a powerful person You know when you see those people It's you're just like wow, this person is a force to be reckoned with whatever they're doing. I'm investing i'm buying from them I'm working with them. I'm saying yes to their request. Yeah, but I do think we should also talk about the storytelling. Yeah, we should,

Katty: Especially because the candidates that we work with. The creatives, whether they're writers or they're visual artists, they are storytellers. And they can probably tell the story of their piece of art that they've created.  But I think when we're talking about an interview session, the story of their career trajectory of their arch, passion like all of that sometimes doesn't come across as a story. There's not a through line in that. So I'd love to talk about that. 

Will:  I have two story frameworks that I like to work with.  One is for your presentation and the other is for your personal story. So let's just get into the personal one because that's the one you're asking about. It is what I call the founder origin story, but those are for startup founders, but anybody can use this when they're telling their own story. 

It has three components, your childhood origin, your youth realization, and then your adult choice. Do you mind if I ask you, if I workshop this with you, Katty, right now, if I ask you some questions? Okay, cool. It's a great thing to see an example. So yeah, Katty,, where were you born?

Katty: I was born in Iran.

Will:  So 13 is an interesting age because it's on the precipice. It's on that edge between, childhood and youth, but maybe that is where it all starts for you or just, and of course, there's no complete story. We're trying to tell it in a short amount of time.

What do you think about growing up in Iran or leaving when you did in the circumstances that you did.  What do you think about that set you on the path that you're on now in terms of what you're interested in or what you became focused on.

Katty: I'm a huge traveler and just like I different cultures or something that just you know, that's what makes me happy. Learning about different cultures, and experiencing different cultures, because I see myself having come from two different cultures and became this congruent piece of the two cultures together. So that piece of it has, I think, influenced me, shaped me from the beginning. 

Will: That's really interesting. By the way, my wife talks about this a lot because she's Pakistani, but then grew up in both Australia and Canada. So she has this like Eastern and Western two things, but a lot of people talk about this as a third culture.  They call it third culture kid.

You're not quite from the culture of your parents, but not quite from the culture that you're growing up in. You exist in this third place. That's what I'm hearing from you.  So that could be really interesting to bring to the forefront.

Will: We don't know this stuff about people because people never tell these stories.

Katty: Humanity comes through, right? Yeah.   Yeah. Suddenly, you're not a name on a piece of paper. You're an actual individual.

Will: Yeah, with real experiences and difficult things you've been through, and yeah, 100%. That's the purpose of storytelling, really. Is to connect with other people by humanizing ourselves, and then they see our humanity, they feel it in themselves, they give it back, and it's that great rebound ping-pong effect.

In general, with storytelling, specificity is really powerful. Whatever story you're telling we want, I always tell people you want to be specific with it because it actually helps the listener hook in more.

Katty: How do you do that in a business environment with somebody looking at somebody's resume or their LinkedIn profile? How do we tie that into a story, but it's more of a professional story? Obviously, we want to show the full individual. I imagine if you have a 30-minute interview that you got to be, to your point, concise. But you got to also be able to tell that story, but you also want to talk about your skills and what you've accomplished and like all of those things. So how do we business storytell? 

Will: Yeah. So what I would say is you have to spend some time in this emotional place thinking of the stories, remembering them, extracting them and figuring out which ones. But as you said, they've got to be relevant. So let's just get the last piece and then I'll show you how you can weave it all together.

Katty: I think it was just having the self-realization and introspection on who am I and what's my purpose and what's my why and that actually really builds into the Artisan philosophy of, we're here about building relationships based on trust. Because we do is help people in that career trajectory to find the next right thing for themselves. And that is really our purpose. So my personal purpose is infused with the company purpose.

Will: And it is for all the best founders. And that's the thing too, is that people need to realize is if your life story doesn't make sense with the work you're doing, then it's, you're not a very attractive person to work with. But for you, so the piece I'm still missing is just the specificity of I realized that I had to do this kind of work.  What was that realization?

Katty:  I don't know if I have a defining moment. I got to think about that. I would imagine that it went back to pre-Artisan work when I first started working and realizing that it fed my soul to help other people. And it's just, like I was saying, it's shown up in different jobs that I had before got involved with Artisan.

Will: And these are things that we want to work on. We want to think about and really like practice. We don't want to make it too rehearsed, but we really want to have those thoughts in our mind when we're introducing ourselves. So then, okay we'll take it. And this is a very simple version.  We've only spent 10 minutes on this, but already here's what you would do in the interview.  I realized helping people be the best versions of themselves actually fed my soul.  I knew I had to do something like that. So that's why I started Artisan Creative. And, you can give a quick little elevator pitch.

So that story takes almost no time. And, but it, but we know so much about you. And you're so human for us. Within 20 to 30 seconds.  So that's what I always advocate for. People are like, oh, I don't want to waste time talking.  about my story doesn't take that long. If you've got it down.

Katty: You got to take the time to workshop it and figure it out beforehand. 

Will: Exactly.What are the points? And that's why, childhood origin, youthful realization, and adult choice. If you get your point for each one, you can cover one to two sentences for each point.

Katty: I love how quickly you did that, Will.  So where can people find you if they want to go through this process for themselves with you? I know you do quite a bit of coaching virtually for a lot of people, right?

Will: The way people generally find me is through my LinkedIn. I try to post I do post every day there, and I'm always giving advice on public speaking, specifically pitching and presentations, but also being on stage and communicating with people, and also a lot of stuff on entrepreneurship.

And so I'd say for your audience, even if they identify as entrepreneurs or not, learning the philosophy of entrepreneurship is really important because it's about problem solving, and that will never be a bad thing to learn. And then I also have a news, a weekly newsletter.  So if people want to follow my newsletter, they can find it.

But anybody can get in touch with me through my through my LinkedIn, through the DMs.

Katty: Fantastic. And of course, I will be sharing all of that information out with the audience too. But I think this is really powerful to recognize the impact that our voice and our tone and all of that can have in any kind of interaction, obviously we're focusing it more on the interview, but in any kind of interaction, even colleague to colleague,  even internal meetings, like all of those.  That energy and that passion is going to come through our voice. 

Will: Absolutely. And it's just that is what I call the final 10%.  If you do all this hard work on your presentation or your pitch or you prepare for your meeting, you get your notes done, you make a presentation, you make a report do this PowerPoint, and then you get up there and you just…It's such a waste and it can torpedo the whole thing. And it's just that final 10%.

If you give that final 10 percent of effort and preparation and training and stuff, then you honor all that hard work you did. So don't let it fall flat at the finish line. That's a, that's my takeaway message.

Katty: Yeah. Actually, you know what, let's have this one be a takeaway message. I remember this so well that when we were speaking a couple of years back, you were talking about just like warming up the face muscles.

Will: Yes, you know that people go on stage and or in an interview or on a call with a client and Like none of this has been warmed up.  Yes, it's not a awake just to warm up these muscles. I can give  you two exercises that you can do to completely change the way that you're going to sound and look.

So the first one is it's an exercise called Big face, Small face. So you want to get your mouth muscles moving your eyebrows going and get your eyes open. Because right now I'm really tired, you can even see my eyes are closed. I have a 17-month old toddler. She gets me up at 5 in the morning every day, and I'm not meant to get up that early.

But, so when I was preparing for this, I had to, do these exercises. Big face, small face looks like this. You go, like that for big face, and then you go for small face. So you open your eyes really, and your mouth really wide for big face, and then you scrunch your face forward for small face.

So even if you're in a waiting room, you can still go to the bathroom, you can find a quiet corner and just do some tongue twisters. And the tongue twisters can be the classic ones that maybe everybody knows. Unique New York, and you exaggerate the mouth muscle. Unique New York, and you start to breathe and use more of voice.

So you do the tongue twisters and the big face small face and try to get your breathing and your voice going  and you'll just feel so much more awake and energized. There's more other warm up techniques you can use but just those two will really set you up for success and you'll, you're doing something silly and goofy so it takes away a lot of the nerves. So we'll do a  big face, little face,  and then a unique New York, red leather, yellow leather, how now brown cow. And you just do, you do those and you're ready to go. 

Katty: Thanks for giving us the sendoff here to really, finish this conversation with energy and with passion.

 The Artisan Podcast is brought to you by the good people at Artisan Creative, a digital, creative, and marketing recruitment firm with 27 years of experience, placing freelance and full time talent across multiple verticals.  For more information, check out ArtisanCreative.  com and we look forward to meeting you.

Ric Krause  | LinkedIn

Katty: Ric, thanks so much for joining me on this episode of the artisan podcast. Looking at your resume, the through line that I see through everything is really the impact of the narrative.  Where did this passion come from for you? How did you get started in this? 

Ric: Actually, in college, I was a music major. I was a composition major, and so even before I got to writing, I was working with form, and my composition teacher said, you could paint a room red and with one white dot, and that's okay, but you better defend that white dot, and that goes to the structure underneath creative,  and it was such a great exercise to get as free as you could, then pin it into a structural foundation.  And then in music, there's all sorts of rules for harmony, ease, melody, tonality. And so the concept is built into the structure immediately.  And that helped me with everything I did. So when I segued into writing, and I had written a play  and that got me represented, and then I started pitching and started to sell TV stuff and film stuff,  all of those, all the ability to think conceptually and grounded into structure came into play.

And at the same time, we are synaptically hardwired to engage with story. So if you can really use that to your advantage and get people to engage quickly and wonder what happens next, however, that translates into your messaging,  people are wired to be taken by the lapel and led forward,  and it's what you're utilizing with good storytelling.

Katty: You're going to invite people into that story with good storytelling.

Ric: Yeah, I would say more than invite them, you grab them. Really good storytelling and audiences on the edge of their seat, leaning forward toward you.  One, someone is leaning in. And within brand messaging, it's really within, I think, less than three seconds,  you've got them.  If they're already tuning you out, how do you make up for that difference when they're already leaning back out of your messaging? How are you going to pull them back in?

That's tough. Once you've got them, of course, you have to extend their engagement all the way to the end, which in a lot of CTA, but you have to grab them in, whether you're telling a thriller or a 30 second spot. 

Katty: Okay, so what's the How? How does a copywriter who's starting in their career path right now make that shift of saying, okay, just writing copy for the sake of writing copy is different than what Ric is talking about right now?

Ric: Yeah I, think that you have to always consider the one question that is the through line of all narrative, whatever that narrative is, and that question is "what happens next?" What happens next? What happens next? There are many tools that you can use to get there.  A reversal reversal expectation; A plot twist.  You set someone up to believe one thing and then it changes.  Use an interesting hero or antagonist, use a cliffhanger, use backstory. We're doing this because this happened before.  You can use all those tools and you're setting people up to track your message with the synaptic pathways that are already there for receiving narrative.

It's taking advantage of something we're already disposed to engage with. 

Katty: How do you do that in like a 30-second spot though? 

Ric: This is where the agencies are often really good at the 30-second spot. My question is what would go beyond that? You have to engage really quickly with, I think, both the right type of hero, heroine and the right type of world-building.  And world-building means that we're always trying to make our audience feel something.  It's not a dry exercise. We want them to feel they are the real heroes of the story. They're the stars of the story.

And we have to deal with how we want them to feel while using our product. If you're an Alfa Romeo buyer, you're a sexy soul and if you're a Jeep buyer, you're a rugged individual, right? They're different. Brands have different feels to them. So what we want to do from the get go is make them build the right world. If it's an ad for a Liberty Jeep, it's gonna have a rugged terrain in front of you. You want to build the right world immediately, show the right person in that world, because that is the aspirational leap someone is taking. I'm that guy. I'm that girl. That's really me.  Now we've got them. That's the first hook.

You can do it with crazy humor, like if there's a 30-second spot,Chewy's is interesting, because they have the dogs and the cats that talk to you, because they're members of your family, and they always have them saying funny stuff.

You're immediately in, and you also know the experience, because you love your dog, you love your cat, they're like your family.  You need to find some immediate hook.  The audience will jump into and see themselves as the star of that, 30 second spot, the old advertising saying is selling the dream.

And that's what you're doing. Really. 

Katty: So I want to pivot here on this conversation, obviously Artisan Creative is a recruiting company.  So my mind immediately goes to when a candidate applies, right? Or when where our clients write a job description. How does that piece….. it almost serves as their advertising piece…, right? How can that job description grab the attention of viable candidates?  And then the flip side of it, how can a candidate's resume or their portfolio provide the same "hook", if you will, so that it grabs the attention of interested parties? So let's start with the client side first, the employer brand, and just the narrative around that. 

Ric: I think that's great and it sets up a possibly great interview. If each party does it well, then you're opening up what I would call story court where people can really talk and the employer or the potential employer can really get a feel for whether this candidate can work for them and their requisites and vice versa.

The possible candidate is given not only the opportunity to show who they are and what they do, they can see if this job is a fit for them and everybody takes it from that moment.  I think employers need to talk about the specifics that are needed in terms of job, and skill set, but also be really clear on what their own brand story is.

It goes to what we were talking about a couple of minutes ago. What is the brand essence? What's the brand DNA? Because what you're doing in all brand messaging is taking that essence and putting it in motion. And that motion is going to be absorbed by us, your audience, and then we're going to feel it.

So you need to be able to talk to your potential candidates in a way that is hands-on and not 30, 000 foot up. If you tell me something general in a, in, in or communicate to your recruiter, something that's general,  it's very hard for a candidate to really respond.  And, that goes all the way to writing briefs as well.

All of the on the employer side is the onus of specificity,  of a hierarchy of ideas, communicated correctly,  of,  Telling your candidates, what is the feel of the creative you want from them? You have to find out from them. How they can create in your playground.

Katty: Yeah. Obviously skills and software that somebody knows that goes without saying, if the job requires it, the job requires it. But what I'm hearing from you is the storytelling piece of it, or the narrative piece of it, excuse me, on the employer side is really kind almost like the soft skills or the EQ side of the equation. You may have the skills, but you need to also be able to buy into the story that we have about our brand.  Who it is that we are what, is it that we stand for.

Ric: Exactly, because if you just were to dump a huge style guide onto somebody.  You will absorb some of the things, but it's not going to give your candidate or your employee a real feel for what you want from them. You need to know it internally, I think, personally, that gives your candidate a place to start from to know what the tone and the attitude of your messaging. And that comes from understanding your brand DNA backwards and forwards. 

Katty: How is a candidate going to really be able to differentiate who they are, if they have not had a chance yet to have a face-to-face or a Zoom interview, but this is purely just on the merit of their resume and or their portfolio, how can narrative and storytelling play a part in that?

Ric: I would say imagine an interview. Imagine before you do it if you haven't done it. Imagine what you would say if you had to be the hero of your own story. What would you say?  Not just the details, but what the details add up to. You need to know your brand. Everything's branding. The process from the brief to the deliverable to the end, Endpoint is all about that communication.

Katty: Love that. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. Because I think, we, try to work quite a bit with candidates to get them ready for their interviews and to just put their best foot forward. And to be able to tell the authentic story of who they are is just so important when it comes to not only the resume but also in the interview and be able to have a thorough line as to their career path, right? 

Ric: Yeah. And I also in all of this emotion is important in all of that and all of messaging, whatever you're messaging about, you can't leave the emotion out of the equation.  People hook into it or they don't. So know who you are. Don't be afraid to show your passion about things. 

Katty: Great words. Thank you. So what are you working on these days?

Ric: Yeah I, took, I  think it's now been seven months off. I created in a wonderful recording studio in LA called The Village.  I created, hopefully, this makes sense, think of a play with a live concert built into its narrative. And that's what I, did quite a while developing, recording, and mixing. And, now we actually have a first offer from a theater in Detroit. It ties together everything I've done all my life, because it's about, music. The lead is a musician, it has literally a concert woven into the story, and the how of that is a story in itself.  The storytelling involves the audience, so it has an immersive quality to it.  And so it gives you a story and a concert in one. And that's what I've been doing,  for the last seven months of my life. 

Katty: Story and a concert in one. I'd love to dig into that. By the way, The Village is just up the street from where I live.T

Ric: Oh, you know The Village? Awesome. 

Katty: Yeah.  Infamous recording studio. I think Madonna's recorded there, Zeppelin's recorded there.

Ric: It all hangs, you feel like the notes hang in the air, all the great notes that have been played there.  It is such a feel. We were in John Meyer's studio. It is, it's just a great place to create. 

Katty: I've always wanted to just see the inside. I've only seen it from the outside. Next time you go, let me know.

Ric:  I wish if I'd known you sooner, cause people don't get to go in and it is, magical. There is a zillion platinum records everywhere. They are so aware of who they are and what their legacy is that they showcase it really beautifully.

Katty: It’s their brand, so they can stand behind that brand.  So let's go back to your play with a live concert within it.   Tell me more. 

Ric:  Okay, it's called The Goldtop, and that's a Les Paul Goldtop guitar. It's about a 1952 Les Paul Goldtop guitar that this down-and-out musician finds in a pawn shop way out in the Valley, and he scratches the money to get it, and his career starts to go on an uptick, and he gets, finally starts to realize all the things he's always wanted to realize. It is a very subtle ghost story. so it works, I think, as a dynamic piece of narrative, but when I wrote it,  I wrote a very hyper-condensed script that left room for the music. 

If you know an album called Back to Black by Amy Winehouse, it takes off from where she left. She did an amazing thing. She combined Motown and R&B, she was a genius and so we have picked up from there. and built our sound from that. And so that's the music. 

Katty: Oh, I Love that.  when, it's live in Detroit and, or it goes on tour and it comes here in LA, just definitely keep us, posted.  In addition to what you're doing with the play tell me more about your, copywriting, your and storytelling. 

Ric:  I was a founding partner of a branded content firm called StoryPoint and pre-pandemic, as many stories in advertising are, we were the content engine for Be Grizzly, which is Chiat Day.

And they took our slate and we're going to sell it through a Hollywood agency.  And I'm now trying to get them just to fund one of those projects, which is called Same Frame. And that uses a variety of influencers that are, we pick their names out of a hat, we match them, we send them a roll of old-fashioned film, not digital film, real film.

And they shoot it on that film, whatever the thematic is. Then we take that same roll of film and we give it to the other one and they shoot on the same roll of film. So we're inviting double-exposure and it's all about how different points of view can come together and create something startling and beautiful.

I've seen the work, and it's extraordinary. And none of the influencers know who each other are, and at the end of the season we have different shows where they all come and they see the results of their work, and so it has a live component to it.  You get to see different influencers that you know operate in the sphere.

There is a, really interesting sub-pocket of people who still photograph and Jeff Bridges and people who are less well-known but equally interesting, had signed up to do this with us. So that’s the project that I'm trying to get going. That's one of the more unusual ones.

Then, in terms of brand, really, when you're a hired hand you're, doing the best you can with what you got.  When I was at a company called Legal Shield, they had, it's a legal insurance where people spend 30 bucks a month to have access to a lawyer. The problem with that is no one wants to think about that moment.

No one wants to think about creating a will, no one wants to think about the time your neighbor breaks their leg on your property and is going to sue you, it's not how we think, and if you catastrophize in messaging, I think you're running a real risk.  And we persuaded them to do it with humor.

Like the insurance companies do, like GEICO, where there are all these stupid laws on the books in all 50 states. If you're in Louisiana, you can't send an unsolicited pizza.  In the state of Connecticut, you can't bounce a pickle off the floor. It's against the law.  So we use these things to make these little spots about you can't, did you know you can't do this? Did you know you can't do this?

And that's a lead into talking about how we can help you know things. And so in terms of what I always hope to bring to brand is that type of thing, where you use a way to deal with human emotion that engages as opposed to anything else, because I don't think anything else works.

Katty: Yeah. And so, many of the other ones are fear factor based, like eliciting fear and it is catastrophizing, but you say  you, you bring up the funny laws and I had heard about some law somewhere, I forget which state it is, that you can't have ice cream in your pocket.  Yeah. Who has ice cream in their pocket?  Or, but I guess there's a law somewhere for it. 

Ric: There are, there's an insane amount of laws. You can Google them. There, there are an amazing amount of silly laws everywhere. 

Katty: So funny.  Let's go to inspiration and creativity. 

Ric: My most favorite brand that has always inspired me the most is Apple. Apple is my personal Mecca because they perform this magic act of taking a sleek piece of tech and telling us it makes us exponentially more human.  That is a brilliant stroke and they do it over and over and over and their ads like the history of sound is the one I love but  they're just wonderful. They're so smart and it's an illustration of again personalizing something that could have been so im

And I, a lot of what I've done, and I always try to bring when I'm doing brand messaging, comes from that.  Not literally, but figuratively. That I always try to find, as I say, the old advertising motto, sell the dream. How do I do that? What's the emotion involved? What do I want our audience to feel?

And that's where you start.  And I think that all copywriters should be tasked with imagining the hero image because they have to start thinking that way. And designers can start thinking about the message and they usually do.  And if you collaborate from the get-go, present, get your notes, and collaborate again, you're going to get a much better product, but it's going back to it, I really love images and I work on it because I edit.

Katty: Sounds like filmmaking and watching films, just being around other creatives, whether it's through a medium of film or working together is really what's an inspiration point for you.

So one final question building on what you're just saying. What happens in this remote workspace that we're in that a lot of people are working in a silo?  Yes, we have zoom and so on and so forth. But, many people are no longer sitting next to someone else in the office. Any advice or experiences that you can share around that? How to continue collaboration and inspiration?

Ric: Yeah, I think one thing for sure, maintain your network, and it can be outside the company you're in. In fact it should be outside the company you're in, as you go through the various jobs  that you have, if you meet a colleague that you vibe with, that you riff with well creatively, stay in touch.

My suggestion is, since we're in the siloed-off world, grow your own network, like a garden.

Katty: So you can be siloed, but just don't be solo and this whole thing.

I'm glad that we got a chance to meet, and be in one another's network and continue, what would you call it? A garden?

Ric: Yeah, you got to grow your networks, your network like a garden.

Katty: Yeah, I love it. Love it. That was, beautiful. So with that, Ric, I just want to thank you for being here and sharing your experience and your wisdom with this group.

And remind us one more time about the name of your play so that when we see it on billboards, we'll know, who it's from.

It's called The Gold Top.

The Artisan Podcast is brought to you by the good people at Artisan Creative, a digital, creative, and marketing recruitment firm with 27 years of experience, placing freelance and full time talent across multiple verticals.  For more information, check out Artisan Creative.  com and we look forward to meeting you

Rickie is a seasoned Creative Director & Design Director who successfully leads 360-degree campaigns for high-profile clients and turns big-picture ideas into compelling multi-platform campaigns.  Together we talk about experiential design and what it takes to be an artisan in this field.

Find Rickie here: IG @littlecountryfox |  Linkedin | rickieashman.com

Katty

Rickie, so excited to have you here on the Artisan Podcast. I know we've known each other through Artisan for a long time, but this is the first time you and I are actually sitting down to have a chat.

Rickie

Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me.  

Katty

How did you get started as a creative? And when did you know that being a creative was a passion for you? 

Rickie

I was always a doodler and a daydreamer, according to my teachers, and I got special permission when I was in middle school to doodle because the teacher saw that my grades were good.

In fact, I was at the top of my class in middle school, so they knew that it wasn't impeding my learning abilities. But, their one rule was that I had to doodle in a separate notebook and not in my class notes or in my textbook, which I was fond of doodling in. And flash forward to the beginning of my career I missed out on the opportunity to go to art school.

It was something that I had wanted to do, but I grew up in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina hit towards the tail end of my high school year.

So, I think my parents were thinking practically when they guided me into going to business school for college. So, when I graduated, I think I ended up moving into a creative career through sheer force of will.

On my first job, I began to teach myself Photoshop through my early interest in art where I was learning how to color-correct photography and illustrations. And then, in my first job, our designer left the company and there was a hole to fill, and I volunteered to take it on and thus began my early career as a designer.

Katty

So that's pretty amazing that your teachers recognized the importance of doodling and didn't curtail that but actually gave you permission, if you will, to be able to do that.

Rickie

Yeah,  I think so. And I think, what also has really helped throughout my career is the ability to tell a story. And starting off as a wannabe illustrator, as a kid where I would draw out stories and plot lines in a linear comic book-like format, has always stuck with me.

I had a brief stint getting into creative writing in high school as well. So working on more of the advertising front, where oftentimes a lot of what we do is storytelling in a sense for both the client and the consumer to get the buy in. I think that's also helped ground me and my approach.

So doodling led to a good overall process for creative thinking. And I think it's a great mental exercise particularly, when you're having writer's block, shall we say, sometimes it's good to just, do something with your hands while your mind is working away.

While I doodle less these days, sometimes I find myself scribbling. In my work notes.

Katty

Love that. Yeah, I'm reading this book right now. Actually, not that far into it, but even in the first few chapters, it's called Your Brain on Art it talks a lot about just the connection of art and just, even the doodling piece of it, but the importance of just allowing your brain to travel and be able to do that.

It helps with writer's block. It helps with anything, really any kind of block but just that physical process, just what it does, the chemicals in your brain,  pretty amazing. 

So you moved from your love of illustration and you built on that and your love of design and you built on that. How did you get into experiential design? And how would you describe experiential design versus traditional creative work? 

Rickie

Yeah, I think  Again, really through happenstance when I began my career, I was working brand side. So I handled everything from print to digital to occasional photo shoot and video shoot production and concepting for the brand.

Early on in my career, I ended up making a jump from the retail brand side to a new creative agency called Matte Projects. And Matte is known for not just being a boutique creative agency, but also throwing their own events and music festivals in New York city.

So right at the beginning, I think of when brands were starting to realize that events were a great way to reach young people, I started working for an agency that I think began the new model of experiential agency.

What started off as throwing our own events as a way to advertise the agency and build an audience for the events that we would later on throw for our brands. I had my hand in thinking about programming, and talent pools and artist selection for events, as well as, pitching the event concepts to potential sponsors.

The experiential projects offered me, as a creative, an interesting chance to do a little bit of everything where on a content shoot, you might not have much print design, or digital design, or even interior design involved in the project. It can be a little routine after a while. I think experiential is nice in that given the scale of the project, you end up being able to touch multiple aspects of design. Which again keeps things always fun and challenging in the right way.

So on any given experiential project, you're design directing, you're directing the spatial environment, the look and feel prop sourcing, there's this stage element, thinking about the theatrics of the performance or the run of show for the guest experience. We like to throw around the phrase cocktail theater. If it's a dinner event or a party, what is entertaining people while they're in this beautiful house that you've created? It's a very 3d type of design experience, and I think the ability to have people experience your work in a physical format, it has always been exciting for me.

Whereas, on a content piece, you're viewing it online or on social media or maybe through a streaming platform, when you're actually there in the environment, hearing them, and seeing the sights and sounds, tasting the thematic menu, seeing the vignettes that we build I think it's all very exciting. 

And it's certainly, at least still now that we've come out of the pandemic, one of the primary ways of targeting young people, thankfully, so it still keeps me busy. I'm glad that we've been able to move back to physical experiences because they are always exciting projects.

I think that, again, the nice thing about experiential is that every project is so different. And,  oftentimes, I find the need to bring on a specialist to handle a certain element of the project. In some cases, we have a need for an illustrator, or an animator, or a motion graphics artist to create content or key art for the experience. So I'll look to find talent that can help express my creative vision or the clients’ hopes and dreams for the experience. 

I think one of the core challenges is that playing in the world of a brand, you have limits. So sometimes you have to use the client's colors and the client's look and feel. But in other cases, sometimes clients are looking to the agency and the creative team to dictate what the look and feel should be. So I worked on an event a few years ago for a jewelry brand where they gave us four creative parameters, but we had the opportunity to create some new elements using stock and vintage photos.

And I brought in a mixed media designer who created this really incredible collage art wall that really fit in with current trends in design, which in my background as a designer, I'm always trying to make sure that we are staying relevant, timeless, but relevant. So it's always exciting when I can make the design work feel a little bit more edgy.

Sometimes we do templatize our approach on things like printed directional signage and menus, things that are the necessary evils of any branded event. But it's always exciting for me when my designer is able to own elements like that and have fun with them and create something that, has a little bit more of an editorial feel.

Even with digital, we're oftentimes looking to build a microsite, or maybe some events have a digital experience component. So there are so many ways that I'll bring on a prop stylist every now and then, or a photographer, or filmmaker for a project. So it's exciting how collaborative and how expansive experiential projects can be because they allow you to work with so many various types of creative individuals across the world.

Katty

 So you said two things I want to dive into a little bit more. First of all, I love that you brought in vintage while you were talking about trends and staying relevant, and for marrying the two together there, I thought that was fantastic. So you talked about always wanting to be relevant and stay relevant and just know what the new design trends are.

Can you share a little bit about what are some of the trends that you're seeing? And a second question to dovetail from there,  for somebody just starting out in their path, where should they go to learn about whatever new trends are if they're not going the traditional school route? \

Rickie

Yeah, I think, when I work with younger designers and look at where they are coming out of design school or, in some cases, people do come from non-traditional routes.  I've worked with a lot of people in experiential who've come from the world of architecture, or in some cases they worked early on in their career as a producers, but, they are creative problem solvers, so they can merge into a creative director or assistant creative director role.

I think it's key for anyone young to try to train their eye from early on. So really being present and mindful of the world around them and noticing patterns, also training their eye around things that reflect their personality.

I think my vision of what is beautiful or cool is very biased, shall we say, based on my background growing up in New Orleans and in Tokyo and living in New York City and London. I feel it's a particular vision of how things should be. And it's certainly not the only or right way, so I've tried to craft it around, what excites and inspires me.

And certainly, what I was influenced by as a young person, I think, anyone starting off should not be afraid to reflect on what they enjoy and what excites them, because it's always different for all of us. I find it helpful to start by being conscious of what you can do and trying to push yourself 10 or 30 percent to do more.

So for me, because I taught myself design, I had to work with those parameters early on. If I  didn't have the technical skill, I would try to learn it, if I could do it in a reasonable timeframe for the sake of the project. And then if not find a specialist to assist me. But then I could continually grow and learn while not staying stagnant or limiting myself necessarily to, to what my skill set was at the time.

I think in terms of current trends, I think font selection is certainly one of the things that live and breathe with the changing of the times. The music industry, I feel is always a great place to start off by seeing what artists are doing in their music videos, on their album art, in their merchandise, and tour posters.  I think there, there's such a need for today's musicians to stand out and attune to the current zeitgeist, that they're oftentimes very on-trend. Coming from a little bit of working in the music industry, I've always found most exciting that as a designer, you tend to get to do the most, authentic and interesting things for artists because they're all willing to be, they're also creative, so there's less pushback than when you're working with the brand and they are worried that something that they might not have seen before is or isn't the right path.

I think, again, there's a need to be mindful and present in the world around you, so by building our eye around what inspires us, we can push ourselves to grow without moving far away from who we are trying to conform to specifically a trend in the design ecosystem.

But I think anyone starting off should just strive to enjoy what they do, and pay attention to the things that inspire them, and build their toolkit around their own personality and vision. 

Katty

I love that. What I'm hearing is it's not necessarily to just stay in the one lane that you're in, but really allow everything around you, whether it be music or other artists or museums and stuff like just take a little bit from everything to then build what your own style is or whatever your what your calling card is going to be around that. 

Rickie

Totally. And I think the key thing too is it's important for a creator to push themselves out of their comfort zone. I think there's the old saying, don't judge a book by its cover. But I find sometimes I will be inspired in a way that, that I didn't normally anticipate by going to an event or watching a movie or reading a book or going to an art show that I wouldn't have initially sought out on my own in some cases.

I go with friends and they're the impetus for discovery and other times, the opportunity presents itself and I make a conscious decision to try it even if I suspect that it may not be for me.

But I found in life that you never know where you need to pull a reference from. So it's helpful to know a little bit of everything and not overly specialize. Always be learning and looking, I think, at the world around you is crucial.

Katty

Yeah, I love that. Have an infinite mind. Be open to whatever the stimulus is.

But you brought up the opportunity that you had to live in a few different places, different countries, and also travel.  I find that inspiration for me comes from travel. Anytime I'm within a different culture or taste different foods or things that I didn't even know I would find inspiration or inspiring I come back to over the years and build the richness of the tapestry of my experiences.

Do you find that's really influenced you as a creative? The fact that you've been able to be exposed from New Orleans to Japan and to New York and places in between,

Rickie 

Totally. I think for better or for worse, it's certainly been one of the biggest imprints  on my taste, my sensibilities, and my personality.

Everyone's heard of New Orleans, but we're still a relatively small city in the American South. So there are some limiting factors growing up there that caused me to want to set out and explore the world around me.

And I was fortunate in high school to have the opportunity to travel to Taiwan and study Chinese opera, which was a more unexpected journey to escape the American South and see something else in the world. But certainly led me to make the decision to pursue part of my university career in Japan, which of course if any designers listening to this don't know, Japanese design is immensely iconic and I think particularly influential in the world of packaging.

So when I lived in Tokyo, even as a young person before I knew that I would work in design I was very cognizant of what I was seeing and experiencing and noticing the variations between the U. S. and foreign markets and, I think what dawned me, and I think anyone who travels probably has these same thoughts, but you know what are the differences that I love to bring back to make something, better back home.

And then, even in the U. S., I think New York, New Orleans, L. A., all three cities are so culturally different. I'm, I think I've been fortunate to have lived in so many different places to broaden my horizons and, again, have a more holistic view of the country what feels right for New York may not work in a market like New Orleans or resonate in middle America.

And I think it's important for us all to be inclusive in our thinking and be aware that the world is a much bigger place, and we have to account, I think, for other ways of thinking beyond our own when we design or particularly work in marketing where our work can impact culture or consumer behavior and how do we use our powers as creative minds to problem solve in ways that can improve the world or improve culture, add to add some sense of maybe for lack of a better word, beauty to the world beyond simply trying to sell or achieve a client KPI.

I think I've been fortunate working more on the boutique front to have more flexibility when it comes to ideating so that we can work on solutions to client needs that, are culturally interesting and maybe beneficial to society versus being purely profit-driven.

Katty

Beautiful. So having a cause or a ripple effect, like the impact that message can have is so important.

Rickie

I think we all need to be mindful because we live in a world that needs our problem-solving to make it better. So I think having that holistic thought process where we understand the impact of what we do is crucial and it's important that we don't lose that.

I think it's important for us to all stop and smell the roses throughout our career to keep ourselves in check. The only people who can make oneself better is themselves. 

Katty

Wise words. Yes, definitely, Rickie. Gotta look inwards and then to be able to look out outwards, right?   

You talked earlier about, working with brands and sometimes just brand guides and style guides and just the boundaries that sometimes that offers and then trying to push those boundaries but still staying within, what's right for the brand, the colors, the fonts, the messaging, all of that.

What's the fine line in that dance between taking a brand or a client, for that matter, and showing them something that maybe they've not thought of or not seen, or maybe it's in their blind spot and they didn't even realize that they wanted it? And still stay within those boundaries and those parameters that have been created.

And then how do you bounce back from that if the idea falls flat or if they're not going to go for it, or if they give feedback that's contrary to what you wanted it to be? How do you do that? How do you dance that dance? Because I would imagine that's such an important piece of what you do is you want to show a side that maybe somebody hasn't seen. But yet you have to be ready that they may not want to go there.

Rickie

 Totally. I think that's the eternal dance of working on the agency side as a creative, as mitigating client feedback. I think there is a big level of empathy and psychology in understanding human thinking when receiving feedback. Sometimes we don't receive all of the information from the client to understand why they might make a certain request or decide to go with the safer alternative.

But I think in my career, I've learned that sometimes you can push and it's really about reading the room and understanding the client. Some clients do want to be pushed and they want to be reminded that they are working with a creative or agency because of their experience level, their taste, their expertise.

Other times, I've had to accept that the solution may not be my favorite choice, but you may just have to settle with the fact that it is what it is and try to make the most of it. And, design within those parameters to make something that you know you as a creative won't hate or feel uninspired by.

But I try to always keep an open mind. If a client chooses path A or path B, I try to always go in suggesting routes that either way I could make work.  And I'm fortunate right now. My team and I are working on a project that the client chose. my favorite my favorite path in, and we've been lucky in that they've been really receptive to our direction which is rare.

Sometimes that's a challenge that I face with my internal team. Not everyone is creative. Not everyone can see or imagine the final piece of creative based on the upfront description that we give in the beginning of the project. And I think there's a lot of, in any art form,  rationalization, contextualization, and strategy that's needed to go into selling an idea.

So I try to work closely with my strategist team or strategist, depending on the size of the team,  to build that breadcrumb trail into the idea so that the client feels confident that it's the right choice and there's the rationale and there's an explanation of the thinking.

And anyone starting off in their creative field, I think younger creatives are oftentimes pitching internally. But if they can create that rationalized approach and that storytelling, there's a greater chance that their idea will be bought, or heard, or considered. And, 14 years in, I still have ideas that get shot down and sometimes it's just the way that it is.

And I think going with the flow is a good mentality to have and turning to roll with the punches, but, it's what makes our life interesting. 

Katty

I think you said that really well.  Not everybody has that gift, though, to be able to see the end result and to see the full picture. They can see this part of it, but not the entirety. So to have somebody like yourself or your team to be able to paint what that picture looks like is definitely a gift.

You talked about collaborating with quite a few people in this conversation at various stages, whether it was the strategist or the person who pulled in the vintage pieces together for you. When you're hiring or you're looking to collaborate, what's most important to you? Is it their skills? Is it the culture fit? What do you look for when you're looking to add to your team? 

Rickie,

I think in my case.  as a creative it's really about who aligns most with the vision. That's where I start. And then there's a budget exercise, which is again, the reality check at times. It's always surprising sometimes, I'll find that someone that I want to work with is really affordable, just it's the right time and place and they're open to collaboration, and other times, their value exceeds the scope available for the project.

And I'll have to work with my team to figure out, who is possible.

But as far as vetting, I think on the designer front, I'd say portfolio is important, followed by culture fit knowing who can handle a high-stress environment or who might be client-facing are questions that I've asked recently, as I've looked to bringing on extra hands on the emerging or younger designer front.

I think it's trying to find the diamond in the rough, the expectation for young talent is not that they're perfect, but that they have potential and that they have drive. I think one thing of value I've learned building my career early on in New York is to be hungry and to be precocious.

So it's always good to try to be cross-functional to aid other team members oftentimes, in my case, it's doing copywriting when we don't have a copywriter on staff or assisting with sourcing or something like that.

But I think you know, I think regardless of what your role is in a company, I think if you can be that person that has vision and wants to be helpful and wants to have your voice heard. Expressing that in a thoughtful way is the best ticket to moving up the ranks.

Katty

Yeah, I think that's, those are great pointers for somebody who's just starting out.

I think what you said about looking for somebody who has potential, and that's huge right, to be able to as you're interviewing someone or as you know as a creative interviewing to be able to message out what that potential looks like and how they can do, variety of things that how they can juggle how can they how they can deal with a stressful environment or deal with change, for that matter, like being agile is critical in this day and age.

Rickie, I want to thank you for the time that you've taken to be here and just sharing your journey with us. Before I let you go though, what are three lessons that you've learned in your path in addition to everything you've shared that a young creative listening right now could really just latch onto and say ....this is what I need to go do.

Rickie

I think my first would certainly be around self-education.  

As often as you can, whether you're in college or just starting off in your career and don't necessarily have the level of responsibility as more senior employees, use that time to better yourself because nothing will help you more in life. I'd say whether it's learning a new language or an instrument, anything creative you can do that you enjoy and that you're inspired by, take the time when you have it.

I think the second suggestion I would make would be around networking and learning the art of conversation. There are two areas where that can help you in your career. One is of course building your contact sheet, whether it's other creatives who you could potentially work with one day.

Doesn't necessarily have to be upward networking with purely work-related contacts. I think the second aspect of that is building conversation skills so that you can grow to sell your ideas to your team or your client or communicate ideas effectively.

The third suggestion is always keeping an open mind and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. I think we've all encountered moments in our lives where someone said that they just don't like something because they've never experienced it in a way that's made them enjoyable, but I challenge everyone to reframe their brain to think ….I could like it.I just haven't found the right way in yet.

Maybe a good example of this is country music. A lot of people, cliche say when you ask them what their favorite music is, Oh, I like a little bit of everything except for country and we all know what they mean.

But in the genre of country, there's a vintage country folk more indie singer songwriter, more contemporary. Beyonce now has a country song. I think in culture it's constantly evolving and it's so expansive that to place those limiters on ourselves, prevents us from truly experiencing life.

And again, when we work on projects, you never know when you might need to pull an information thread from something that you've experienced and didn't expect to. In my case, I went to Burning Man one year with a friend on a whim and I fully worried that I would have a terrible time.

And lo and behold, I had a great time and it wasn't the time that I expected. And I was really surprised by how much art and creativity was expressed. And anyone who's gone will say, of course, but had I not gone, I would have remained biased against something that I really didn't know anything about.

And particularly for experiential where I look to design, um, activations around this notion of emotional presence. It's so helpful to have this vast knowledge pool that's abstract and, unfiltered because it allows me to come up with new combinations of ideas that allow for my work to, I think, truly sing.

Katty

Great lessons, regardless of whether you're creative or not, right? Self-education, communication skills, being open-minded. I think those are great life lessons, regardless of whatever path somebody takes.

So thank you for that. 

Rickie

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much again for having me. Hopefully, This is helpful to anyone starting off in their career, but I definitely have a lot of, um, empathy and respect for anyone pursuing a creative career because it does require a lot of self-determination to rise to the occasion, shall we say.

Always love meeting and working with young talent and seeing them grow in their career. So hopefully this information will be helpful to someone one day.

I am available on Instagram, my handle is @littlecountryfox and always available through LinkedIn or I have a semblance of a website that I'm terrible at updating, but my email is on there.

So I'm always happy to answer questions to anyone who may want to learn more about the agency life or creative process. 

Executive coach and team development expert: Jamie Douraghy  jdouraghy com.

LinkedIn profile:  

Hello Everyone.  I'm excited to welcome Jamie to this podcast and introduce you to him. You may wonder why we have the same last name… It's because we're married! I was looking to create this series of podcasts on company culture and realized that, right here,is someone who has expertise in helping companies and leadership teams build culture using the strengths of the team

And I thought… Hey, Jamie, would you come and talk to me about building company culture? So here we are!  Jamie, glad to have you here. Finally, after 30 years of marriage, our first podcast together!

Jamie: Yes, we've been negotiating this moment for quite some time now. 

Katty: Exactly, So what I wanted to dive in with you in this….With everything that has changed in the past few years with COVID and the Great Resignation and this whole movement with hybrid and remote and so on and so forth. We talk about how companies go about in terms of building culture, and learn about their teams. And I know that one of the frameworks that you use is StrengthsFinders.

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about that and the importance of knowing what strengths people BRING, and what it is that they NEED on a particular team. Would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background and how you've come to this point.

Jamie: Absolutely. My, journey into this world of understanding why, how, and what people need to do to work better together began about 11/ 12 years ago, when I went through the proverbial discovery of your WHY, and then the HOW and WHAT became easier.

What I appreciate about CliftonStrengths is that it focuses on HOW we do what we do, when we know our WHY, which is intrinsic and very personal, our WHAT can become much more dynamic. And then many individuals can get lost in how they're doing what they're doing when they're not clear on that. And CliftonStrengths, as you take the assessment, you look at your 34 complete talents and the top five become your strengths.

Those are the ones to initially focus on. When I'm working with companies is focus on the talents of 6 through 10, because that's where we are learning that the true potential lies and the greatest potential to be unlocked are, is in the talents that are not necessarily our strengths.

Katty: So you mean the first five of those 10 is something that naturally occurs. It's the six through 10 that the potential and the opportunities lie within.

Jamie: Exactly. For example, Context is my number two (strength). I don't have to think about watching a documentary or what I'm going to learn from a specific book. I just pick it up, or I just do it.   

My number six or seven is Maximizer, where I need to take good things and I want to make them great. I have to put a little bit more intentionality and a little bit more thought into it. It's not an automatic process.

Katty: So really a growth opportunity even for every individual.

Jamie: Definitely. Our greatest growth, for me, lies within the six through ten. 

Katty: How would you say…from a team dynamics standpoint,  I know you've shared in the past that GallupStrengths or CliftonStrengths is not a hiring tool, but more of a development tool.  Can you share a little bit more about that and how hiring managers as a whole can utilize tools like CliftonStrengths to be able to develop their core team, and their people?

Jamie: These tools show how good a person may be on paper,  or as a result of algorithms and science that have been put out there. Where the greatest growth happens is when they are doing the work.  And when I know how I can do some things better than others, then I can team up with the right people that are, if not, better at certain areas and partner up with them.  And for me, that's where team dynamics become more important than growing just one individual.

 It's really how you grow the entire team, and what are the individual contributions that each player can make, to make that team greater. So, I didn't answer the question.  Probably to be more specific, all the assessments are good.  They all offer insights. It's similar to a painter. A paintbrush is a paintbrush, but it's a different painting in the hand of Picasso than it is in Van Gogh's. It's really how the manager knows how to use those tools to get the best, to extract the best out of people. 

Katty: I understand that. Thank you for that analogy.  That makes sense to me. I know that it was a very eye-opening exercise for me to just take my assessments and recognize what my strengths were and maybe what is not so strong for me, and choose whether I want to work on that or not.

How would you suggest to different teams who work together to use this tool for constant communication? And how do they operationalize it? Basically where I want to go with it is it's one thing to take the assessment, but it can easily sit in a drawer and collect dust.  It's another thing for it to become part of the everyday conversation of a team. What would you suggest there? 

Jamie: The best way is to use it as an opener for many meetings. There are thousands of companies that use Gallup's tool, CliftonStrengths, to create a strengths-based culture.  I know when I was in a leadership role several years ago, as we were going through COVID, our monthly meetings were “What two strengths are you counting on to get you through COVID?”  And it allowed for people to be authentic. It allowed people to look at themselves and say, okay, these are the things that I can count on myself because we don't exactly know what's going on in the world outside.

 And then when that is shared collectively, people start to connect. They say, oh, okay, I can go to this person for that, I can go to that person for this. And importantly, my team can come to me for what they need.

One of the CliftonStrengths reports is the Bring/Need report…What's the value that I bring to the team, and what's the energy that I need to gain from the team? And when you have everybody doing this in sync, it can become a very powerful way of pushing teams up to that next level. 

Katty: Who can I go to beacuse I don't have that strength, but somebody else does. Or who can I rely on to see this (through) and vice versa? 

For clarity's sake, speaking of context... I know we're referring to CliftonStrengths, Gallup, and Strengthsfinders.  Would you mind sharing with everyone that we are talking about the same tool, just the name has evolved?

Jamie: Yes. It was StrengthsFinders and then it became CliftonStrengths. And within CliftonStrengths there are 34 talent themes, of which the top five become your strengths. 

Katty: And then six through 10 are the opportunities for further development and growth.

Jamie: Exactly, They do support the top five.

Katty: And I think it's really interesting for the audience to that we're talking about it in the context of work, but how impactful it is in the context of everyday relationships and conversations.  Jamie's number two strength is Context, it's my number 32…..

So you could just imagine the conversations that we have around that, or I know who to go to any time I want details on things because that is not me! Or I want the history of things, I know who to go to for that. That makes a very interesting conversation!

Jamie: I know to come to you for ideas because you have ideation quite high.  And if I'm stuck on a certain area and can't break through, I will come to you and ask, Hey, this is the challenge I'm facing. What thoughts do you have? You'll give me a list of ideas very quickly. And then I will take those and then put them into my way, my methodology of executing.

Katty: So at Artisan Creative, we, several years ago chose to adopt, StrengthsFinders as one of our frameworks and one of the tools that we're using here.

What we've done to operationalize it is that on our Slack channel, every single member has their strengths listed. In every single team meeting, we talk about what we bring to the table, and what we need based on our strengths.  When we're talking about reviews and just having one-on-ones, really looking at where those strengths need support, how those strengths are showing up. It's become part of our company culture and part of our conversation, which has strengthened, no pun intended, but it has strengthened how we're communicating and how we're talking to one another.

Jamie: That's good. What's an example of how you've done that beyond Slack? What's an example of maybe in a meeting or when you're facing a challenge where you said, Let's look at our collective strengths. 

Katty: Yeah, so the interesting piece is that we have some team members who are very high in Communication. And we have some team members that communicate but maybe not necessarily outgoing, they're not the social butterflies if you will, and making sure that both sides of the equation, the ones that have, you know, WOO (Winning Others Over) as part of their strengths, and recognizing that maybe not every single person on the team has that. And still creating space for everybody to have time to communicate and to verbalize what's going on and not dominating the conversation…so just that recognition and that self-awareness has been huge. Otherwise, our conversations could turn very one-sided.  So that's been an important distinction, just to know that there are some amazing people with amazing things to say. They may just not be the first ones who jump in with something and how to create the space for them to say something. That has been important to recognize.

So when you're talking and working with leaders on these leadership teams, and utilizing, whether it be StrengthsFinders or any other assessment that they're choosing to use on their teams and in their organizations, how do you go about advising them as to how to use that tool and how to utilize it to bring clarity, communication and conversations to the forefront?

Jamie: I believe for leaders to get to know their teams better, the teams have to get to know the leader better and open up and show your strengths, show your struggles.  Let everybody have a peek behind the curtain, see that, and then open it up. Usually, the answers most time the answers are already within the room.

And if the leader is able to openly communicate, this is where we're going, here's why we're doing this, now let's get to the how part. And this is where we're going to need each of you to step up.  Let's talk about the value that you bring; let's talk about your strengths; let's talk about your struggles.

And if we are lacking certain resources or certain diversity of thought, then let's go out there and get those players or look within and develop people that are within and bring them up to that next level. So, it's really important for the strengths to be throughout the entire company and not remain the exclusive domain of the leadership team.

Katty: So do you mean that as a leader, if they're looking at all the different strengths of their team members and are seeing particular gaps in particular strengths, they can recognize that in their 6 to 10 strengths they have an opportunity to develop that strength up or go out and add to their team with people who may have different skill sets.

Jamie: Exactly. Look within first. If it's there, create opportunities for those strengths to evolve, for those talents to evolve into strengths.  If it simply doesn't exist on the team, then let's look at who can complement this team.  Because if we have a team that is too similar in thinking, then the blind spots become pronounced.

We're all susceptible to the same blind spot if we don't have that broader base of diverse thinking. 

Katty: Yeah, I'd imagine that if a company culture is really about developing their existing talents and helping their existing employees rise to the next level, whether it be within the company or just, you know, personally grow,  having a tool to be able to calibrate that and help promote that is going to be really important.

If people are interested in just finding it out for themselves, maybe it's not something that their company offers, can they just go to the CliftonStrengths site and take the assessment for themselves?

Jamie: Absolutely. The assessment requires about 40 minutes of uninterrupted time, and there are two products that they offer.   One is the Top 5 at a certain price, and then there's the full 34 at a higher price. And the reports are very robust and they give a lot of good personal insight. And what better investment of one's time than to start to study oneself? 

Katty: I wish I had had this tool many, many years ago. I think there are some things that I was harsh on myself for but realized later on that actually, wasn't a strength.  I just didn't recognize it at the time. I know that this particular tool is also available for younger adults. 

Jamie: They do have one that's designed specifically for children from the age of seven/ eight to about 13.   And it's called Strengths Explorer.  That's really to allow families to have a similar conversation with younger children. And I believe it gives you the top three in a language that's easier to understand and easier for parents and children to communicate.  

Katty: I know what, that's something that you've focused on is to bring clarity, and open communication to teams and to groups. 

Jamie: And one thing I've learned from the coaching that I've done and in particular from Judith Glaser and Conversational Intelligence is that the quality of our relationships is based on the quality of our conversations, and the quality of our relationships determines the quality of our culture…and everything happens through conversation.

And if CliftonStrengths can be a tool that stimulates a level three conversation, then what better tool to be using on an ongoing basis in terms of both personal and team development? 

Katty: What's a level three conversation? 

Jamie: Well, actually, before I start that, let's go to level one. Level one is, is really transactional. It's when you tell and ask and just go back and forth. And level two is positional when you're advocating “I'm right, you may not be right. I'm right, you may not be right”.  

Level three is transformational. It's where the conversation builds on each person's contribution to that conversation. And from there, you're in essence, co-creating, and it's releasing different kinds of chemicals in the brain where you create a safe space, to build something. That's where the greatest creativity happens because you're building something greater than when you started the conversation. 

Katty: Yeah, I can see how that's so powerful, especially, obviously, we work with creatives and we work with people who are in the space of co-creating all the time and or a creative working with their team members and maybe on the Account side or the project side.

Creatives look at things differently. Art is very subjective. So, to have that ability and to understand that I'm trying to have a transformational conversation and not necessarily positional.  Maybe sometimes it is transactional, but elevating to that level and know who our teammates are and what their strengths are, really helps to have those types of deeper transformational conversations.

Jamie: Absolutely. And we do need transactional and positional conversations. It's when we get stuck in that rut and don't elevate ourselves to the next one, is that's the opportunity that's being missed and being able to recognize a pattern and knowing, oh, so and so is this way because they have such high Belief as one of their Strengths. So how do I get them to see that there's another perspective that may be as equally as valid as the ones that they are so tightly holding on to?

Katty: What would you leave our audience with, if there was one thing after this call that they chose to implement on their team or in their company to help elevate culture and understanding and communication?  What would you suggest that they do? 

Jamie: I would put it in a simple phrase: "know your strengths, know yourself."  And then when you know yourself, be curious about the strengths of your team and your teammates and bring that culture so they are equally curious about you.  And so we're constantly uncovering these amazing talents that we all possess. Yet, we don't always have the opportunity to express them. And once we're able to express them and see them in action, it does tend to elevate the entire team. 

Katty: Amazing. Well, thank you for, after 30 years, taking the time to sit here with me and have this conversation about StrengthsFinders and culture building. Where can people find you?

Jamie: Easiest way is jdouraghy com. I'm also on LinkedIn as well.  

Katty: Thanks so much, Jamie.

Jamie: Thanks. And, I guess we got to go make dinner now, right? 

Katty:Yes, it is that time.

https://www.joyful.co/   |  Linkedin

Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency that designs and activates company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups.

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Welcome to this next episode of the artisan podcast. My name is Katty Douraghy. I'm the president of Artisan Creative and your host for the artisan podcast.

Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, the co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency. They design and activate company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups.

In this profound shift that we've had lately in the world of work, the rise of stress and burnout across leaders and employees and finding this need for best-in-class companies to re-recruit their talent and welcome them to a better future. Joyful saw this opportunity to focus their unique skill sets on this vital lever of growth, which is culture.

And that is what has brought us here to this conversation to talk about company culture employee retention, and bringing more joy to work. So with that, please welcome Allen and so happy to have you.

Let's welcome Allen Hardin to the podcast.  Allen and I are both part of an organization called EO, The Entrepreneurs Organization, and I was fortunate enough to visit his offices a few weeks back I just loved what I saw there. I saw all the joy that was there with everything that they have created for clients and that’s what has brought us to this conversation.

Katty I was really curious about the genesis of Joyful and your background, Alan, and have an opportunity for us to just really connect and chat.

Allen: Thank you so much for having me. Katty. I really appreciate the opportunity.  

Katty: I think with everything that's happened through COVID, with everybody being remote and now people being hybrid and some people not even knowing yet what their company culture and or their org is going to be like. Whether they're gonna bring everybody back or not or stay hybrid thing, it's just a really important topic to talk about, you know? Build and maintain culture through this. Craziness. This new work place that we're in.

Allen:  So there's a number of milestone moments that have happened over the last few years that everybody reset or refocused on it, but it's continuing to change as well. So that's the important thing to recognize is that you're never quite done working on your company culture. It's something that always needs a little bit of attention.

Katty: Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about you and kind of how you started in the space and what kind of was the impetus to start Joyful?

Allen: Yeah, absolutely. My background really stems from live event production. So in the early years of our company, that's what we really focused on. We originally started in 2015. And we're producing big events for ourselves, public events, ticketed events in the Portland area, but also producing big events for clients.

And one of our colleagues has said in the past that any live event any live experience is inherently a cultural experience. And I think that that is what really helped us focus and refocus on the path that we're on now. Focusing on company culture.

Live events in that world require a number of different mindsets if you will. And I like to say that you have to be one part visionary, right, really seeing the big picture and being optimistic of what could be and creating this emotive thing that really makes people feel something at an event or an experience that they have. But you also have to be very pragmatic, but you have to be able to execute those things on the ground and deliver on that promise because people will know, in real-time, whether you're telling a story or whether you're actually able to deliver on that on that vision that you cast.

And so that's how I frame the work of live events and it’s that same perspective that we apply to company culture. So you would need to have that optimism and vision for what your company can be like, what it's actually like to work there or experience.

But we need to be able to make it happen to, actually be able to activate on those needs. So my background really comes from live event production. And I think I blend that a little bit with, you know, how I want to spend my time and, you know, casting a little bit on, you know, just the purpose of Joyful if you will.

Our belief really is that life is short, and one of the biggest places people spend time in their life is work. So… it shouldn't suck.

It's if it's so much of your life, how can we help people enjoy what they do a little bit more, and be more engaged? It's got a very, very clear tie to productivity and efficiency and just a lot of long-term value metrics for organizations. So that's my story. I grew up we grew up on the West Coast and a lot of time outdoors spent a lot of time in various activities, but my professional career has been around live event production and a few other things.

Katty: Thank you for that. And you're right, the two prongs that you talked about are those having a vision as well as being able to execute. I can see that all the way is going to manifest itself in a company's employer brand… like how are you like what's the vision you're putting out there to attract new talent to your doorstep, and how do you execute on that and how do you make sure that there's a through line and everything that you're doing to message that out accurately.

So when you guys start collaborating with clients and you know, just really this emphasis on, you're here to make work more joyful. Do you sit through a discovery session? And is that do you bring joy primarily through live events? Or how do you get involved in expanding company culture?

Allen: All over the map in terms of what those tactics are, if you will. So on one end of the spectrum is the big picture thinking, that strategy session, the discovery strategy, you're really uncovering the current state and figuring out what the future state is and basically, creating a map of how to get there, right?

So we focus a lot on the strategy of how to accomplish what our goals are, and what that client's goals are. But we also focus on those tactics or activations as we call them. So, we found that, you know, in the marketplace, there's a lot of groups on either end of that spectrum, right? There's some that do culture strategy or organizational psychologists or, you know, folks that have come up through HR, learning and development, things like that, and they'll work with you to help make that map, but then they hand the map to the company and say okay, this is what you have to do.

And a lot of those, those, our clients find themselves in a spot where like, it's great, I know where I'm going. I don't have the capacity or the experience or the tools or whatever it is to actually bring this to life now. The other end of that spectrum is, you know, a more standard creative agency, right, where if you give them a very specific brief from saying, hey, I'm looking for this video product or this event or this experience or whatever it is, they can execute on that.  But again, a lot of our clients didn't have that vision or that articulation to give that kind of correct brief to that group. So, we tie those two things together.

I invite clients to join us anywhere in that spectrum, right? So sometimes people just need a tactic and they need some help producing something. And we have the capability to do that in-house.

But our most successful work, I would say is the work that starts on that strategy side of things. So, I typically say the best tactics are built from great strategy. The tactics are what people see and they get attention and people get excited about that. Oh, we should do that at our organization.  Those were built based on a strategy for a specific client for a specific reason.

So it's, it's good to reset and refocus on why are we doing something What's the objective with this and what's the best way to go about it? And, then build the tactics from there. So that kind of extends from our origin story a little bit too, where events were more of the tactic, right, but the why and the how was really what we were skilled at.

And so, we really transitioned during that COVID era, from just focusing on events to zooming out again and saying, what's the real purpose of this? What are we trying to achieve for these events for our clients, and it was to bring that authentic cultural experience for them. So anytime you can zoom out and start with strategy, that's when we see the highest success, if you will, for work that we do.

Katty: The COVID era was a shift in what you were doing a Joyful or did it just amplify what you were already doing, and you just put more emphasis on it.

Allen: A little bit of both. So, we were heavily focused on live events, and that that period, you know, live events basically went away. Our company story was one that we had a large amount of work planned for 2020.  And we were building the plans and the tactics to execute on that level of work, and it all went away.

It so it just in the beginning of March, I think it was you know, basically all of that work went zero. Then we had to refocus, now the clients that we were working with the same situation that we were in, they used to rely on these live events to motivate employees, to celebrate employees, to enjoy time together. They used to rely on in-person in the office or, or, you know, kind of camaraderie building and trust building and all of those other collaboration aspects as well. So you were relying on these things that have existed for so long and all of a sudden that goes away.

You have to rethink how you're going to do that, so, that was a big refocus for us where we were really doing a lot of that same tactic of live event experience. But the skills were the same to refocus on instead of saying how can we impact this small group, this one day this one time, to how do we impact instead, the whole company, all year, from anywhere, right?

So your audience grows quite a bit.  And so, in that year through that COVID kind of switch, if you will, we had a big swing from having a lot of work planned, to go into 0, to back to our biggest year again, because a lot of businesses were in the same spot that they needed to focus on company culture now more than ever to make sure that they were resilient enough to withstand those factors.

Katty: Absolutely, gosh, my mind goes to seems like a long time ago now…but my mind goes to certainly March 2020 when the whole world just got upended. That must have been a pretty as frightening business owner, a really frightening time to just be there.

Allen: Yeah. I mean, you just kind of go along the same lines as some of our other perspectives, but as a culture company, that helps our clients with their company culture., it can’t suck to work here. Right? So it's got to be a good place to work.

So during that time, we're not only focused on our people, that's kind of number one is taking care of our folks, making sure our team is healthy and has what they need to survive and thrive and do everything on that human level.

But then also from the perspective of business, we had to change our product offerings, change our messaging, change the way we talked about what we do to meet the new needs of that time. So, both have to look internally at our team, but also externally at what our product is and how we support our clients at that time. It was a crazy time for sure. Yeah, for sure.

Katty: A little bit of a segue to kind of what we're talking about, but as you're talking about just what you needed to do, the word that pops into my mind is ….resilience. And I know that we work with candidates all the time who may have lost their jobs, or their interview didn’t happen, or their work is shifting, whether it be because of AI or because of whatever it may be.    Where did you go to for strength for yourself? Where did resilience come from for you?

Allen: Oh, all over the place. I mean, I talk about resilience a lot, especially with company culture, right? I make the case that that's really what we do, is if you have that strong company culture, your team is inherently more resilient and that helps in good times and bad. So, it's a mitigator of two things, right? So if you're growing very fast, the team is going to need to be resilient to take on that changing world.  Right?

Or if you're in a really tough time, whether that's a macroeconomic thing or just a specific thing, you need to be really resilient to be able to handle that too. So I think company culture is what helps people with high-growth situations or really tough situations.

For me personally, I mean, in that timeframe, I'll start giving the Entrepreneurs Organization a plug, where, you know, being a part of that organization was incredibly helpful because I could connect with fellow entrepreneurs that were going through some more things all over different industries or different sized businesses or different locations, all you know, a lot of the details are a little bit different, but the same macro situation where we're trying to figure it out and survive, you know.

So just being in a room full of people that you know, you're all in it together, and we're all rooting for each other and trying to support each other was a huge, huge part of my resilience at that moment.

I owe a lot to the EO group, especially during that time.  I had just joined I think maybe the year before, so what a fortunate circumstance to have recently joined that group and then, you know, be thrust right into such a situation where it became so beneficial.

Katty Is that just the importance of community I think it's so impactful right? And absolutely, we feel we’re the only ones going through something, and yeah, the to support that. So impactful.

Allen: Absolutely. Yeah, that perspective is going to give you do feel that way sometimes, but when you get back in that room of other folks you know, like-minded folks, you realize, you know, a lot of other people are dealing with a lot of stuff too. And you know, we're not we're not in it on our own.

Katty: So going back to the other point you were talking about and before I had this little segue question for you, this shift of shifting from singular events, that was the big crescendo of kind of building culture, to this mindset shift I would imagine for not only for Joyful but for the clients who are used to these big, singular events of company culture is really this constant thing. It's not a big wave that crashes through but it's a stream that continually is running. How were you able to shift that mindset? For a hiring manager listening in, for example, or somebody who's trying to build their company culture, where would be the starting point for them?

Allen: Yeah, I think the starting point is today, right? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.

That would be my advice to hiring managers in a similar situation where it's, it's every day we refer to culture as a ground game. It's every interaction. It's every exchange that employees have on a day-to-day basis. It's not these big shiny moments that happen quarterly, or whatever cadence you choose. But it's really what they experience every day when they go to work and are they able to feel productive and motivated and safe and all of those things that go around with a good experience.

You know, what we typically do is focus a lot on a roadmap or a framework and we map out your year. I like to use the analogy of a beach ball.So you think of a beach ball at a fun concert, right, so somebody has a beach ball and puts it up into the air to concert, think of that as your company culture, right? That can stay up in the air as long as everybody in that crowd is contributing to bouncing it up a little bit higher, right, and it keeps going, but as soon as somebody takes their eye off the ball or they're not paying attention or get out too far out in front of them, or too far to the side or something like that, that's when it can really fall.

Culture just like the gravity will kind of find its way back down unless people are actively contributing to it on a daily basis. So you're never done working on that. Right?

So, it's a combination of the everyday moments, your peers, your managers and your leaders, to those big events from time to time, better, maybe the bigger hit that pushed the ball up a little bit higher in the air.  It's a combination of all those things.

So I don't think you can focus just on one or just on the other. But being able to visualize and kind of a roadmap if you will, and look at 12 months, okay, what are these quarterly things that are inspiring moments for our team? Okay, what are these things have happened monthly, where they're kind of dry right now, but maybe we have an opportunity to make them a little more engaging or give our employees a little bit more something that they're looking for during those times. Okay, well, well then what about our one-on-ones? And then what about when he walked through the door? Right? What about how we send emails or how we have meetings all the way to the most minute things?

 So being able to have that perspective of kind of 30,000 feet, the big you know, Vision stuff, but all the way down to on the ground is each day like you know, what, what is the technical hurdle that I run into every day that is just really frustrating to me, that just should be way easier? You know, those ways of working.  It's all of that, right? So you can't think it's just the one big thing and the big shiny thing. You can’t think it's just the small tactical stuff, but it's, I would say it's a sum of all of those things that really contribute to their culture.

Katty How does that tie back to a company's core values?

Allen: I think it all starts there. I think we really try to frame our work on the purpose of the organization. So, we start with the purpose of the organization and what are your core values, beliefs, and behaviors. If you start your work there and work on your employee experience, we feel that's the strongest way to do it.  You know a lot of the work we do has to do with communicating and letting values, and purpose, live every day. Right?

Because for so many organizations, you develop something maybe you share. Maybe you put it on a poster, but what are the ways that those come to life every day?

You know, employee recognition or in the way that you hold your meetings or in the way that you organize your events or whatever that is, that's where those should shine.

More, as a throughline as you said earlier, you know, they should be there every day.

So we start there. You know, we've looked like a creative agency or organization looks like a creative agency. We just choose to focus our efforts on company culture, and employee experience. So we do a lot of communications, we do a lot of marketing about an organization's purpose and values for internal purposes.   Not to sell something to a customer, but to share that message internally with the employees so that everybody is kind of re-recruited to that same purpose on a regular basis. We produce a lot of videos, we do a lot of newsletters, communications, all that type of stuff to really reframe the conversation about that.   To put it simply Katty, it's constant, and essential to focus on that.

Katty:  And this is all internal communication that you're producing. You're producing that for the organization and its employees.  

Allen: Exactly. So, it's, instead of, you know, us making ads for promotions, for a company to sell to a customer. We're using those same skills to share messages from a company to its employees.   

Katty: And I and I would imagine, I think I mentioned to you that I’ve spoken about this before, believe that company culture comes through even before that candidate is hired, how that candidate is interacted with all the way from the date, the time they apply to that job or what how that job description is written, like all of those have to be connected, right, that that message has to come through on those too

Allen: Absolutely. I mean it starts very early on and then it continues even with your most seasoned employees, right, because the way I like that you mentioned that, the way the job description is written, where they find that post, you know, what their first interview is like, and are they made to feel as part of the team or as an outsider, and, you know, you can't, in my opinion, you can't run onboarding or an interview or an application process one way and then give them a different experience on day one. Right?

And that's kind of a shift that, you know, are you being authentic in that interview to what it's actually like to work there. And, it goes two ways, right? So, we often can make this interview look good and shiny and say, hey, it is amazing to work here and it’s awesome. And then they get to work the first day and nobody says hi to them or no, you know, it's a different experience that way. So it goes both sides. You know, you might have a really hard interview and then it's amazing to work there. Have a great interview and it's not amazing to work there.

Having alignment and intentionality through that whole timing is critical. And I mentioned seasoned employees too, we talk about re-recruiting your employees every day, right, to reset really what the company stands for and is about and what the values and behaviors are for that organization. You can't just stop after their onboarding, right, and pretend that they've been there 10 years. You need to be intentional with it on an ongoing basis regardless of whether that employee has been there for one day or 10 years or anywhere in between.

Katty: I like that mindset of re-recruiting your employees every day. It's really important not to make assumptions that we just need to look at external or new employees and forget about people who are already here. I think we saw that during COVID with a great resignation.

Allen: Absolutely lots of people's priorities shifted. Yeah. And they realized hey, you know, how I'm spending every day is not how I want to be spending every day. And it's their decision to make as to what they want their day-to-day to look like. And so it's important not to forget that you have great people already, and they may need some attention just as much as you focus on your onboarding program. So I think that's another kind of differentiator of how we focus on the work. We're not focused just on one part of that lifecycle, not just the onboarding experience or just your holiday party or something like that, right but it's everything in between for the whole organization.

Katty:  How would you emphasize culture building and just employee experience and employee engagement through this hybrid space that we're in now? There are some people in the office others never come in, and kind of how you build culture in these two diverse groups of people that are maybe geographically separated from each other.

Allen: Yeah, the simplest way I would say it is intentionality, the more complex way is that it's different for every organization, right? I'll speak about our organization, right? So we're a midsize company here in Portland, and we have a physical office. But our policy is to work from wherever you're most productive.  So, we don't have a requirement, of how many days to be in, or which days to be in or anything like that, but we’ve tried to build our location such that people will feel like they can come here and be productive and be a little bit social.

So a lot of the folks on our team can do more work in their day if they stay at home. They can be more productive with their tasks and their workload when they're not bumping into colleagues and having side conversations and things like that. They can just stay focused and get their work done.  However, I'm a strong believer that trust, collaboration, respect, and a lot of those things are really built the more in-person time you spend with each other. So, we tried to build our situation such that people want to come in, and people enjoy coming in and spending time with each other. But it's not coming in and realizing hey, I would have gotten more work done at home. The space is such that you can be productive and you can connect with your colleagues simultaneously, and we let people self-select.

Now will that work for every organization, will that work for us forever, no. It’s gonna be different all over the board, but I think being intentional with why you're asking people to do something, is really important.   And a lot of folks will make a decision because that's the way they used to do it, right? Or we used to do it this way. And I think that's another perspective that deserves to be looked at again, too, right? Because things are constantly evolving and, you know, the way people work will ebb and flow forever, so we need to adapt.

So there's lots of details in there from technology to collaboration. That's what we're doing for our for our organization. For now, it's working, but I don't pretend that that's the answer forever.

Katty: We've been remote for 12 years now,  long before I think it was the thing to do. And the minute the systems we were using went cloud base we were like, Oh, we don't need to have this physical office here anymore.  And I have to say,  in the beginning, there was we had to work a lot harder for engagement, right? We had to work harder to make sure we were communicating more, to do everything more.

And I still find that that has to be done. Like some of those assumptions or conversations that are water cooler conversations or the spontaneity of just going to lunch together. That just doesn't really happen anymore. Everything has to be, as you were saying, intentional, planned, that needs to be you know, a path towards It's continuing with that. So that's been an interesting thing. And when COVID happened, everybody's asking, so how do you… how did you do it? It was something I hadn't even thought about.  

Right. Yeah. We didn't necessarily have an SOP around that. We had to step into this and share with others how we had done it.

If there are companies whose culture you really admire, what are some of the common denominators? First of all, who are they? And what are some common denominators that you see that are just telltale signs that they got it right.

Allen: That's a great question. I think there are a lot of points in time, and answers I would give, and I think that, again, culture is dynamic, right? And it's constantly evolving within an organization. And so there are peaks and valleys for the company. Personally, I would say, that organizations that value the whole employee, where people can really bring their best selves to work, and be productive and operate at a high level, really execute great work product, and have time, make time for their personal pursuits.

Often it feels like organizations are one or the other, where you're either in this high-performing situation that that's all you do, right, you're really in a grind on that you're delivering great work, but it's all-consuming, or it's a little more casual, and you have time for everything, but you know, it's not operating that same kind of performance level.

So the organizations or the kind of situations that come to mind are ones that balance both. So my personal view on it, you know, is where people can bring their, their whole selves. But I think the broader answer I would say is that it's different for every person.

We don't really believe that there is good culture and bad culture, we more believe that every culture is a little bit different. Let's be authentic and genuine with what ours is, and then let's promote that and communicate that and let people self-select in or out, to that. So we more subscribe to that kind of wrong fit- right fit, if you will.  A colleague has authored a book by that title where let's just be transparent about what our culture is, and there are people that want to fit that, and let's recruit them.

Rather than, let's pretend that our culture is something different than it is people in the door. And then they later realize that it's not the right fit.

The book is called Wrong Fit, Right Fit. By Dr. Andre Martin, that's a plug of a colleague, if you will, but it's a shared belief with our organization, for sure.

Katty: It reminds me of many years ago, many, many years ago, actually through EO I got a chance to hear at the time the President of Trader Joe's.  One of the things he said that always stuck with me was he would walk up and down or grocery aisle and see if there were people were smiling, and if they were engaging with customers, and he just really, really wanted people, people.

And if somebody was just really focused on putting the items on the shelf the right way, and just not engaging with what was happening, what was happening there in the store, he would go up to them and say, you know what, you're doing such a beautiful job here with the aisle. But that's not what we need. There's probably another company out there looking for you to be that perfect person who's stocking the shelves perfectly. That’s not who we are, we'd rather have that be messy, but you are engaging with whoever's walking in.  That has stayed with me in terms of culture.

Allen: I mean, that makes me think of values and behaviors. Right. So when you I don't know their values offhand, but it feels like they have, you know, a defined behavior that associates with a certain value, right, where it's being personable and engaging over being so focused on the little details of stocking the shelves because of that customer isn’t excited to be there. It doesn't matter if the shelves are organized well, alright. I think that's a great example. I'm not familiar with all their details, but I think that's a great example.

Katty: So where can people find you? If they're looking to engage with you're just learning about Joyful a little bit more.

Allen: Yeah, I would push folks to either our website or LinkedIn, our website is Joyful.co

Or you can find us on LinkedIn company name is Joyful. That's the best way to find us.

So we'll be around that a number of HR / culture focused conferences here too. So you'll see us out and about, if you're part of that community, we'll see you there. But yeah, please find us online and, and reach out we'd love to connect with you.

Katty: I just want to clarify that even though you're Portland-based, the clients that you service are nationally and internationally located.

Allen: Our office is in Portland, our team works all over. And, yeah, our client base right now some are based in Portland, but most if not all, have international presence. So we work with teams all over the world on that type of work.

Katty: And as a final statement, if there's one takeaway that you want people to have some this conversation, what would that be.

Allen:   Life is short, let’s make work more joyful.

www.theotheeros.com

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Eros Marcello a software engineer/ developer and architect specializing in human interfacing artificial intelligence, with a special focus on conversational AI systems, voice assistance, chat bots and ambient computing.

Eros has been doing this since 2015 and even though today for the rest of us laymen in the industry we're hearing about AI everywhere, for Eros this has been something he's been passionately working in for quite a few years.

 Super excited to have him here to talk to us about artificial intelligence and help demystify some of the terminology that you all may be hearing out there.

 I'm so excited to welcome Eros Marcello to this conversation to learn a little bit more about AI. He is so fully well versed in it and has been working in AI at since 2015, when it was just not even a glimmer in my eyes so I'm so glad that to have somebody here who's an expert in that space.

Eros glad to have you here I would love to just jump into the conversation with you. For many of us this this buzz that we're hearing everywhere sounds new, as if it's just suddenly come to fruition. But that is clearly not the case, as it's been around for a long time, and you've been involved in it for a long time.  

Can you take us to as a creative, as an artist, as an architect, as an engineer take us through your genesis and how did you get involved and how did you get started. Let's just start at the beginning.

Eros:

 The beginning could be charted back sequentially working in large format facilities, as surprise surprise the music industry, which you know was the initial interest and was on the decline. You'd have this kind of alternate audio projects, sound design projects that would come into these the last remaining, especially on the East and West, Northeast and So-cal areas, the last era of large format analog-based facilities with large recording consoles and hardware and tape machines.

 I got to experience that, which was a great primer for AI for many reasons, we'll get more into that later.

So what happened was that you'd have voiceover coming in for telephony systems, and they would record these sterile, high-fidelity captures of voice that would become the UI sound banks, or used for speech synthesis engines for call centers.

That was the exposure to what was to come with voice tech folks in that space, the call center world, that really started shifting my gears into what AI machine learning was and how I may fit into it.

Fast forward, I got into digital signal processing and analog emulation, so making high caliber tools for Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase , Mac and PC for sound production and music production. specifically analog circuitry emulation and magnetic tape emulation “in the box” as it's called that gave me my design and engineering acumen.

Come 2015/2016, Samsung came along and said you’ve done voice-over,  know NLP, machine learning, and AI, because I studied it and acquired the theoretical knowledge and had an understanding of the fundamentals.  I didn't know where I fit yet, and then they're like so you know about, plus you’re into voice, plus you have design background with the software that you worked on.  I worked on the first touchscreen recording console called the Raven MTX for a company called Slate Digital. So I accidentally created the trifecta that was required to create what they wanted to do which was Bigxby which was Samsung's iteration of the series for the Galaxy S8 and they wanted me to design the persona… and that as they say is history.

Samsung Research America, became my playground they moved me up from LA to the Bay Area and that was it.

 It hasn't really stopped since it's been a meteoric ascension upward. They didn't even know what to call it back then, they called it a UX writing position, but UX writers don't generate large textual datasets and annotate data and then batch and live test neural networks. Because that's what I was doing, so I was essentially doing computational linguistics on the fly.

And on top of it in my free time I ingratiated myself with a gentleman by the name of Gus who was head of deep learning research there and because I just happened to know all of these areas that fascinated me in the machine learning space, and because I was a native English speaker, I found a niche where they allowed me to not only join the meetings, but help them prepare formalized research and presentations which only expanded my knowledge base.

 I mean we're looking into really cutting-edge stuff at the time, AutoML, Hyperparameter tuning and Param ILS and things in the realms of generative adversarial neural networks which turned me on to the work of Ian Goodfellow, who was until I got there was an Apple employee and now it's gone back to Google Deep Mind.

He's the father of Generative Adversarial Neural Networks, he's called the GANfather and that's really it the rest is history. I got into Forbes when I was at Samsung and my Hyperloop team got picked to compete at SpaceX, so it was a lot that happened in a space of maybe 90 days.

 Katty

You were at the right place at the right time, but you were certainly there at a time where opportunities that exist today didn't exist then and you were able to forge that.  I also can see that there are jobs that will be coming up in AI that don't exist today. It's just such an exciting time to be in this space and really forge forward and craft a path based on passion and yours clearly was there.

 So you've used a lot of words that are regular nomenclature for you, but I think for some of the audience may not be can you take us through…adversarial I don't even know what you said adversarial … Yes Generative Adversarial Neural Networks.

Eros

A neural network is the foundational machine learning technique, where you provide curated samples of data, be it images or text, to a machine learning algorithm neural network which is trained, as it's called, on these samples so that when it's deployed in the real world it can do things like image recognition, facial recognition, natural language processing, and understanding.

It does it by showing it, it's called supervised learning, so it's explicitly hand-labeled data, you know, this picture is of a dog versus this is a picture of a cat, and then when you deploy that system in production or in a real-world environment it does its best to assign confidence scores or domain accuracy to you know whether it's a cat or a dog.

 You take generative adversarial neural networks and that is the precipice of what we see today is the core of MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and image-to-image generation when we're seeing prompts to image tools.

Suffice it to say generative adversarial networks are what is creating a lot of these images or, still image to 3D tools, you have one sample of data and then you have this sort of discriminator and there's a waiting process that occurs and that's how a new image is produced. because the pixel density and tis diffused, it's dispersed by you know by brightness and contrasts across the image and that can actually generate new images.

Katty

So for example if an artist is just dabbling with Dall-E, let's say, and they put in the prompt so they need to put in to create something, that's really where it's coming from, it's all the data that is already been fed into the system.

Eros

 Right, like Transformers which again are the type of neural network that's used in ChatGPT or Claude, there are really advanced recurrent neural networks. And current neural networks were used a lot for you know NLP and language understanding systems and language generation and text generation systems. Prior, they had a very hard ceiling and floor, and Transformers are the next step.

But yeah more or less prompt to image. Again tons of training that assigns, that parses the semantics and assigns that to certain images and then to create that image there's sequence to sequence processes going on. Everyone's using something different, there's different techniques and approaches but more or less you have Transformers.

Your key buzzwords are Transformers, Large Language models, Generative AI, and Generative neural networks. It's in that microcosm of topics that we're seeing a lot of this explode and yes they have existed for a while.

Katty

Where should somebody start? Let's say you have a traditional digital designer who doesn't really come from an engineering or math background like you didn't and they can see that this is impacting or creating opportunities within their space-- where should they start?

Eros

First and foremost leveling up what they can do. Again, that fundamental understanding, that initial due diligence, I think sets the tone and stage for success or failure, in any regard, but especially with this. Because you're dealing with double exponential growth and democratization to the tune where like we're not even it's not even the SotA state-of-the-art models, large language models that are the most astounding.

If you see in the news Open AI is and looking at certain economic realities of maintaining. What is really eclipsing everything is and what's unique to this boom over like the.com bubble or even the initial AI bubble is the amount of Open Source effort being apportioned and that is you know genie out of the bottle for sure when it comes to something of this where you can now automate automation just certain degrees. So we're going to be seeing very aggressive advancement and that's why people are actually overwhelmed by everything. I mean there's a new thing that comes out not even by the day but seemingly by the minute.

I'm exploring for black AI hallucinations, which for the uninitiated hallucinations are the industry term they decided to go with for erroneous or left field output from these large language models.  I'm exploring different approaches to actually leverage that as an ideation feature, so the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do with these things and the different ways people are going to use it.

Just because it's existed it's not like it's necessarily old news as much as it's fermented into this highly productized, commoditized thing now which is innovation in it and of itself.

So where they would start is really leveling up, and identifying what these things can do. And not trying to do with them on their own battlefield. So low hanging fruit you have to leverage these tools to handle that and quadruple down on your high caliber skill set on your on what makes you unique, on your specific brand, even though that word makes me cringe a little bit sometimes, but on your on your strengths, on what a machine can't do and what's not conducive to make a machine do and it's does boil down to common sense.

 Especially if you're a subject matter expert in your domain, a digital designer will know OK well Dall-E obviously struggles here and there, you know it can make a logo but can it make you know this 3D scene to the exact specifications that I can?

I mean there's still a lot of headroom that is so hyper-specific it would never be economically, or financially conducive to get that specific with this kind of tools that handle generalized tasks.

What we're vying for artificial general intelligence so we're going to kind of see a reversal where it's that narrow skill set that is going to be, I think, ultimately important.  Where you start is what are you already good at and make sure you level up your skills by tenfold. People who are just getting by, who dabble or who are just so so, they're going to be displaced.

I would say they start by embracing the challenge, not looking at it as a threat, but as an opportunity, and again hyper-focusing on what they can do that's technical, that's complex, quadrupling on that hyper-focusing on it, highlighting and marketing on that point and then automating a lot of that lower tier work that comes with it, with these tools where and when appropriate.

Katty

I would imagine just from a thinking standpoint and a strategy standpoint and the creative process that one needs to go through, that's going to be even more important than before, because in order to be able to give the prompts to AI, you have to really have to strategize where you want to take it, what you want to do with it,  otherwise it's information in and you're going to get garbage out.

Eros

Right absolutely. And it depends on the tool, it depends on the approach of the company and manufacturer, creators of the tool. You know Midjourney, their story is really interesting. The gentleman who found that originally founded Leap Motion, which was in the 2010s that gesture-based platform that had minor success.  He ended up finding Midjourney and denying Apple two acquisition attempts, and like we're using Discord as a means for deployment and many other things simultaneously and to great effect.

So it's the Wild West right now but it's an exciting time to be involved because it's kind of like when Auto-tune got re-popularized. For example it all kind of comes back to that music audio background because Autotune was originally a hardware box. That's what Cher used on her song and then you have folks that you know in the 2010s T-Pain and Little Wayne and everybody came along it became a plug-in, a software plug-in, and all of a sudden it was on everything and now it's had its day, it had 15 minutes again, and then it kind of dialed back to where it's used for vocal correction. It’s used as a utility now rather than a kind of a buzzy effect.

Katty

Another thing to demystify.. Deep fake—what is that?

Yes deep fake, can be voice cloning, which is neural speech synthesis and then you have deep fakes that are visual, so you have you know face swapping, as it's called.  

You have very convincing deep fakes speeches, and you have voice clones that that more or less if you're not paying attention can sound and they're getting better again by the day.

Katty

What are the IP implications of that even with the content that's created on some of these other sources?

Eros

The IP implications in Japan passed that the data used that's you know regenerated, it kind of goes back I mean it's not if you alter something enough, a patent or intellectual property laws don't cover it because it's altered, and to prove it becomes an arbitrary task for it has an arbitrary result that's subjective.

Katty

You are the founder and chief product architect of BlackDream.ai. Tell us a little bit more about that what the core focus?

Eros:

So initially again it was conceived to research computer vision systems, adversarial machine intelligence. There's adversarial prompt injection, where you can make a prompt to go haywire if you kind of understand the idiosyncrasies of the specific model dealing with, or if you in construction of the model, found a way to cause perturbations in the data set, like basically dilute or compromise the data that it's being trained on with malice. To really kind of study those effects, how to create playbooks against them, how to make you know you know zero trust fault tolerant playbooks, and methodologies to that was the ultimate idea.

 There's a couple moving parts to it, it's part consultancy to establish market fit so on the point now where again, Sandhill Road has been calling, but I've bootstrapped and consulted as a means of revenue first to establish market fit.

So I've worked for companies and with companies, consulted for defense initiatives, for SAIC and partnering with some others. I have some other strategic partnerships that are currently in play. We have two offices, a main office at NASA/Ames, our headquarters is that is a live work situation, at NASA Ames / Moffett field in Mountain View CA so we are in the heart of Silicon Valley and then a satellite office at NASA Kennedy Space Center ,at the in the astronauts memorial building, the longevity of that which you know it's just a nice to have at this point because we are Silicon Valley-based for many reasons, but it's good to be present on both coasts.

So there's an offensive cyber security element that's being explored, but predominantly what we're working on and it's myself as the sole proprietor with some third party resources, more or less friends from my SpaceX /Hyperloop team and some folks that I've brokered relationships with along the way at companies I've contracted with or consulted for.

I’ve made sure to kind of be vigilant for anyone who's, without an agenda, just to make sure that I maintain relationships with high performers and radically awesome and talented people which I think is I've been successful in doing.  So I have a small crew of nonpareil, second to none talent, in the realm of deep learning, GPU acceleration, offensive cyber security, and even social robotics, human interfacing AI as I like to call it.

So that's where Blackdream.ai is focusing on: adversarial machine intelligence research and development for the federal government and defense and militaristic sort of applications

Katty

This image of an iceberg comes to mind that we only see in the tip of it over the water you know with the fun everybody's having with the Dall-Es and the ChatGPT's but just the implication of it, what is happening with the depth of it ….fascinating!!

Thank you you for being with us and just allowing us to kind of just maybe dip our toe a little bit under the water and to just see a little bit of what's going on there. I don't know if I'm clearer about it or if it was just a lot more research needs to be now done on my part to even learn further about it.

But I really want to thank you for coming here. I know you're very active in the space and you speak constantly on about AI and you're coming up soon on “Voice and AI”.

And where can people find you if they wanted to reach out and talk to you some more about this or have some interest in learning more about Blackdream.ai?

The websites about to be launched Blackdream.AI. On Linkedin I think only Eros Marcello around and www.theotheeros.com,  the website was sort of a portfolio.  Don't judge me I'm not a web designer but I did my best. It came out OK and then you have LinkedIn, Instagram its Eros Marcello on Twitter/X its ErosX Marcello.

I try to make sure that I'm always up to something cool so I'm not an influencer by any stretch or a thought-leader, but I certainly am always getting into some interesting stuff, be it offices at NASA Kennedy Space Center, or stranded in Puerto Rico…. you never know. It's all a little bit of reality television sprinkled into the tech.

Katty:

Before I let you go what's the last message you want to leave the audience with?

Eros:

 Basically like you know I was I grew up playing in hardcore punk bands and you know.  Pharma and Defense, AI for government and Apple AI engineer, none of that was necessarily in the cards for me, I didn't assume. So my whole premise is, I know I may be speaking about some on higher levels things or in dealing more in the technicalities than the seemingly, the whole premise is that you have to identify as a creative that this is a technical space and the technical is ultimately going to inform the design.

And I didn't come out of the womb or hail from you know parents who are AI engineers. This isn't like a talent, this is an obsession.  So if I can learn this type of knowledge and apply it, especially in this rather succinct amount of time I have, that means anyone can. I mean it's not some secret sauce or method to it, it's watch YouTube videos or read papers, you know tutorials, tutorials, tutorials.

Anyone can get this type of knowledge, and I think it's requisite that they do to bolster and support and scale their creative efforts. So this is gonna be a unique situation in space and time where that you know the more technical you can get, or understand or at least grasp the better output creatively the right it will directly enrich and benefit your creative output and I think that's a very kind of rare symmetry that isn't really inherent in a lot of other things but if I can do it anyone.

I love it thank you for this peek into what's going on the defense component of it, the cyber security component of it, the IP component of it… there just so many implications that are things we need to talk about and think about, so thank you for starting that conversation.

Absolutely pleasure I appreciate you having me on hopefully we do this again soon.

Rachel Cooke | Lead Above Noise | Modern Mentor Podcast

Katty: Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Rachel Cooke to our session here today and talking about the employee experience and why it is so impactful for both engagement as well as retention in our companies. Welcome, Rachel. So happy to have you here. I’m excited to talk to you about this incredibly impactful journey that our employees go through and that we go through as business owners and as managers of our teams.

Katty: I had the pleasure of hearing and meeting Rachel at the Association of Talent Development Conference in San Diego. We've been talking about having her on here so that we can talk about the WHY of this amazing initiative, as well as the road trip that Rachel refers to when she talks about the employee experience. Why don't we start there? Let's talk about this journey, this road trip that we're on.

Rachel: That's awesome. You have such a good memory, Katty. I do love a good metaphor when I talk about these things. I use the road trip metaphor, you could pick many, but I think sometimes, something like the employee experience can feel kind of cloudy and ethereal and nobody quite knows how to wrap their hands around it. And so, I like to say that the employee experience is a journey and I think about it as a road trip and it has these three core elements.

To take a successful road trip, you need a destination; you need to understand where you are going, you need a road map; you need some turn-by-turn directions, and then hopefully you've got some fuel in the tank, and if you're lucky, some snacks and a playlist, but something to sort of fuel you or give momentum to your journey. That's how I like to think about it.

Katty: I love that. Can we start at the beginning of that employee experience? We're in the recruitment space here at Artisan Creative and I sometimes get the impression that the employee experience for some companies starts after the onboarding. But we see the employee experience, the candidate experience if you will, even before being hired. You know how the interviews are conducted, how they're being responded to during that whole application process. So maybe it's the pre-journey of the journey, right, the conversation, and that state. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Rachel: Yeah, I see your pre-candidate experience and I would say it goes back even further than that which is the experience that your existing employees are having within your organization, such that they are going to be ambassadors of and successful recruiters of that talent to whom you want to deliver that amazing candidate experience. I do think it is always ongoing and continuous.

I think fundamentally for me, what stands out about the employee experience and where a lot of well-intentioned companies are getting it wrong, is that I think companies tend to think about the work that we're doing and then the employee experience,  that we think about later when we have free time. Which spoiler, we never have free time. I believe that a real powerful employee experience fuels rather than follows the work.

I think employee experience is not about free food, foosball tables, and sort of fancy cocktail parties. It begins with how we enable our employees to deliver the work that we have hired them to do.

I think that resonates even in the interview process. Even in the recruitment process, I see organizations posting roles and then running these potential candidates through the wringer with really complex application processes. You've got applicant tracking systems, you've got recruiters that have this as #17 on the priority list and people are interviewing with 27 different people and then waiting months and months and frankly, in a buyers' market, which we may not be in right now but we will be in again it's an off-putting experience for somebody to have.

For me, the fundamental first question is what can we be doing as organizations to streamline and simplify how we are finding, attracting, and recruiting top talent? Where can we strip out some of the noise I can guarantee, there is plenty in there.

Katty: Absolutely. I 100% agree with you. I recorded a mini session on the whole interviewing journey and that's what I talked about. Sometimes, our intent as a company is to make sure all stakeholders are involved, make sure everybody has a voice, and everybody has had the chance to meet the new candidate, the new prospect if you will. But the implication of that is very different and how it lands on someone could be very different. Sometimes we don't look at that side of it as to how it is my six-step interview process and assessment reflecting on us as a company.

Rachel: I could not agree more. You might recall that in the presentation I gave at ATD, I talked about these four pillars of the employee experience which are very much about asking the question, what are we as an organization doing to enable our teams to effectively deliver, develop, connect, and thrive?

To me, when we get those things right, we are both fueling work results and outcomes and we are effectively engaging our employees. In that parlance, going back to this recruitment experience, in recruitment engagement, our goal is to find top talent and bring them into the organization, right? What we should be asking in the organization is if we want our existing talent to do our internal recruiters or hiring leaders,  what we need them to deliver in this context is top talent to our organization. We need to be asking questions about what we can do to help them deliver that result more effectively and often it is stripping out extra voices, extra process steps, and extra approvals. It is streamlining the process. It is getting to the heart of the matter. It's not having 17 different people ask this person the same 25 questions. So on when we're thinking about it  all of our work, all of the pieces of the employee life cycle through this lens of how to help people deliver, develop, connect, and thrive. That first question is to deliver and so I think in so many recruiting processes we have all of these extra steps and overwrought decision-making processes and approvals, and, you know we have 17 different systems that need to talk to each other.

We have made it so much harder for our internal recruiters to deliver, which means finding the candidate and bringing them in. How do we simplify it? How do we streamline it? How do we empower the right people to get it done quickly and effectively?

Katty: I love that. Can you dive a little bit more into each of those steps and what could a company do as they're trying to enhance their employee experience, what can they do in the delivery stage, the development stage, the connect stage, and the thrive stage that really would deliver that?

Rachel: When we were at the ATD conference, and we had the good fortune of watching a keynote delivered by Adam Grant, who is a tremendously renowned Organizational Psychologist, Leadership Researcher, and Speaker, something he said that resonated with me was that in the current environment that we're in, the number one most critical leadership capability he said it's not a lot of intelligence, it's not charisma, it's not vision, it's not all these things. The number one most critical leadership capability that any leader needs today is agility; the ability to quickly pivot and to see what's happening at the moment and be able to flex.

That resonated with me because that very much aligns with the way that I think about the employee experience. I think that what's happening is that organizations are looking for those best practices out there. What are the experts saying we should do around development? What are the experts saying we should be doing to drive connection?

The way that I think about it is the best way to enable your employees to deliver their best results, and their best impact, the best way to get them to develop new skills and to feel invested in and grow and be coached. The best way to help them connect, whether you are hybrid or remote, you know the best way to help them connect, with customer with purposes, and finally, the best ways to help them thrive, which to me is about feeling well and balanced and whole is you've got to understand where they are today and where they need to be.

I think where so many people are seeking those external best practices, what they need to be doing is seeking the expertise of their internal experts, which are their teams, and their employees.

When I run an employee experience audit with a company, what I don't do is come in and tell them what to do. What I do is I come in and help them understand this framework. Why are these the four pillars? And we talk about some data around why delivering, developing, connecting, and thriving are so important. But the expertise that I bring is in the asking and the facilitating and the synthesizing.

So my expertise is not in the ideas or the tactics. My expertise is in framing and asking and soliciting ideas from employees so that I can come back to a leadership team and say, here's how well your employees are currently able to deliver, develop, connect, and thrive.

Here are some of your blind spots, your opportunity areas. We're going to assume positive intent, you mean to do well, but here is a place where people are struggling to deliver because they're struggling to access this system. These types of decisions take too long to make.

Or in the develop bucket, you've got a million courses in your learning management system, but nobody can find time to do the learning, or there's not a culture of coaching. What about upskilling your leaders?

My expertise and the value I bring to an organization is tapping into the wisdom that they are sitting on and they didn't even realize it. When an organization can open its ears and be agile and say, OK, whatever employees need at the moment, that's what we're going to do. That's where we're going to leverage that Adam Grant wisdom that's where I see the employee experience start to shift quickly and meaningfully.

Katty: Love that. And I should have known that because agility is one of our core values. But the word was just out of my mind.

Rachel: You’re doing it so organically, you don't even think about it.

Katty: There you go. That must be it. But thank you for saying that because you are right. We forget that sometimes those little things may seem little and I will get to it later, but impact what that experience is. Not being able to have your different technology pieces talk to each other and having to do ten steps to do something that would only take two steps in reality and so forth. So I love this notion of every organization has its potential and its opportunity bucket. You go in there and you can find out what that is.

I would imagine part of that whole component of that employee experience also is how much they feel heard and seen and belonging and that whole component of that teamwork plays profoundly around that.

Rachel: Absolutely. I so often go into organizations that have these robust employee engagement surveys that they run once a year and then they get all the data and they spend months crunching and analyzing and slicing and dicing, and from the employee perspective, they're like we took the survey three months ago, I haven't heard squat. My voice doesn't matter and I'm not going to waste my time doing next year's survey. Whereas with these employee experience pulse checks, I call them, it is fast.

I go in, I run these focus groups and we turn around results within a week and we deliver a set of actions. Recommended, small actions. They don't need lots of dollars and lots of approvals. Tweaks. It's a series of experiments. Let's try making all of our 60-minute meeting default is now 45 minutes versus 60. Or we don't do meetings on Fridays. Or let's experiment with instead of me, the leader always running our team meetings, we're going to take turns running them because people want an opportunity to have that leadership experience.

We look for these small, quick-to-implement experiments that we can run and we run them through the language of employee experience. So we invite employees into these focus groups, we capture their ideas, and we reported out quickly. Then as we start implementing ideas, we say we're doing this,  “we're changing our meeting times, we're changing how we run meetings because of your voice, because of your input, it matters”. Employees feel heard and they feel valued.

One of the conversations I love having is when I run these pulse checks and I sit down with the clients and I report out the results and the client says, “Well, where do we start”? I love to be able to say you already have started.

Just through the action of asking these questions, not in a survey where people are filling out boxes,  it's very static to solicit action-oriented intelligence. You want to invite people into a dialogue and by inviting them into a dialogue and just letting them ventilate, letting them get their voices heard, letting them say, “Oh my God, thank you for asking. I have spent 27 hours over the past year wrangling this process when it could be so much cleaner, but nobody's asked.” Just by asking and listening and playing it back to them, you've already started the journey. You've already given them that space, you've invited them in and you've heard them. You're already past the finish line. I find that clients kind of get excited about that. We're already at step two. That's fabulous. Let's keep going.

Katty: Beautiful. There's so much wisdom in what you're saying because sometimes just because we've done things a certain way all along doesn't mean there's not an opportunity to make a change. Hearing that coming from somebody else's voice is so impactful. Some people see things differently, so why not listen to them?

Rachel: Absolutely. And these are the people executing the processes. These are the people who are engaging with your customers or engaging with your candidates. They're the ones who see and feel the pain points. So their inputs matter more than anyone's.

Katty: Exactly. This brings me to the development component of your 4 pillars. You talk often about career development and just that internal mobility and just having this opportunity to have your voice heard and showcase what you're capable of is a great opportunity to hopefully advance within your team, advance within your company. When it comes to the recruitment phase, bringing it back to that, I often ask our clients, "Have you looked within? Is there anyone on your team that can do this or you can train or is there an opportunity for that before we start looking outside?” That's the last thing I want is to be looking outside it, then somebody internally not being recognized or at the 11th hour the client said, oh, we found somebody internal. Let's have that conversation ahead of the game.

Rachel: Absolutely. I'm not a recruitment expert, but I did use to work as an HR business partner and so I partnered with recruitment one of the things that I always found with my business partners is what they would put together, you know a job description or job rack and there would be like 17 required. Do you really like the person who's going to do this job? If you want to prioritize these 17 required skills and rank them one through 17, can you do that? And they would do that. And I would say, let's look at numbers 13 through 17, what if somebody didn't have those? Could they still be successful at that job? And the answer was almost always yes. And then I would say, well, what about numbers 9 through 13?

I think as leaders we tend to write these job descriptions, and like the fantasy person would be amazing at absolutely everything. When the reality is, we need to be more discerning at hiring leaders around what fundamentally does this person need to be able to do on day one? Where can we leverage somebody who may have less, let's say technical capability, but they've been within our organization for three years and they know how things work and they got our culture and they have relationships with our clients. How do we think about weighing the value of those things relative to expertise in the XYZ system? Right, because that stuff is trainable. But this three years' worth of interior knowledge and understanding of how to get things done, that just takes three years. You can't quickly onboard somebody to that.

I do love to challenge organizations to think a little bit more differently and openly about what is really required and what is maybe the value of some of your internal candidates that you are taking for granted and where can we start to weigh the value of what somebody internally brings versus somebody external.

Katty: I love that we are so aligned on that. I often talk about what are the must-have skills and what are the nice-to-haves. Nice-to-haves are great to have, but are they a deal breaker? If they're not, let's somehow distinguish them on that job description and also the hard skills versus the soft skills; the EQ piece of it is so important. What if somebody had all the technical skills but didn't have any of the soft skills that you're looking for? They didn't have the communication skills, didn't have the leadership skills, didn't have a teamwork mindset, like all of those things, are almost even more important because you can teach the technical component if needed.

Rachel: Absolutely and not to mention, and I don't want to take us too far on a tangent, but there's a ton of data out there and I'm sure you've seen it that shows statistically a woman is much less likely to apply for a job unless she possesses 100% of the skills listed, whereas a man statistically pretty much he just needs three and he's going to go for it, right? So we are unwittingly limiting our talent pool and frankly limiting our ability to build pipelines of women leaders, which I think a lot of organizations are focusing on right now. The more skills we require, the more heavily we're going to wait for our applicant pool towards men. This is women, and I think that's something we just need to be aware of.

Katty: Very valid point. Thank you for bringing that up. Can we talk about “Filtering Out the Ins”? Can you talk a little bit about that and what that was in greater detail?

Rachel: I think that part of what confuses people about the employee experience, like I was saying earlier, I think we can feel kind of like everything, right? What isn't the employee experience? For me the question to be asking isn't what is and what isn't the employee experience.

A better question to ask is where can we have an impact on the employee experience? I talk about filtering out the four Ins and I'll tell you what they are in just a second. But for me, the four In’s are areas that do touch the employee experience, but they are not where we get the bang for our buck. I'd like to filter them out so that we can focus on where we do get impact. The first one is what I call the intangible and that is your organizational culture. I think of organizational culture like the weather, it's like the climate, it touches us, it impacts the choices that we make, but it takes many, many actions. Over long stretches of time to shift the weather, shift the climate, shift organizational culture. So it matters, but it's not where we get impact, so I filter it out.

The second “in” that I filter out is what I call the inaccessible. These are things like your compensation philosophy, the location, or the layout of your physical building. They are things that again impact our employee experience, but they are only informed by decisions made at the very top of your organization, right? Leaders in most organizations are not able to influence your comp philosophy or your physical location. So again, not a lot of bang for your buck when only C-level executives can touch it. So we filter it out, we filter out the intangible and we filter out the inaccessible.

The third that I filter out is what I call the indelible or the unerasable. And these are things that I consider table stakes. Things like having fair market rate compensation, having basic policies that keep people feeling safe, and having an equitable approach to leading your workforce. These are the things that if you get them right, they're invisible. They're not winning you in any contest, but if you get them wrong, they're going to destroy your employee experience. So just get them to baseline and then. Nobody wins the employee experience contest by having fair, inequitable policies. So that's the third one, the indelible.

Then the 4th one I adorably call incase you have money to burn. And these are what I think of as sexy extras. These are the free food, the foosball tables, and the fancy holiday parties. I call these the sizzle and fizzle. So they're like a sugar rush to your employee experience. They're exciting, they're fun, and then we acclimate. They're not the things that drive our experience. So when you can filter out the intangible, which is culture, and the inaccessible, which are those things only decided by the top. The indelible, are your hygiene factors or your table stakes, and then in case you have money to burn or your sexy extras, you filter those out, where you're left is focusing on creating the conditions that allow us to deliver, develop, connect, and thrive. And that's how I get there. We've taken the road trip backward. But I still love it.

Katty: Well you know sometimes when you're on a road trip you have to make sure that you're not taking a turn in the wrong direction.

Rachel: We're checking the rearview.

Katty: We're making sure that our Google Maps is connected to the satellite still. How's that for just taking that analogy and just running with it?

Rachel: I love it. I love what you did there. How would you encourage a management team to start looking at this puzzle piece? For some companies, it is a puzzle piece. They may not even know where to start. I would say there's a macro and a micro. There's the employee experience from an organizational standpoint. But, also really looking at each team and how that team leads is leading that experience within that. So how would you say for someone who's never done this before, maybe they don't even have an onboarding program. This is another conversation for another day, but how would they even begin this process?

Rachel: I believe that the process genuinely begins with education and alignment. I go into several organizations and I'll talk to a handful of senior leaders, and each one has a completely different definition of what the employee experience is or what matters. So I think if it begins with just bringing a leadership team together, having a conversation, providing an education on why these four pillars, right, What's the data behind why these are the four that matter and what do they mean, right? What are the things,  when we think about what helps organizations deliver, we think about things like. Do we have the right number of priorities? Do we have alignment? Do we have tools and resources? Do we have obstacles being stripped out? When we think about what helps teams develop, do we have a culture of coaching? Do we know how to give feedback? Do we have on-the-job experience? Do we have peer mentors? So bringing a leadership team together, giving them the language of delivering, developing, connecting, and thriving, and just helping them understand what are some of.

Those bullets are underneath each of these pillars. I think it starts there because you cannot move an employee experience until you begin by just understanding what constitutes it.

 So I always begin there. A lot of my engagements will begin with a keynote or an interactive workshop with the leadership team just to start building that language. From there, I love to encourage a leadership team or senior leaders to just start using that language within the organization because again, you've got employees walking around saying well I think the employee experience at Google is better because they do free food. What I think is important is that leadership teams start to talk about the employee experience through the lens of we want to fuel and not follow the real work. So it begins with conversations, from there, I think the next step is just a little bit of observation. Once we start thinking about the employee experience through the lens of deliver, develop, connect, and thrive, it helps us to put on a filter that suddenly now we can start to spot. Oh, you know what? I recognize as a senior leader, I've been sitting on this decision for three weeks and I'm now realizing seventeen people in this organization who have not been able to get anything done because I'm sitting with this thing on my desk. It helps us just to start to notice some of these opportunities. I think that that's really where it begins.

From a macro perspective, I think the executive leader's job is to have this language, have this awareness, start to talk about it, start to cascade it down to their leaders, and start to infuse it into the organization. I think you're right, Katty, that there are things that need to happen at the team level as well because a lot of times what's keeping the marketing team able to deliver is very different from what's holding back the HR team, the recruiting team, the finance team, and so on. Giving leaders at the function or team level some tools and some skills around what are some questions you can ask your team to solicit their ideas? How can you facilitate candid dialogues such that your employees will not just have the ideas but feel safe? Been offering them speaking up, How can you as a leader at that level start to implement experiments and have a sense to know if it's working or if it's not working, what's working well and how do we continue this?

I also love to talk about starting to infuse practice sharing conversation. So over time bringing leaders of different functions or teams together to share strategies. Oh, I tried this with my team and it worked incredibly well. Maybe you want to try this with your team. So I think it's a very organic process and this is why I call it a road trip. It's not a project it doesn't have you know it's not a one-month thing. It is a journey, right? It is always kind of ongoing, but you have to have clarity of that North Star and then invite your team to help you inform the road map or build the steps.

Katty: Sometimes it's not a straight line. There are bumps in the road and there are some curves and so forth.

So a final question. And it’s a big one it has to do with the hybrid workforce and this, you know, that we have to admit, work has changed. My company's been remote for 12 years, so having a remote workforce is a normal thing. We came together and we built culture, probably in a more focused and intentional culture building because we are remote. But now we're in the space of people wanting people back in the office and or trying to navigate the whole hybrid space, can we talk about the employee experience as it relates to the remote and or the hybrid workforce?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean there is no doubt that things have changed significantly, and I don't believe anybody has cracked the nut on this yet. I think we've learned a lot. I think we still have a lot more to learn. I love to tell people one of the things I like to do in my free time is go hiking, very gently. I like a gentle hike. Sometimes you go to a public park and you will see a sign that says something like a “$500 fine for littering, be warned.” Other times you'll see a sign that says “Please help keep our parks clean, take your trash out with you”, and at the end of the day those both drive the same behavior in me. Either way, I am going to throw out my trash and not litter, but in that first example, that sort of threat-based example it makes, you know, this makes me wanna revolt. It's almost like, well, can I sneak a piece of trash in there? Don't talk to me that way. I'm a grown-up. But when you invite me to be a part of something bigger, you invite me to be one of the many who are keeping this beautiful public space clean. That inspires me and that excites me and I think about that.

The principle is, the way that we are bringing our teams together I think too many organizations in my opinion and my experience are going with the must be in the office three days a week or everyone's in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which to me is sort of like that don't litter or will fine you sign because people resent it, right. When you are threatened and when you are forced, what you are compelled to do, the human reaction, the human gut reaction is “No, no, don't tell me what to do.” I think companies are without purpose, forcing people to do a thing that is backfiring. I'm not focused on keeping the park clean. I am focused on how angry I am at that sign.

What organizations want to be doing is driving engagement and driving in connection and by forcing people into an office, I think it's having the opposite effect.

What I'm encouraging leadership teams to do is to be thoughtful about it. Rather than Tuesdays and Thursdays, infuse purpose into those days. How about people come in when we're bringing customers in? Or people come in when there's a big brainstorming day. Or people come in when we're doing a leadership offsite or a learning event, when we infuse a sense of purpose and we're all together into bringing people physically into an office. I think that that can be so much more powerful. I think forcing people's hands is not the way to do it.

I just ran a meeting  a couple of weeks ago. It was a 25-person leadership team. 50% of those people were physically together, including me. 50% were remote and I was not granted, I am a facilitator, so this is what I do for a living and I understand not every leader can be so thoughtful, but I was really thoughtful in how I designed that experience such that we made it feel, as much as possible, like everybody had an equivalent experience of that day.

I think the more thoughtful we can be when we're operating in a hybrid way to make sure that we're not doing exercises where half the people see things on the wall and half the people don't. To make sure that we are leveraging that virtual technology, I had people buddy up. So everybody who was participating remotely had a buddy in the room, and that was just their point of contact. And so if somebody participating remotely had an idea but couldn't raise their hand or couldn't hear something, they would ping their buddy, and their buddy would ping me. That's just one tactic but I think about being thoughtful about how we equalize the experience when we are operating remotely and not make people feel like first and second-class citizens based on where they're participating. These are just some of the things I have started to pick up along the way.

Katty: I appreciate that. I appreciate the buddy system quite a bit because sometimes, you may forget the person who's on the screen or not, you know. Sometimes they don't realize they're on mute and they're trying to say something and it's just not working. So we appreciate that buddy system.

So Rachel, as we wrap up, we talked a little bit about your expertise and what you bring to the table, but can you talk about Lead Above Noise, how it came to be, and where you see yourself growing in your practice?

Rachel: I started to Lead Above Noise in 2015, and I named the organization because I had worked for many years as an HR practitioner in big corporate America, and I found that as organizations, we just keep throwing more and more stuff at leaders and it feels like the leader's job is to somehow juggle more and more. Whereas, I believe that is the crux of being an effective leader and being a successful organization is really about understanding how to filter out all the noise and understand what to focus on and it's so hard to say no to the things that aren't going to fuel you forward and yet I think it's one of the most important things that we can do as leaders.

I really, truly believe that the most successful organizations in the world, I don't care how good your product or service is, your organization will only ever be as strong as the talent you've hired to deliver your products and services. So investing in your talent, understanding their experiences, and developing your leaders, I think is truly the secret to success. That is what we specialize in in Lead Above the Noise, we focus on employee experience. We do keynotes and we run these audits within organizations to help them build these action plans. And then I also run a group coaching program for leaders which is called SIMPLE, which is an acronym that focuses on building what I believe is kind of the six core skills, the six foundational skills. You used the phrase earlier, the must-have and the nice-to-have. I think especially when people are stepping into new leadership roles, they're trying to boil the ocean, they're trying to learn everything and I think I run this cohort-based program that helps leaders understand what they need most critically, start by building those skills and get really comfortable, confident, and then they can add other skills over time. So that's really where I spend my time.

Katty: I love it. There's a through line in everything that you've said, wrapping it up with SIMPLE, pretty much everything you've said from when we were talking about the job description. Taking things out of the job descriptions that aren't necessary, the four INs, you know, the Ins that you were talking about, taking those out of the, filtering them out, and then with the leadership that you just spoke about is, you know, just let's focus and simplify it. Let's just really get to the core of what it is that we need to do.

Anyways, there is so much noise around us and so much noise. Hard. But yeah, we've got to keep filtering. Yeah. Well, I appreciate your time. Thank you for being here, and thank you for sharing your wisdom with our audience. I loved this conversation.

Desmond Lomax is a Senior Consultant, Master Facilitator, and Implementation Leader in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion work at the Arbinger Institute.

Find Desmond on Linkedin

Arbinger books: Anatomy of Peace | The Outward Mindset | Leadership and Self-Deception

What I especially appreciated was how you were able to take this topic that is top of mind and many people out there are talking about it, but you were able to humanize it and you were able to allow the audience to be able to connect from a human to human level. That obviously is so important in every environment, every circle that we’re in. 

For our conversation, I wanted to bring that into the workplace, specifically hiring and integrating new people into the mix. But before we get into that, I'd love to just know how you get involved in this line of work.

Desmond: I started in the prison system. I was a therapist for the prison system and it was my first introduction to marginalized people struggling to make it in society, outside of my personal experiences.

I can't think of too many things more difficult than coming out of a prison system and returning as a citizen of the society and not feeling that you have the capacity or the resources to be able to do that successfully.

So I went from a therapist to a manager, to a state director where I was in charge of all the programming outside of the prison in the state of Utah. From there, I started teaching courses in Forensic Social Work at the University of Utah. I'm a Licensed Clinical Therapist, so it all came together.

I started doing many podcasts and videos about the things I've learned, and then my son passed away. I lost a child, he was a freshman in college. He committed suicide. I found myself in this unique position where I was like okay, Dezzy, you’ve been through some stuff now, you know what it's like to lose a child to something horrific. What can you do differently in society to create a greater sense of inclusion and belonging?

I think that's what motivates me. My son seemed isolated and alone, even though we talked every day. We had a lot of communication and people cared about him, but there just wasn't a sense of belonging for him. I wanted to do something about that. I just took all of this background and my knowledge and as I was working with Arbinger, I joined their design team, and we created the curriculum called Outward Inclusion and I spent the last few years sharing the message of what it looks like in your organization and in your space where we can, 1)  see the humanity of another person, and then 2) understand our impact on that humanity.

As simple as that sounds, there are things that we all have that interfere with our ability to do those two basic things. I've been working all over this country, all over internationally, just doing the work, being motivated by the loss I've experienced and the knowledge that I've gained.

Katty: Thank you for sharing that and heartfelt condolences. I don't know how long ago that was, but it's always fresh in the heart of anyone who's lost someone. Thank you for sharing that with us. I appreciate that you took something so devastating and you were able to turn it around and then bring positive impact to others from it.

Desmond: Yes, I hope so. What I've learned is that loss is energy. It's bonafide energy and either you do something with it, or it does something with you. I would like to say there are all these other options, but either that is the same energy that is just really hard. I've seen both of them in my life so I'm not trying to say I'm on one side or the other. But loss is a lot of energy that you need to transform into something or else that loss will transform you. That's what I've learned and that's what I'm trying to do.

Katty: Thank you for doing that and thank you for including us in that conversation. Let's go back to the two-pointers that you mentioned. The first one was seeing the humanity in each other and the second one was impacting humanity. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how it impacts the workspace, specifically as we bring in new people into that workspace; a brand new hire joining an existing team that's been together for a long time?

Desmond: I love that, Katty. I always say to people, good people, good hard-working people are often blind to their impact on others. The first step to understanding my impact is to humanize aspects of the workplace. If I'm not humanizing the workplace, and I'm seeing people as objects, either vehicles that are doing the work I need them to do, or obstacles that aren't doing the work I need to do or relevancies. When I see people through that lens, what’s happening is that I'm spending a lot of time justifying my view of a human being good enough, and spending a lot less time understanding that human being in a way in which I can be more effective.

Thus, the new employee coming into the workplace my view and my objectification of that new employee can impact my ability to improve their life-work situations.

If they approach it like “Here comes a new employee. It’s going to take nine months to get them on board. Three months to do this and one month...” If all they are is a problem that I now have to carry until I get them to a point of efficiency, they will sense that and they will resist. What we've learned is that all people will resist being objectified.

If we can start looking at the resistance in our lives and how we are seeing people and their resistance to us, we can start to recognize that maybe there are ways in which I see this person, ways in which I objectify this person that might be creating some of this resistance.

Katty:  You're saying that they're resisting because there's a feeling of sensing something coming from us that's creating that? They're putting their guards up. Is that what's happening?

Desmond: Absolutely. Well, it's twofold. One thing, yes. A lot of times when we have resistance, it's because people have a sense of objectification. They see us objectifying them.

The twofold is this, we may be doing things to objectify them and they may have emotional luggage that they bring with them to the circumstance where they've been objectified in the past that can also create some of those feelings. It can be twofold. It's not necessarily all on our side.

As leaders, as people who are supervising, people who are co-workers, and we have a direct impact on people, we can only work on the latter part; our impact. How we impact these folks so that they feel seen, they feel valued, they feel they're a part of the process, and they feel amid all the difficulties that come along with work, that they matter to us. That’s the part that we can control.

Katty That we can hear their voices, right?

Desmond: Yes. We can read a lot of books like, “How to Influence People and Make Friends,” and gain all the tools in the world, but people have a sense of when you acknowledge their humanity or not. What we’ve recognized is that in the hustle and bustle of work, when we’re trying to accomplish what we need to accomplish, at times we are not humanizing the process. We do not see people as people and they are responding in a way that's resistant to us as their leaders or co-workers.

Katty: What would you recommend both from the person who's starting their job, as you said, they're also bringing their baggage into the mix. We all have them, right? We travel with them. Hopefully one day we can set them down and lose that baggage.

We're bringing that with us into a new role and our teammates, supervisors, all of them, everybody has their baggage of life with them. Right? How do we go about creating a space and creating dialogue around not allowing that to permeate? I would imagine that even during the interviewing phase, that probably can show up. Right?

Desmond: Yes, this is something I've recently done in my whole life. I recently moved to a beautiful little town on the border of Maryland and Pennsylvania side of the base and Mason Dixon Line. 35 minutes from Baltimore. Amish countries. I get the best of both worlds. I can have a fresh pretzel one night and a crab cake the next night. Anyway, I'm in heaven.

We've been here for a year. We spend more time inside of our house fixing up our house may be engaging with the community. I go to my wife, like, “Hey, it's the Fourth of July. The Lions International Club is looking for volunteers. Let's do some social exercise.” Let's just get out and meet people and connect with people. It's a social exercise. We went out there for two days, we volunteered, flipped burgers and prepped hotdogs and hamburgers, and met a lot of people in the community. We have our social baggage; we have our challenges and fears that are associated with connecting with new people and being in a new space.

In the midst of all that, we have to practice social exercise, social work, and our ability to connect with others in meaningful ways. If I'm the new employee, I may be disappointed if I'm waiting for someone to engage me positively. I remember one of my first days at the prison. I worked as a correctional officer for many years and then became a therapist. The correctional work wasn't for me. I wanted to help and I didn't feel like I was helping, so I became a therapist. On my first day as a therapist, one of the supervisors goes, “Hey, what are you doing here? Don't you work somewhere else now?”  I said no, I came here. He looked at me and he goes, “Why would you do that? This is horrible.” That was my first day at work. Sometimes, the social exercise we get from others is not the most positive thing.  Sometimes, as new employees, If we don't socially engage multiple people, we'll find ourselves in a situation where the people that are engaging us can be bringing a lot of negative energy. For the new employee, social engagement and social exercise, meeting new people communicating with people, sharing your background, and gaining a deeper understanding of others is just a great way to acclimate very quickly into the process.

For new employees, it's the same type of work. For every person that comes in, there should be a system in place. We can understand them in a way that extends beyond the work and what I mean by that is when people feel seen and valued, you understand their role, and they feel supported, they work at higher levels than those that don't.

There's this generation that I come from, where it’s like I care about you because I give you a paycheck. That's my way of saying that you've worked, good job. You get a paycheck.

Somebody's like, “Desmond, I'm confused what’s with all this seen, valued, have a voice, and roles? Back in the day, you gave me a paycheck and I'm unhappy. People have changed. Pandemics will do that to them. People will change. They want more from their work environment. As leaders, a part of our social exercise is helping those people that we're supervising or co-working with feel that sense of belonging that's needed for work performed.

Katty: What would you say to the managers who are in charge of creating that welcoming, open environment, how do they go about humanizing that connection and roll out the carpet, that welcome carpet for their new people?

Desmond: I've got a great story about when I was a State Director. I realized that a lot of people didn't like me. So I was reflecting on what can you do when people inherently don't like you. Because I think it's the position when you are in charge and you make hard decisions. I think it's also the personality. Some people like my personality, some people can't stand me. It’s the nature of life. It's okay.

I realized that as a leader, the only way for people to see you or recognize your personhood is for you to make them a priority. So as a leader, everyone that got hired, I tell all my regional managers, you go to the HR to make sure they get all the paperwork done. You come right to my office. We have a 30-minute meeting to learn. I got to know and learn about that person and in that meeting, I got to learn about that person, I got to express appreciation for that person and I got to let them know I was there to support them. In 30 minutes, you can accomplish so much. Over several years, all of a sudden, I became a very, like well-appreciated supervisor. Because I simply took the time as we say in the DEI space, to close the proximity. Instead of being the supervisor over here (so far away in distance) now I'm the supervisor right here in support of you. You don't have to guess who I am. Right there. The proximity is closed and I'm right there to support you.

Katty: Close the proximity. I love that.

Desmond: Yes, supervisors need to close the proximity so that the people that are there being supervised by the other supervisees don't have to guess about the type of person they are.

Katty:Really showing up as authentic leaders themselves.

Desmond: Yes, if they are willing to do it. Some people don't like themselves. I work with hundreds of hundreds, thousands probably of leaders when you get down to it, who are very nervous, very insecure, and worried about how people are seeing them and their ability to lead. If I'm stuck in that space, how am I going to be anything for anyone else?

Katty: If one isn't open, if they can't close the proximity for themselves, it’s going to be hard to do it for somebody else.

Desmond: Beautifully stated. At the heart of most conflict is our internal struggles with ourselves. When we're treating people poorly, it’s simply a reflection of our self-worth.

Katty: It’s that baggage again.

Desmond: There we go. It's universal. Make no mistake, it's universal. We all carry things with us that we have to address, we have to acknowledge, and we have to love to work through them to heal. I spent many years as a therapist and the number one issue I saw was that people were so resistant to their imperfections. They were so resistant to the fact that they wanted to accomplish something and they couldn't. I spent quite a lot of time asking them can you love that part of yourself? Can we do that first? I think we can start making some grounds for changing the behaviors that you want to change.

Katty: Love that. That’s sometimes easier said than done.

Desmond: Katty, that's okay too. I have lifetime struggles that I'm currently dealing with that I'm trying to overcome. Things I'm trying to get better at and I struggle at those things all the time. Do you know what I call that? Being a human being. I am very human. They're just elements of my life that are very human and that I need to improve on and get better at, and things I need to love about myself that are hard to love and just going through that whole process.

Katty: Thank you for sharing that. So that was point one. Let's talk about that second pointer, humanizing or creating impact with that.

Desmond: I work with a lot of organizations and a lot of training has put us in this space. It's like, well, my intent is good. Let's just assume everyone has good intent. Let's just assume that we're all just, in the midst of our humanism, we all have good intent. Sometimes we're going to have conflict. I think that's a good place to start. But there's something we can do a little bit better, and that is having the courage, to understand how we're directly impacting the people who lead the Cowork in a positive and or negative way. I think that's the kicker. Do we have the courage to ask the right questions in a way, where we can get the answers we need to understand our impact? Because until we do, we're just kind of an ‘okay’ leader.

Katty: That is such an important point there. I was just talking about this the other day with someone about the interviewing process and how in some companies multiple rounds of interviews are necessary and multiple stakeholders are necessary to decide whether a candidate moving forward or not. The intent may be to include all stakeholders and that decision-making, but the impact on that candidate sometimes is either the company can't make a decision or they don't like me. They're not going to move forward with me. And we just don't sometimes recognize that our intent may be a bit intense, and the implication that it has to that person is a completely different one. Just having that awareness is so huge.

Desmond: It is and like I said, that's just one aspect and just look at how powerful it is. If I can just address that aspect, we can figure out a system to interview people in a way in which they feel that they're joining a meaningful work family, joining a group of people that are willing to support them, instead of running them through this gauntlet. You can interview me six, seven times, but each time if I feel more at home with the organization, I'm fine, but if you're interviewing me five or six times, and I'm feeling unseen, I'm feeling like I'm more or less going through a process instead of being a part of a process. It's going to create the consequences you're talking about. That's why when we talk about this humanization, how does a human feel going through six interviews?

Why don’t we ask them and understand their impact? Leaders are busy and sometimes they just feel they do what they think is right and they’re not asking impact questions. They're not figuring out the pros and cons. So they're just decent. Not great. Hopefully, they're good, but they're just decent leaders who are unaware of how they are impacting people. Or even worse, I really know I’m having a negative impact but I don't know what to do differently, so I'm just gonna keep an emotional distance from everyone, continue to do my job, and do it in a way where I can maintain my job and stay blind to the impact because if I dug deeper into it, it would come up in a way where I might need to change.

Desmond: The most liberating thing we can do in life is change. It’s okay to be different. I work in spaces where people are waiting for me to say or do something wrong. Many of us work in those spaces. If you're in the DEI space, the Inclusion and Belonging space, and it's become politicized, people are waiting for you to say something to validate their view or to be in opposition to their view.

In situations like that, I have to be willing to humanize that process and say, “Yeah, I did say that and that's not appropriate.” Or, “Hey, I didn't understand that.”

As we say at Arbinger, it's not about being right, it's about getting it right. I can be my most authentic if my mindset is if I make a mistake, I'll just work on getting it right. Some people are so hell-bent on being right, they can't move to that stage of getting it right which would greatly improve their capacity to lead others or to work with others.

Katty: That's powerful. That recognition itself is powerful, to come to that as a leader of an organization and as a manager of a team, and recognize just what you said, that DEI space is about belonging and to have not only the foresight, but the strength to step into this unknown, or maybe it's uncomfortable, but that's okay. Because growth comes from that and that's a good thing.

Desmond: I would add the DEI space is about office and work productivity. We neglect that part of it sometimes. It is about work productivity. Research has been out for a long time about how people perform when they feel a sense of belonging.

We have to stop putting this DEI thing in a separate space. This is one of the things I talk about in my ADT talk. If I'm a leader, DEI is over here, away from me and I'm just doing the training. I'm trying to do this inclusion training to make sure my organization is going to be productive, but I haven't included myself in inclusion work.

It's about the other folks, it's about the females, it's about the people of color, it's about people with different sexual orientations than I am. We're missing the main fact that it is about you, no matter what your background, orientation, or beliefs are. If we all are working on inclusion, instead of it being something these marginalized groups need in my organization, that's when it fails. It fails when I don't include myself in the inclusion process as a leader. And I'm somehow supporting and helping all these other groups, not recognizing that when I feel included in those groups and we’re all feeling included, then productivity is a direct result.

Katty: So powerful. It takes me to me. I'm an immigrant and I came here when I was in high school. In the middle of 9th grade, we immigrated to the States. I felt so excluded. I'm from Iran originally and this was in the middle of the hostage crisis. Probably not the best time, I felt, not the best time to be Iranian at that time, but I just felt very excluded. But I don't think anyone excluded me. I excluded myself because it felt like it was my protective layer of letting me exclude so that nobody says anything because that may hurt.

Desmond: There may be a twofold thing there, Katty. I'm going to protect myself because that's a lot easier than opening myself up to criticism and there's also the second part of it that could be I literally came from a different country where maybe society doesn't see it as a great place, and because of that, I might be susceptible to things that aren't nice. So it can be twofold, and that's the complexity of the work.

There are certain circumstances whereas an African American male, I'm probably a little overcautious. Like in how I engage people and how I communicate with people. I have bosses that are like, “Dezzy, you are way too agreeable.” I'm thinking in my mind like, do you guys want me to be disagreeable too? I don't. I don't want to come off as a disagreeable black guy that you work with. Agreeable works for me. Can you just let me let it work?

So there are parts of it that are grounded in my overprotection of myself, and parts of it are grounded in a lot of evidence that I've had throughout my life where people look at my skin color and treat me differently and make assumptions about me based upon that. It's that twofold nuance there and it's universal. You've had the experience that, I've had to experience that, and many people experience that in a lot of different spaces.

Katty: How do we ensure that in the workspace, in the hiring space, and in the recruiting space we can create this? We can close this proximity by using words where we can create a sense of belonging sooner than later. I think we recognize we need to do that but sometimes, it's too late and a candidate feels like they don't fit in. I'm leaving.

Desmond: That's a great question. Organizations need a common language. They need a common way to communicate. At Arbinger Institute, we try to provide people with that common language, but in like a worst-case scenario, you need everyone in the organization to understand this is our organization's definition of inclusion, belonging, diversity, and of equity. We need a common language so that we can take care of the people that we're bringing in.

The other part is we need to figure out where are our weak spots. Because most organizations are struggling internally with how they're treating each other. How can I expect the new people to come in and have a different experience? We need to work on the language. Focus on what's going on internally in our organization, and how we're currently treating each other, and then create a plan which humanizes the process across the board.

I know so many organizations, that want to create all these new processes for all the incoming people and the staff that are there, are like what? Do they get a $1000 bonus for getting hired? I understand the need to get people in the door, but I'm telling you, like, you need to humanize. The process get the common language is to figure out how to take care of people internally, then create a plan that involves the incoming people as well as the internal people in this process of belonging.

Katty: Because otherwise, you'll be creating separation.

Desmond: That's one of the common issues we have when organizations are trying to implement DEI work, it's not inclusive. They're trying to diversify but it's not inclusive and it's not creating levels of belonging that they would like. A lot of organizations like “What we do now?” Get a common language, take care of your people internally, make sure they're supported, and whatever you do over the next few years to create a strong inclusion and belonging system, do it across the board. I tell people, everything that they do should be able to be implemented across the board. If you can't do it across the board, you need to reflect upon it and see what your purpose is.

For example, there are a lot of groups and organizations like LGBTQ+, and Indigenous American groups. We have a lot of different groups and they're great if they're inclusive. If there is just a group for just people to talk amongst themselves about what's working and not working, then all it creates are silos. it's not inclusive. All the groups should be welcoming. All the groups should be sponsored in a way that they're providing education and support to everyone in the organization. I think from the recruitment and the new hires, doing things in a way where people are humanized across the board in the organization will get you a lot further than just focusing on the new hires who then come in, because then there are people who haven't gotten what they've gotten that are now having to train them. It's a lot of meaningful conflict.

One thing is to the middle managers and most organizations, I say that the C-Suite tries to define the culture. The middle managers and first-line supervisors are running with it. What I've learned is that we're neglecting first-line supervisors and middle-level managers. We're neglecting them and putting them in a situation where they get negative both ways. They're getting negative from all the problems they've got to deal with, with their staff, they're dealing with all the problems they have to deal with from the administrators about them, and they're just caught in the middle making two or three dollars more an hour than their staff, thinking what the hell is this, right?

What I've learned is that focusing on the trainers of these new hires, the first-line supervisors of these new hires, making sure they're cared for, they're trained in a way where they can be supportive, is everything. One of the most common things I see is “Hey Desmond, this is great training, but my first-line supervisor is still treating me like crap.” If we're not empowering our first-line supervisors, and caring for our first-line supervisors, then we're going to see ongoing issues with incoming staff.

Katty: What I'm hearing, Desmond is once we create that plan, it needs to be operationalized across everything. It can't be my twist on how we're going to be doing it. This is how we're doing it across the board at all levels. We all have to step into it. We all have to believe it. We all have to accept it otherwise, probably from a core value standpoint, it’s a mismatch anyway, right? It's probably not the right job for me. Someone who's not willing to embrace it.

Katty: You know, Katty, you're on point. I'd add one more word, modeling. You have to model. The strongest implementation of work is modeling. I tell people all the time and they think I'm weird, but it's just truthful. I say ever since I went to preschool, my parents have taught me. how to be safe as a black male in America. Be careful how you behave. Be careful how people respond to you. If you feel you're in danger, walk away. If there's an issue, do this. If someone comes to you in the middle of the night, call us. In my day, it was a pay phone. Get to a pay phone and call us. My whole life since I was in preschool, I've been trained to behave or act in certain ways to make sure my environment is safe; safe as I can control. I received my Ph.D. starting at the age of 4, 1/2 to now, of understanding people. Understanding the energy they bring, understanding the safety they bring or lack thereof. Understanding their frustrations and anger. I am just focused on the nuances of the people I work with, for good or bad. So when you come to me with this great, do I project right or this great initiative that we're going to do? And I'm using my skills. I'm 49 now. I'm using my 45 years' worth of skill to evaluate you as a person. I'm going to have a pretty clear, clean sense of whether you're genuine or not about the work you're going to do. Or whether this is just one more thing that you've been obligated to do as my supervisor

Katty: Checkbox, right?

Desmond: Yeah. I'm not alone in this. I'm not the only one in society that has been trained for safety to pick up on the nuances of others. I know women who will tell me at least you can walk around at night. It’s like I've talked to women who said, Oh my goodness, like that has been my experience, Ever since I've grown up, I've been very sensitive for my safety. So people know when people are thinking, they know when things matter to them. A lot of times we have these leaders that are going through the motions of the work. People know. Just before they even open their mouths, whether it's something authentic, or whether it's something you're just going to do the motions on. That's one of the reasons the DEI processes often fail.

Katty: Tell me about the process you guys have at Arbinger and please share a little bit about Arbinger and what it is that you do and how you go into organizations to create impact.

Desmond: We are an organizational change organization. We work on mindset change. One of our mottos is we like to humanize the workplace. We go into organizations through consulting and training, and we help create a common language. We call it the outward mindset, our ability to see people as people, or our ability to see people as objects. In the process of creating this language, we have multiple curriculums: outward performance, outward leadership, and outward inclusion, are just 3 trainings we have to help humanize the process, whether it's in performance, whether it's in leadership, or whether it's in inclusion work to humanize the process in a way in which people have a sense of our authenticity.

In a way in which people feel seen and they respond based upon it. We have multiple frameworks built around this understanding that humanizing another person, that's our quickest way to create resolution. In most of our most complicated circumstances and situation.

Katty: Amazing. I'll be providing your contact information and Arbinger if anyone wants to reach out to you and needs that support to bring that into their organization. But if they wanted to do it on their own, if they were so passionate about creating a sense of community and belonging and just being heard and being present, how did they go about it themselves? What's the first thing you talked about? A common language, but maybe that's beyond them, right? Maybe that's an organizational thing. Be just within their team, what can they do?

Desmond: There are a few basics, you can start by reading. We have a couple of best seller books. One is called “Leadership and Self-Deception.” It's on Amazon, one of the best sellers on organizational behavior work. And one book is called “Anatomy of Peace.” It's probably one of the number one or #2 conflict resolution books on Amazon. Then a third book we have is called “Outward Mindset”. So those are good foundational books that you can start to read. You can read them as a team and then start to get some of that language together. We also have public workshops. You can go to www.arbinger.com. There are public workshops you can sign up for there as well to take a deeper dive into some of the things I'm talking about. We have a bunch of different mechanisms like I said, from the options of just grabbing one of those books, to signing up for a public workshop. We have a bunch of options that we offer as an organization.

Katty: It seems that as long as someone is open to having those half-hour meetings that you were having with your team, which sounds like with existing and new people. We just really need to open up the door for bringing our full person to work, our full self to work. Just really look at people as if they are who they are, they're human beings. They're not the admin. They're not the tech guy. They're not the designer. They're human beings. A human is being there with challenges, struggles, aspirations, all of that and we need to see that.

Desmond: Yes, and I will throw one more nugget out there for your podcast to reflect upon. When I don't see the humanity of another person, then I spent a lot of time justifying why they're not human or not as human as I am. When I stay in that justification, I form bonds of anguish and frustration with those individuals.

When we're asking you to see people as people, we're not asking you to just only see the good side of people or take a Mother Teresa approach to life where you're giving everything of yourself. What we're asking for you to do by seeing another person's humanity, is breaking free of the bonds of anguish that are associated with seeing them as an object. We're asking for emotional and cognitive freedom. When you see the humanity of another person, it's a much better place to start.

When you're looking at the challenges and conflicts of your life, if you start with objectification, it's always going to be much more difficult to resolve something than when you start with an analogy, another personality. And like I said, someone may say, well, That's what somebody is saying. I can feel it. But I'm telling you, we all struggle with this, and it's just a dilemma that we got to limit and learn to face while doing our work, doing busy work, and accomplishing the tasks that we need to do at work.

Katty: That's probably it. We're so busy running around in ten different directions that it feels like if I take a pause back, and connect with you, I don't have time for that so can you do whatever you need to do?

Desmond: Right. Katty, you're on point. We don't see it as a part of a long-term solution. Taking that 15 to 20 minutes to understand a person more deeply, to help that person to solve their concerns, were more likely to get the accountability that we seek. In objectification that's associated with correction and it goes back to the whole impact piece. Then I may not realize that my intent may be just to get it done quickly, but the impact that I'm leaving with you as well, you can't do it yourself. So let me do it for you. Yeah, that's a whole conversation there too.

Desmond: Beautifully stated.

Katty: Thank you so much for taking the time and talking about what it means to be inclusive, and what it means to create a space of belonging in a in a work organization. But really we're talking about beyond that, we're talking about just in any interaction between any two people. That's talking about.

Desmond: I've learned  a quote recently that was like “when you interact with people, we want to leave them better than when the came.” The goal in life is to leave a person better off with the experience you've had with them then when they first interacted with you. I've made my mistakes and had my struggles in life for sure to accomplish that, but I think being much more aware that that's a process for me has been very helpful to recognize that each person is a person. One of my goals in life is to improve my impact on that person.

Katty: Thank you for sharing that message with everyone. If we all could do that, it would be a beautiful world. Well, thank you so much again. As we wrap up this conversation, I will share the books that you mentioned. I know you've authored some of them, “The Anatomy of Peace.” Incredibly impactful. I got a chance to get that when we were at a ATD. I want to thank you for taking the time to being here with us and talking about this really, really incredibly important conversation. Not just because we need to check a box, but because we all need to see each other as the humans that we are.

Desmond: Yes, and I will add, I didn't author the book, the Arbinger Institute as a whole did, but, thank you. You'll find the books and Amazon at the Arbinger Institute. They listed there as an institution.

Thank you, Katty. I appreciate your time. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for being the type of human being that's willing to lean into conversations that I think create solutions where we often don't see solutions. Some people see this space as a dilemma that we have to overcome or try to figure out, but there are a lot of solutions and inclusion in this space. Thank you for inviting me to be a part of your podcast.

 Katty: It's been a pleasure talking to you, Desmond. Thank you.

Suzan Oslin

https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzan-oslin/

concreteoasis.city

Suzan is an independent XR creator with a focus on persistent, geo-spatially located AR. She uses immersive technology to build aspirational futures that reflect her own wonder and awe for the beauty of life–at the same time revealing ugly truths that endanger our very existence. Using her mastery of experience design, she crafts interactions intended to engender empathy and motivate positive action. 

Katty

Where are you? It's beautiful where you're sitting.

Suzan

I’m at the AR House here in Los Angeles, and it's a co-working, co-living space run by Aidan Wolf and Lucas Rizzotto. Every month, they bring in ten new artists, where we live and collaborate together for four weeks. And it's in a beautiful house in the hills of Hollywood. We have a pool and a sauna and we invite people in from the public to be a part of the community and it's just a really amazing place for artists and creators to be inspired, build relationships, and build cool stuff.

Katty

What a beautiful idea for collaboration. All AR projects?

Suzan

Not necessarily but it's pretty much AR/VR as far as I know. Some artists come in and they're not necessarily developers, they're designers or illustrators, but they're pretty passionate about the AR/VR space, and they'll work usually with one of the devs to build stuff.

Katty

Okay, let's step backwards just in case there are some people in the audience who may not be familiar with AR/VR. Can you just give us a quick little rundown of augmented reality/ virtual reality and then we'll start with how you got started in this.

Suzan

There's sometimes a lot of confusion about that. Virtual reality is when you're completely immersed within a digital or virtual world, and that's usually through a headset, and there's no relationship to the outside world at all. You're completely in a created and fabricated world. 

Augmented reality is when you are in the real world and your real world is being augmented by digital or virtual objects. So it's a layer over top of the real world, and usually that's done with your phone, or augmented reality glasses. There used to be a distinction of mixed reality. Mixed reality and augmented reality are kind of coming together into one thing and people talk less about mixed reality. I think it pretty much put it all together with augmented reality.

Katty

And how does that play into where your career started from, which is in the UX space and what was the trajectory for you and the transition for you from traditional UX into what you're doing now?

Suzan

Well, my career actually didn't start in UX. So when you and I met, my UX career was starting. I actually have a background in visual effects and animation and I've worked in the film industry for a number of years, so the 3D world is not a stranger to me. I had been doing UX for about 12 years. 

I don't think I wrote a single line of code in that whole time and my background is very much in technical art. To be honest, I was getting a little bit bored with user experience design and wasn't challenged in the way that technology really challenges you. I was in a space where I was looking for my next evolution of my career. That's when I started to see, around 2018, and I started to see a lot of posts on LinkedIn and whatnot about augmented reality and virtual reality. It was more virtual reality at that time. To me, it seems like a no brainer to kind of go back to my roots, but also bring with me, my user experience design and hope to make an impact in terms of a new technology and bring in those concepts of user experience design. So often when a new technology is being created, a lot of the applications and experiences are created by the developers. And I know it makes sense because they're the ones figuring out the technology. So those are the ones that get built first and so I really wanted to have a presence of user experience in this burgeoning industry.

Katty

To have both technology background, the design background, and the visual effects background in that space. I imagine the three of them together really play off of each other to help create the alternative universes that we're working on. How does Metaverse play into this?

Suzan

There's a lot of debate in the industry about what exactly the Metaverse means. I just try to stay away from it. I think many of us do. I can tell you what the Metaverse means to me. Most of my work now is really in the augmented reality space and specifically in city-scale augmented reality because my vision for the future is where the digital and the physical worlds really come together and are one and that we can have digital content in context. 

So that's why I'm really interested in physically located location-based augmented reality. Because it's like being in context, I think is where it's really going to make a lot of meaning and have impact. But I also believe, and I’ve believed for a long time that virtual reality and augmented reality will really come together as just being one spectrum of the other, of the same thing. So I can imagine, being in a space and putting on a pair of glasses and completely removing the light and going into a virtual reality space. There's a lot of, in terms of co-presence, having virtual people in your space, sit down next to a virtual being. Sit down next to you, so there's, that kind of mix of virtual and augmented reality. So, that's my idea and Metaverse is really the bringing together and combining the virtual, digital virtual, and physical worlds. But also having those spaces that are purely virtual and having it all connect and be interoperable and not be separate spaces. You know, similar to how the web is now, you can go anywhere on the web. That's how I see the Metaverse. It's really just an evolution of the web in 3D. In real space 3D in our world, not 3D on the screen, but in our present.

Katty

You know where my mind went as you were just explaining that… this is gonna sound maybe strange, but this is the space that I've been in lately because of the book that I wrote, The Butterfly Years, which is my journey through grief. As you were talking about being there, the memory that came out for me was can I have a conversation with my loved ones?

Suzan

That have past?

Katty

Yeah. Like they're physically there.

Suzan

In a way, yes. My father passed away shortly after I got into this industry and it was always very sad for me because the technology is there now where we can do a volume capture, a 3D capture of a person and pretty much create a hologram like you see in Star Wars in real life and how I wish I had had an opportunity to capture my father before his passing. 

In very rudimentary ways, that is possible and they've even been talking about this yesterday. They've even brought back to life people that have passed on and recreated their figure in 3D just through photographs, and you know, I'm sure quite a bit of 3D modeling clean up. It's pretty exciting some of the technology that's being developed in terms of presence. I think really the thing that people are after right now is creating that co-presence with people that are actually here. You have someone in Bulgaria and you're in the United States and bringing that likeness through holography into your actual space, where you can sit across from each other and have a conversation and you're digital in their world and they’re digital in your world but you physically have that connection.

Katty

I've been fortunate to be at a conference where the speaker, from my very elementary vocabulary, had been beamed into that space and the facilitator and the guests were having this conversation and the facilitator was there in person, but the guest was a hologram. And it was fascinating to be in that space. And this is several years ago, so I'm sure that technology has just exponentially grown from there. But even there, it was so fascinating to be able to hear someone and it was just different than to watch a YouTube video of them. They were there, but they weren't, but they were so it was just really fascinating for them to be there and be able to answer your questions. Live, if you will. 

Suzan

Yeah, because you get their whole presence and all their mannerisms.

Katty

When you describe what you do to people, how do you go about it to the layman audience when you tell them what it is you do, how do you how do you tell them? Do you say I'm more of a creative do you say I'm more of a technologist, what do you say?

Susan

I use the term creative technologist now. When I first moved into and got interested in virtual reality and augmented reality, my goal was to work as a consultant as a UX expert, but I really got interested in making things and becoming a creator. So I see myself more as an experience creator and experience director, using the technology to create experiences out in the real world. I don't know how I describe myself!  But for the longest time when I was a UX designer, people would ask me what I did, like my family or someone that really doesn't have a lot of understanding of the technology industry, I would just say I was a web designer and it was close enough, but I can't really say that anymore. Sometimes, I just say I'm a designer. But if I'm talking to someone who understands the technology I say, I'm an XR creator, creative technologist.

Katty

I would imagine. Some people don't even understand what it is that I do, even though to me it's just such an easy thing. But anyway, where does inspiration come from for you? Is it in the real world, is it in the digital world, how do you get inspired?

Suzan

I would say it's the internal world. Just taking time to be quiet and allow inspiration to come to me. I would say it's like divinely inspired. That's where the predominant inspiration comes from.

Katty

Is there a practice for you.. do you meditate on it?

Suzan

Well I don't meditate on it, but I do have a regular daily meditation practice and I do yoga, so I definitely take quiet time for myself. I believe that myself and everyone, had been brought here with unique talent and gifts and to become quiet, I think we're pushed in that direction and we're driven to whatever that is. 

But it requires getting quiet, to really listen, to know what that is. And so that's really my inspiration. That's my primary inspiration and outside I think I've always been very involved in communities. All the way back when I was in marketing, I’ve always been a part of the community and I think that's really important to know what other people are doing and know what people are doing locally. I'm very involved in the AWE, the Augmented World Expo, which has been around for I think 12 years now. I think it was the first and continues to be the biggest Expo for this technology. And I myself and my partner, Ray Mosco have been co-producing AWE Nights LA for our fourth year now. So the local chapter for AWE. I worked for many years at the LA User Experience meetup doing programs and participating. I did a mentorship program for about 4 years in Downtown Los Angeles, where once a month, designers would come in and just show their work and they had an opportunity to get feedback from whoever was there and that was really rewarding.

Katty

Thank you for that. That's always been something that I've really admired about you. Is this drive to give back to the community. I do remember you are very, very active in the user experience meetup space, always posting, always welcoming me and inviting me to the events that you were having, and just even given what you're doing now and where you are now. The AR house just really speaks volumes about the impact of community and the impact of collaboration and how powerful that can be.  It also takes me to mentorship and whether we mentor or are mentored, how important that opportunity is to be able to give constructive feedback, to be able to help someone along on their path. So hats off to you. Ever since I've known you, you've been doing that. I’m sure the creative community thanks you. I'm sure you've influenced a lot of people.

Katty

But speaking of mentoring and giving feedback, it's hard to sometimes give constructive feedback and receive constructive feedback. Is there anything that you can share with people who maybe are earlier on in their careers and listening to this and getting excited about trying something new? Maybe you can share about your lessons learned? As you've grown on your path and the type of feedback that you've received or you've given.

Suzan

Some organizations do have a culture where open communication and feedback is welcomed, but I think many more don't have that. I don't think it's very much a part of our culture in the United States. I can't say about other cultures. I think we would all be better off if it was more a part of our culture. I think that when someone offers you feedback, it's really a gift. I think most of the time it's intended to help you and help you to grow and help you to get better or help you to evolve. I think it's really great when people are willing to give me honest feedback, because then I can get better. When people are reluctant to give honest feedback, then you can't grow.

Katty

It's difficult to receive it sometimes though, especially with art and creatives. Sometimes, it maybe difficult to separate the person and the piece. When giving feedback on resumes and when giving feedback on portfolios, sometimes the way it's received… somebody's identity is so tied into that piece versus we're trying to give feedback as to like, this is beautiful. It's just not what this particular client is looking for because of XY and Z. And I can see how difficult sometimes that is for somebody to hear, especially early in their path when maybe they're second guessing themselves.

Suzan

I kind of feel like the distinction that is really important is that when you're doing a piece of art, if we can make a distinction between art and design is when you're doing a piece of art. You're really expressing yourself, right and it's whatever it is, and someone else's criticism, maybe doesn't really matter. Maybe you have an art teacher who's trying to develop your technique, or whatever. 

But it's very different when you are getting hired as a designer. You're being hired to solve a problem. You're not being hired to express your innermost creativity. It's great when those two things can intersect, but more often than not, they may not. And so you really have to stay focused on what's the problem that you're trying to solve? Who's the audience, what are their needs, what are their goals, whether that's the client or the end consumer? It's really important that you stay focused on who your audience is and what are the needs of them. And I think then maybe that helps a little bit. So it's not about you. It's not about you. It's not about your vision. It's really about solving a problem.

Katty

Right, being able to extract yourself from the middle of it. Great insights. Thank you for that. And for you personally, how do you evolve? How do you continually learn and grow? What keeps you curious all the time?

Suzan

I don't know that anything keeps me curious, I just am curious. That's why my career is always evolving into something new. I like that constant learning, building, and growing. It's part of what I love about my career and so I think the one thing people in technology have is that passion to learn more and be curious. I think that's just part of my makeup. 

I remember when I was doing the mentorship downtown in Los Angeles, and a lot of people would come wanting to switch into UX design from graphic design. We had psychology majors from school wanting to know how to get into UX design or people from all different things. I think that what I've always done is when I become curious about something, I start to explore it. Some people might have a plan where they're going to do this in that amount of time but I just kind of start exploring and go to the community and get involved with the community and doors start to open and I find my way. When I started in XR, and XR is a term that combines VR and AR for listeners that may not know, so when I started my journey in XR, I was going to plan to be a consultant as a UX designer, and ended up getting interested really in creating.

Katty

Love that. You talked about community again, and I'd love to just hear from you as you're looking to hire people or you're looking for other collaborators. What is it that you look for? What's important to you? Is it skills, is it fit? Is it vision? What specifically draws you?

Suzan

It's definitely skills. It's important to have the skills to be able to get the job done. But aside from that, what's really important to me is how they are as a communicator. Are they able to have conversations openly about their work and receive feedback? Are they good about letting me know what their schedule is or scheduled shifts so I can count on the delivery? So I'd say a second to skill is really communication is so important in any career.

Katty

At every stage from the interview stage, all the way through.

Suzan

Even how you present yourself online is a form of communication.

Katty

Absolutely. 100% and I think a lot of people forget and they certainly forget that with social media. A lot of hiring managers do have an opportunity to evaluate and get a peek into communication styles and/or skills and so forth. I mean our portfolios, our LinkedIn profiles, all of that is an extension of who we are right now. What is it that you now know, as a creative technologist, or as just someone who's been in this field for many years and has seen your career morph and evolve to where it is today, what is it that you wished you had known when you first started in your path?

Katty

Okay, think about that we’ll come back to that before we wrap up. I’d love to, again, take you back to the earlier days. Lessons learned along the way?

Suzan

I think my lessons learned are don't take things personally.. Even though I think many creatives tend to take things personally. Never assume you know why a choice was made in your favor or to your disfavor. There's always 100 things going on that don't have anything to do with you. I've learned over the years not to personalize things, because that can be very constricting, and I think damaging to self confidence. That's something I've definitely learned along the way. It's something that I see other people, especially younger people struggle with. So that's the big one. I think the other thing is that there's not a finite number of opportunities. There's really an infinite number of opportunities and to believe in the possibilities of your dreams coming true and to follow those dreams wherever they take you. And there's always going to be an opportunity at the right place and the right time.

Katty

Beautiful. Well you can see I have “dwell in possibilities” on my wall so I’m a big fan of just seeing what else is out there and if there isn’t, really this opportunity that we've always had but it’s probably been amplified even more now because of COVID, this opportunity to just create possibilities. To venture out to do what it is that one wants to do if a traditional 9-5 job isn’t it, that opportunity, especially in the freelance space, that we’re in. We’ve always known that this exists… this opportunity for entrepreneurship… and creating our possibilities is a beautiful thing.

Suzan

Yeah, now is a good time for that. COVID had some positive impacts. I think our work-life was definitely one of them, at least for technologists and creatives, the ability to work from home and opening up so much more opportunities for freelance has been really great. 

Katty

How was that overall impact for you? You’ve always worked from home, have you not? 

Suzan

No, I haven’t always worked from home. Twice in my career I was a solopreneur. Earlier in my career when I first met you and more recently. But when I was in UX design I was, for the most part working at companies. 

That’s interesting. When COVID hit it wasn’t all that different for me because at the time, I was working from home. But, that’s not entirely true because I think the intensity of being forced to be at home and the lack of human contact, and having my kids home everyday from school.. it was challenging. We live in a small house so it was really challenging and I’ve always been very much of an introvert and not really good at when I go to events. I tend to go late and leave early so I don’t have to do a lot of the networking, even though that’s the reason I go. It’s a little bit challenging for me to really put myself out there on a one-on-one basis when networking. 

After COVID, the first party that I went to I was walking up to people and saying hi and introducing myself and it was completely natural because there was such a hunger for human connection. For me, that was a really positive impact, because I have a much easier time networking. In fact, that’s how I met the people here who run the AR House, and that’s how I got here. 

It was the first party I had been to since COVID a few months back and I had recognized Lucas Rizzotto because I see a lot of his work online and I just walked up to him and said I love your work, I follow your work. We got to talking and he introduced me to his business partner, Aidan and I was talking about my project downtown in Pershing Square, which is a location-based AR project. Coincidentally that month, they were being sponsored by Niantic, and Niantic is in the process of putting out there location-based technology visual positioning system. So he said “hey, you should come by and hang out when Niantic is here and get to know the cohort. I did, and then the next month, I applied to come and live here.

Katty

I love how that kind of came back full circle for you back into being with community. Are you able to talk a little bit about your Pershing Square project? 

Suzan

Absolutely, it’s my personal project so there is no NDA. Early on I got involved with the Open Air Cloud which is a Non-profit organization that promotes open and interoperable standards for the Metaverse, the air cloud, whatever we want to call it. 

I had been working with them for some time and when their technology got mature enough to build something with, I decided I wanted to make a location-based something. For whatever reason I picked Pershing Square and I brought on a design partner, Laura Garcia, to collaborate with and she did some research. I wanted to do something that was impactful, socially impactful and meaningful so we threw around a bunch of different ideas and we ended up deciding on water conservation.

Pershing Square has a history around the fountain and the design right now. The fountain is now dry, but the design was created to represent the water that is diverted to other places to Los Angeles, so it already had this history around water. We decided to do a project around water conservation and it’s coming along very slowly. I had a small development team come together for the AWE AR Cloud challenge back in November. We won the challenge and I’ve continued to develop the design. I am now in the stage where I am applying for funding. I’ve applied for three grants now… My first time doing grant applications. Hopefully, one of them says yes. The goal of the project was to do something that was impactful and also that I believed could get funded. So a lot of thought has gone into this exhibit that will be throughout Pershing Square that educates people about the water ecosystem in LA. The fact that we get our water from all these different places. The seriousness of this drought, I know we’re going to fill it this Summer.

I know June 1st there’s legislation happening where we’re going to start getting restricted on our water usage and there is discussion on if we stop watering outside, and all the trees died what a huge environmental disaster that would be  and how difficult that would be to recreate that. We’re not in a very good place around water. The exhibit is intended to raise that awareness and also engage people in interactions, where we have the opportunity to interact with content that is more engaging and more immersive and hopefully drive behavior change. 

We’ve put a lot of thought into how we would measure that and create partnerships with local businesses and municipalities to help us measure and bring the whole community together around the issue. 

Katty

Beautiful, I got goosebumps. Beautiful, congratulations. 

Suzan

Thank you. Well, congratulate me when I actually get the money to build it.

Katty

The first step is to have the idea and the concept and putting it to a true social impact, environmental impact cause so, you are there. I do remember in Pershing Square, there is even like a sculpture the represents the aqueduct if I’m not mistaken.

Suzan 

Yeah, it’s like a big purple wall and that's where the water used to come down the purple wall into the fountain and it doesn’t do that anymore. 

Katty 

The symbolism doesn't escape me that even that’s dry. 

Suzan

We’re going to put water back there. People will create an oasis by engaging in these water-saving activities. Then we’ll have the plants grow and the more people that contribute, the more beautiful that the oasis is.

Katty 

Is there a way for the public to help support? Is there a GoFundMe if a listener here hears it and say I’m interested? 

Suzan

That is not set up yet, but I do have a website, it’s still a bit of a work in progress but my contact information at least is there and it’s concreteoasis.city. 

Katty

We’ll put that in the show notes. Where else besides Concrete Oasis can people find you? Are you available for projects? Are you available for new opportunities? How could people find you and reach out to you?

Suzan 

The best way to find me is on LinkedIn, that’s where I’m the most active. So it’s Suzan Oslin. I’m also on Twitter.

Suzan, thank you so much for being here and really educating us on this amazing new space that you're forging into and taking us along with you.